The Maze at Windermere

by Gregory Blake Smith

  She made a face but let him lead her all the same, first slowly down the steps, then up onto the first boulders of the breakwater. From there they went carefully from stone to stone. He held her hand, let her come along at her own pace. She kept her face down, watching her feet, keeping away from where it might be slippery. When once they came to a spot where some rocks had tumbled away, he put one of his arms behind her knees and lifted her and carried her across to the next boulder. He expected her to cry Oh, Mr. Winterbourne! or something, but she didn’t, had instead this look of thrilled concentration.

  When finally they reached a break in the stones that was too much for them, they stopped, found a spot to stand, and without saying anything just looked around at everything there was to see: the big sailboats out on the ocean, the smaller ones upcoast, the hazy arc of the Claiborne Pell Bridge in the distance, the coastline as it swept south, and the horizon where blue met blue. After a time he felt her squeeze his arm and then point at a racing yacht in the distance. It had just unfurled a bright red spinnaker, the huge loose sail filling so that the boat suddenly heeled. She smiled at the sight of it. The wind whipped her hair so she did that thing that women do, dragging her hair back from her lips with her fingernails.

  “Sometimes,” he heard her say after a minute; she had her head turned from him, upwind so the breeze took her voice, “sometimes just being alive is enough.”

  Back on the Indian they continued around the point, the mansions on their left with their many-windowed facades facing oceanward, and after a couple of miles the private beaches on their right, first Gooseberry, and then Bailey’s Beach, where they’d gone that Clarendon Court day. They banked in and around the inlets and finally onto Bellevue, shooting down the long avenue toward Alice’s house. But when they reached the gate he didn’t turn in, gunned the engine instead so she screamed behind him, and kept on down Bellevue until he could turn onto Thames Street where the evening crowds were beginning to gather. He guided the Indian along the wharves, past the tourists looking for a place to eat, the college kids waiting for dark to start drinking, and then pulled the bike up onto Da Silva’s Wharf where he knew of a not-quite-illegal place to park.

  “Are you allowed to drink?” he asked. She fixed him with a what’s-that-supposed-to-mean look. He hoped he wasn’t doing the wrong thing.

  They were seated at a table on Da Silva’s Terrace with its canopy and trellises and where there was an outdoor wet bar. He was aware of people’s eyes on them and he had the thought that it must be like that for her all the time, people looking and pretending not to be looking. The waitress came and they ordered a bottle of wine and a dozen oysters. When she left, Alice leaned across the table and, pointedly keeping her eyes from looking at the people around them, whispered: “They can’t figure out why a fella like you is with a gal like me.” After a couple of minutes the waitress came back with their bottle of wine. Alice lifted her glass, waited for him to lift his, and then as they clinked said:

  “Here’s to your and Margo’s cheatin’ hearts.”

  Well, geez.

  He looked past her, out through the terrace trellis at the busy wharf, at the kiosks and boutiques and scrimshaw shoppes, then out over the rooftops of the old warehouses and chandleries on Pettibone’s Wharf toward where the tall yacht masts swayed at anchor. Maybe the thing to do was to just not respond, let her know that she was crossing some line and that it was not okay. There were half a dozen wind-speed thingies spinning atop half a dozen masts, gulls and pigeons standing hunch-shouldered on the roofs of the buildings. Just to drive the point home he ran his eye slowly along a banner that was spread across the width of the wharf advertising the 12-Metre Worlds. Out in the harbor there was the deep, loud bark of the Providence ferry.

  “I’m not sleeping with Margo,” he said finally. “If that’s what you mean.”

  She eyed him a moment with something like a bemused expression, then made a forget-it gesture with her good hand. “I don’t care if you are, you know.”

  “But I’m not,” he said and then, as if to mitigate the lie, said something about the night of the Champions Ball—that crazy night, he said: afterwards, after they’d brought her home and Margo had to give him a lift back to his hotel because he didn’t know how to ride a motorcycle back then—well, that night, he said, but not since.

  “What you do is your own business.” She still had the look of saying forget it. She shrugged herself out of her fringe jacket. “But just to put you on notice: I make it a rule not to sleep with men who have slept with Margo.” She lifted her hand, palm out as if to ward off his protestations. “I know that limits my options considerably—” and here a so-be-it gesture—“but I consider sleeping with Margo a sign of moral infirmity in a man.” She drank from her wineglass, set it firmly on the table. “Not to mention bad taste.”

  He screwed his mouth up, like ha-ha.

  They sat and sipped their wine and ate their oysters, and when the oysters were gone, decided they’d make a dinner of hors d’oeuvres, since the wharf was getting crowded and they were lucky to have a table. The sun was setting and the lights were coming on and there was music from somewhere. The more wine they drank, the more Alice talked, first about local girl Jacqueline Bouvier marrying that Massachusetts senator at St. Mary’s—you could see the steeple from here—and then Edith Wharton and her unhappy marriage, and then about the Da Silva of Da Silva’s Wharf and Da Silva’s Restaurant and Da Silva’s Terrace where they were seated even as she spoke. A Portuguese Jew, she said, that was his house over there, and she indicated a clapboard building right on the wharf that Sandy could see had the lines of a Newport Georgian even though it was a restaurant now with modern windows disfiguring its facade and kitchen vents like brain tumors. Slave quarters on the third floor, she said.

  “So what I do at the Redwood,” she said, changing gears, “is I put on these white cotton gloves and I paw through all these old documents and stuff. Letters, diaries, receipts. Even Da Silva’s account books. A Jew surrounded by Christians. I identify with him,” she said, again with the wry smile.

  “But you’re not Jewish,” he felt called upon to say. She looked up at him from under her brows.

  “You need to approach the world more metaphorically, Mr. Winterbourne.”

  But she said it kindly, with none of the smart-aleckness of the last week. She sat back, slouched so the nape of her neck touched the chair back, closed her eyes. She’s drunk, Sandy thought.

  “Sometimes I imagine what Windermere was like when it was first built,” she said, still with her eyes closed. “Such a big pretentious house, and the husband dying within a year of the young couple moving in, and the maze they’d designed and planted because they’d loved the one at Hampton Court on their honeymoon. Or I imagine I’m poor little rich girl Consuelo Vanderbilt being bullied by her mother into marrying the Duke of Marlborough, or the young Henry James with a life of celibacy ahead of him. You ever do that?”

  He kept an attentive expression on his face. Do what? he was wondering. She sat up again, leaned over the table all confidential.

  “And sometimes,” she stage-whispered, “I get drunk late at night all by myself and call a taxi and I get down here and I just walk around the city. I’ll start with the seventeenth-century houses out on the Point, and go up to the Quaker meetinghouse, and then the Jewish graveyard—and I just imagine a different world, I imagine it’s not now, it’s then. It helps if it’s foggy. You ever do that?” she asked again.

  He shook his head no, smiled. “No,” he said.

  “Not even up at the Casino? Never think about the US Open being held there a hundred years ago? René Lacoste? Bill Tilden?”

  “Sure,” he said, “okay.”

  “The wooden racquets? The long pants? The spectators sipping their gin daisies?”

  He smiled, nodded.

  “See?” she said, like she’d reveale
d something about him to himself. And she started to close her eyes again and then just as quickly was getting to her feet. “I gotta pee,” she said. She took a step away from the table, set her sights on the restrooms, but then she was turning back and leaning toward him. For one awful moment, he thought she was going to kiss him.

  “In France,” she whispered instead, “they have a crime called abus de faiblesse. Which is exploiting someone’s frailty or weakness for your own gain. A kind of killer instinct,” she said, fixing her eyes on him, whether serious or mocking he couldn’t tell. “Woe to him who is guilty of abus de faiblesse.”

  And she made a pistol with her thumb and forefinger and shot him.

  Later, after they’d found a cab for her—she was too drunk to ride a motorcycle, she’d said—instead of going straight to where the Indian was parked, Sandy let himself fall in with the crowd strolling along the wharf. He remembered something he’d said to Aisha that first day, that Alice always looked like she was being electrocuted. Like she was being perpetually electrocuted, he’d said. There was something about her, something about the curved fingers and the bent wrist and the ungraceful gait and the self-consciousness that went with it all. It was as if with the condition, with the misfiring nerves and muscles, there came an inability to keep the world out, like her body was an open circuit and the world traveled through her like electricity. She was open, he found himself thinking, and she could not get herself closed.

  At the end of the wharf he stood and looked out over the harbor, at the hundreds of masts rocking gently in the dusk, and he tried to imagine what it was like a hundred, two hundred years ago. He closed his eyes and tried to picture—what, frigates? schooners? clippers?—but he couldn’t do it. Not really. The present was too strong, had too fierce a claim on him. He lacked the imagination to overcome it, to loosen its grip. Or maybe he just lacked the need.

  1896

  The rooms inside the Casino were done in dark paneling so it took a moment for Franklin’s eyes to adjust to the light. Whoever had called him to come have a smoke and drawn him away from Mrs. Belmont and the other women—Hobson he thought it had been—was nowhere to be seen. He milled about with the men in their summer jackets and their cigars. One of the tennis players was standing in the embrasure of a window with a circle of admirers. Franklin added himself to their number so he wouldn’t look conspicuous. But the talk was so tiresome that he peeled off after a few minutes and strolled toward one of the other rooms where there was the clack of billiard balls. He stood a ways back from the table, hands clasped behind, and watched.

  Children, he thought. How had he missed that? True, he had not given much thought to this Mrs. Newcombe after the winter—there were half a dozen Mrs. Newcombes to whom he had been introduced in the past half year—but he did not like being taken by surprise. He did not like not knowing what was arrayed against him. What he had to contend with. And what he had to contend with evidently was children. Two at least, he should think. And what to make of that?

  He had always envisioned a woman weakened by widowhood, by loneliness, by the sight of herself in the mirror. He imagined, in short, an invalid who would be hungry for the sun of his attentions. Onto such a battlefield—always keeping a path of retreat in view—he might indeed stride and conquer. His lack of wealth, his respectable but by no means exceptional family—if the invalid were weak enough, none of this would matter.

  But children. Children gave the widow an obscure heft. How did they alter matters?

  The thing he knew—had always known—in the deepest part of himself, was that he could not make love to a woman. He could not. He could not even do what some of the men he knew from the Slide could do: make love to their wives once a month, have children by them, turn their wives’ naiveté to their advantage, keep a loving smile on their face as they went out the door Saturday nights. No, if he was going to do the deed—and he must—if he was going to lure a woman into the trap of marriage with him, he would have to do it with the private understanding—an understanding with himself, he meant—that he must be prepared to destroy her. To tell her after the wedding that theirs would be a public marriage only, that he was prepared to treat her in the presence of others as admirably as any husband treated his wife, that he would dote and fawn and caress—she would have his word on this. He would not rob her of that dignity. But she must understand that in private they would be—how would he phrase it? as brother and sister? as friends—well, however he managed it, she must understand that in private she could not expect attention from him of the other sort. He would be polite and pleasant in private, but not more than that. If he could phrase this kindly, he would. If not, so be it.

  And who knew, perhaps children could be his allies in this. He was not un-fond of children, he supposed. He could picture himself winning their little hearts, and by that their mother’s affection. He could turn the little so-and-sos into his advocates. And then afterwards, after the deed was done, would they not provide the woman with an emotional reserve? She would have her children at least. And she could comfort herself with the thought that her husband appeared to adore them. Would that not serve?

  “Drexel!” he heard behind him. He turned—it was Hobson and the others, all dressed in their smart summer suits. He smiled his hail-fellow-well-met smile.

  “I say, Parrish, pour the man a brandy!”

  They circled around him, put a snifter in his hand. Was he going sailing? they wanted to know. Briggs had the Dolphin outfitted, and there was going to be an evening party, was he coming? Alas, no, he had made a promise to Mrs. Belmont for tea.

  “Oh, break it,” they all cried. “Come sailing!”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Hobson said with some sort of meaning. He had planted himself opposite Franklin with his chest out in that way he had. He was smoking a cigar. “You don’t mind breaking the rules, do you, Drexel?”

  “As long as they’re not Mrs. Belmont’s rules,” he smilingly replied.

  Hobson knocked his ash into his empty snifter. “Parrish here tells us you were breaking the rules just the other weekend. Isn’t that right, Parrish?”

  Parrish just grinned. He was dressed in a rather undergraduate-looking jacket, all wide stripes and cheeky naiveté.

  “He’s given us to understand you’ve set yourself up as something of a cicerone. A docent of the demimonde. Is that true?”

  “I shouldn’t mind a tour of the demimonde,” put in Phelps with his British accent and with the tops of his ears reddening. “Ladies of the evening, don’t you know.”

  “It isn’t ladies of the evening that form the chief attraction of Drexel’s sightseeing, as I understand it. At least not the sort of ladies you’d like, Phelps.”

  “I like all the ladies,” said Phelps. “And they like me.”

  At which the others guffawed.

  “As to that,” Hobson went on, “I have no doubt, these ladies would like you, Phelps. But come clean, Drexel, we’ve got it from Parrish here.”

  “I had it from Simmons,” Parrish added somewhat sheepishly. “He said you took his set down into the Bowery. Ghastly, he said. He said it quite undid him.”

  “Ah, that,” Franklin found himself saying with his easy smile around. “It’s become quite the Fifth Avenue fashion, didn’t you know? Rather like Virgil and Dante, I should say. A tour of the demimonde—why, it’s better than the zoo!”

  “Simmons said there were these places where—! Well, I say,” Parrish said and stopped.

  “What?” the others cried.

  “Yes, spill it!”

  Parrish looked helplessly about himself. “These places where there were men with—! Well, with girls’ names.”

  “All part of the tour!” Franklin managed. He smiled around as if daring them. As if he were in the know, had stolen a march on them, the donkeys. “Next time we’re all back in town, what do you say? Shall I give you my Baed
eker’s for the Bowery? If you think you’ve got the stomach for it. Eh? But don’t be telling your mothers!”

  They all laughed and then someone mentioned a story in the Mirror about a police raid in the Village—had they seen it?—and then it was off into newspaper gossip. After a few minutes the billiard game broke up and Phelps and one of the others began to play. And then it was back to Briggs and the Dolphin and whether there would be any young ladies at the evening party. Franklin drank his brandy and listened, dimly aware that he had managed to step back from the precipice. Indeed, he was so preoccupied with looking unimpeachable—Parrish had offered him a cigar—that it took him a moment to realize the others had stopped talking and were looking at him. It was another moment before he realized that someone—Mrs. Belmont’s footman—was waiting beside him for his notice.

  “Ah, Wells!” he said, turning.

  “Thank you, sir,” the footman responded. “Mrs. Belmont wishes me to communicate to you that Mrs. Newcombe will be accompanying Mrs. Belmont in her carriage to Marble House for tea. As you are expected as well, sir, she is wondering if you would be so good as to return with Mrs. Newcombe’s conveyance.”

  “Mrs. Newcombe’s conveyance?” he found himself saying. “You mean her bicycle?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He was aware of the others’ eyes on him. Was he going to be twice in ten minutes held up for scrutiny? “Look here, Wells”—what else was there to do but make light of it?—“did you dream this up yourself?”

  “No, sir.”

  He let his accusing smile grow even broader. “Not trying to do me a mischief?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Ah! Then Mrs. Belmont is.” He wagged his cigar in the air. “But I shall outflank her. I shall prove to her that I am an excellent cyclist. None better!”