It went back to Grayson House.
So there it was, my reality: I was doomed to an existence of squinty eyes and ugly mouths. My only other option was to die, to quite simply will myself to stop breathing. Even now, after all these years, how I wish I could’ve managed that one. To have been able to leave a life defined by mere fleeting glimpses of happiness, by grief and betrayal and conflict, and, oh, how I hate conflict, and that all too-familiar, dependable, pervading feeling of impending doom.
All of which had been instigated by the women, starting with the murders.
And my daughter thinks she had it rough! Give me a break. One lousy break. Elyse has no idea how lucky she had it. How could she have? She’d been too busy inferring how admirably I’d worked at fulfilling a “self-imposed destiny.” I tell you, Elyse has a mouth on her that won’t quit. But I never put much stock in anything she said. After all, she betrayed me too, just as I knew she would eventually, given half a chance. I mean, it’s not as if I could’ve predicted, let alone prevented, the monstrous thing that happened to Bean. My heart breaks over what happened to poor Bean.
But my heart does not break for Elyse. Not after everything I did for those poor half-orphaned children, and Elyse throwing everything back in my face! Sacrificing my dream, my brilliant career, taking one demeaning job after another, any job, working my fingers to the bone so that those girls could have a roof over their heads, clothes on their back. I loved them deeply, those babies of mine, so much it hurt—and the thanks I got? A fist to the gut. Yes, that’s right. I even saw it coming, yet still hoped against it, believing I could make a difference, that I could save them, my beautiful girls … but their fates had been cooked way before I arrived on the scene. That was Rose’s fault, of course. Rose's family has always been no good. And that’s what I’d wanted to save my daughters from. From being caught up with no-goods. From being cheap and deceitful like those horrid children in the schoolyard, like Earl and the women of Grayson House.
Was that such a terrible thing, wanting to save my girls? Wanting to instill honor where there had been none?
So there you have it. Long story short, I am not the victim my daughter Elyse will try telling you I paint myself as. Nor did I ever abuse a child. Ever. Elyse is a pathological liar—she needs help. Professional help. I’m the one who was abused. Truth is, I’m a man who did his best with what he had to work with, and, plain and simple, I wasn't given much. The rest of my truth is that Elyse, like everyone else, starting with the women of Grayson House, and Earl, and progressing right through my very first day of school, crapped on me.
But I digress.
“Back off, Billy.” To my amazement Billy did back off, and the hecklers scattered. I looked up into the blue-gray eyes of Aidan Madsen, the schoolmaster I knew mainly by reputation, although we had spoken once before. A bit of a celebrity with his “Folks at Home” radio show on WDEL, featuring his Delaware Boys band, Aidan Madsen was a common sight on roadsides: a tall, athletic figure in vest and jacket, a fiddle case in one hand and a battered briefcase in the other, hitching rides in and out of East Chester.
I eyed Aidan Madsen warily, wondering if he remembered me, thinking he probably didn’t; I wasn’t like Earl. Stupid Earl had presence, and he had timing; Grandmother just didn’t give Earl enough credit. Earl knew exactly what to say and when to say it, especially if he thought it would save his sorry hide. But I didn't have presence or timing. I was only five years old, a small five, a born scapegoat.
Earl wasn’t so tall either, even for fifteen, but whereas Earl was stocky and already had broad shoulders, I was slight. I’d no shoulders to speak of, and no promise of any, and my legs, the parts that showed between the hems of my pants and the tops of my socks, were toothpick-thin; straight, milky lines broken only by the joints of my big, knobby knees. Earl was blond, but my dark hair, almost black actually, accentuated my paleness. And then there were my hands. No one else in the family had hands like mine. Earl called them spider hands. Did I mention Earl was a pissant? But my hands were thin and bony with abnormally long fingers, and I kept them in my pockets as much as I dared, which wasn't as much as I’d have liked, because if the women saw me with my hands in my pockets, I got the big lecture on how gentlemen did not walk around with their hands in their pockets; how gentlemen always walked with their shoulders back and their arms loose and relaxed at their sides; how gentlemen did not hum or sing to themselves. Humming and hands in pockets were bad habits, like biting one’s fingernails, and everyone knew bad habits were, well, bad.
I couldn’t bear it if Aidan Madsen remembered me. We’d only spoken that once, when I wasn’t yet five, on that rare day I’d accompanied Mother into East Chester to purchase the supplies we neither grew nor recycled. Mr. Madsen had bid Mother good morning, and I’d been amazed that a famous gentleman such as Mr. Madsen, who had, the women said, won the Delaware Valley Industrial Editors’ Man of the Year Award for “communicating the American Way of Life in and out of the Delaware Valley,” knew who Mother was. Mainly I was amazed he even acknowledged her. Most people walked by us with their noses in the air.
“Ignore them,” Mother always said, referring to the shopkeepers who looked at a point past Mother’s shoulder while taking her money. “They have small minds. Hold your head up, Francis. And for heaven’s sake, stop humming.”
I pretty much assumed all people heard disjointed bits of composition in their heads, just that mine came out more readily than most. What I couldn’t figure, though, was why humming should bother Mother so much when the bigger problem, it seemed to me, was that people looked at us as if we were yesterday’s garbage. I couldn’t figure that out at all. I mean, my mother was nice to look at, and she held herself straight and tall, and both of us were clean, our clothes well-mended. Besides that, our family’s roots went deeper than most anybody else’s in Brandywine country, even if we did have to live out in the boonies while everyone else got to live in town, and even if we were poor while they were not as poor, and even if we were in “investments” and taking it in the shorts, while they were shopkeepers who hadn’t completely lost their livelihoods, everyone still needing coffee and sugar, flour and seeds, rope and whatnot.
Mother introduced me to Aidan Madsen and I’d extended my hand as I’d been taught, shaking firmly as a gentleman should, but Mr. Madsen held onto my hand when I started to withdraw it. He had a gray-flecked mustache, and wore gold wire-rimmed glasses, and I remember this so clearly; his eyes were somber, as if he were … well, tortured sounds so exaggerated, but it’s really the best word. He asked me some questions, none of which I remember, and while Mother talked up a storm, he kept staring at me. I was dumbfounded by Mr. Madsen treating us so nice, as if he’d yet to hear we Graysons weren’t regular people. But—and this is the next strange part—Mother remained juiced up after seeing Aidan Madsen that day, and I say “strange,” because enthusiasm was not Mother’s style, not unless she was running a number on Lothian, one of my aunts. The whole way home, pale eyes sparkling, Mother chattered on about Mr. Madsen, how he’d come to teach at East Chester the year she’d been born, in 1900; how he’d started his band, and then Festival—which, the way she described Festival, was like the Fourth of July and Mardi Gras rolled up into one—and how, for years, Aidan Madsen lived in the Washington’s Headquarters house in Chadds Ford, where he’d created a museum celebrating America’s battle for freedom. Chadds Ford was the tiny crossroads village on the Brandywine (ten miles north of Wilmington, Delaware), in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, while Grayson House, where we lived, was just to the south, in Chester County, Pennsylvania.
“A very doable walk from Chadds Ford to Grayson House,” Mother said. “A mile or so.”
I knew that. Everybody knew where Chadds Ford was because everybody knew where the Brandywine was—and that’s because the Brandywine is everywhere, and so, of course, everybody knows all the Brandywine’s crossings. Starting with two branches uniting in one stream above the circul
ar boundary line dividing Delaware County from the state of Delaware, the Brandywine is typically a creek, but sometimes it’s more like a river, especially in winter. In the old days, Mother told me, the creek banks were steep and lined with a dense growth of trees, and to accommodate travel, roads were graded down to access shallow places. The ford most used, the one on the direct road to Philadelphia, was called Chadds Ford. It was there, at Chadds Ford, on September 11th, 1777, that George Washington and his troops had tried stopping the advance of the British on Philadelphia. That battle, Mother said, was Aidan Madsen’s passion, one he lectured on at any opportunity. But there were three well-mentioned reasons for this battle being so memorable. The Battle of Brandywine was the bloodiest battle of the American Revolution; it was where Lafayette had been wounded; and it was the very first time an American flag had flown from an official headquarters.
Oh, and another reason for the Battle of Brandywine being so famous, the one most people didn’t mention, because it was such a terrible cliché? We lost the battle.
But we won the war for independence from the British.
He remembered. “Francis Grayson,” Aidan Madsen intoned. He towered over me, hands in his pockets, stance casual, almost lazy.
I swallowed. “Yessir.”
He touched my shoulder. “Go on with you.” He’d already shooed the other children into the schoolhouse.
“Go on where?” I asked miserably. I pointed at my crotch. “I think I’m wet.”
“If you are, it doesn’t show. Now go inside.”
“I can’t.”
Aidan Madsen went down on his haunches. “I know how you feel. The same thing happened to me once.” His voice was deep, his words measured: “But if you go home now, it’ll be worse for you tomorrow, trust me.”
I didn’t know whether to believe him or not.
“Trust me,” he repeated.
I didn’t really have an alternative, so I followed Mr. Madsen into the schoolhouse, past the cloakroom and piano, sitting where he pointed, in the front row. And somehow I made it through the rest of that day, although none of my classmates spoke to me again, not even the girl with the dark, sad eyes; Elena, Mr. Madsen called her. When class was dismissed I trudged back through town alone, into the open fields, crossing two pastures, taking no notice of the natural beauty surrounding me: the tall, gray-green field grasses, the occasional stately oak, the poplar and sycamore. Forty minutes later, reaching the road going up Grayson Hill, I simmered with anger at Earl. He’d sicced Billy on me, then left me to walk home alone. I kicked up small stones, not caring if I scuffed my shoes. I thought about what I’d tell the women of my first day and determined the truth would not be worth the cost. I wondered if Earl the pissant would tell them of my humiliation. I hummed loudly, concentrating on the stones, pretending each was Earl's head, my fury growing with each vicious kick.
I rounded a narrow bend in the road going up Grayson Hill. The road flattened at the top, a long, wide expanse in front of Grayson House, then wound back down the other side of the hill. I looked up at the house, which at one time had been a real showplace, so the women said, and, granted, Grayson House was obscenely enormous, but no more a showplace than we were rich anymore. I hated it. Built by my grandfather, who’d blown his head off after the crash of ‘29, Grayson House was a monument to stupidity. Not only did ugly things happen inside, but it wasn’t built of stone or brick like other grand houses, that’s how stupid it was. The wood-framed three-storied main building and its two wings and all its numerous gables were a mix of architectural styles. There were hundreds of windows and too many doors, and exterior stairs on the sides of the house that looked like railroad track, and an improbable number of chimneys studded its roof, like tumors. Without concentrated, unending maintenance, which it didn’t get, seeing as how Earl was a slow pissant, and Grayson House would’ve required a team of men anyhow, it had been ripe for the damage caused by our hard Pennsylvania winters. The paint was peeling, where you could see paint, that is, the outside of Grayson House was so covered by vines, all the way up to the second story, and the white-columned portico, which ran three sides of the main building, had become an ugly screened-in affair. The screening had been put up the year I’d been born, and it sagged in places, dirty with rusty holes all over, where good-sized squares had been cut out.
Grayson House and its occupants were the worst things possible: pretenders gone to seed.
“Francis! Don't you be roughing up those shoes! Those've got to last you, what? You think money grows on trees? You get in the house and put your old shoes on!”
Stella was in her garden, the only beautiful thing left on Grayson Hill, on her hands and knees most likely, which was why I hadn’t seen her. But I should’ve known. Weather permitting, Stella was always in her garden, that square of land below and to the side of Grayson House, west of the vast, unkept groves of apple, peach, and cherry trees. Stella stood up and took off a glove, pushing pale hair back under her hat.
“Go on with you,” she said.
Stella was one of my two aunts, and it’s strange that despite the women’s penchant for rules, I wasn’t raised to address my aunts as Aunt Stella or Aunt Lothian—I always called them by their first names. And right then I wanted to tell Stella that these were old shoes too, and that everything we had was old, but I didn't dare risk being called a sassy-mouth because that could be just the very beginning. Although Stella never got really mad at me, I’d seen her at work, screeching and running her number on the other women, and I wanted no part. I hated screeching. It terrified me.
I rearranged my face and squashed my feelings, squinting up at Stella, noticing how the distance between us and the shadow made by her hat almost hid her harelip and rough skin that made me think of long-standing oatmeal.
Stella was the oldest of Grandmother’s three daughters, before my mother and then Lothian, so I’d hazard a guess she was thirty-six back then, but already her back had the start of a hump. She had narrow shoulders and big bony hips, which her shapeless cotton dresses couldn't quite hide, and long arms, the longest I'd ever seen, and wide hands—big as hams, Mother said.
“I'm going, Stella,” I said softly. Stella’s narrow shoulders sagged, which meant she was already feeling awful about talking aggravated to me—I was Stella’s pet.
“How was the first day?” She walked beside me, inside the fence made of weathered pickets with broken tips. Where the bottoms of the boards had rotted away she’d wired screening between the slats to keep rabbits and gophers out of the vegetables; hence, the holes in the screening around Grayson House’s portico. To someone unfamiliar with Stella, her words might’ve sounded like, “Ow us ta fis ay?”—and Stella was hard to understand, I’ll give you that. She had a speech impediment, the result of a cleft palate, a harelip, a thing that shamed her, which I knew by Stella’s never, ever wanting to go to town. Not that it would’ve mattered had she even wanted to, because Grandmother said going to town was hoo-ha, and Grandmother always had the last word on everyone, Stella especially.
“Good,” I answered firmly.
Stella's eyes were a watery blue, and she had long pale lashes that stuck out straight, not curly. She looked at me sharply. “Where's your brother?” This sounded like “Airs er uh-er?”
“I don't know,” I replied, unable to keep the sullenness from my voice.
“Ah.” Stella reached across the fence and crooked a finger under my chin. “I see.”
And I suppose she did.
“You're an angry boy,” she said matter-of-factly, and just like that my anger was superseded by an inexplicable desire to reinstate my worthiness in Stella's eyes. I say “inexplicable” because Stella had never even insinuated that anger was unattractive. But the point was, regardless of what the women permitted themselves, I knew anger, and not humming or slouching, to be the unattractive habit.
“Not really angry,” I lied in a small voice. The shadow shifted and I looked up into Stella’s homely
face. “They hated me. All the kids at school hated me.” There, I’d just revealed what I’d said I wouldn’t—but I got the desired commiseration. In fact, I got more than I’d bargained for. Baggy dress hitched up to her knees, Stella was over the fence then, all over me, smothering me, covering my face with kisses, murmuring unintelligible things, until, perversely, I wanted to twist free of those groping arms and run away. I couldn’t breathe, and it didn’t matter right then that Stella knew everything about being hated. What mattered was there was no place to run, to breathe, no place to hide, from her.
I’d no idea what had happened between the women and I’d stopped asking ages ago, when Grandmother had made it abundantly clear that gentlemen did not ask questions that were “improprieties.” But it was impossible to live in Grayson House with all those women and not feel the rabid resentment they had for one another.
My mother was a widow, the only one of Grandmother’s daughters to have ever married, a fact that counted like the Holy Grail with women, I could tell by the things they said about my mother. And never mind that Mother’s “ne’er-do-well,” what Grandmother called him, had run off when my mother was about to have Earl, deciding a war in France was more rewarding than zings from those sharp-tongued women—even though my mother always pointed out that the “ne’er-do-well” had returned, regardless that it took him ten years, and just in time to get me started, so there.
Which meant there were no actual men in my life, my father having ultimately died from sharp tongue-lashings (how I explained his demise), and my grandfather, Grayson House’s builder, having been a suicide, in all likelihood goaded into it by the women. In fact, it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn the women had loaded the gun before handing it over to my grandfather—that’s how much they disliked men. No, I knew women only (and Earl didn’t count for shit), and the sure truth that any male having a thing to do with them eventually chose death over life. That’s what existing with women was about: watching, waiting, gauging, and then dying. For instance, my grandmother was formidable enough on her own, but put her together with the other women, and I lived in awe of what she could unleash, of what she could walk away from.
The Angry Woman Suite Page 5