The Maze at Windermere

by Gregory Blake Smith

  “Very good, sir. I understand the bicycle to be somewhere adjacent to the pavilion.”

  “Thank you, Wells.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  He stood a moment longer smoking so as not to look like he was at the beck and call of a footman, and only when the billiard game ended said his good-byes all around, said he’d try to make it down to the wharf before Briggs’s lighter ferried them all out to the Dolphin, but not to wait for him, and then turned and left the Casino. Outside, the crowd had thinned. The sun was a little lower in the sky. He crossed the grass courts toward Berger’s Pavilion.

  He was obscurely aware that he had been insulted. That as playful as Mrs. Belmont’s request was—he could so easily imagine the laughing conversation and the importuning of Mrs. Newcombe: she must not ride her bicycle all the way back down Bellevue Avenue, rather she must come in Mrs. Belmont’s carriage at once—why, they would get Franklin Drexel to ride her bicycle back (the young man claimed to be such a lover of bicycle riding!)—yes, playful as that was—indeed, he could imagine making the joke himself—still, to be summoned by Mrs. Belmont’s man there in front of the others . . . ! Well, he supposed he must take refuge in its being Mrs. Belmont who was doing the summoning. Hobson and Parrish could whistle into the wind until they were so summoned.

  There were three bicycles outside the pavilion but just as he drew up a young man and woman wheeled two of them away. He sauntered over to the remaining metal contraption and eyed its pedals and wheels and its chain drive. He supposed it was not so very difficult to ride. Women managed it, after all. He took the thing by its handlebars as he’d seen others do and walked it away. He would start down Freebody Street, where he would be out of view until he had gotten the hang of it and then come out onto Bellevue.

  But how the deuce did one mount the thing? He supposed he might use the curbside as a mounting block as women did when mounting a horse. There was that box hedge to watch out for. One foot on one pedal, push off—he believed it was necessary to have a certain initial speed—swing the other foot around onto the other pedal and . . . and . . . oh, good lord!

  He inspected the bicycle first to see if there was any telltale damage. The end of a handlebar had dug into the sod, but the machine appeared otherwise unscathed. Not so his leg! His trousers were not torn but there was a deuce of a scrape on his shin! He became aware of some children laughing at him from across the street. He righted the bike and without looking at the nasty creatures began walking it away.

  It was a good two miles to Marble House.

  But damn that Simmons! What was he doing blabbing about their slumming expedition? It was indeed becoming fashionable among the younger set to tour the Bowery and the tenements—but really! one needn’t broadcast one’s divertissements. Especially to a knucklehead like Parrish. And what had made Franklin suggest the tour in the first place? Was he so perverse? So indifferent to exposure? It had been dangerous and foolish.

  He had at least had the good sense to keep the party out of Bleecker Street and Washington Square, where he had his own haunts. They had instead threaded their way through the tenements along Mott and Spring and Hester Streets, marveling at the throngs of people, the carts and laundry hanging between the buildings, the smells and the spray of incomprehensible languages, the Italian women with babies riding on every hip and the Jews with their absurd ringlets and ridiculous clothes. He had taken them into a couple of the taverns along the Bowery where the drink-mollies plied their trade and the prostitutes showed their wares. And then—what had he been thinking? really, he had wanted to force their muzzles into it, hadn’t he?—he had steered them into the Paresis, where Simmons and that fool Chauncey went quite white. Well, if Hobson and Parrish and the others took him up on his offer—and he wouldn’t be back in town for any extended stay until September and there was a good chance the whole matter would have blown over by then—but if they did importune him, he would confine himself to showing them the tenements and the prostitutes—let them wonder where the mincing Mary Anns were.

  He was coming up on the broad face of the Massasoit Hotel, where he had his rooms. The resort with its wide veranda and striped awnings had been fashionable in the fifties and sixties just before the great years of cottage building and was still discriminating enough, but it was no longer frequented by the best society. Mrs. Belmont, for one, never inquired as to where he was lodging. She no doubt knew—Wells or one of the other footmen had no trouble finding him—but she did not wish to have the matter acknowledged between them. Because really, when one came right down to it, he was lodging with parvenus and Jews and with families from Scranton and Albany, and with the occasional shopgirl who had saved all year to spend two weeks in Newport where there were lawyers and brokers who might be induced—by the double-barreled testimonials of her beauty and her being able to lodge at the Massasoit Hotel—into marriage. One of these girls had the previous year, he believed, set her sights on him. He had been kind enough—comrades-in-arms!—to set the poor dear straight.

  Now, wheeling Mrs. Newcombe’s bicycle along as fast as he could without looking ridiculous, he wondered whether he might not turn in for a drink of water—he was devilishly thirsty!—but he was already on thin ice for his remark about the Dollar Princesses; arriving late would have the ice cracking under him. There was nothing to be done but to keep going.

  1863

  ~I have tried to keep from these writer’s notes any day-to-day record of young Harry James’s life for I am not engaged in the writing of a diary. But news came today that Will Temple has been killed in the late battle at Chancellorsville and I am pitched into a gloom. I must summon the courage to go see Kitty and Minnie and the others for I can only imagine how distraught they are. The six Temple orphans, as the world calls them. Now they are one fewer. And oh! Gus Barker with his red hair, showing off his beautiful muscles! His laugh never to be heard again!

  These friends from my childhood, they have done something with their lives, committed themselves to an action noble and terrifying. What will I do with mine?

  ~When we first lived in Newport—before Father whisked us off to Geneva—the little Rhode Island seaport was known as the Carolina Hospital, so common was it for Southerners to flee the “country fever” they were subjected to in the summer. There were in the city in those days planters from Savannah and Charleston and the Indies who brought their household servants with them without a second thought given to the sensibilities of the Northerners. Might not a story be made of that? One in which the rich past underlies the present?

  I have read somewhere that curators of antiquities have discovered that oftentimes parchments of the Dark Ages have underneath their present writing an older writing incompletely effaced, and that by careful investigation, the older writing can be read beneath the newer. Such a layering of writing is called (Mrs. Browning, I believe, uses the word in one of her poems) a palimpsest.

  Ah, to be able to read both the surface and that which is below the surface!

  ~O! I am exposed and my life incognito (at least as regards the Huntress) is at an end!

  It happened thusly: I was at the Ocean, seated on one of the wicker chairs that dot the playing lawns. There was a tennis match being contested between two young men dressed all in white and a goodly number of guests observing their exertions, my Diana and her brother among them. This latter came over at one point and dropped himself in the chair beside me. He had a tennis ball which he exchanged from hand to hand in a little tossing motion. I kept my head down, looking into my notebook, so as not to excite notice. Diana stood off a short distance, parasol held over her head, watching the men play.

  The following is a simulacrum, reconstructed without the aid of notes. (For how could I have been taking notes? It was life lived!)

  “Say!” I heard the boy say beside me. “You’re that one always hanging about writing!”

  I looked across at him
as if he were a nightmare I had endowed with the faculty of speech. And as I did, his sister turned to ascertain what her charge was doing and, seeing him safely in a chair, did a most remarkable thing. She closed her parasol, pointed it at him from her shoulder as if it were a rifle, and shot him. Then she reopened it and turned back to the match.

  “Yes,” I said, at a loss.

  The boy tossed the ball back and forth between his hands. There came the sound of rackets striking a ball, and polite applause for a point. We sat like this for several such exchanges, and I began to collect myself.

  “I play base-ball,” the boy said sullenly after a minute. “Base-ball’s a good game. Not this.”

  That last opinion expressed with a wrinkled nose at the athletic spectacle before us.

  “I have never seen a base-ball match,” I ventured.

  “Blazes!” he said, getting a good look at me as he might an animal in a zoo.

  Blazes! I wrote down in my notebook.

  “Hey!” he cried. He leaned over toward me. “You can’t be taking down what people say!”

  Again his sister turned toward us. I wondered, should I get up? Make my escape while I still had the chance?

  “Let’s not bother the gentleman, Harry,” my Diana said.

  “It’s that one that’s always writing!” the boy called with a tone that partook of both discovery and tattling. I was chagrined to see several of the guests turn to us.

  “Let’s not bother people anyway,” she said, crossing over and standing before us, without quite acknowledging me. I had no choice but to stand and bow.

  “Watch out! He’ll take down what you say!”

  Thinking that I had been, after a fashion, presented, I stepped forward with a second little bow.

  “Hello.”

  “That’s my sister Alice,” the boy said; and then, disgusted: “She’s always blowing at me.”

  I smiled agreeably, said hello again, said my name, and when she didn’t seem to recognize its eminence, was sufficiently in possession of my Geneva manners to ask did she enjoy the lawn tennis, though I stammered on the “t” in tennis. She answered that she had never seen the game before and had been attending to the play so as to deduce how the score was kept, the deuces and loves and faults and advantages. Curious, wasn’t it? Did I understand such obscure nomenclature?

  She has the most unusual eyes, the quality of which I had never before been close enough, or rather had never been sufficiently the recipient of, to notice. They seem to be of a gray-blue hue, yet not quite, rather more violet, if such a thing is possible. Or better said: they seemed to melt in and out of their color as if there were some molten substance inside her onto which her eyes “gave,” and which was always dissolving and remaking itself as she gazed at you.

  She asked was I staying at the Ocean, and why did they never see me at dinner or supper, to which I responded that I was an interloper, that I was of the town itself, and only came to the hotels out of a sorry need to amuse myself.

  “You amuse yourself at our expense?”

  I told her the beau monde must make itself useful in some fashion or other (which made her smile) and then, because she had gazed pointedly at my notebook, told her she beheld a young man in search of a profession, one who thought he might “work up” an article for one of the journals on the life at Newport, the resort life I meant, and so took notes of what I saw and heard, and “lines” I might take. I hoped it might provide an entry into the life of writing pour les revues (that last to avoid the treacherous “m” of magazine).

  She asked did I remember the scandal a few years back, just before the war, when a newspaperman had pretended in print to be a young belle giving herself over to the follies of the Newport social life? She hoped I was not going to be so duplicitous as to pretend to be something I was not.

  We went on in this manner for some time, eventually moving toward the hotel veranda when the dinner gong rang, talking as we walked, “feeling” one another out. She was not, of course, a dressmaker on the lookout (though I may still use her as such; there’s that much duplicity in me). She said she was from Waterbury (did I know it? I did not) where her father, Mr. Taylor, looked after a brass mill, a position so consuming (she said) that he would not be free to join his family until the end of the month. And then to reciprocate, she asked the question which William and I have dreaded ever since we were school-boys about Washington Square. She asked what my father “did.” I pulled a face and told her what Father had told me to say years before when I complained that he had no profession as the other boys’ fathers had (and which I could never, of course, have actually said to those boys), to wit, that he was a Philosopher, a Seeker of Truth, a Student, a Writer of Books. Ah, she said, for I think she now recognized my name, was my father not the great thinker and were we not friends of Mr. Emerson’s? I told her that indeed I had that weary pleasure. And then told her how we had of late sojourned in Europe, and that Newport, being the most European of the Northern cities, was meant to be a country, as it were, halfway between the two, in whose atmosphere we might live whilst we changed out of our European attire into our American.

  “For like the smallpox,” I said, debarking from one metaphor and embarking on another, “one must be inoculated against America if one is European, and against Europe if one is American.”

  She looked at me then as if I were, indeed, a rare animal, and then said she wondered that an American might need to be inoculated against America. Indeed, if I had been inoculated against both America and Europe, then who was I? Did I mean to be an Arab? And she peered at me (down at me, it needs to be said) with a look I can only describe as satiric, as if to see if I were up to returning the tennis ball she had just batted at me. I stammered something in response (alas! no figurative stammer!) but she shook her head and smiled at me, softly and beautifully, so that I might understand that she had meant no harm, that she had been teasing me as if we were great friends—indeed, were we not great friends? She folded her parasol and stepped up onto the first stair of the veranda.

  “Thank you for rescuing me, Mr. James,” she said, and when I gave her a quizzing look, explained herself by saying that the conversation in the hotel could be dreadfully conventional. She hoped she might see me and my mysterious notebook about the place again some time. She would even consider serving as my Epeius (really, she said that: not a dressmaker) some day in order to get the Trojan journalist inside the citadel of the Ocean that he might thereby observe the beau monde at their consommé. What did I think of that invitation, her looks seemed to ask, was I bold enough? She then called to her brother—Harry!—told him to throw the tennis ball back, and then, holding her hand out for me to shake in the forthright American manner, turned and started up the steps into the hotel.

  Was this, then, an example of the business of Newport? I must say I do not believe I have ever been flirted with before!

  1778

  Mar 26

  It has been in my thoughts, one story the Jew told the other evening. I understood it at the time as just part of his Reminiscence, but now I wonder did he mean more by it?

  He related a story of a fellow Merchant, tho’ I think he meant us to understand the story was of himself, who, before the present Hostilities had commenced, had happened at night upon a Tidewaiter in the hold of one of his ships looking for smuggled Goods as they were charged to do. And that this Merchant, who as I say I take to be Da Silva himself, had snuffed out this Tidewaiter’s lantern and had caused him to be removed from the ship, yet then had treated him to a Whisky at one of the low Taverns that front the wharves. He lulled the fellow with Bonhomie and then, as they were leaving, looked around at the riffe-raffe in the room with them, the molattoes and wharf Rats, and said did the Tidewaiter not think that £10 would buy the Violent hand of any one of them?

  He is not a man to be trifled with. I know this even without the Evidenc
e of this story. His family survived the Romish Inquisition through Guile & Duplicity, and he himself made his way by his own wits first to the Netherlands and then to the Dutch West Indies, where he rose to Prominence and has still trading Interests & Properties. A man who buys and sells other Human beings, even if they be Africans, is not likely to scruple in his private Affairs, notwithstanding his pleasant aspect and his snug Abode and the dark eyes of his Daughter.

  And withal I wonder just how I am to advance. These first moves have been easy, for we have our Parts to play: I the visiting Aristocrat, she the colonial Flower. We are thrown together by the Exigency of War, and the Rules which otherwise govern are for a time suspended. But how to progress? What plausible Plan to employ? If she is naïf enough to think that someone of my Class might marry a Jew, then her father is not. So I cannot pretend to court her as I otherwise might. But if not that, then what?

  As to employing Phyllis, as was my original Intention, how do I know that she is not already a Spaniel, reporting my moves to her Master? She speaks no love for Da Silva, or for her Mistress, and I fancy she might enjoy seeing them played, yet might not these same dislikes be but Feints & Ploys? Indeed, the very Hatred she expresses toward the family may be a Masquerade, or it may be no Masquerade but why should she not have hatred as well toward me and my Purse? If she does not object to getting her Knees sore for half-a-crown, would she not sell her Loyalty to whomever would Pay?

  Mar 27

  A Colo Benjamin came in last night and is released on his Parole to return to England. A month past there was a pinnace-full of Rebels brought in, sick each one, and released too on their Parole. Are we to believe the word of these Rebels not to rejoin the strife? If War is to be fought should it not be fought to Win, and to the Devil with these Grace notes and Curtsies?

  Heard from an aged Resident of this city that the Jews of Newport in years past were wont to fling open their doors and windows at the onset of a Thunder-storm, and to employ themselves in the midst of the Storm with prayers & singing. This was a Superstition of their Race that the Messiah would come at just such a Calamitous moment and this was their way of welcoming him into their homes. Curious.