The Angry Woman Suite

by Lee Fullbright

  I look back from where I sit now, nearing forty and remembering Mother and Aunt Rose, and I think the story about Nellie explained a lot, because unlike Aunt Rose, I think my mother must’ve always been a sucker for underdogs like herself, like what Nellie had helped make her—and so Francis had been a natural progression for Mother. Aunt Rose, though, had been almost transparent, something Papa had loved as much as the rest of his newly expanded family, calling Aunt Rose’s transparency “honesty that hurts.” Aunt Rose just never gave a holy hoot what people thought. And while Papa had that in common with Aunt Rose, he was generally more genteel about the not caring thing than she was; he was kind.

  Not to say Aunt Rose wasn’t kind—she was to me and the rest of the family—but she wasn’t shy about arguing people stupid either, and neither was Grandma. Papa always said they were like two spunky peas in a big pod—but how he described his daughter, my mother, besides, “like majesty”? Here’s a clue: it wasn’t “sweet.”

  Diana, Papa always said, was even more complicated than Francis Grayson.

  FRANCIS

  Pennsylvania 1934–1943

  I fidgeted waiting for Mr. Madsen to finish band practice. Only two boys had showed, producing horrible noises on horns for an hour, making it all seem pretty much a waste of time. Afterward, I cornered Mr. Madsen, bringing up the subject of gluing things back together.

  “And what is it you’ve broken, Francis?” Mr. Madsen got up from the piano and led me outside. It was Indian summer: hot, the schoolyard deserted.

  I replied earnestly, “Women, sir. But I think they can be fixed.” You might’ve thought I’d said something funny.

  “Ah, Francis,” Mr. Madsen hooted. “You can’t fix women! Generations of men have tried and, believe me, it can’t be done!” He tousled my hair and sat down on the ground, as if he didn’t care about dirt, crossing his legs, patting a spot beside him. “Here. So we can talk man to man.”

  I sat gingerly, worried about the women seeing dirt on the seat of my pants.

  “So,” Mr. Madsen said, all seriousness, “what’s this about, Francis?”

  “Do you know a Matthew Waterston?” I asked straightaway. Mr. Madsen drew in a crackly breath. I’d said something, that much was clear. I picked up a twig and traced a design in the dirt, waiting, my own breath bated.

  “I did,” Mr. Madsen finally answered. “I knew Matthew Waterston.”

  I looked up. He was staring at my hands, mesmerized. I cast the twig aside, stuffed my hands in my pockets.

  “Don’t be ashamed,” Mr. Madsen said quickly. “You have very capable hands. Let me see them.” I held them up.

  “Earl calls them spider hands,” I said morosely.

  “Does he now? And what do you call his?”

  “Pig hands,” I admitted. “But he’s got short, fat fingers!”

  “Well, there you go. So which would you rather have? Spiders, I think, are elegant creatures, and very industrious. Pigs slop in the mud.”

  Something I’d never considered. “Spider hands!” I crowed.

  “Brilliant,” Mr. Madsen said gravely. “With spider hands you can reach forever. You can reach for the moon and the stars. You can reach things no one else can even see.” He spread his own fingers out. “See, even I can’t reach as far as you can. But I’ve known people with reaches like yours, reaches that go on and on forever.”

  He was being nice. Aidan Madsen could reach anything he wanted. He had hands twice the size of Stella’s ham-sized ones. But I asked who these other big-handed people were, thinking surely he’d say Stella. He didn’t. Instead he said Matthew Waterston had been such a person. In fact, Matthew Waterston had actually hung the moon and stars, he’d had such a long reach. But Mr. Madsen said more; in fact, he said a lot more. He said it’s one thing to blame yourself for things you have no control over. Conversely, you always had to take responsibility for the things you could control. Matthew Waterston had been a wise person, Mr. Madsen said. He’d known about being responsible, plus he’d not only set the price for his redemption, he’d paid it off in spades.

  I’d no idea what Mr. Madsen was talking about. “But is Matthew Waterston dead or alive?” I asked when Mr. Madsen took a breath. “I need to get in touch with him.”

  “Passed on, sorry to say.”

  I exploded. “Then it’s painters they must hate!”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Mr. Madsen, my mother has a portrait Matthew Waterston painted of her, but my aunts and grandmother hate the painting because they hate Matthew Waterston; they fight about him all the time. He did something to the women. He broke their hearts, I think. So it’s my job to make things better, to fix the women. They’re broken. I have to glue them back together …” I began sniffling. It seemed hopeless. “But how can the women hate someone who’s dead?” I cried. “I mean, he’s dead!”

  “More likely,” Mr. Madsen drawled, “the women of Grayson House hate the idea of giving up their beloved passion play.”

  I asked what that meant.

  Mr. Madsen shook his head. “Never mind. Look, Matthew Waterston didn’t get away from anybody. And your family doesn’t hate painters. A person’s profession grows out of who he is, not the other way around. Now, hold on. Matthew Waterston was a very good person. Even so, very good people do bad things sometimes.”

  “But if it wasn’t Matthew Waterston who broke them, then I don’t know who it was that got away from the women! Earl said you’d know, that you know everything—and I need to know!” I began to hum.

  Mr. Madsen got to his feet. “Come, Francis.” I dutifully followed him back inside the schoolroom, plopping myself down on the piano bench, prepared to take my punishment for being a sassy-mouth. “Turn around. Face the piano.”

  I complied, wondering if he’d whip my head. If you hit the crown just right, there was never any blood.

  “Now put your hands on the keys. That’s right, thank you very much. I once knew a boy who could play so beautifully, the angels sang. His name was Jamie—”

  Jamie.

  “Would you like to do that, Francis? Would you like to do what Jamie did? Would you like to make angels sing?”

  I could hardly breathe, let alone answer. I fingered the piano keys, making out the little tune I’d been humming, and then I thought of Grandmother telling Lothian to turn her damn RCA off, that the Casa Loma Orchestra’s “Casa Loma Stomp” was heathen. I wondered if I could make a piano play heathen music. The idea sent a shiver down my spine. Forget everybody’s stupid Jamie. I’d something else in mind.

  “Could I be heathen?” I asked, swiveling around on the piano stool. Mr. Madsen was glassy-eyed. “Mr. Madsen?” His eyes cleared.

  “Heathen? You mean loud and fast? Angels don’t need to hear loud and fast, Francis. They need to hear heart and soul. Now, you know that little tune you were humming? Do it again. Yes, that’s right. Put your spider hands back on those keys. Yes, and now reach, thank you very much.”

  Music became my fare for a disconnect from the women. I no longer felt Lothian’s cold hands or sharp teeth, or heard Grandmother’s reprimands, or Stella’s piercing shrieks. Even Earl was no longer a thorn in my side. I’d found my niche, unbeknownst to any of the women, or to Earl, who was keeping a distance from his embarrassment of a brother. I practiced the piano after school when no one was around, increasingly oblivious to the outside world, existing only for the moment my long fingers produced a consistent sound, one soft enough for Mr. Madsen but heathen enough to express all the fury in my soul.

  I kept my music lessons secret for well over a year, until I’d sharpened my skills to the point where I felt invincible—and then I told Mother. I intuitively felt she’d be pleased. I was right.

  “How wonderful!” she exclaimed, spiking a thrill of pride in my chest. “We’ll tell the others at dinner. And I hope you’ve been a perfect gentleman, Francis, showing Mr. Madsen your appreciation for teaching you piano?”

  But when I made t
he announcement that Mr. Madsen had taught me to read music and that I played the piano at school, and that I could even play the Prelude in C-sharp minor with hardly any mistakes, my aunts let out little cries and my grandmother slammed her fork down on the table. I felt a twitch of the old fear. But Mother was smiling.

  “I don’t believe it,” Grandmother said. I thought maybe she meant she couldn’t believe I could play so complicated a piece, but I could and what’s more, Mr. Madsen knew I could. More than once I’d caught him looking at me with amazement.

  But that was it, all that was said. Which was good enough—and the rest of that evening passed in precious silence, which puffed me up with new pride, and with good reason; I’d beaten the devil. I’d shut the women up and I’d lorded it over Earl and I hadn’t needed any Matthew Waterston to do it.

  My dreams were filled with long fingers dancing across black and ivory keys. I smiled myself awake, stretching and opening my eyes. Lothian sat on the edge of my bed. I grabbed my crotch. She put her hand on top of the lump my hands made under the blanket and patted me, saying, “Jamie, it’s time.” Then she cooed in my ear and planted moist kisses all over my face. She didn’t bite me. She didn’t even hit me.

  The next morning was the same and the one after that as well, and as time went on I actually looked forward to the scent of lilacs and the feel of Lothian’s soft hands; she loved me after all. And there was not one fight at Grayson House, not for months, about the man who’d gotten away from the women. What a surprise, what a gift! What a miracle worker I was! And all because I’d become a pianist!

  But Mother ruined everything.

  “Lothian,” she said one night at dinner, “what went around doesn’t necessarily come back around.”

  I didn’t understand Mother’s meaning. And although Lothian didn’t answer, there was a glint in her eye, and my gut cramped with the old, familiar anxiety.

  The next morning I awoke to teeth biting down on my ear. At first just a tiny bite, but then harder. Lothian took my arms and pushed them under me, mean-like. She hissed, laid her body over mine, pinioned me, tried to smother me.

  And then she nibbled on me like a rat on garbage.

  After, I went into the bathroom and got up on a stool so I could see myself in the mirror, and I clawed the leftover skin on my ear with furious abandon. My earlobe looked like shredded cheddar when I was done, the sink covered with blood—and that’s how Stella found me, shrieking so loud she set my teeth on edge, making me want to wipe the blood out of the sink and slather it all over her horrible mouth. Instead I told Stella that a bug had bit me in the night, making me scratch my ear ragged. She took me in her arms, shrieking the whole time, and dabbed iodine, and taped bandages over my wound, and she wouldn’t let me go until Mother finally took me away from her and put me to bed.

  I didn’t have to go to school for two whole days. Days in which I laid in bed and listened to Stella and Lothian yell back and forth about the best way to look after me, and nights in which all the women yelled about the mysterious man who’d managed to get away from them. We were back to that.

  Earl mumbled that only a pissant could sleep through a bug gnawing on his ear all night long, but Grandmother, giving everyone very odd looks, said there were no bugs in her house or she’d know the reason why. Stella let me wear her old straw hat to school, which nearly covered my bandages; and I told anyone who asked that I’d wrestled a mad dog out of Stella’s garden.

  “Is that so?” Mr. Madsen said after class was dismissed. “A mad dog, you say?” I sat at the piano doing scales, not caring about the piano anymore, disconnected, letting my mind go. It hovered somewhere near the ceiling.

  “Yessir,” I answered from that high, distant place. “It was very mad.”

  “Did you make it mad?”

  “Mr. Madsen, it was born mad, I’d nothing to do with it.”

  “I see. And where’s the dog now?”

  “Dead,” I said serenely. “I shot it. It had to be done, sir. Really it did. It was the only way to get peace. That dog just had to be shot dead.”

  My life was in the toilet. The women fought every night, and Lothian chewed on me every morning. I brooded non-stop. I also went back to wondering about Matthew Waterston, staring at the portrait he’d painted of Mother. It was a study in mixed messages. Mother’s eyes were soft and beguiling, at variance with her slight, uninviting smile. Then there was the portrait’s backdrop; it was murky, but a silver river rose up out of that murkiness, curling about Mother’s head like a halo. Her dress was silver-white, sheer, as if she were light-filled, like an angel. In a farther distance was another ghostly figure, this one masculine, but man or boy I couldn’t tell.

  A year passed, then another. By then I’d made a game of the portrait. I’d turn quickly away, pretend I was someone else, anyone else, then turn back to see the portrait with my new eyes. One day it hit me. To render any part of Mother angelic, Matthew Waterston must’ve loved her. And so it followed that my mother must’ve loved Matthew Waterston back.

  Which meant that Lothian must’ve also loved Matthew Waterston.

  Lothian had always coveted everything of my mother’s.

  ***

  Washington’s Headquarters was where I learned more about the Battle of Brandywine than even the most ardent Revolutionary War scholar would’ve cared to know.

  I’d given up on piano, but I lived for weekends, for that near slide down Grayson Hill and straight shot across open field to the tree-shrouded headquarters where Mr. Madsen lived in Chadds Ford. By simple virtue of having made myself an ever-present pain in the ass, I’d procured a job at Mr. Madsen’s museum. I swept floors, rearranged relics and took charge of the guest log.

  A half-dozen chairs were pulled up to an old trestle table that did triple duty as Mr. Madsen’s desk, filing cabinet, and dining table. Two wing chairs were angled in front of a stone fireplace, and under a window was a chest that housed a phonograph, records, and various musical instruments. The rest of the room was outfitted with cupboards and bookcases brimming with relics and bric-a-brac from the Revolutionary War era, positioned so that little paths wended past showcases filled with old coins, maps, letters and edicts, knives and swords. Uniforms, boots, flags and muskets hung on the walls, and in all the room’s corners were stacks of books, more weaponry, and even bugles and drums.

  Washington’s Headquarters was also where I discovered the joy of phonographs, playing non-stop the records Mr. Madsen lent me while I dusted books and showcases: Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman and Fats Waller. I was especially enamored of Goodman’s sound, which I considered the epitome of heathen, though “swing” was what Mr. Madsen called the new musicians’ music. It was the hot thing, the “Big Noise,” but Mr. Madsen wasn’t a die-hard fan.

  “Please, Francis, a little lower,” he begged, looking up from the table where he was writing. “Swing is not for thinking. It’s for jitterbugging. Maybe something else? A pianist would be nice. Might even inspire you to practice. That Duchin fellow is good. Put on ‘Moon over Miami.’”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “All right, then. Put on Witherspoon. Put on ‘Dazed.’”

  “Dazed” was no less sweet, but I put it on.

  “I’ve started a journal,” Mr. Madsen suddenly announced. “Everything about your grandfather and me and Matthew Waterston, and how we started Festival, and well … everything. Everything about your history, Francis. Things you’ll need to know someday. Things your children will need to know.”

  “No kidding, Mr. Madsen … isn’t that something? Because just this morning I was looking at my mother’s portrait and trying to figure out why Matthew Waterston painted Mother the way he did, her looking so nice and all. Actually, why he even painted her.”

  Mr. Madsen looked at me as if considering the part in my hair. “Matthew Waterston painted more than one portrait of your mother, Francis. And she became very famous as a result of their collaboration. That’s a big part of your his
tory.”

  I couldn’t have been more shocked had he told me Mother had once done time at Sing-Sing. I told him to repeat the part about Mother being famous. Twice.

  “Yes, she was quite the celebrity. She was the model for ten of Matthew’s most celebrated paintings. All different, but put together those paintings told a story. The group of them is called The Angry Woman Suite.”

  “Say again one more time.”

  But Mr. Madsen wandered. “Most considered Matthew Waterston a realist, but he considered himself an abstractionist at heart. He even painted canvasses that suggested music. Isn’t that something, Francis? Painting music?”

  I asked Mr. Madsen where I might see Waterston’s other paintings of Mother. He hesitated before answering, “They’re privately held.”

  “What’s that mean, privately held?”

  “It means you can’t see them. Nobody can.”

  “That doesn’t seem right.”

  “Right or no, it’s the way it is … and, Francis, it’s best you not mention the suite to your family—trust me. Now please, no more questions. History must be approached in a linear fashion, meeting players first, then the meat, otherwise endings are totally incomprehensible.” He added softly, “I’m writing a story, Francis. Writing stories takes time. It takes quiet.”

  “But I thought you said you’re writing history … a journal.”

  “Same difference. Stories, history—both are about power. Who gets it, who gets to keep it, who loses it. History explains everything, though. Now, patience, please. You’ll have it to read soon enough, thank you very much. When I’m finished writing everything down.”

  I endured listening to Witherspoon until Mr. Madsen went out, taking the notebook he’d been writing in with him, and then I took Witherspoon off the phonograph and put Benny Goodman back on.

  I detested pianists.

  Mr. Madsen gave me a nickel for every two weeks’ work I did at the museum. I offered the nickel to Earl, who was immediately suspicious.