The Angry Woman Suite

by Lee Fullbright

  I got lost in my dream—a dream of desperation that lasted until fire flared into my consciousness, when I’d been propelled back to the loathsome reality of who and what I really was: the wrong man for the right woman, gone too far, way too far, and way too late to take any of it back.

  Yet if it hadn’t been for saving The Angry Woman Suite from Lear Grayson, I’d have never gotten a stab at redemption. Of course I wouldn’t have needed it, either. Funny how things work out.

  That is, if you call hypocrisy and murder funny.

  After shifting blame for the fire to Stella, Lear had made the mad dash for Matthew’s studio.

  “Let’s go!” he’d yelled over his shoulder, even though the fire had started moving the other way, toward the trees. Dazed, reflexively, brain muddled at how quickly things had gotten out of control, I ran after Lear. I watched him fish the key from his pocket and unlock the doors to Matthew’s studio, shouting directions, snatching an Angry Woman painting and wrapping it in his overcoat, galvanizing me out of my paralysis. I grabbed another painting and covered it with the blanket I’d taken from Washington’s Headquarters, and helped Lear make a half-dozen frantic trips back and forth across the road, putting all of Matthew’s Angry Women in my spare room, ripped not only by new fear while doing so, not knowing if Magdalene was watching from my bedroom window or if she’d managed to slip away without her father seeing, but also by a daring inspiration.

  Because I’d changed my mind: Lear would not have any parts of these paintings, I’d see to that. Because too much had become way too smelly: the fire, and now accusing Stella, when I knew better.

  Stashing the last painting seconds before fire officials screeched to a halt in front of the mill house, I ran back across the road while Lear talked to them, and upstairs to my room. Magdalene had gone—and I’d no idea how much she’d seen.

  After I told Jamie this, I needed to hear him say he hadn’t known that his mother had dispatched Lear to return the Angry Women to her, to be destroyed. At which point I‘d explain why it behooved us to maintain silence while the public was informed the Angry Women had been re-purchased by the Waterston camp and subsequently lost in the mill house fire. We would not deny such a story, I’d tell him. And, second, I’d tell him why, in the meantime, the best place for the suite was at Washington’s Headquarters—until we trotted it out again, years and an obscene amount of money hence. And, third, I wanted to discuss the injustice that made it necessary for me to shut out Lear Grayson.

  And I wanted Jamie convinced that Magdalene would be protected, and that Stella, in time, would see justice.

  But I never even got to first base. Lips drawn into a tight line, Jamie held up a hand, as if daring me to open my mouth.

  “You know what I’ve been standing here thinking—and it’s not the first time I’ve thought it?” It was a question not looking for an answer. “I’ve been thinking, Aidan, that if you hadn’t judged Magdalene so harshly, you might’ve had to love her instead. Now isn’t that funny?” The air between us went suddenly and piercingly thin, like the horrible spasms twisting down my legs.

  “I’ve been thinking that if you hadn’t been visiting with Magdalene the night of the fire, you might’ve had time to glance out a window. You might’ve even seen the fire when it took hold. You might’ve even been able to put the fire out yourself—the meadows are new; it must’ve taken a while for this fire to really get going. You might’ve saved two lives … ah, but I forgot, Aidan: you were busy.”

  I gestured helplessly.

  “I see.” Jamie touched his forehead gingerly, as if feeling for a new wound. And then he shocked me further.

  “Look—Aidan, there’s another reason for today. I’ve signed papers making you custodian of the Waterston estate. It’s what my father wanted.” Eyes shimmering with what looked to be the beginnings of an unspeakable pain Jamie then delivered his coups de grâce.

  “I will expect you to take care of Magdalene’s child. But you know what’s really disgusting? My father was wrong about you. I’ve never known anyone more afraid of truth, Aidan.”

  “Jamie, please—”

  “Don’t. Life won’t be easy for Magdalene—but then, who has an easy life? You’ll have to right that too, Aidan. Because you owe me.”

  “Jamie, if you’d just—”

  “It is unfair that someone so humane should have to suffer so much. Magdalene wouldn’t have gone to you if she hadn’t been suffering. She did, didn’t she? She went to you.” He jammed his hands into his pockets and took a deep breath.

  “No, no details. I have to believe I’m partially at fault here. Because I couldn’t convince her that she was more important than California or Lothian or a few hundred other things …” He made circles in the dirt with his shoe.

  “And I couldn’t because I couldn’t convince myself. I did have Lothian, and I do want this break, Aidan. I want California. I want to be the best popular musician this country’s ever had. I want it more than anything. I want people talking about me a hundred years after I’m gone. Me. Not Jamie Waterston, son of the artist. But James Witherspoon, the musician. The orchestra leader.” He looked up. “And that, Aidan, is why I’m going to believe I’m partly to blame for you and Magdalene. Otherwise I’d never speak to you again.”

  And he left then. Just left. Never once looking back.

  So he didn’t see me sink to my knees at the edge of that charred meadow, and he never heard my broken whispers of protest, or pleas for forgiveness.

  And I never understood—not for years—that Jamie, my dear boy Jamie, engineered his freedom by manipulating Magdalene and me. I never saw it, couldn’t have believed it, wouldn’t have accepted it, because I was just too damn guilty to put blame anywhere but square on my own shoulders.

  Ensconced within a gin-fueled haze, I pictured Jamie walking all the way to California. Stomping is more like it. From Chadds Ford back into town, then onward across the whole country. Stupid, I know, but it’s the way I imagined it. I imagined it was his disappointment in me pushing him on. His crushing anger at my treachery. First for shutting his father out, then for loving Magdalene. I imagined so much that I made an unendurable pain even more wicked. And I began hearing voices: Matthew and Jamie’s expressing the same thought about injustice being that which formed Magdalene. Those Waterston voices banged around like crazy inside my skull, talking over each other, and I drove myself to the point of exhaustion trying to shut them up, busying myself removing every shred of evidence of the mill house, which I started on right after the sheriff gave me the go-ahead to begin bulldozing.

  Which happened right after Stella Grayson confessed to the murders of Matthew and Sahar Waterston.

  ***

  I fired a letter off to Magdalene outlining the parts of the Waterston trust pertaining to her unborn child, as stipulated by Jamie. I told her a sufficient amount of money for the child’s care would be left in a post office box each month. But the transactions were to be our secret. I told her it was best we avoid personal contact—and she knew why—but that she was free to correspond for business purposes, although I stressed she should keep the correspondence discreet and to a minimum. For two reasons: I’d no intention of doling out money willy-nilly. The Waterston estate had to last a lifetime. Better yet, it had to grow. And I didn’t want Lothian knowing I’d been tapped to oversee the vast Waterston holdings, otherwise she’d likely regard me as her personal conduit to Jamie and harass me to death.

  Alone as I was, my drinking got out of hand. I grieved for Matthew. I grieved for the Sahar I thought I’d known, and the Lear I thought I’d understood. I longed to forget how horrifically it had ended for Matthew and Sahar. I couldn’t forget. But I was determined to forget my night with Magdalene, how we’d betrayed Jamie. I needed to stop hungering for Magdalene.

  And I had to forget how I’d finished it with my one-time friend, Lear Grayson.

  I missed Matthew, did I mention that? I missed us.

  I m
ade a stab at retirement. I petitioned the town council to find another schoolmaster. I canceled band practices. Festival no longer mattered. I closed my museum, pulling the heavy draperies across the windows and putting a “Not Interested” sign in the front yard. I did have one last thing to do, though, before totally burying myself with the hidden Angry Woman paintings at Washington’s Headquarters, along with my dead dreams and deader relics, all soaked in gin: I had to attend a hearing for Stella Grayson—it was the first of the many debts I had to pay.

  ***

  It was still morning, but I was already drunk when I walked into the courtroom in time to hear a pasty-faced, hollow-eyed Lear tell the judge how, in locking up Grayson House the night of the fire, he’d begun by checking in on his daughters as was his habit, starting with Stella. Not finding Stella in her bedroom, he’d gone downstairs to the kitchen, then outside. Stella had a tendency to wander. It was as he reached the bottom of Grayson Hill that he’d smelled the fire.

  Dull and bleary-eyed, I sat on a folding chair, registering that Magdalene was a no-show, and that Elizabeth Grayson seemed diminished, small and pale. I even registered Lear’s predictable rationale that Stella had only meant to frighten Matthew Waterston, not kill him and Mrs. Waterston, “because of,” and here Lear cleared his throat meaningfully, “my middle daughter’s condition.”

  The judge made what I heard to be an appropriately sympathetic noise, which Lear apparently took to be more of an invitation. He should’ve seen it coming, he said. No, not about Matthew and Magdalene, everyone had always known about the two of them. But about Stella. Stella had never thought right. Stella couldn’t put two and two together. Stella didn’t connect dots. Stella was simple. Stella had believed her sister injured by Matthew Waterston, so she’d wanted to get back at him, to injure him.

  Going strictly by appearances, it didn’t take a genius to conclude that the humpbacked, hare-lipped giantess with the downcast eyes sitting beside Elizabeth Grayson at the front of the Delaware County courtroom had never connected a dot in her life.

  But Stella wasn’t calculating either, Lear stressed, as if that hadn’t just been established. Which was why it was the right call to not send her to prison. People who couldn’t connect dots didn’t belong with murderers in prisons. They belonged with other people who couldn’t connect dots, in “safe houses,” where they could be watched.

  Stella belonged in Portsmith’s asylum.

  Lear’s voice broke when he said, “It’s clear we kept Stella at Grayson House too long. But we wanted to protect her. Stella’s our child. You understand … what kind of people give up on their child?”

  I shrank down farther in my seat, and then I heard the word, “Guilty,” mangled to sound like, “Ilty.” I opened an eye. Stella stood before the judge—but he hadn’t called on her. What was she doing?

  “I’m done,” Stella said in her garbled way. A lone tear slid down a pitted cheek. “I’m done being talked about.” She lifted her chin and attempted straightening her back, shoulders pumping, hump remaining. “Ilty, ilty, ilty …”

  I jumped to my feet and made a beeline for the exit.

  “Mr. Madsen!” Lothian was at my side like a shot, taking my arm as if we were friends, never once breaking stride walking us outside.

  “It’s not to be stomached,” I growled.

  “Magdalene let Jamie get away,” she said once we’d cleared the courthouse, as if that and not the extent of Stella’s mental deficiencies were being determined in that courtroom. “Because she hates me. Because she wanted to hurt me.” Her look was cagey. “But I know about the fire.” She then dropped my arm as quickly as she’d taken it and walked back toward the courtroom, leaving me more bewildered.

  What could she know about her father and the fire?

  I was sure it had been Lothian on her bike who, following Magdalene and seeing her go inside Washington’s Headquarters with me, had witnessed the spread of the fire as Magdalene and I slept. But Lothian couldn’t have seen her father and me take the Angry Women because she’d been on her way to town to report the fire. So that’s how much Lothian knew. But where had Stella been that night? Had Stella, on foot, been following Lothian follow Magdalene? Damn—was it impossible for a Grayson to stay in at night like a normal person? Were they all night prowlers? A chill ran down my spine, imagining Stella watching her father and me skittering here, there, everywhere, clandestinely stowing the Angry Women at Washington’s Headquarters, looking for all the world like thieves in the night.

  As if we were stealing. As if murder had been the plan. Was that what Stella had told Lothian?

  No, of course not. No one but Magdalene had ever understood anything Stella said.

  Staggering home from that joke of a proceeding, I marveled at Stella Grayson’s decision to shield her family by giving herself up to the asylum in Portsmith—and then I couldn’t help thinking of Matthew again, and how despite being barely able to walk he’d made that brave last stand against the fire—a fire that would not have spread had I not fallen asleep, because it had been my assignment to stamp it out.

  I went around the corner, off Broad Street and into an alley, sliding on gravel, crumbling into a heap against the side of the five and dime, shaking not only because the booze was wearing thin, but because there was sudden music. Someone had put a nickel in the jukebox.

  “Dazed,” Jamie’s signature song, enveloped me.

  And this, Francis, was what else I decided, then and there—facts: I could keep your mother at arm’s length forever, a goal that had to be easier than loving her had ever been. And I would mourn Matthew the rest of my days. But I would never give up on Jamie. I told myself that this last break with him had to be repairable. I couldn’t stand thinking otherwise. I had to keep thinking Jamie would resurface soon, and call me. He was a star after all, and real stars were theater, they were presentation. Make them wait, leave them begging for more, that kind of thing. Stars didn’t just fade away. Burn out, yes, and brightly, even garishly sometimes, but they did not fade away: Jamie would return.

  Matthew told me once that every creature is complex and contradictory. Maybe not using those precise words, but it’s what I took to be his point. Magdalene once said something almost identical. She’d said that not one of us is any one thing through and through. We’re good one minute, bad the next, and anyone who tells you that’s not the way we are is either stupid or delusional. All of which is just my way of saying I’d no way of knowing that the resentment I’d harbored for Matthew would’ve led to his passing—I’d have changed everything if I’d known. And neither did I know about Jamie’s illness, or how all our lives and all the facts I’d ever known about anything would continue to change because of Huntington’s chorea and James Witherspoon Waterston, and his son.

  That son is you, Francis. Your complexity—your very existence—has redrawn many, many maps.

  I passed out in that alley, but not before making the decision to pull my life together again. And later that night, while removing the “Not Interested” sign from the front of Washington’s Headquarters, with “Dazed” still whirling around inside my throbbing head, I illustrated my own contradictory nature. Despite my grief and horrible guilt, not to mention sublime hangover, my spirits had lifted somewhat.

  The game was still on and it was bigger than ever. Because, fact: I was the Graysons’ next obvious target.

  Fact: I was the man who knew too much. I was the bee in Lear Grayson’s bonnet. I was the only one who knew what he and Sahar had been up to—and that he’d then turned the tables on Sahar.

  Bigger fact: I meant to triumph over Lear. It was now clear one of us had to go and I’d no intention of it being me.

  Fact: Some things in life are not repairable. Sometimes something else has to be repaired or eliminated instead, in order to make life even, in order to make things right.

  So, Lear Grayson had to be eliminated—but Matthew Waterston’s Angry Women, they would be my redemption—for yo
u, Francis.

  I would be the keeper of Matthew Waterston’s suite’s legacy. That would be my life’s real work. Fact.

  ELYSE

  San Diego 1958–1965

  “Elyse Liebling.” Those were the first words I heard when we pulled into the driveway of our house in Sacramento, home from Mississippi and then Pennsylvania, and the last words I heard when we pulled out again, this time for San Diego.

  “Sweet girl, all right,” Daddy said, getting out of the car and stretching his neck and shoulders. “Been yakking my ear off five days straight.” Daddy pumped Papa’s hand, then went straight to work untying suitcases from the top of the car. Papa didn’t hurry to help. He picked me and Bean up, one in each strong arm, and then leaned forward to peck Aunt Rose and Mother’s cheeks. I ran my hands through Papa’s blond-gray hair, making him laugh and holler for me to quit.

  “I could use some help here,” Daddy said tersely. I froze, ashamed of the way Daddy could talk.

  “In due time, Francis,” Papa said evenly. “You’re tired. Come in the house first.”

  Daddy chewed his lower lip, and I could tell he was hurt at having been put in his place in front of everyone. Daddy was always on the lookout for getting hurt, and despite Papa’s iron-hard arms, my stomach churned and I couldn’t help wondering if even my omnipotent grandfather had stamina enough to go up against someone as dense and complicated as Daddy.

  In due time the car got unloaded and Mother went back to her old job at the Mather exchange and Daddy went out looking for work. Despite Grandmother Magdalene’s invitation for us to stay on at Grayson House, Daddy had eventually said no. I loved Daddy for that, because I’d have died if I’d had to stay away from Papa another minute longer.

  “But I got real scared,” I confided when Bean and I got Papa all to ourselves. “I thought I’d have to live at Grayson House forever. Grandmother Magdalene is very—” I couldn’t think of the right word.