The Maze at Windermere

by Gregory Blake Smith

  He marked the “we.”

  “We are about the pursuit of pleasure,” he said. “According to the papers. We are the standard for the world.”

  “I shouldn’t mind that,” she returned, “if there were in this pursuit of pleasure some actual . . . well, pleasure.”

  They walked in silence for a few moments.

  “Do you not take pleasure in your life, Mrs. Newcombe?” he finally ventured. She thought longer than what he considered the question warranted.

  “I take pleasure in my children,” she said, pausing and looking back at the croquet. “And I love Windermere. And I love my gardens—you must come see the maze we are just encouraging. And I love my bicycle,” she said with a little laugh that was almost charming. “But Mrs. Belmont’s tea train? Or dancing with the faux Prince of Wales?” And she eyed him to see how he took her doubts.

  “As to that,” he said—some response was demanded—“Mrs. Belmont is a paradox, is she not? On the one hand, we have her absurd teahouse and her even more absurd train. And we have her moving heaven and earth to get poor Consuelo married to the Duke of Marlborough. And yet she has taken up the suffragettes’ cause—serves tea to them, if I’m not mistaken, in that very teahouse—and supports them financially. And she is a force behind the Political Equality League. And she has turned the scandal of her divorce into a rally for women’s liberty, indeed for liberty in all our social relations. Why, she has even made me a minor skirmish in her campaign.”

  He had meant his presence among them despite his lack of fortune and he assumed she understood this. But when she spoke, she said something quite different.

  “Do you mean because she wishes to include artists and other worthies in society?”

  It took him aback. He was not an artist. He occupied himself in making aquarelles and ink drawings, but he was not an artist. Her remark gave him another glimpse of how Mrs. Belmont had “sold” him.

  “I mean,” he responded, “she intends to renovate society as thoroughly as she is renovating Belcourt.” And then, because he felt obscurely unethical not denying it: “I am not an artist.”

  “Ah, but I have seen your work, Mr. Drexel! A lovely watercolor of the Bethesda Fountain in the snow! Mrs. Belmont has it in her boudoir.”

  He was not—thank god!—privy to Mrs. Belmont’s boudoir, but he well remembered the picture. He had had the good sense to let the white of the paper predominate so that the angel on the fountain appeared to hover in a snowstorm. A whirling snowstorm in the midst of Central Park in the midst of Manhattan was the feeling the picture gave. It was quite beyond what he was usually capable of. He had given it to Mrs. Belmont just when news of her impending divorce had become general. He had meant it to appear as a token of his support. The frame had cost him dearly.

  There was another scream of the train whistle, followed by a startled cry from the teahouse, and then laughter.

  “Mrs. Belmont says she treasures it.”

  He made a little bow of his head, acknowledging the compliment. He wondered sourly whether Mrs. Belmont treasured it as much as her Titian but thought better of asking. Instead he contented himself with letting his impish look come over him and saying: “I am relieved that you find me so capable an artist, Mrs. Newcombe, because then you will not mind learning how incapable a cyclist I am.” He let the change of register affect her. “Completely incapable as it turns out. I had to walk your machine here.”

  “What?” she cried.

  “It quite defeated me.”

  “You walked it here?” she said, mock-horrified and shaking her head at him. He was dimly aware that this was all rather charming of him, that he was her servant and all that.

  “Don’t tell Mrs. Belmont,” he continued. “I will take steps to rectify my shortcoming and then she need never know. I will be able to present myself to her on the matter of bicycle riding with impunity. I must say, at one point in my walk an athletic young man came pedaling past me and I found myself quite regretting not being able to follow after him.” Down, boy! he thought, and wound up more safely: “He seemed so free.”

  “Ah, free!” she said. “Think what it means for us women. Miss Anthony calls the bicycle the Freedom Machine.” And she simultaneously frowned and laughed at the epithet. “But if you are worried about Mrs. Belmont learning of your imperfection, I would be glad to teach you the skill before she has occasion to find out.” And she hurried on so as to cover the implication of the offer. “It’s quite simple once you get the hang of it. And it is fun.”

  “So that’s where pleasure resides,” he took up and smiled at her. “Well, henceforth I shall consider myself your pupil. We shall pursue bicycling together and prove to the world how modern we are!”

  “Agreed,” she said and extended her hand to him. He shook it, aware that they were being observed from the teahouse; to spend any more time together would make them a subject. “Now I must collect my children and you must get your tea.”

  “You’re not going?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But only over there.” And she pointed toward the trees. “You have never seen Windermere? That’s it there. Or its roofs anyway. We are quite in the habit of crossing the intervening lawns. My James likes a good hike.”

  He could see up the coast above the treetops the top floor of a cottage with its green tiles and gables and seven ornate chimneys. Ah! he thought, and again he felt the prickle of sweat breaking out on his ankles.

  “Good-bye, Mr. Drexel,” she said.

  “Good-bye, Mrs. Newcombe.”

  She turned in her lovely blue dress and began walking back toward the croquet game. As Franklin watched her go, it occurred to him that she might actually be a fine woman. And what a shame that would be.

  1863

  ~For a break from my spying—and because after my intercourse with Miss Taylor and her young brother I now consider the Ocean closed to me—I went yesterday with Sarge out to La Farge’s studio, spent the morning looking over some watercolors and the afternoon walking out to Paradise Rocks. In the evening there was to be a lecture on the history of the Jews of Newport at the Athenaeum and I proposed to go with Sarge, but he afterwards was tired from our hike (“To tarnation with the Jews of Newport!” he said) and took himself homeward. When I returned home myself I discovered that Father, who I knew was a friend of the lecturing Professor and had planned on being in attendance, had been waylaid in his study by a Swedenborgian Angel eager to discuss the question of Divine Love, and so could not. William was nowhere to be found. Alice said she would go with me, but I told her she was too young, and went out by myself.

  And in the manner of novels, Miss Taylor was there. Quite out of place, I thought, for lectures at the Athenaeum were not the sort of thing the resort people attended. But I having trespassed on her world, she evidently would now trespass on mine.

  She was sitting toward the front of the room and did not see me as I entered. I confess to experiencing a momentary impulse to retreat, but the dramatic interest of the situation got the better of me and I stayed. I sat at the back where I could occasionally catch a glimpse, between the seated shoulders, of the feathered hat she was wearing. The Professor’s lecture was of some interest, detailing as it did the generations of Jewish inhabitants of Newport, their escape from the Portuguese Inquisition to the islands and plantations of the West Indies, their eventual presence and mercantile importance in Newport before the Revolution. He told the story of several such families, one being the very rich Isaac Da Silva, whose house and warehouses still stood (and at the end of whose wharf I had listened to the absurd steam organ concert). I began to sketch in my head (and take the occasional note; my indefatigable hand!), for I thought there might be a subject in this history for a story of some antiquarian interest. I was standing at the back of the Athenaeum giving Da Silva a lovely young ward who might be a subject of interest to a gallant French officer du
ring the Comte de Rochambeau’s occupation when I became aware of Miss Taylor bearing down upon me with what novelists are pleased to call a “quizzical” smile.

  “More local color, Mr. James?” she asked.

  “And for you too, Miss Taylor?”

  There was then an awkward moment, for I was expecting someone, her mother, a hotel acquaintance, the aunt I had invented, someone at any rate who had accompanied her, to come up to us. But there was no one.

  “You have ventured out alone?” I found myself asking.

  “I have indeed,” she responded.

  I gestured toward where the lecturer was surrounded by admiring auditors. “Would you like to be introduced to the Professor? He is a friend of my father’s.” I was at something of a loss.

  “Thank you. I think not.”

  “Then,” I said (what else was left me?), “then would you allow me to escort you back to your hotel?”

  She hesitated, and I thought I had overstepped. But when she spoke she said that she had thought of going to see the Synagogue of which the Professor had spoken. He had roused her interest in it, for it seemed a thing of some wonder, did it not?

  “And it has the virtue,” she said with a mordant smile, “of not being on the hotel’s list of Newport sights. Do you know it?”

  I said I did. It was a venerable building, over a hundred years old. If it were not growing dark, I said, I would gladly walk with her and show it to her.

  “Oh,” she said, “it is not so very dark. I would be obliged to you.”

  Which I made a mental note of, a note on the evident freedom of the young ladies of Waterbury.

  We walked westerly down Bellevue, the lavender sunset behind the housetops and in the trees. There were carriages returning to the hotels and people still about. We talked as we went, the darkening air filled with birdsong and the thud of hooves on the earthen avenue. Every now and then a spot of reddish sunlight would bloom on some expanse of grass, or dapple the wall of a building we were passing, or appear in an upper-story windowpane.

  I wanted to compliment my companion on her hat as we walked. It was a most striking raiment, made of pheasant feathers and black netting and held quite closely to her fair hair. But I did not dare, for I must be careful that she does not mistake my intentions. She must understand, without my actually saying it, that my intentions are not what is common in such relations, not what the world, observing us, would suppose them to be.

  (Although why my attentions are not what the world would suppose is a question I find myself more and more at a loss to understand. But that is not for this notebook.)

  After ten minutes we reached the Synagogue on its plot of earth, shuttered and gloomy, for as the Professor had told us, there are no longer Jews in the city. We remarked on the building being canted away from the street, the effect of its being oriented toward Jerusalem, and on its overall classical look, not unlike some of the grander houses in town, yet for all the similarity, still inexplicably different. The building’s face had in the gloaming a sad aspect, and there was about it a sense of history, of lives lived, lives now vanished and unknown. We stood for some time in meditative silence. Finally I remarked that I was put in mind of the feel, the tone, of the Point.

  “Have you had a tour of the Point?” I asked.

  She said she had not, that—alas!—she was quite en-dungeoned in her hotel. I smiled, and told her she must visit the Point for the quaintness of its houses all huddled together, the small, queer lanes, and the tiny-paned windows behind which one might catch an aged Quaker face gazing out as if from another century. It was the oldest part of the town, I told her, and quite charming.

  On our way back up Bellevue we stopped outside the Jewish cemetery and peered in. It was quiet and still and the evening darkness seemed to fall and pool about the gravestones. After a moment I asked Miss Taylor did she know the poem Longfellow had written about the cemetery. I had the first quatrain memorized and recited it to her.

  How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves,

  Close by the street of this fair seaport town,

  Silent beside the never-silent waves,

  At rest in all this moving up and down!

  She asked me to recite it again, saying it was hard to catch the meaning on the wing, and when I had finished, repeated the last line.

  “Is that not us?” she said. “All this moving up and down? The quick, the alive?”

  I gazed at her and said I supposed it was. She seemed in some inchoate way touched by this.

  “Can we go in?” she asked. She went up under the great granite portal with its wings overhead and looked between the iron rails of the gate. I turned to see if anyone was observing us.

  “We should not.”

  She swung open one of the heavy gates and peered in. I hung back. After a moment she turned to me.

  “Will you not come?” she whispered. “We needn’t scruple, I think. Did not the Professor say there are no Jews left in Newport?” She urged me with a little gesture of her head, and then when I did not move, forsaking the furtive fraternity of her whisper, said: “Ah! I see I mistake you. You are worried about my reputation.” And something like a mocking smile spread across her features, though gently. “But it is you who live here,” she said, “you who will have to salvage your reputation, not I!” And with that she turned and walked in, leaving the gate ajar behind her. I forbore looking around a second time (I wished to appear craven even less than I did scandalous) and instead followed her.

  She made her way slowly through the unmown grass, between the imposing obelisks and the more humble grave markers, some of which were nearly covered with vegetation. I hung a little ways back and watched her. In the deepening dusk and under the canopy of trees and with the theater of the graveyard around us, the movement of her white dress with its muslin furbelows seemed like that of a specter. She stopped from time to time, read an inscription if it was in English, or let herself marvel at the enigma of the Hebrew letters, which she would caress with her fingers. Once she gazed back at me and I thought I saw a dark fervor move across her face. We did not speak, but let the melancholy of the place, its rich suggestiveness, take hold of us.

  “Esther,” she murmured once, running her fingertip over the beveled incision of an inscription.

  At the rear of the cemetery we stopped and for a time simply stood in the gray air with the somber gravestones about us, and the dark tree limbs arching over us, and about our ankles the eddying mystery of it all. My companion said something once, which I could not quite catch. And then, perhaps because she knew I hadn’t heard, she said it again. “I have had this feeling before,” she said. But when I turned to her, somewhat mystified, she did not explain. Her face was in shadow, but I could see there some evidence of emotion working on her, and yet not an emotion of dismay or withdrawal occasioned by the gloomy place we found ourselves in, but rather something like elation, or perhaps rather exaltation. Whatever it was, I did not dare trespass. Through the trees and houses we could hear someone calling a dog home.

  “It’s as if we have stepped out of the world,” she whispered after a time.

  “Yes,” I murmured, so as not to be discordant with her mood.

  She closed her eyes, and I thought I could see move through her some psychic vibration, as if she were what I understand Father to be, subject to the incursion of spirits and currents from some other world.

  “All this moving up and down,” she said in her low voice, still with her eyes closed. And then: “We are but the temporary inhabitants of our bodies.”

  I did not understand her and so kept silent. I watched her breathing, the fabric of her lovely gown moving silently, slowly, in and out.

  “Others will come and take over,” she said.

  And did I not marvel at her? Her speech had some of the mystical import that I find in Father’s writing
. And which is so unlike me that I am at a loss whenever I encounter it. She turned then, and opened her eyes, and fixed them on me. And though they were but pools of shadow, I had the sensation all the same of their color melting and re-forming.

  “Have you not had that sensation?” she asked after a moment. “That your life has already been lived? That everyone’s life has already been lived?”

  “Ah!” I intoned, for I felt I had to say something, and I did not want to go too far with her. “All except in the details.”

  At which she inclined her head, as if allowing the exception. “Yes, the details are different,” she said. “You’re a gentleman, I’m a lady. You have dark hair, I have light. These Jews no doubt had dark, but the thing itself—” she said with intensity, and she left off. And then she tried again: “Life,” she said.

  I held back. There was the call of a whippoorwill. We stayed some minutes in silence.

  “It’s the graveyard that has made you susceptible,” I said softly, as if to recall her. She turned her face toward me and I thought I detected a look of disappointment. “But,” I quickly went on for I did not wish to be found wanting, “I understand you.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes,” I said, because I believed I at last did. “I take you to mean that we have all strived to live, we have all strived to be worthy, to love and be loved, to live lives that will not be found wanting. You and I. These Jews. In that sense the details do not matter. One’s religion, one’s class, one’s manner of loving. Whether one—” and here I took a leap, “whether one stammers or not. In that sense—” And I left off, hoping I had come close to her mark. She seemed to soften where she stood.

  “Yes,” she said, and something like the fervor of her thought seemed to exhale from her. And then she said, curiously: “Thank you.”