Naturally, in real life, I didn’t make a move toward Magdalene. And neither did I say anything to give myself away. Not one word. Beyond a healthy fear of rejection, and the paradoxical assessment that Grayson House was the epitome of everything I’d never have (so why would anyone want to be taken from it?), lay another truth having less to do with ghosts and paradoxes than with perhaps the real dilemma Magdalene Forsythe Grayson presented, and what Matthew might really have pitied me for.
In real life I was old enough to be Magdalene’s father. I’d been her teacher, and although she’d repelled me then, I wanted her now … yet, would anyone believe I had not been drawn to the child?
Reputation, if it’s a good one, is not something to play around with.
Some weeks later, Magdalene asked me to join her for a walk after her sitting.
“They’re his paintings,” she fretted as we strolled the meadow ringed by cedar and scrub oak adjacent to Matthew’s studio. “It doesn’t seem quite right … all the money he’s paying me.”
I knew Matthew was inside working, and I imagined sheets of white light streaming through the windows and skylights, illuminating a portrait of Magdalene. I saw him lean in and dab more light onto Magdalene’s pale hair, brushing soft tendrils onto her cheeks, down her neck, softening cheekbones cut just sharp enough to prevent Magdalene from ordinary beauty, like Lothian’s. He grazed the dark arches of brows, startling against Magdalene’s white skin and light-filled hair, and pale eyes starred with equally dark, thick lashes. His brush dipped to lips that curved upward in a secret smile, and an unlikely square jaw; then, in a more unlikely finish to all that angularity, a delicate chin, slightly pointed, definitely girlish.
“Matthew’s doing all the work, and for this I’m feeding my family, paying bills, and getting Grayson Investments off the hook?”
So she wasn’t calling him “Mr. Waterston” anymore.
I said, “He needs you, you need him. It’s that simple. You have a look he likes.”
“So he said.”
“You’re not mad, then?” I ventured.
“I was at the start.”
“Of course.”
“Well, who wouldn’t have been? The more I thought about it, the way he talked to me that first night, the madder I got. But later I realized I wasn’t so much angry as I was … ashamed. You heard right. Ashamed of Frederick—of my father too, Aidan.” She looked at me sideways. “You’ve been wanting to ask me something.”
She’d caught me off guard.
“It’s written all over you, Aidan. You want to know about Frederick, don’t you?”
I fumbled, asking, “Were you … happy, then? You seem happy now.”
“Happy?” She toyed with the nosegay of wild flowers she’d picked. “You mean, forgetting the fact that he was a thieving scoundrel, how could I be happy without Frederick if I’d been happy with him?” She seemed to ponder. “I don’t think I’ve ever been happy, Aidan. I thought I was once, but I was wrong.”
I didn’t understand her. It was the great American dream, being happy. “But … you loved Frederick?”
She threw her nosegay in the air and twirled, holding her skirt out like a child celebrating the first day of summer.
“I hated him!” she cried. “Oh god, but I hated Frederick Forsythe with a passion!”
I stared, alarmed by words and action that didn’t square. Magdalene continued twirling, staggering up against me, grasping my vest, laughing and crying at the same time.
“Oh Aidan, I was such an idiot! Did you think I didn’t know?”
Know what? I clenched her upper arms, barely able to think, between her scent and histrionics and those pale eyes so close to mine.
“Of course I knew,” she whispered before my lips could touch hers. She turned her head slightly. I pulled back too, imperceptibly, as if I hadn’t been at all close to kissing her.
“Do you know why I married Frederick? Because I was tempting the fates. And I was curious! I wanted to see if someone could make me smile the same stupid way she did.” Her lower lip trembled and her hands slid down my vest. She moved out of my arms. “She didn’t deserve to smile,” Magdalene said petulantly.
I held myself straight, arms stuck safely at my sides. “Your mother, you mean?”
“Of course my mother. She had a thing for Frederick. She was unfair to my father …”
And just like that I was put off—put off by her pettiness and recklessness, by her sheer waste of time and self, and the fact that I had been right about her from the start: Magdalene was serious trouble, and even more fey than the usual meaning of the word. Worse, she was theatrical. I hated theatrical. Theatrical belonged in Philadelphia. It belonged on the cheap women I knew there. It had even belonged on my mother, she who feigned sadness to pull me in, to keep me from living the life I’d dreamed of, in music. It was unbecoming on Magdalene. It was disappointing.
It was relief.
I said dully, “So you seduced Frederick and took him away from your mother because she didn’t deserve him? And because you wanted to feel her passion.” I laughed; a bitter sound to even my own ears. “Maybe your mother did deserve him, Magdalene.”
Her expression was equally withering. “And you think maybe I deserved him, too.”
“Does your father know … about your mother and your husband?”
She surprised me again, this time hanging her head. “You know,” she whispered, “I didn’t know for sure about Mother and Frederick’s affair until …” She looked up. “And you know what else? I really only wanted to play grown-up, that’s why I married Frederick. Isn’t that insane? But it’s the truth. God, Aidan, but my family’s a rotten mess, a real rotten mess. Except for Stella. Stella’s not rotten. But Frederick—damn, he was the rottenest of us all. But once I knew what I’d gotten myself into, did I give him a run for his money! Did I ever!”
“Did you now?” I said, irritated at her anew, sidestepping my questions. “But what about Lothian? Surely Lothian’s not rotten?”
Magdalene’s gaze turned cool. “What a fool you are, Aidan. Can’t you see anything?”
I was getting pretty sick of this question from everyone. “Fine one you are to talk,” I shot back. “Marrying Frederick Forsythe!”
She laughed then, and I mistakenly thought her amused. “That’s very good,” she retorted. “I like a man who says what he thinks. So many don’t.”
As if she’d had a world of experience with men! And then, perversely, I began laughing too, even as she began crying again, even as I began realizing what it was about Magdalene that kept drawing me in.
It was her transformations. I’d seen them many times by now, notably on a long-ago moment we’d shared on the crest of a small knoll overlooking a golden distance—but what I understood this very instant, with no small pang of thrilling anxiety, was that Magdalene’s way, this switching back and forth between worldliness and vulnerability, was the seduction, making me want to change nothing and everything about her.
“I’ll tell you about Lothian,” Magdalene said, walking ahead, seemingly impervious to the pull she was exerting on me. I stepped quickly, keeping pace.
“She’s like the rest of us. She’s not what she seems. I’m probably not what I seem, either. Neither are you. Ever think of that, Aidan?” Her backward glance was oddly knowing.
“But on the inside I believe Lothian to be … seething. Yes, that’s a good word, teacher, don’t you think? Seething. And for many reasons. Our parents for two, because they’ve been so wrapped up in hating each other over Stella. Plus Lothian hates that I got to choose the role of the renegade, leaving her to play the part of Miss Goody Two-Shoes—which, by the way, Lothian does excel at.” Magdalene walked faster. “I’ll never marry again, you know.”
My heart thudded. What nonsense was she talking now? Women always married.
“I know nothing of the sort,” I said, keeping up.
“Marriage isn’t all it’s cut out to be—b
esides, I don’t think I’m the marrying kind.”
“You just said you didn’t marry the right man.”
Magdalene faced me. Red splotches stained both her cheeks. Oh god, but she was angry. Gloriously angry. “Oh, but I think I did,” she enunciated clearly. “I think I got just what I deserved. I got a faggot for a husband, not to mention a cheat and a thief; and a failing business—plus a mother who hates me to death. I’d call that poetic justice. Wouldn’t you, Aidan?”
I worked my throat and not just because I’d never heard a woman say faggot before. One didn’t hear the word much in old Quaker territory, even from men, but it could be heard plenty in Philadelphia. No, it was because I’d finally stepped far enough outside myself and what I wanted to hear, which was that Magdalene was attracted to me, to be able to hear what Magdalene was really saying, which was that she had taken stock of herself and fallen short. So, actually, none of anything she’d said had been theatrical. Instead, just the opposite. It had been real. Everything Magdalene said and did reflected her truth as she knew it at a given moment. And the truth was I wasn’t anything special to Magdalene—except maybe a shoulder to lean on.
Her pale eyes darkened looking at me, and that’s when I knew Magdalene knew I’d known about Frederick’s preference for men. How, I’d no idea, but I knew it as sure as I knew there would be ice on the Brandywine come winter—and having never been pegged as a particularly insightful man, that’s how well Magdalene managed to convey that she was still and always one step ahead of me.
Precisely the point she’d intended making when she’d arranged our little walk.
I looked away. I had known about Frederick. I could’ve saved her.
Nasty business, consciences.
“But I got my son,” Magdalene said, apparently choosing not to rub my nose in what she considered incomprehensible apathy. “I got Earl. So maybe there’s a good God after all … and maybe, just maybe, I can turn everything around, Aidan.”
Two months later, about the time we got word Lear was out of prison and even writing press releases from the front, and that it had been decided American forces would fight independent of French advice, Magdalene and Earl moved into the mill house. It made no sense, Sahar said, for Magdalene and the baby to be traipsing back and forth to the mill house every day when she’d more room than she knew what to do with.
“Though I hate to see a family split apart,” she said over coffee at the mill house, just the two of us at the table; Matthew, engrossed when he had a project, was already in the studio with Magdalene.
“Second thoughts?” I said, forgetting all those summers Sahar had chosen to not accompany her family from Maine to Chadds Ford.
“No, no. I just hate the splitting up, that’s all.”
“My darling Sahar, now who’s being dramatic? You’re not making Magdalene do anything.” I rose, gathering my things for the day. “Yes, you invited her, but it was her decision to take you up on it. Besides, it’s only until Lear gets home and I’m sure he’s on his way. Or will be once he gets this war correspondent bug out of his system.”
“I worry, though,” Sahar persisted. “Lothian up there at Grayson House with just Elizabeth and that poor unfortunate Stella.”
I loved Sahar back in those days, but as I said before, she lacked Magdalene’s complexity: she was too good.
“Cheer up,” I said off-handedly. “Lothian’s here at the mill house more than she’s at Grayson House anyway. She and Jamie have a thing for each other, don’t you know.” I filched Matthew’s words for the other, the monster. “And there’s nothing that can be done for Stella. She’s a freak of nature and nothing can be done for freaks of nature, Sahar. Nothing at all, and no use even trying.”
I missed Festival that summer, missed it badly, even more than the year before, but in light of the number of American casualties being reported, missing Festival should’ve been irrelevant. I enlisted Jamie and Lothian for a thorough cleaning and inventory of the museum, and in-between overseeing them and keeping up with my lecture commitments, I shared coffees with Sahar and Magdalene most mornings, and gins with Matthew most evenings.
“We’ve got ourselves a real routine,” I said to Matthew one afternoon. We sat in lawn chairs under the oak, sipping gins.
He flicked an imaginary ash from his cigar. “Jamie walked up to Grayson House with Magdalene to see Stella. He said the Graysons had a letter from Lear. Apparently, he’s still writing pieces for The Gazette.” Matthew flicked another ash. “Interesting thing, really … I mean, a man with all his pull, in Europe, in prison, and now writing of all things. Doesn’t make sense, does it? A lot doesn’t make sense here.”
“Things will get sorted out when he’s back.”
“Perhaps. Of course Lear’s no idea about Frederick or what happened to the business, I shouldn’t think, or that Magdalene and Earl are living at the mill house. Elizabeth, apparently, won’t tell him about the business until he’s home. Magdalene’s threatened to stop her mother’s stipend if she does.” He paused. “Magdalene’s got a lot of spirit, and she knows the power of money.”
“If I recall, spirit was what you were after. How are the paintings coming along?”
“We’re on the sixth.”
I asked, and not for the first time, if I might have a preview, and once again Matthew told me the suite was to stay under wraps until Lear was home. At Magdalene’s request.
“What’re you two hiding?” I half-kidded.
“You know better.”
“Tell me this then: are you still painting Magdalene angry?”
Matthew leaned forward, as if I’d finally asked the right question. “A word of caution, Aidan. There’s more to Magdalene than meets the eye. She has layers. Frederick was only one.”
I sat back farther in my chair.
“By that I mean what’s formed Magdalene is more subtle than the hundred and one usual things that go into making character. In Magdalene’s case, it’s injustice. Magdalene may flaunt Frederick, but Frederick was never her center. Injustice is. And you are nowhere near ready for the game of injustice, my friend.”
I was more than casually offended. “Magdalene doesn’t flaunt Frederick. She hardly even mentions him! Besides, Frederick’s dead!”
“And just in the nick of time, wouldn’t you say? Now Magdalene can use him any old way she pleases.”
We were back to that. Matthew thinking he knew everything there was to know about Magdalene, when it was I who knew Magdalene and had known her for years, and better, longer, far more intimately than Matthew ever could.
But suddenly I was insecure, because Matthew spoke with such authority. Maybe I still didn’t understand anybody. I wasn’t like Matthew, or even Lear, who excelled at microscopic examinations of people. Lear was a writer at heart, with a passion for description and inventory. But I was an empirical man, which was why history was my baby: things already done and written about. Things coherent.
Later that night, tossing and turning, I thought back on what Matthew had said about injustice and its influence on Magdalene.
I experimented, trying to visualize Magdalene’s center, to think through all those layers she supposedly had. It was easy enough at the start. At the start of anybody is their core family, in this case Elizabeth and Lear Grayson. But that’s as far as I got before finding myself so squeezed into a tunnel of bias and supposition that Magdalene’s center disappeared before my eyes. Poof, gone … way before I’d ever given consideration to Lothian’s role in Magdalene’s development, or to mine as the teacher who’d fawned over the younger sister and dismissed the one with the pale, knowing eyes—or to the notion that Frederick, a loser in life, and an abuser, could now be used as a good excuse for avoiding another relationship.
An empirical man, I consoled myself, drifting off to sleep. That’s what I was, and there was a need for people like me.
On June 5th, 1919, I made this entry in my diary: “Just got the news that Lear’s on his way
home. The war’s finally over. I’m sure my life with Magdalene begins now.”
FRANCIS
On the Road
1945
I was an overnight sensation. My rendition of “Dazed,” introduced at Glenn River Casino with Elena on vocal, was received with an unbelievable standing ovation from the live audience, phone requests from hundreds of radio listeners for more of the Francis Grayson Orchestra, and the unpretty picture of Elena’s agent, Pete Burdick, salivating all over himself.
Short, dark and nervous, Pete gave me the willies. His saving grace was that he seemed to know what he was doing. The booking agency he represented—MCA—maintained a roster of key ballrooms that had become virtually exclusive to MCA, and with my phenomenal success at Glenn River, Pete was breathing down my neck and patronizing as hell, talking to me as if I were an idiot, telling me how to dress, smile, talk, eat, even think. He had, in just two unbelievably short days, begun to grate on my last nerve.
“Someone’s showing a big interest in you,” he announced our third night out at Glenn River, wringing his hands. “Someone very important. He wants a meeting. You’re gonna have to pull out all the stops. Act like you understand what he’s talking about. Do what you do best—after blowing that horn, that is. Look pretty—but let me close the deal. Think you can do that, Frankie?”
The dipshit.
But the someone Pete referred to was important. He was Earl Hunnicutt, the bigwig at Tandem Records, one of the emerging companies that had cut into the majors’ actions during the musicians’ strike.
He was exactly what Elena had predicted.
Elena accompanied me and Pete to the dinner meeting with Earl Hunnicutt.
“I’d be taking a rider on y’all,” Hunnicutt drawled, a middle-aged, cigar-chomping Southerner in a too-shiny suit.
Most of the new record companies were focused on hillbilly music, so it was true what Hunnicutt said. The Francis Grayson Orchestra would be a huge change for Tandem.
The Angry Woman Suite Page 20