The Angry Woman Suite

by Lee Fullbright

  It was an odd picture. Matthew had never painted out-of-doors that I recalled, and I didn’t remember Lear Grayson ever reading aloud to us—why would he have? I shook my head and wiped my eyes—and that’s when time played another trick on me; I heard Lear and myself drunkenly declare ourselves the chosen, the mighty, and with Matthew at our helm, the colony destined to become renowned. I heard us liken ourselves to our countrymen in Paris, only instead of the Seine we had the humble Brandywine, and in place of Harry’s we had the old Turner mill house.

  Enough. I stepped out of the building on Broad Street. Truth was Lear and I’d been self-appointed purveyors of excess, period. We’d been co-conspirators.

  He’d been the somber man, a business lawyer, which meant Lear Grayson had made a great deal of money telling other people what to do with theirs. He’d been, hands down, the wealthiest man in three counties—until 1911, when Matthew Waterston had brought his fortune to the Delaware and Chester counties, along with his need for long stretches of respite. No matter the credit given me since, Matthew is the start of our story. Back then, compared to Matthew Waterston, the premier American painter, I’d been a nobody. Even Lear had paled by comparison. Before Matthew Waterston, we’d all been relative nobodies.

  A lump formed at the back of my throat, and I had to remind myself it isn’t my nature to wallow in introspection. Still, Matthew Waterston’s laughter reverberated in my head, and I suddenly realized what he was laughing at. He wasn’t laughing at what Lear Grayson was reading: Matthew was laughing at me. How many times had Matthew told me I was thick as a plank, more interested in squeezing a buck until it danced, and in gin and history books and my museum, than in what lay beneath the surface of things? Sure, Matthew had found me amusing, sometimes interesting, possibly challenging, but he’d always said, “Look deeper, Aidan. Think.”

  But for some, introspection shows up late, if at all. Introspection is the bane of getting old. It’s about coming to grips with loss of youth and vitality, of family, and ways once believed to last forever. Aging is about losing friends. I think that’s the hardest part of all: losing friends. Maybe that’s why I resist introspection so much, why I prefer my gin, music, and the solid dependability of history books. I’d never wanted to see myself as old or lost or used up. Unlike Lear Grayson, I’d refused to give in. Instead, I’d re-scripted my reality, accommodating various versions of what had happened between me and Lear, and what happened to Stella because of what had happened to Matthew Waterston and his legendary suite of paintings.

  The boy’s eyes connected with mine; he’d sensed me looking at him. He was so like Jamie I almost wanted to hide, to forget. But I also wanted to connect with the boy. How could I not? I wanted to hold him. I wanted to never let him go.

  The long-awaited time had come.

  “Magdalene!” I exclaimed, crossing Broad Street quickly, hand extended. “Magdalene Gray—” I faltered, for although Magdalene had reclaimed her maiden name, unheard of for those times, but then that was Magdalene for you, I’d no idea what surname this son went by. Crazy as it seemed, I’d made it a point to not know, believing the more I knew the more I’d want. Was the boy’s surname the same as Earl’s? Had I been on the verge of a faux pas, and so quickly into the game?

  Magdalene’s hand slipped into mine, and her eyes were as warm as I’d imagined, pale blue, just as I remembered. She was glad to see me. “Grayson,” she finished, not the least ruffled. She put her other hand on top of mine, and we leaned back from each other. I don’t know what she saw, probably an old sawhorse of a wreck, but what I saw was a revelation, a revelation I’d glimpsed years earlier, when I’d tried projecting what Magdalene might look like as a grown woman, when I’d wanted to see her as my contemporary. It was extraordinary; she was in her early thirties now, but hardly changed. Her hair, beneath the wide-brimmed pastel-colored hat she wore, was pale, the near-platinum made ethereal by still unlined, milky skin. I was reminded of silvered light, and those old summer days that had stretched long and golden, filled with lazy energy and unbroken dreams.

  “How good to see you, Aidan.” She nodded, as if she too could scarcely believe it had been five long years—or probably closer to the truth, as if she could hardly believe I’d forgiven her.

  And had I?

  I heard humming and looked down. Magdalene withdrew her hands and placed them on the boy’s thin shoulders. “This is Mr. Madsen,” Magdalene introduced me. “A very old friend of our family. And, Aidan, this is my son, Francis Grayson. Francis, manners please.” The boy ceased his humming and put his hand out, and right away I saw his long, sensitive fingers. I saw Jamie’s fingers. I took his hand and held it. I held it for the longest time.

  “How do you do, Mr. Madsen.” The boy’s eyes crinkled up at the corners just as I knew they would, just as I also knew it would be a moment before the crinkling turned his lips upward into a tentative, winning smile, revealing the defensiveness at the center of his personality, the hidden hurt, breaking my heart all over again. He offered shyly, “I know who you are.”

  “Do you now?” I recalculated his age. He was not yet five, small for his age, loosely-jointed, all elbows, arms, and knees. He bit his lower lip.

  “Go on, Francis,” Magdalene encouraged.

  “Everybody knows who you are,” the boy said carefully. His guarded manner intrigued me. “You’re the schoolmaster … and,” his next words tumbled out in a rush, “you have a radio show.”

  “That I do. Do you listen to it?”

  The boy’s face fell. “No sir. My grandmother doesn’t like the RCA on much.”

  He was honest, anyway.

  Magdalene and I chatted a few moments more—about what, I couldn’t say—and before I was near ready, she said they really had to go. Although I searched for something to say, something to keep her and the boy with me longer, I came up empty. There was so much I wanted to say, but couldn’t—not then, not with Francis there.

  I’d too many gins after seeing Magdalene and Francis that day. But they did the trick because I eventually came to the conclusion it was better we had not lingered. I acknowledged my recollection of us “new men” sharing laughter and dreams in the shade of an old oak as nothing but a nostalgia-sweetened sliver of the big picture—and the big picture was not friendship or the festival that had become such an integral part of our legend. The big picture was huge slices of passion and deceit and those self-created walls that had kept us separated from ourselves and one another. I had to keep telling myself that. I had to keep remembering that I couldn’t let Magdalene Grayson get under my skin. Not again. I had to remember what she’d done to me. I had to remember that if it hadn’t been for her showing up at my door that horrendous night, the colony that had fed my life, my soul, would still be thriving—so it was perfectly understandable why I’d wanted to wash my hands of the whole affair, of the whole lot of them. It had been the only way I’d known to honor Jamie. My dear boy, Jamie. It had been the sane thing to do.

  I had another gin then, for I had to face more facts. Soon Francis Grayson would be ready for school. I was the only teacher in East Chester. My school was the only school. I would be Francis’ teacher.

  Facts.

  So I had to prepare, to figure things out.

  Facts.

  The boy was not like his brother Earl; I’d seen that. Earl was a scrapper, a little loose in the head, but Francis was soft and curious and judging by his hands and that tender smile, he was also artistic and intense. He was like Jamie. But hopefully not too much like Jamie. No way under heaven could I go through that again. In time, Francis would come to me with questions about his family. I was the historian, after all.

  Which meant it was time to give in all the way. It was time to look at the truth all the way, not variations of it. It was time to go back to the very beginning and stay there for longer than two minutes, no matter how uncomfortable. It was time for me to get my stories straight. No, better yet, it was time for me to hone on
e story and stick with it. It was time to put pen to paper. A full accounting was also what Matthew Waterston deserved. And I owed Matthew. I owed Matthew Waterston everything. No getting away from it.

  Facts.

  ELYSE

  Sacramento 1955

  “Shush now, notice how the mourning bird stands so absolutely still? He is a plain little bird,” Papa observed. “But he is very, very serious about his music … watch. See how he holds every muscle so perfect in his striving for an extremely difficult performance?”

  Back in our happy Sacramento days, before Daddy took me and Bean and Mother to Biloxi, Papa and I always got up at dawn. He liked things organized by the time Grandma arrived home from her graveyard shift at the hospital, and so he’d straighten the house, lay out Grandma’s nightgown for the day, get the percolator going, and the frying pan out for the one egg she liked, over easy. Then we’d sit out front on the porch swing, waiting. I’d still be in pajamas because Mother and Bean wouldn’t be up for another hour, which was when Aunt Rose got up too, for just long enough to smoke and talk while Grandma ate her egg, and then they’d play a hand of pinochle before heading off to bed for the day.

  I watched, head on Papa’s shoulder, my muscles turning liquid at the distinctively plaintive cooOO-woo-woo-woo of the mourning bird’s song.

  “It is nice,” I offered.

  “He sings friedlich—peaceful, not really mournful at all,” Papa agreed.

  “The boys down the street shoot the mourning birds with their BB guns.”

  “Shooting a bird of peace—now that’s irony for you, Liebling.”

  “Irony,” I said half to myself, liking this new word. I looked up at Papa. “Not all of them get shot down,” I reassured him. “They can fly really, really fast. They can get away.”

  Papa’s smile was almost sad. “It makes me think—” and then he stopped.

  “Yes, Papa?”

  Papa chose his English words carefully. “That, like this little bird, it’s in this process of stepping up, of striving, even when there’s a good chance of getting shot up, that life gets meaning—especially where our hearts are concerned.” Papa brushed his lips against the top of my head. “I still grow through my problems, Liebling, like that little bird—and so, someday, will you.”

  I could scarcely believe Papa had problems, let alone big ones. Papa was cheerful and busy as ever; why, just the night before he’d finished his covering of the entire Frigidaire with flowered contact paper, and while Mother clearly hadn’t appreciated the final product when she got home from work, harrumphing her way back out of the kitchen, Papa hadn’t seemed to mind her lack of appreciation. In fact, he’d seemed pleased with her reaction.

  “Needs some loosening up,” he said. “Wound very tight.”

  “Has Mother always been … tight?” I’d asked, not because I seriously cared so much about the answer as I wanted to stay talking with Papa. In fact, I wasn’t even sure I knew what being wound tight meant. We picked contact paper remnants up off the floor, stashing them in the flowered wallpaper-covered trash can.

  Papa looked at me intently, much like when he checked something in the fry pan to see if it was ready for turning. Whatever he saw in me seemed to satisfy him.

  “Ja,” he answered. “Tighter than a jack rabbit’s butt.”

  I giggled, instinctively checking over my shoulder for Mother coming in and making a comment about Papa’s nasty talk. Instead Aunt Rose stood in the doorway, dressed in sparkly black, fastening an earring, a cigarette dangling from over-rouged lips.

  “Well, that’s a new one,” Aunt Rose said to Papa—and then, “Little pitchers have big ears.”

  “You look beautiful, Aunt Rose,” I breathed.

  Aunt Rose’s nightclub job meant she got fixed up every work night, but her fix-up was a lot different from Mother’s fix-up. Everything about Aunt Rose was glittery, and she wore thick, bright red lipstick, and had piled-high blond hair, whereas Mother carefully blotted her lipstick every morning and pretty much stuck to blue or gray suits, and crisp blouses with turned-up collars. The only fun things Mother wore were spectator pumps, which I loved, even if they were “tasteful.” And I didn’t feel the least disloyal telling Mother I liked Aunt Rose’s glitter best, or even sometimes catching the drift of Papa or Aunt Rose’s comments about Mother (and even Grandma’s, who could throw out a snide remark along with the best of them, usually having to do with the word pretentious) because I knew everybody really loved Mother, too. Especially Aunt Rose.

  It was my whining that loosened the Nellie story up out of Aunt Rose. Mother had been long gone at work that day, but Aunt Rose had just gotten up from her daytime sleeping to weed our lone flower bed, and I’d begun my daily fussing about it being time for me to go inside, to get ready for Mother coming home, when I was nowhere near ready for going in.

  In between weeds Aunt Rose said, “Honey, your mother’s seen a lot of heartache. I think you should stuff a sock in it and give your mother your best smile when she gets out of the car tonight, think you can do that?”

  “Well, I don’t see why,” I whined some more. “It doesn’t seem … truthful. And Papa says truth keeps life clean.”

  “Well, Papa says a lot of things, that’s for sure, honey, but none of them tout whining. Now, come here.” Aunt Rose sat back on her haunches. “I think it‘s time to tell you something about your mother.” Aunt Rose said this so seriously, I was sure she was talking an imminent disaster.

  “Your mother’s mother—her name was Nellie—wasn’t quite right in the head. She drank a lot when Papa was at work, and talked to thin air and hit your mother. She scared her. And your poor mother didn’t have any sisters and brothers to bounce things off of, and Papa was gone all day and didn’t know about your mother being scared until a neighbor lady caught Papa on his way home one afternoon and told him your mother had run over to her house the day before, crying … this neighbor lady felt real bad she hadn’t said something to Papa before, because she’d heard your mother crying lots of times and she knew Nellie wasn’t quite right.” Aunt Rose chucked my chin, adding, “Nellie didn’t say anything about wanting to take your mother with her when Papa kicked her out—”

  “But Papa would never have let someone like Nellie take Mother!” I cried indignantly. “Not if Nellie was hitting Mother!”

  “I know … yet crazy as it seems, it hurt your mother’s feelings real bad, not being wanted by her own mother. And here’s the other thing: As much as Papa loves your grandma, I know he loved Nellie too, and it hurt him something fierce having to let Nellie go …”

  All this seemed like an awful lot of hurt for one family and I was suspicious. “Did Papa tell you this story? Because it doesn’t sound like Papa.”

  “No. But the pinochle crowd is tight and I’ve heard talk about Papa and Nellie.”

  There was that word again, tight.

  “But, Aunt Rose, it doesn’t square, Papa not knowing about Nellie being not quite right—Papa always knows everything before anybody else.”

  Aunt Rose seemed perplexed by this, too. “Yes, you’d think … but my point is, you know how Papa always talks about doing the right thing, and the right thing hurting a lot, and that’s how you know when something’s right?”

  I nodded, suddenly understanding. “It’s like the mourning bird putting everything he has into his song.”

  Aunt Rose looked more puzzled, but she said, “Well, there you have it.”

  “I do,” I said confidently. “That’s Papa. He’s the mourning bird. But he didn’t know it till after Nellie happened; that’s when he started putting everything he had into striving, when he got serious and started being able to see through people. And someday that’ll be me too. I’ll be a mourning bird, Papa told me so.”

  “There’s more, Elyse. Nellie died right after Papa kicked her out; that was the same year I met your family. Your mother was twelve then, and I was seventeen and your daddy sixteen. Our own dad had taken a hike,
and my mother—your grandma—supported us herself … then one night she got invited to go bowling.”

  I tried imagining my big, fat grandmother bowling. Aunt Rose saw my expression.

  “Okay, she went for dinner. That’s where she met your grandfather—and here’s why I think they hit it off. Because they’d been kicked in the teeth, and people who’ve been kicked in the teeth can see that same thing in other people; Papa because he’d had to give Nellie the boot in order to do the right thing by your mother; and my mother, not only because she’d been deserted, but because she was as big as a house—no, two houses.

  “A month after they met, Stephen Eric and I and your grandma moved into the house where Nellie had lived with Papa and your mother … but here’s the other deal about your mother, Elyse; she was a sweet thing, really sweet, and I was in trouble at the time—”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  Aunt Rose grimaced. “Later, when you’re older.”

  “Oh.”

  “I know your mother didn’t understand the trouble—she was too young, too—other than she understood it was trouble, but believe you me, that girl took my hand one night when I was in a bad way and she didn’t ask questions and I’ve loved her like she was my own ever since—she didn’t have to try to make me feel swell, you know. I mean, all these strange people just moving in and taking over her house, she could’ve turned her nose up—God knows she’s damn good at that, too. But she and Papa, together, made us family; they stood behind me and my big mess.

  “And then we—your mother—lost Stephen Eric, your daddy. And your mother had loved Stephen Eric something fearful, Elyse. So, you see, she’s had a whole lot of losing, your mother has, honey. Look there, here’s her car—run, give her a kiss. Do the right thing.

  “And Elyse, please—don’t ever let your mother get to thinking that she’s losing out again.”