The Angry Woman Suite

by Lee Fullbright

  And that’s where Aidan, another complicated man, comes back into the picture—or, rather, where a very important link, called Aidan, actually begins.

  AIDAN

  Pennsylvania 1900–1916

  Everything dates from the beginning, but this beginning has had many false starts. I began writing this journal in 1932, after seeing you and your mother in town one day—you’d have been about four then, Francis. And I’ve rewritten parts of it many times over the years as I grew to know you; as I continued peeling away the layers of rationalizations. In fact, I’ve reworked these first few pages many times, but the heart of this story I have let flow, never looking back.

  Already, Francis, I see the tendrils of a growing cancer. An unavoidable situation maybe, given your beginning, but a situation that doesn’t have to be terminal given the potential of your sensitivity. Because you do have a great potential, Francis, and when I say potential, I’m not referring to any material success that may result from your unquestionable talent. All I’m saying is you will touch others; you will affect them, because you’re an artist. So it’s important that you realize that the power you have be tempered, because like many artists you have a twin soul, and that twin is a child and it has a dark and reckless nature. It is also highly imaginative.

  You must stay with the music, Francis. Music by definition is sensitive, but it takes discipline to become a top musician—and so that is your medicine. Music. To stay disciplined, to stay on top of your game, to stay the cancer. And then you must understand your beginning, Francis. All of it. Which means you must understand my beginning, all of it.

  That said, we begin.

  ***

  In the beginning, in 1900, I was drawn to the hamlet of Chadds Ford in Delaware County for four reasons. Southwest of Philadelphia, Chadds Ford had been the setting for the famous Battle of the Brandywine, and being a history aficionado, especially regarding the Revolutionary War, I believed Chadds Ford offered myriad opportunities for exploration. Secondly, the village of East Chester in Chester County, a mile or so from Chadds Ford, had an opening for a schoolmaster. The East Chester town council was desperate, and I, a recent graduate of West Chester Normal School, was inexperienced, hungry, and equally desperate.

  The third reason was the unsurpassable beauty of the Delaware and Chester counties. I got off the train at East Chester, walked out on a bluff and gazed into the distance. I squinted, adjusting my spectacles, for I was—and am—short-sighted, the result of a boyhood injury. Still, I saw clearly the streams that cut into the lush land settled by Germans and Quakers, their neat farms and magnificent barns, and just below, in the nearer distance, the town of East Chester. Under a blue Indian summer sky, the oyster-gray Brandywine Creek rolled around the town’s edges, and outside its banks there nestled tidy rows of simple brick buildings shaded by old maples. There were church spires, a tiny square on a main thoroughfare, specks of people scurrying about—and I couldn’t help imagining their lives, content and circumspect, one day flowing into another, like brooks into the Brandywine. I was captivated, and I pretended I was king of that bluff, pretended all that clean, fresh quaintness below me was mine and mine alone, and that I’d only need to come down off my hill and register my claim to make it so. But I stood longer that day, inhaling the heady fragrances of old summer and new season—gifts that seeped under my skin and promised to hold me together forever.

  And then I struggled against them.

  But I had reasons for struggle. I was not just a fledgling teacher—a vocation to fall back on—I was also a musician. And my twenty-year-old heart yearned for adventure and travel, and bands, on the road more often than not, meant just that: travel. Mostly self-taught on instruments left behind by a wayward musician father, I played several admirably well, the violin being the one that really counted, for violins were the focal instrument of dance bands in those days. Plus, I wanted to write. I wanted to write all the music that was in my head. Music that had resided there for as long as I could remember. But there were other things residing in my head as well: voices.

  An only child growing up in the village of Mont Clare, I’d been gangly, bespectacled, shy, appallingly poor, and, not surprisingly, ostracized. My father was absent, maybe even dead for all I knew, and my mother, a laundress, was perennially tired and short-tempered. Books were my sanctuary, my passion. History books mostly, and the voices in those books moved into my head, right along with the music: General Washington, Lafayette, Green, Wayne, Weedon, Maxwell, even Cornwallis, all those revolutionary era characters, they became my friends. I identified with their heroic fight because their fight spoke to my own inner turmoil: I also wanted to be recognized as a person to be reckoned with—but, first, I just plain wanted to be recognized. And then, if I were to get that validation, I wanted to be left alone to make my music. But more than anyone else, I wanted my sad mother to leave me alone. I couldn’t rescue her from her hopeless life. I couldn’t even keep my own head above water. So when the day finally came for me to go away to school, to West Chester Normal on a music scholarship, I set a new speed record getting out of the town of Mont Clare, leaving my mother quickly, even joyously.

  Then after graduation from West Chester Normal, instead of cutting loose and heading out with a band as I’d wanted, there I was on a hill overlooking a placid valley. And that’s where the fourth reason for being in East Chester came into play: my mother again, from whom there was no great escape. While I’d been away, she’d become older, slower, even sadder, and unable to work as much—and I’d become her sole living relative. So that day on the hill I put my dream of traveling with a band aside, for just a time, and that was the first of my rationalizations, telling myself I could have the best of both worlds; that indeed I would travel, only it would be throughout the land my history book friends had walked; land they had shed their blood on—but, I also told myself, I could have my music, too. King of the mountain that I now was, I listened to the sounds of my subjects, the birds and cicadas and the soft sweep of breeze, the rustle of crop and foliage, and I hummed along—like you do, Francis.

  Like Jamie did.

  I accepted the schoolmaster position in East Chester, and began sending money home to my mother in Mont Clare. I was also able to save some of my $45 monthly wage and I lived independently those first few years, in Chadds Ford, renting a room in an old boardinghouse. It was an even smaller village back then, Chadds Ford, but there were two railroad stations, a creamery, a grange hall, two churches, and a barber shop, so we weren’t entirely insignificant. East Chester, the bigger town, was down the road a piece, and it had lumber and coal yards, plus the grocer was there; the bank, the schoolhouse where I taught, and three churches, meaning I’d plenty of company whenever I desired, which wasn’t often. I played the organ for church services when asked, if I felt like it, and the violin at dances. The Chadds Ford and East Chester citizens let me know they appreciated my music and the care I gave their children, and they appreciated my passion for history, too. The East Chester Historical Society welcomed my requests for articles and books on the Battle of Brandywine, and I combed the immediate Chadds Ford area, collecting artifacts and hoarding the coins and letters and bits of uniforms I found, in crates, filling a dozen, stacking them one on top of another, until they reached the ceiling of my room.

  Eventually, the time came when complete responsibility could no longer be put off, and in November, 1905, an aged, cranky Mary Madsen arrived in Chadds Ford with two large trunks and a satchel. The trunks held crockery, utensils, linens, sheet music, a graphophone, five Victor recordings, a cornet, flute, saxophone and a trumpet—my father’s old instruments. Via my association with the Delaware County historian, I’d learned that the Washington’s Headquarters house, just east of Chadds Ford, was for rent for $7.00 a month. Once owned by Benjamin King, a prosperous Quaker farmer, it had been considered imposing for its day; constructed of stone, two-storied, with white-painted shutters and a front porch. It was the house whe
re George Washington himself had slept; where Washington and Lafayette had plotted the astonishing Battle of Brandywine. Two giant leafy trees shaded the front of the house and then, as far as the eye could see, with the exception of the old Turner mill house across the road, was gently rolling land thick with grass and wild flowers; land on which the battle had been fought.

  I jumped at the chance to live in this historical house—and, amazingly, my mother did not interfere in my life the way I’d feared. Maybe she’d finally realized I was a grown man; maybe she’d been afraid it was her last chance with me, maybe she’d realized I was the roof over her head, maybe she’d been plain worn out, maybe I’d mellowed, maybe all of the above; I don’t know the answer. At any rate she gave me a long tether, busying herself setting up house; even, eventually, taking time out to help me gather souvenirs and mementos from the Great Battle. The last things I moved into Washington’s Headquarters were my crates, unpacking and reverently arranging the relics I’d collected over the years, filling one side of the good-sized front room, whereupon my mother took one look at my huge collection and put up a sign in the front yard announcing, “Brandywine Museum.” To my surprise, people actually stopped by, interested in looking at my things. Word spread, and more letters and maps and crockery and clothing and weapons were donated to my little enterprise, and there grew a steady stream of visitors and tourists curious to learn about the events leading up to the battle between the British and Colonial forces.

  At the heart of it, she wasn’t a bad woman, and many said my mother was the reason I never married. They said our relationship was so close and my interests so focused that a wife could never have figured into the picture. I take comfort in the perception that my mother and I were close. I believe that means I appeared kind. I certainly tried hard to be. But I wasn’t kind, not really. My mother and I had history, as they say—a history I rarely overcame. The way I saw it, she’d always wanted more than I could give. It’s a ludicrous expectation for women to have of men, thinking they live to fill their empty spaces. So I blamed my mother for my father leaving before I’d the chance to know him. I blamed her for my childhood poverty, and I suppose I even blamed her for not having other children, companions for me. I certainly held her accountable for not being a real woman, whatever the hell I thought that was.

  And so, on my forays into Philadelphia, I had real women. Women who laughed and played and teased. Women who were the polar opposite of my mother, except they were more unacceptable for different reasons. Women who suited me just fine. Women who required nothing more than a little money, and who didn’t care to know me any more than I cared to know them. But the truth was, naturally, I’d resolved to never marry. I didn’t deem children of my own necessary for a meaningful life. And I wasn’t lonely. Marriage, then, was superfluous—although I did carry a picture in my mind of the way the perfect woman for me might walk: the way she held herself aloof, regal, and the way her pale blue eyes, restless and intelligent, looked past me, into a world I was mere steps from discovering for myself. I knew everything about her, this tantalizing challenge of mine—and yet, of course, I’d never even seen her.

  Conveniently for me she didn’t exist. Or so I thought.

  And I didn’t really see her until the summer of 1918, when I was thirty-eight and my mother had lived with me for nearly thirteen years. By then my teaching career was firmly established and my student band was up and playing—started with those instruments my mother brought with her from Mont Clare—and my museum had become the cultural hub of our two counties. I’d long since put my old dream of traveling with a band away, right along with the picture of my lovely challenge. In short, I’d accepted my life. But then the unexplainable happened. The recalcitrant Magdalene Grayson metamorphosed into the unattainable, and when I saw her for who she was, I was completely dumbfounded.

  She’d been my pupil for over ten years, and although I’d never had an overwhelming number of students, given that many children those days went to school only a few years, I’d just the one vivid recollection of Magdalene Grayson. That memory is rooted in 1916, on a June afternoon a few weeks prior to graduation day. I’d dismissed class, locked up the schoolhouse and begun my own trek home, back to Chadds Ford. I turned a bend in the lane and saw her on the side of the path where the land fell away in a sharp decline, sitting on a fallen tree limb, gazing out over the valley, crying. I wondered where Lothian was and why Lothian and Jamie had left Magdalene by herself, when Lear Grayson’s instructions were written in stone: his daughters were to walk home from school together.

  “Magdalene,” I called out. “What is it, child?”

  Startled, she jumped to her feet and turned her back to me. “Nothing. Really, it’s nothing, Mr. Madsen.”

  And from the back of Magdalene I could tell nothing. I saw only a fall of long blond hair, the way she straightened her broad shoulders and the dirt on her skirt from where she’d been sitting. And that she wanted to be left alone. But I waited. And when she finally turned back around, her pale eyes were anguished. Other than that, she looked fine, same as always, large and awkward for a sixteen-year-old. What I didn’t see was that Magdalene Grayson’s bigness was smooth and symmetrical, even classical. I didn’t see it because, primarily, Magdalene did not impress me, never had. And I had my reasons (and it’s a long list). Let me condense it for you: Magdalene was difficult. She was damn difficult. Even as a first-grader she’d been difficult, restless and moody, regularly declining participation in the schoolyard, not wanting to be in my band, looking at me with disdain, as if she knew more than I. And so I naturally proceeded to do what any overworked, underpaid teacher in my shoes would’ve done: I pretty much ignored Magdalene Grayson. For ten years—and although it’s been said that teachers have their favorites and I’d like to say that isn’t so, I’d be lying if I did. I’d had my share of favorites over the years, and my favorites, then, were Lothian Grayson and Jamie Waterston. Especially Jamie.

  Jamie had been twelve the summer of 1915, the first time he’d visited his father at the mill house across the road from Washington’s Headquarters. I’d felt sorry for the boy, stuck out in the country with a distracted father and no other boys to play with, so I’d invited him for walks alongside the Brandywine, and in due time he’d become a regular at Washington’s Headquarters. He’d dust my artifacts and line them up just so, then stand before the phonograph, eyes beseeching—just as you have, Francis. And at my nod he’d carefully remove a record from its jacket, and when music filled the front room of Washington’s Headquarters, those great eyes of Jamie’s glowed with something wild. Oh, how Jamie moved me when he looked like that. I knew that look, I felt it. I showed him the new sheet music with parts for dance band instrumentation instead of just pianists. He was duly impressed by the “new” music—ragtime—and my collection of double-sided records featuring W.C. Sweatman, billed as the only man who could play three clarinets simultaneously.

  One day Jamie asked if he could actually hold my violin, and then if he could touch the strings, and to my amazement he handled the bow as if born to it, a little tremulous at first, then assured, picking out notes, matching them to those of the recording on the phonograph. I was astounded, and when the music stopped and Jamie looked up at me, something huge clicked between us.

  “He’s got talent, raw talent,” I said to my mother, watching the boy caress the bow of my violin. “I should try him on a piano. Just look at that stretch of his. Mother, his hands are amazing.”

  I didn’t have a piano at Washington’s Headquarters, but when Jamie’s father returned to Maine at the end of that summer, he permitted Jamie to board at Washington’s Headquarters, to study violin with me. Of course I was overjoyed when Lothian Grayson took Jamie under her wing, showing him the ropes of the schoolyard, introducing him to their classmates and urging him to take part in their activities. And even more satisfied when my other students immediately took to Jamie, deferring to him, because Jamie was confident, differe
nt from anyone they’d ever known. A born leader, he exercised fairness and enthusiasm toward the shy ones and the homely ones, and was even accepted by the rowdies, who’d somehow gotten it through their thick skulls that here was one who was blessed, who was destined to stand apart, even above them.

  Lothian Grayson was an extraordinary child as well. At five, she’d exhibited guileless precocity, and by thirteen she was undeniably the most popular girl in my school: straightforward, pretty, exquisitely tiny—so unlike her sister Magdalene, who lumbered about running into things, staring me down with those great pale eyes of hers, arrogant and closed-off and into herself: a carbon copy of her mother.

  The girls’ mother, Elizabeth, was a recluse. But I’d met her when I’d driven a borrowed buckboard up to Grayson House to retrieve some relics Lear Grayson had collected for my museum. Like most everyone, I’d never had occasion or invitation to visit Grayson House, and never would’ve had Lear not heard of my museum and expressed an interest. I was awe-struck driving up to the grandly immense Grayson House—I was still, after all, a rube from Mont Clare. The woman who put her head around the front door and rather brusquely asked me what my business was put me in mind of a teacher I’d once had, the kind who makes you think you’ve done something terribly wrong, yet you’ve no idea what. “Oh that,” she said when I told her who I was and what I was after, and then she left me to wait in a foyer as large as my entire living room while she fetched Lear.

  Although Lear Grayson’s family had been in the Chadds Ford area for years, and everyone knew who he was, I don’t think anyone could say they knew him well. He was distant, quietly officious in his duties as the Chadds Ford Historical Society president and well-respected, mainly because of the charities he patronized, and the churches he generously donated to, although he and his family never attended any of them. Neither did the Graysons socialize with the Wyeths, the du Ponts nor the Windles, the other bastions of the upper echelon who kept fine homes in the valley; indeed, aside from Lear’s business and civic activities, the Graysons appeared to live in a world apart from everyone else. Maybe, as many whispered, it was because Lear and Elizabeth Grayson had a third daughter, named Stella, older than Magdalene and Lothian, said to have been born in Europe, and an aberration: a monster with one eye smack dab in the middle of her forehead, who could neither speak nor hear, and had to be kept locked away at Grayson House lest she inflict grievous harm on herself and others. Of course no one had actually ever seen such a child, and I didn’t believe such a story for a minute.