The Maze at Windermere

by Gregory Blake Smith

  In time I was able to answer, and instructed John Peele to tell Edward Swift that I would consider his Offer and would Pray over it, but could not say when I might be clear in the Matter, that he would have to wait. He nodded gravely, and as I thought, Sensible of some misgiving. I told him I would keep Silence about the Proposal, thinking that that might be what clouded his mind. But the look of Conscience did not abate.

  Perhaps he is Sensible of having gone from asking me a Month ago did I not wish to return to School, to asking me would I consent to be married. And to a man Father’s age.

  I was left with the Evening falling, and the Parlour fire turning to Embers.

  4th Day

  We have had a great, blasting Storm. Dorcas does not remember Snow from last Winter. She would go to the Kitchen window and look out at the Dooryard, and then toddle to the Parlour Window to see if it was snowing as well at the Carters’. It seem’d as a Miracle to her.

  Edward Swift sent his two boys over. I believe their names are Edward and James. They clear’d the Snow off the Woodpile and set about making a kind of lean-to over the pile that it might be kept dry. I watch’d them from the Kitchen with Jupiter curl’d up in my lap. They did not ask did we want such an Improvement, but they were handy at the job.

  6th Day

  Are not men ugly? Jane Beecher ask’d me today. We were at her house doing our laundry together. I have not yet told her of Edward Swift. With their Beards and their coarseness, she said, were not men ugly? I said I suppos’d they were, that I might fall into her Humour. And she went on in a like Vein, saying a woman was so much more handsome, for we are soft and smooth of skin. She said she was sure any woman would prefer a smooth Face to kiss than a prickly one. Was it not a Pity that women could not marry women? She laugh’d at this and I laugh’d, for it took me out of myself and was Sport as I might have had with Hannah and Martha. And then she made more Sport of men and of their Courting, mimicking them in their walk and showing her Muscles as if she were one such. She made to embrace me in Mockery and kiss me. We were in a Fit by then and the water in the Washtub slopp’d between us. Thy lips, O my spouse, she said, drop as the honeycomb, and she embrac’d me again as a man might. And then she did kiss me, holding me behind my head, but I push’d her away. I was laughing for I thought we were still in the Riot of her mood, but when I look’d again, her face was strain’d and of a Passion I know not wherefrom.

  Perhaps she is more afraid than I allow. Perhaps she feels a need to strut and contend, or otherwise it were to show Weakness, and that by showing it she would become it.

  We are both of us lost, I suppose, and unsure how to find our way.

  7th Day

  I have had a Dream. We were all together and it was warm, and there was a Light over all and over all was a Warmth that was not of the world alone, but seem’d to come from the Hearts and out of the Eyes of Mother and Father and Dorcas, and out of their Prudy too, as if we were each other’s Light and Comfort. I know not how to describe it, but we seem’d to swim in an Air and a Light that was warm and was of the Air, and yet was of us too.

  How horrible it was to wake into the cold and the dark and the Knowledge that it was not so! So overcome with Griefe was I that I could not help myself and cried. I went then and stood over Dorcas’s trundle-bed and I felt a deep Wound at the sight of her, for I could not give her my Warmth and she could not give me hers.

  That we might have the Light always! That we might understand! But we move in Darknesse, as it seems to me. We do not know who we are. We do not know who others are. We do not know how they work on us.

  5th Day

  I have rais’d up the courage (I know not why I should need courage, but I did) to tell Jane of Edward Swift. Her face grew hard at the Knowledge and she said that she expected something of the like was about. She had a great Sorrow for me, and then a Despair that I should be so forc’d. We were in her keeping-room and it was not yet dusk tho’ the room was dark and Wintry. She took my hand and held it in a way that was like an older sister to me and I felt greatly moved by her Care of me.

  We talk’d and talk’d, and it grew darker in the room, and the darker it grew, the more her Fancy seem’d loos’d, so that she spoke of how she sometimes dreams of going away, of leaving Newport and all the town behind. Even her children, she said in this Fancy. She dreams of going into the Wildernesse and living alone in a house by herself as a Pilgrim, or as I suppose, a Hermit.

  Other times, she said, she imagines going with her children, and at still others, with other women, that they might make a Household away from the World and become Quaker Separatists, as we hear they have in England.

  Other times, she said, she feels the Leaning is God’s, that he is calling her to make a Testimony elsewhere than Newport. That a new Life of Women separate from Men might be to live even more clearly in the Light. For if we have our Meetings separated by Sex, she says, then might not we have our households, yea, our whole Lives so separated? If it is right for the One, why is it not even more right for the All? She pos’d this Question to me, and I must admit it had a great Force of Logic, altho’ I cannot conceive of life with Women only, nor believe the Lord intends such Separation. Perhaps she means only to point out the Unfairness of our separated Meetings, and our separated Schools, for if being a Friend is to treat all as Equal, and not to honour a Magistrate above a fishwife, why are we then so apart?

  However she meant it, she seem’d greatly inflam’d with her Conception.

  7th Day

  The Snow is melted and it is turn’d so warm that Dorcas and I went out without our cloaks. I fashion’d a Purpose to walk past Edward Swift’s house that I might see it and appraise it and try to imagine myself its Mistress. Young Edward was at the Forge and he stopped his hammering long enough to watch me go past. He is much bigger than I am. And I would be his Mother!

  I may confess here that I do find myself sometimes when I am a lazy Slow-worm thinking of John Pettibone and of his lovely unruly hair, and of his laugh which leaps out of him as if it were a Jack-in-a-box, and of the fun he and Hannah and Henry Whitlow and I used to have playing skipjack down along the breakwater. Oh, that those times might return, and everything else vanish as if a Dream!

  3rd Day

  The Lord grant that someday I may show these Pages to someone who has a love of me. That he might understand me, and know who I am in my inmost Self.

  5th Day

  This evening I had a most beautiful sad Colloquy with Jane. We had done our work and were sitting in the Kitchen as the sun went down. We did not rise to light a candle, but sat in the Dark with the Fire low and talk’d. We talk’d of our old Selves, and Jane said it was as if they had been set adrift and lost over the Horizon. This Picture work’d on me greatly, as I think it did her. Our old Selves as if in a Tub, set upon the Waters and drifting vanishingly away even as we watch’d from the Shore.

  O! to what unknown Countries, and to what Centuries hence?

  II

  Substance and Shadow

  2011

  The Monday after the Champions Ball Sandy brought the deerstalker hat with him to the Casino. He would give it back to Alice as a way of acknowledging what had happened without either of them having to say anything about it. He would give it to her with a softness—a gentle smile, a rueful look: something anyway—so she would understand he was sorry. Understand that he was still her friend, that they could still talk, go for rides and stuff, hey? But she didn’t stop by as she usually did. Not after Margo’s individual lesson, or the next day after her doubles league. When he asked Margo about it (“Hey, where’s Alice these days?”), she made cuckoo circles around the side of her head and said the girl was going off the deep end again. And when he pressed her about it—what did she mean? not, like, seriously the deep end?—she grimaced, shrugged like she’d had enough of Alice.

  “I’m not my sister-in-law’s kee
per,” she said.

  So after a couple more days he took a deep breath and set out for the Redwood Library—was this a good idea?—walked the couple of blocks from the Casino down to the elegant eighteenth-century building with its wide lawn and stately trees, and went up to the main entrance. But as soon as he put his hand on the door he was suddenly sure that no, this was not a good idea. The deerstalker hat in his hand, the little speech he’d been writing in his head the past several days, his bare arms and legs (he was still in his tennis whites)—none of it was a good idea. So he had turned around and left, and on the walk back to the Casino gave himself a talking to. Wasn’t this just another type of killer instinct he lacked? He didn’t want to hurt people—he didn’t want to hurt her—but maybe sometimes you had to. There was no helping it. There was nothing short of kissing her, making love to her—loving her—that would make it all right. And he didn’t see how that was going to happen.

  Back at the Casino, he grabbed a hopper of balls and went out onto one of the grass courts and hit serve after serve—slice, kick, twist, down the T—until a little crowd gathered. It was something to see, a pro doing what he could do.

  And then it rained for three days. His lessons were off, and Aisha was down in Brooklyn minding her interns, so there was nothing to do but stay in the condo, stare out at the rain, make recipes from the owners’ diet cookbooks. He got so bored he read Daisy Miller again, struck this time with how clear it was that the girl wanted Winterbourne to kiss her. And what a dud Winterbourne was.

  By the time he heard from Aisha—could he pick her up at the Amtrak station in Providence?—he had determined that he had to tell her what had happened. He hadn’t mentioned it to her yet, hadn’t in fact even seen her since the foggy night, hadn’t brought it up when they’d last talked on the phone because he had been still imagining Alice in a stupid-me frame of mind and not in a seriously deep-end frame of mind. But now somebody had to know, didn’t they? And he couldn’t see himself telling Margo—that felt too much like betrayal—and Tom he didn’t know well enough. It was Aisha who was her best friend.

  But back in his condo after the motorcycle ride down from Providence, after they’d caught up, made love, started in on some truffles Aisha had brought back from Brooklyn, he got all messed up in the right and the wrong of it. Wouldn’t this just be a further trespass on the poor girl’s heart? You didn’t go around broadcasting someone’s failed gesture toward love, did you? But at the same time the thought of the girl harming herself, if that really were to happen . . . Couldn’t he tell Aisha what had happened without Alice ever knowing?

  So he made some decaf to go with the last of the truffles and they sat on the sofa looking out at the shipyard, Sandy in his boxers and Aisha just out of the shower. She had a towel turbaned around her hair in that way women had, and she had on the silver necklace she’d been wearing earlier, a scimitar-shaped thing that cut from collarbone to collarbone. It was just dusk; they had the lights off, and out the big window the harbor was beginning to sparkle.

  “Listen,” Sandy said finally. “This thing happened.”

  And he did his best to tell her about it. About the ball, about the fog and the walk through the Point, about Alice drunk and the graveyard and what happened there. She listened quietly, thoughtfully, pursed her lips when he got to the kissing part, imagining—he supposed—her friend’s humiliation. And then he told her what Margo had said, and that he was worried about her, and that he thought she—Aisha—should know so that, you know, she could keep an eye out for things, for how Alice was acting and stuff.

  He waited for her to say something, waited for her to give him a sorry look, to sigh Oh, boy! with a grimace for her friend. Instead she sipped her coffee and looked placidly out the window at the harbor lights, at the sparkling water and the grid of hotel rooms out on Goat Island. She spent a minute just sitting and thinking, running her fingertips up and down the length of the mermaid tattoo on her arm, and then turned back to him.

  “You could’ve just kissed her,” she said quietly.

  He wasn’t ready for that. “Kissed her?” he repeated and he made a face. He had upbraided himself for everything else: for not nixing the whole thing from the start, for not insisting on getting her a cab, for agreeing to be her date to the ball in the first place. But he had never once thought that he should have kissed her, kissed her and thereby—was this what Aisha was saying?—evaded the moment of humiliation, gotten through that night at whatever the cost, and then the next day have had something ready to say, some excuse, evasion, something to help her save face.

  “You have to give things to Alice. Give the right amount and she won’t expect more. She understands things.”

  He wondered at her. What was the “right amount”? How did you kiss Alice the right amount?

  “I’m not sure I can do that.”

  “Sure you can,” she said, turning to him. “You’ve made love to women you didn’t love before, haven’t you?”

  She’d said “made love” with a little smile at him. For it was one of the Southern Gentleman things he said, like “geez” or “cripes.” He could never say “have sex.” She kept her eyes fixed on him a moment longer and then undid the turban from around her head, began pressing each individual dread dry. “With Alice you have to give what she’ll be grateful for,” she said. “Attention. Sympathy. You have to find the point where you’ve given her enough. And then she won’t expect more. And she’ll keep her side of the bargain.”

  He struggled to maintain an even expression. He remembered Aisha more than once saying that she loved Alice. Was this her idea of love?

  “Is that what you do?” he asked.

  She stopped drying her hair, checked his face. “I haven’t made any secret of my dependence on her,” she said, and then as if challenging him to say otherwise: “I’m sure in certain quarters I’m seen as using her, as exploiting our friendship. I’m sure there are those who see me as a kind of remittance man,” she said with a little laugh, looking to see if he knew the term. “But it’s a fair exchange. I give as much as I get.”

  “I know,” he said, though he wasn’t sure he did. Or if he did, he didn’t like the implication. “But I don’t need to keep Alice satisfied,” he went on a little stiffly. “It’s not a question of kissing her or not kissing her. Or kissing her ‘the right amount,’” he added, and he felt a little thrill at spurning her terms. “I’m not indebted to her. I only brought this up because I was worried about her. I thought someone should know.”

  “Because you think she might injure herself.”

  He fixed her with a look. “It might be the last straw,” he said. “You should know that better than anyone.”

  She inclined her head as if acknowledging his point, then said carefully: “I wasn’t asking you to keep her ‘satisfied.’ I was asking you to be kind to her, to give her something. It helps her.”

  Again he shook his head no. “That’s too dangerous,” he said, and he marveled at her. Did she really think that you could make love to Alice and that Alice would understand it wasn’t real love, that it was just “having sex,” and so would be okay with it? Did she think that Alice was like Margo that way, like—he had to admit to himself—like her, Aisha?

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Okay.”

  “I like her,” he found himself saying. “I think she’s funny and—” and what?—“and I think she’s got a good heart, a deep heart,” he said. “If things were different—” And what did he mean by that? if he wasn’t sleeping with Aisha? with Margo? if she didn’t have cerebral palsy? wasn’t bipolar? “I just want to be her friend,” he wound up lamely.

  “Okay.”

  Except she said it like she was resigning herself to a shortcoming of his. Like he was too simple of mind, too simple of heart, to understand what she was saying. Were they—were all of them, Alice too?—so sophisticated, so c
ounterfeit in their emotions, that they operated one or two steps removed from the substance of things?

  “Just look in on her,” he said. “Make sure she’s okay.”

  She clutched her shirt around her. “I’ve been doing that for ten years,” she said with a thin smile, and she went in search of the rest of her clothes. He watched, feeling like there was more to say, but what?

  “Poor you,” she said when she was ready to go. She raised herself on her toes and kissed him lightly on the lips. “All the girls fall in love with you.”

  At which he tried to smile.

  When she was gone, he stood at the big window looking out at the night harbor with the breeze coming in and for the first time acknowledged to himself how things were. He was sleeping with two women, neither of whom loved him. And then he immediately felt stupid—quaint—for thinking that. He might better ask himself, did he love them? Surely not Margo, but Aisha? Well, he had been waiting to see—a consequence of his rootlessness, of the shape he was in—waiting to see if something good might happen, if having sex might turn into making love. He had contented himself with thinking that things were just tentative with Aisha, that the constraints of silence and secrecy that had been imposed on them from the start were stunting the natural course of things. But that in simpler circumstances—and could not such circumstances come about once out of Newport?—they would be more free to find one another. And so he had held off scrutiny, kept at bay the misgivings that grew from the apparent ease she had at sharing him, the way she seemed able—and he said this out loud to himself, standing there gazing at the dark harbor, at the thicket of masts in the moonlight—the way she could take or leave him. She seemed to have no quotient of jealousy or possession. A good thing, right? But maybe not when you wanted to be possessed, when you wanted someone to smile and slip her arm in yours and whisper, “You’re mine!”