I waited the better part of a half-hour that day, rocking on my heels in the Grayson House foyer, wondering at the silence, where the servants were, wondering what was taking Lear so long, even wondering where he kept his mysterious Stella tied up. I peered into the massive parlor I’d not been invited to wait in. It was richly furnished, elegant, as intimidating as the house’s rolling manicured lawns and well-tended shrubbery. When Lear did finally come downstairs to greet me, it was perfunctorily, and we went outside, straight to work, hauling boxes from the carriage house to the horse and wagon I’d left parked at the top of the drive. He offered me neither food nor drink. He spoke only as we were finishing up.
“The society has some new articles coming in from Philadelphia, Aidan. A shipment you might be interested in. I’d be happy to bring it to you when it arrives. Might be something there for your museum.”
I’d be happy to bring it to you. I understood then that the woman who’d answered the door was Elizabeth Grayson, Lear’s wife. His embarrassment. I wouldn’t be invited back.
“Right kindly of you, Lear,” I answered politely.
He loaded the last of the artifacts into my wagon, along with a heavy chair his tall, lean frame easily handled, then stood back and looked at a place past my shoulder. “Elizabeth wasn’t always—” I waved a hand as if to say no offense had been taken. Lear’s long face tightened, but he continued. “We traveled everywhere, all over the world. When we returned here, home from Europe, I knew I’d rediscovered something special. I committed myself to raising children here, schooling them in this country, a place distinctly American, not foreign. I want my children to be Americans, Aidan.”
I’d misread Lear Grayson. He wasn’t so eager to be rid of me after all. He wanted to talk.
“It’s magnificent, Lear. Truly magnificent.” I looked about the grounds, the orchard in the distance, then back at the enormous house. It was a mix of architectural styles: Georgian, gothic, even traditional, complete with wraparound porch. Somehow it worked. Lear’s voice brought me back to the present.
“Sorry,” I said. “What was that?”
“But she never goes outside anymore. Never.”
I felt a ripple of apprehension and adjusted my spectacles. “Mrs. Grayson, you mean?” It must’ve been the way I said it, because Lear’s face closed down completely.
“Things have a way of changing people,” Lear said crisply, turning away, adjusting the ropes around the bundles in the wagon.
“That they do,” I said with mock cheeriness. I fished for something safe: “The girls. I expected to see Lothian and Magdalene.”
“They stay in on weekends.”
Not a word about his much-rumored Stella, as if I really expected Lear to say he kept a little girl chained up in the basement and would I care to take a look? As if his Stella even existed.
“Lothian’s quite the girl,” I said, grasping at straws, wondering why I didn’t just leave. I mean, I wanted to leave. “A good student. So popular. Spirited. Quite the picture of industriousness. I can always count on Lothian. You must be very proud of her, Lear.”
Lear extended a hand. “I’m proud of all my girls. A good day to you, Aidan. I’ll be in touch about that shipment from Philadelphia.”
It was clear I’d been dismissed, and so I climbed into my borrowed buckboard and made my getaway, not acknowledging even to myself that I’d found Lear’s sadness threatening, even tiresome, and that by side-stepping it, hurrying him past it, I had been the one who’d put the skids to our meeting. I didn’t see that I was only for myself, and so it goes without saying that neither did I hear Lear say “all my girls,” and not “both my girls.”
The main thing was I escaped the oppressiveness of Grayson House with normalcy and dreams intact, but of course I didn’t realize either—how could I have?—that normalcy is only perception, and that dreams are merely illusions, not necessarily markers of anything that one intends to make real at all.
***
“What is it?” I repeated to Magdalene. I couldn’t leave her to sitting in the dirt, bawling her eyes out. I was the teacher, the authority. Until safely home, Magdalene Grayson was, technically-speaking, my responsibility.
I followed her gaze. We were standing on the crest of a small knoll. Just ahead was a rock ledge. Below it and to the right, in a golden distance, were small farms intersected by the curve of streams. To our left were dark clouds, a possible storm.
“Do you see?” Magdalene asked softly.
Did I see what?
“There’s a war going on, Mr. Madsen. The war is something almost … uncontrollable. And I was just thinking that those dark clouds over there are uncontrollable, too. Those clouds are like the war, and over there, farther, where the sun is still shining, do you see how the sunlight is getting smaller, how it is almost just a speck now?”
I squinted into the horizon, straining to see into those dark clouds, to see what Magdalene saw, although I guessed what she was implying. The war she was referring to was the fracas in Europe. She was intimating that the furor instigated by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Slav nationalist was a threat to us: an ugly idea, and a stupid one too, and I’d told her so in class.
“What do you see?” Magdalene whispered. “Do you see what I see? Do you see the encroaching savage? Can you feel the rain on your head? Or are you really just like the others? Do you see only what you want to see?”
I longed to tell her she was impertinent. I bit my tongue. Fey was the next good word that came to mind.
“Hear no evil, see no evil,” she murmured. “Isn’t that right? In that one tiny splay of light, you see a safe and glorious past—nothing more. You see only your precious history, don’t you, Mr. Madsen? No future.”
Worse than trying to bait me, she was now reproaching me—and so of course I wanted to shake her. Instead I delved deeper into my schoolmaster persona, dredging up what I thought were words of comfort, adult words, words that were my job.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of, Magdalene. War is a million miles away.”
She looked at me hard, and the disgusting thing was I thought I saw pity flash in her pale eyes. She knew I didn’t understand her, or even want to. She knew I was insincere. And that’s what she pitied me for. For being hollow, empty. I disliked her even more.
“I’m not afraid,” she said, tossing her head. “I am overwhelmed by grandeur, Mr. Madsen. I told Lothian and Jamie to get lost because I wanted this spectacle all to myself.” She looked back over the valley, and her voice went soft.
“I wanted to watch the shadows chase down the light. You probably can’t understand that, Mr. Madsen. You’re not … contemplative. But I am. You don’t know that about me, do you? You don’t know anything about me. But it doesn’t matter. The thing is, I wanted to see what the light would do, how long it would take to seek out its freedom again, and how it would go about doing it—which cloud it would peek out from under, because it will, you know. It always does. And I wanted to watch it happen. I wanted to be moved.” She glanced back over her shoulder.
“I want to watch the future unfold, Mr. Madsen. I can scarcely wait for the next chapter, what will happen next … whatever it is, I want to be a part of it, everything! And I’ve nothing to lose by speaking my mind now. I’m graduating, Mr. Madsen! I’m free!”
Magdalene spread her arms then, as if embracing the world, and on anyone else, in any other place, the gesture could’ve been melodramatic. But it wasn’t, not on Magdalene Grayson, at least not at that moment. And that was the moment when I should have known what Magdalene would do to me—to us all. But, naturally, I couldn’t hold onto the moment. One never holds onto the moments one should. Instead something instinctive went off in me, a warning bell, and things fell right back into place, back to where they’d always been, and again Magdalene Grayson was the bane of my professional life: the fey child, the smirker, the one who’d believed herself superior. Exchanging nary another word wit
h her, I’d walked her to the base of Grayson Hill, and when she graduated the next morning I silently declared her diploma my passport to freedom, a ticket out of the bondage that had held us together for ten years. But, even better, I was now free all the way around. It was officially summer. Teaching duties were over. I was free to tend my museum full-time, and to prepare for Festival. Best of all, I was free to prepare for the return, to the mill house across the road from Washington’s Headquarters, of Matthew Waterston.
***
He was visiting with Mother when I arrived home to Washington’s Headquarters from graduation ceremonies. We slapped each other’s backs, hugging like men do, shoulder blades touching.
My mother, a worn woman with white-streaked hair pulled into a tight bun, wiped her hands on her apron and declined Matthew’s admonition to stay seated.
“I like your company,” Matthew said kindly.
I said, “Gin would be fine, Mother,” dismissing her. I grinned at Matthew. His chin had grazed my shoulder and I was vaguely surprised. Despite having stood next to him countless times, and put in my place more times than I cared to remember, I still thought of Matthew Waterston and myself as standing shoulder to shoulder, of seeing eye to eye. It’s what I wanted to think. That I was in the company of interesting men because I also was interesting.
Matthew was just medium height, though, but carried himself smoothly, which was the first thing I’d noticed when we’d met five years earlier, when I’d taken welcoming libations across the road, unable to wait any longer to meet the much-lauded artist for myself. The next things I noticed were that his attire was careless—an old jacket with patches at the elbows—and his hair thick and long to his collar, lightly streaked at the temples, and his moustache more gray than dark. He didn’t look like a celebrity, but then what kind of celebrity leaves a much-storied compound in Maine to summer at an abandoned mill house in Chadds Ford?
Actually, I’d always known the old mill house across the road from Washington’s Headquarters had possibilities, even if no one until Matthew Waterston had seen the same things. Set amidst acres of overgrown meadow, complete with its picturesque and useless water mill, the mill house reminded me of a pencil drawing in a history book: huge, poetic and classic. Matthew had begun sprucing it up, completely restoring the interior, cleaning years of built-up gunk off the floor of the great room, until its gleaming wood competed with the mill house’s vast number of windows for shine. The kitchen retained its original knotty-pine cabinetry, which had also been scrubbed and polished to a high sheen. I’d pressed a knothole in the kitchen siding, sliding open a hidden door that Turners from two generations earlier had used to take in runaway slaves, a door that blended beautifully with the rest of the cabinetry.
“Who’d have known?” Matthew marveled.
“A historian,” I replied, thinking us off to a fine start. We stepped through the doorway and into a small courtyard at the back of the mill house. Below, one level down, was the old water mill itself, and a hundred yards to the right was the carriage house in the last stages of its remodel, with windows being installed top to bottom where solid walls had once been. It was to be Matthew Waterston’s studio, where he’d teach his students, five of them that first year.
On the night Matthew told me of Sahar, he and I’d known each other two weeks, touching base nearly every evening, having gins together. We’d settled in lawn chairs under an old oak on the grounds of the mill house, reveling in the kind of relaxation only accomplishment gives. I’d had the best day yet at my museum, escorting numerous visitors about the site of the Great Battle, doing my best to bring it to life, to impress upon my audience the supreme importance of the place. I’d nearly 7,000 signatures in my guest log, a fact I’d shared with Matthew, and I’d just taken delivery of two new showcases for my relics, thanks to Lear Grayson’s largesse, a fact I’d also shared. I was a busy man, I’d just finished pointing out, and all the more so lately because I was becoming a sought after dinner speaker on the subject of the Battle of Brandywine.
“Sahar would like it here,” Matthew managed to interject. “She loves a good warm summer.”
“Sahar?”
“My wife.”
“Your wife?” I picked at something on my trouser leg, aiming for just the right amount of nonchalance. On the face of it, Matthew seemed as devoted to gin and cigars and the other appurtenances of bachelorhood as I. He’d never mentioned a wife. He certainly didn’t look married.
“I also have a son. In Maine.”
Of course Matthew would’ve expected me to ask why his wife and son hadn’t accompanied him to Chadds Ford, or at the very least to ask about them, what they were like, where the son went to school, standard conversation fodder. But I didn’t—and Matthew never mentioned Sahar again, not once during the subsequent four years he summered alone at Chadds Ford. Strangely enough, even after Jamie came to board with me for the school term, he never mentioned his mother either. Neither did he receive letters from her while he lived with me. Looking back, I marvel at the breadth of my self-focus. I marvel that I never wondered what it was in Maine that Matthew and Jamie had been trying to escape.
I marvel at the depth of my abhorrence for intimacy.
But my world did go on to broaden in other respects. For one thing, surprisingly, I became friends with Lear Grayson, which came about when Lear was recommended to Matthew for investment counsel. Lear and Matthew hit it off and Lear also began dropping by the mill house several evenings a week. That was actually the beginning of my awe, watching Matthew break through the tomb of elegiac reserve that was Lear’s cocoon. He did it beautifully, asking questions, pausing at the right moments, letting sentences dangle so Lear could pick them up, listening intently to Lear’s responses. And once Lear had enough gins under his belt, his tongue loosened and he became amusing, friendly, and even funny while expounding on Elizabeth Grayson, her inexplicable moods and sharp tongue, the sheer meanness of her, things I understood about women even when sober, things that corroborated my initial impression of Elizabeth, things that validated me. Lear never spoke of his daughters. They were not his misery. It was Elizabeth, always Elizabeth.
We were well into Matthew’s second summer at Chadds Ford when Lear came up with the idea of an art festival. Matthew never drank to excess, but Lear and I could scarcely sit up straight the night Lear made his proposal, so naturally we were completely undeterred by the expense, energy and sobriety such an undertaking would require. We drunkenly agreed I’d made a mighty stab at culture with my little museum, and with my school band we already had a semblance of music. We acknowledged Matthew Waterston as America’s finest painter—and if he’d loan us a collection, plus some of his students’ pieces, we could initiate a more than respectable art exhibition. In Lear, we had the right contacts and unparalleled business sense, and so the obvious was right in front of our glassy eyes: we were civilized men, patrons of the arts, and it was our duty, our mission, to bring enlightenment to the masses.
Although Matthew seemed more amused than inspired, he did agree to underwrite the event with Lear, and even cajoled his old friend, N.C. Wyeth, into lending two of his works for our show. Our first festival, in 1912, in the East Chester Historical Society Hall, was attended by most of the area’s curious farmers and townspeople, and each summer, until it became a tradition with roots that no one remembered correctly, the East Chester and Chadds Ford Waterston Art Festival got larger and ever more elaborate, drawing visitors from all over Pennsylvania and Delaware, even New York.
At our second festival, which was a whole year in the planning and promoting, there were cake walks on Broad Street, and game booths and food kiosks and displays of crafts and finely-stitched quilts. I passed out handbills for my museum, and led my student band up the middle of Broad Street, directing them in rousing renditions of Souza and Foster, stopping the parade at the hall where the Waterston Institute works were on exhibit, where Lear stood watching.
“Uh-oh, troub
le’s coming,” he said, looking past me. I turned to see Elizabeth Grayson taking hold of Lothian’s shoulder, shoving the child ahead of her. Absolutely tone-deaf, Lothian played the triangle for my band, a fairly safe assignment, and Lear had brought the ten-year-old into town with him. I was amazed that Elizabeth, hermit that she was, had managed to get herself to town. She marched up to Lear.
“Lothian has no business here,” she said, getting right up in his face. “It’s not a school day.”
Passers-by slowed, straining to hear, and I knew I should be moving the band along, but I was transfixed, rooted to the spot.
“She belongs at home!” Elizabeth screeched. “And so do you!”
Then I looked away, embarrassed for Lear, and glanced at Lothian as I directed the band up the street. Her gaze was riveted on her parents, and I saw, unbelievably, what looked like sheer hatred in that little girl’s eyes—and I flinched again. Anger and hatred were the worst emotions of all time; much, much more threatening than even love.
The Angry Woman Suite Page 13