The Maze at Windermere

by Gregory Blake Smith

  They were catching up, was what they were doing, even though they had only been in each other’s company—what, maybe half a dozen times the previous summer? He remembered they’d talked once, bonding over their both being blue-collar kids who had gone to fancy colleges on scholarship, Duke for Sandy and Vassar for Aisha. And he remembered something Margo had once said that had seemed to imply that Aisha was being semi-supported by Alice, the thin girl who was an heiress or something. “Semi” because she really did design and make her own jewelry. He’d even seen her work in one of the chic Newport stores. Strictly upscale, he’d gathered.

  Aisha had made a few sly comments about Margo like she knew what had been going on the previous summer and wanted him to know that she knew—but it was okay, she wouldn’t tell. She was small—maybe five-one or -two—but her parts all fit tightly together the way they did sometimes with small women so that there was a quickness and a brightness and an athletic ease about her. Her dreadlocks had this lovely way of brushing across her shoulder blades as she walked. And then there was this overbite she had that struck Sandy—maybe he was just being generous, falling into the mood—as cute. Her skin was dark enough he couldn’t quite make out the tattoo that ran up the inside of her arm. (Snake? Dragon?) From time to time as they talked she gazed up at him with a look he knew.

  And so it was that when they entered the Orangery (she’d asked if he could help her move the oxygen and acetylene tanks) and she’d turned to him as soon as they were inside the door and lifted herself onto her toes and kissed him on the lips, he had said to himself, Well, okay, here we go. She had made room for them on the little narrow bed that was set against one glass wall and they had fallen onto the cold sheets in the living part of the studio and the whole time he had tried to make out just what her tattoo was. A mermaid, he finally decided. Only instead of a fish’s it had a serpent’s body that started in a coil down near her wrist and ran up the inside of her forearm until it turned into the breasts and neck and face of a woman. You’re beautiful! he heard her whisper under him more than once. I can’t stand you being so beautiful! He leaned his head over and kissed the mermaid’s tiny lips, her breasts, the coil of her tail. Outside they could hear the aluminum rattle of a ladder against the side of the big house. There were the cries of seagulls coming in at the door, and the sound of the surf. And when once he lifted her on top of him—she was so small!—he could see the blue sky through the glass roof.

  And then it was over and he had—lovemaking had this unfortunate effect on him—he had started telling her about the state he was in. Which he was still doing (though she’d pulled on her top, was calling Manny’s Gourmet Pizza).

  Truth was, the girl—Alice—made him nervous. It wasn’t just the cerebral palsy—as those things went he figured hers was pretty mild—but driving her home in the SUV that first night he found it hard to talk to her, even just to say something the way you do because you’re in a car with a stranger. She answered his questions in a manner that seemed to border on rudeness—her name was Alice; she’d grown up in Newport; she didn’t do anything—sitting kind of crumpled into herself, not looking at him when he glanced across at her. And there was that wrist of hers, bent and useless, lying in her lap like a strangled kitten. She told him where to turn, and when they got to Windermere directed him up the drive between the massive tree trunks to the porte cochere, where Margo stood with the Indian on its kickstand. There were lanterns behind her on the side of the house, all soft and Gilded Age looking, the brick and granite in shadowy repose, the ornate beams, the fluted copper downspouts. He hit the SUV’s lights and shut the engine off, opened the door so the cab light went on.

  And that’s when he saw the scars, he told Aisha. (They had gone back outside, back onto the lawn to make sure the gate was open for the pizza truck.) Unmistakable, he said, and he made a slicing action along his wrists as if asking for confirmation. In the cab of the SUV he’d shot a look at the girl’s face and from her expression he could tell that she’d seen him, she’d seen him see. He tried to act like he hadn’t, but she kept her own eyes on him as if daring him to say something. Her whole manner was this mix of pain and humiliation and at the same time fierceness, resentment. They sat like that for a time. And then he did this thing, this Southern Gentleman thing. He reached out and placed his hands over her wrists and pressed. Nothing more than that, but it made her drop her gaze and soften into her seat. Half a minute went by—through the windshield he could see Margo striking the impatient fist-on-the-hip pose—and then he had taken his hands away and that had been that. They’d gotten out of the car. The girl had said good night and with her hitching gait gone inside, and Margo had driven him in the SUV to his hotel where, you know, things had happened. But hey, he said to Aisha now, he was right, wasn’t he? Alice had tried to kill herself?

  They were walking down the pebbled path that led toward the house, waiting for the trees to give way so that they might catch sight of the gate onto Bellevue. She didn’t answer at first, kept her face forward. Some pickup trucks had shown up, and there were three or four ladders now against the exterior of the house and workmen retrieving lawn chairs and porch stuff from the carriage house. He had the thought that he had overstepped, that the scars were there for anyone to see but you didn’t talk about them. He was about to apologize, say he understood, change the subject, but Aisha stopped walking, turned to him, and looked up into his face.

  “I’ve known her for ten years,” she said. “She’s tried to kill herself three times to my knowledge. She can be very difficult. And very special. She’s my best friend and I love her.”

  He had the good sense not to say anything. Perhaps because he couldn’t tell whether he had just been granted access to some inner life of hers or warned away from it. He turned and let his eyes roam over the house on its crest, over the rich brick and the mossy shingles and the tiny leaded panes. The caretaker he’d first seen that morning stood a ways out from the house, supervising the workers.

  “Sorry,” he heard beside him, “that was a bit much.”

  He inclined his head slightly, touched her lightly at the small of her back. He knew how to say things with his body. She moved against him and for a minute they both looked up at the beautiful house coming awake in the spring sun.

  “You ever been inside?” she asked, and when he shook his head: “C’mon, then.”

  So he followed her up the lawn. And while they walked she said she didn’t want him to get the wrong idea about Alice, she didn’t want him to think that she was a total basket case or something. Because she was really smart, super-smart, and she could be really funny. She had this really dark sense of humor. Like after the wrist business, lying around sighing like a Southern belle, calling the bandages her corsages.

  “Funny in her Alice way,” she said. “Which I guess means dark and manic-depressive and suicidal. But funny all the same. Wally, my man!” she called out as they passed the caretaker. “Keep an eye out for Manny’s, yeah?”

  The caretaker did this little salute thing. One of the workmen watched them—watched Aisha in her tight top and her bare legs and her ropey dreadlocks—as they went up the wide granite steps onto the wooden veranda that wrapped around the ocean face of the house.

  “And there you go,” Aisha said, turning and making a sweeping gesture at the view. He turned and looked too.

  Well! He’d been around the rich before. And the famous. Had hung out in the players’ lounge with Agassi and Hewitt, after the Italian Open had been invited to stay in a villa outside Lucca. But this was something different. This was like you owned the summer itself—the breeze, the salt-spray roses, the sailboats like props out on the sparkling water. He said “wow!” and Aisha said “yeah” and then she was telling him he was in luck because she’d been a student docent at the Vassar College art museum and was a pro at giving tours of stuff you wanted but couldn’t have, but all he could really see, all he could real
ly take in was the deep ease of the house and the grounds, the sense he had that under the rich patina of the shingles and the dark brick there was a century of life that was as good as it got. Lime rickeys, he remembered some of the women—his middle-aged students—ordering at the Casino in their post-lesson lassitude. They would invite him to join them and he would have his stupid Sam Adams. This was the life they had: lime rickeys and Adirondack chairs, the sound of children playing croquet and a date later in the afternoon to go riding, or play mixed doubles, or go sailing out on the bay. And yet even as he was thinking it, feeling it, some voice in him was saying, What rot! Hadn’t the house seen a poor girl try to kill herself? Not to mention Margo and Tom’s marriage. And yet standing there he couldn’t quite shake the feeling that here one might give up trying to be something, that the house and the workmen, the warm breeze and the rich brick would vouch for one—would authenticate one—and one could let go, a poor schmuck of a has-been (never-was?) tennis player could let go and simply let life be.

  “The seagulls are on retainer,” Aisha was saying. She was standing along the knee wall looking out at the gliding birds. “Like me,” she said, turning back to him, “just part of the picture.”

  For the next half hour they strolled through the lower floors of the house, into the library and the drawing room, down into the massive kitchens in the basement, rooms with brick floors and stone walls where there’d once been servants and which now were mostly closed off except for one remodeled space with its Frigidaire and its Amana range looking like middle-class stowaways. He got the story of Aisha and Alice at college together, the Thanksgiving Aisha had come down to Newport for the first time, the first time she’d met Tom (how to get her nineteen-year-old black scholarship ass married to him? she said with a laugh), the first suicide attempt (horse tranquilizer, stomach pump), the European tour she and Alice had gone on the summer before their senior year—(here she got a bottle from the wine cellar, poured them each a glass)—the money Alice’s mother had discreetly sent her way, the travel, the visits, the art openings, the vacations.

  “It took me a while to realize they saw me as a kind of employee,” she said, throwing him a look like maybe the Casino’s International Touring Pro understood what she meant. “A paid companion, au pair girl, attendant, chaperone, nurse, whatever.”

  They had just come back into the massive hall with its coffered ceiling, Aisha carrying the wine bottle by its neck. Somewhere above them a vacuum cleaner was running.

  “At first I thought it was just because they loved having me around. I was the college friend.” She stopped and leaned back against the newel post. Behind her, the wide stairway climbed with its dark wood and burgundy carpet to the second floor. There was a workman on a ladder on the other side of the big window on the landing. “The daughter wanted to go to Europe. She wanted a friend to go with her. The friend’s father was a pipe fitter at the Bath Iron Works and couldn’t afford it. Gosh, what the heck, let us pay your way! And I was such an innocent, twenty years old, I thought everybody just loved me and wanted me around.”

  “It could’ve been both,” Sandy said in his nice-guy way. “They could like you and want you to help take care of her.”

  She peered at him as if maybe he was putting her on, then crossed to him and kissed him on her tiptoes. “You’re sweet,” she said like it was a quaint personality trait. She filled his glass, gave him another quick kiss, and crossed to the window that looked out onto the porte cochere. There was a window seat there with a tufted cushion and she sat and pulled her bare legs up under her. Through the wall they could hear the rough sounds of the storm windows coming off the dining room windows.

  “You know it was Alice who put up the money that night, don’t you?” she said after some time had passed.

  “Alice?” he said and shook his head like that wasn’t possible. And then: Wait, what?

  “The drama was all Margo,” she said, “but the necklace itself was Alice’s. It was her money on the line.”

  “She told you? Alice told you about that night?”

  “She said she felt sorry for you.”

  He felt a sudden heat rise from his neck into his cheeks.

  “She also said you were the most beautiful man she’d ever seen.”

  He had an idea he must look silly—injured vanity, a suicidal girl feeling sorry for him—but he had the good sense to keep quiet, keep his face expressionless. Aisha fixed her eyes on him, maybe looking to see how he took it, and then with a toss of her dreadlocks turned from him and looked out the window at the Indian on its kickstand.

  “You have to keep this quiet,” she said after a minute. “You and me, I mean. Do you understand?”

  He raised his wineglass to his lips, drank from it cool as a cucumber. “You mean because of Margo?”

  “Yes.” And she tracked him to see if he understood. “I mean if you want to see me again.”

  “I’m not even sure it’s still on with Margo,” he said a little stiffly. “And if it is, I can break it off. She’d hardly care, I think.”

  She shook her head with this sorry amusement and stood up. “These people,” she said, putting her wineglass down on the wide sill of the window, “they say when things are over.” And not convinced he understood, taking a step toward him, she added: “She could make things difficult for me. My situation here.” And again, did he get it? “For you, too. At the Casino.”

  He pursed his lips—Margo was on the Casino board of directors—and then bowed his head as if conceding.

  “And then there’s Alice. I don’t want her to feel—” And she searched for what she meant, and then said simply: “I don’t want her to feel bad.”

  She had crossed to him and set herself small and barefoot before him. She took the wineglass out of his hand, set it down, and with the edge of her palm caressed where his hair grew out of his temple. “Sandy Alison,” she murmured like his name meant something to her. She lifted herself on her toes and said something in his ear, which made him direct his gaze up to the big triple window on the stairway landing where the workman could see in from his ladder.

  “It’s all right,” she whispered, her breath exploding in his ear. “They’re on the outside. We’re on the inside.”

  Summer 1896

  As Franklin told Mrs. Belmont—the former Mrs. Vanderbilt—(and the dear monster thought he was joking, of course) he liked to pretend to be looking at the young girls when in fact he was looking at the young men, their silly suitors, dressed in striped jackets and straw boaters, and panting like hounds in heat. Dogs were so much more attractive than cats, didn’t she find?

  She didn’t know what she found, she said. But she was sure he was very, very bad!

  They were drinking lime rickeys (he’d managed to get some gin in his), sitting outdoors at the Casino overlooking the grass courts where some inexplicable contest involving racquets and balls was going on. There was a net that kept getting in the way. Why on earth did they not simply remove it? he kept asking. Well, of course he knew . . . but he liked to pretend he was at a loss in matters of the world, posing questions to Mrs. Belmont and Mrs. Auld concerning who was serving whom, eh? and who was an ace at love and who was a deuce, in ways they chose to find delightfully absurd. It was part of being a lapdog, which was his most recent sobriquet in the scandal sheets. Mrs. Richard Auld was seen at the Horticultural Society taking Mrs. Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont’s lapdog out for a walk. Might there be canine jealousy a-brewing along Fifth Avenue? But he was a lapdog with a bit of a bite, he liked to think. A cheerful, brown-eyed, wet-nosed, tail-wagging, lamppost-peeing lapdog who when you weren’t looking might take a piece out of your hide.

  “Marriage!” cried Mrs. Auld. They had been talking of this the last half hour. Indeed, the last six months. “That will cure you of this wickedness!”

  He was sure it would, he told them.

  They were
sitting up in the Horseshoe Piazza, which at least had the advantage of being above the damned sea of parasols so you might actually catch a glimpse of the lawn tennis. Which was to say, a glimpse of the young men in their white pants and their bare wrists and their hair falling about their flushed temples. It was one of the perquisites of being a lapdog. One was given the best seats. One was invited to Newport for the summer season, invited uptown for winter evenings (even though one’s own apartments were down around Fourth Street, below which nobody descended), and there was the occasional tour, some Mediterranean sailing, quantities of foie gras and salmon terrine. Woof, woof.

  “For purposes of efficiency,” Mrs. Belmont said—she was having a high time; plotting his engagement was a favorite divertissement; indeed he sometimes thought she was using him to reestablish her precedence after her own shocking divorce the previous winter—“we might divide the candidates into widows and debutantes. The two rough categories will serve. Which would you prefer, dear?”

  “Oh, a widow by all means,” he answered. “Someone wrinkled and quite desiccated. Then I needn’t water her.”

  It was safe for them to be seen with him. Because he was seen everywhere, with everyone. He was handsome, and witty, and sunny, and well dressed, and he always knew the right thing to say. Even when the right thing was wrong, if it was he who was saying it—he with his fair color and his ready smile and his slight, elegant frame—it became the right thing. Even TOWN TOPICS had remarked upon it. Mr. Franklin Drexel, they said—this was before the lapdog business—Mr. Franklin Drexel was the Skeleton Key of Fifth Avenue, for he opened all locks.