The Maze at Windermere

by Gregory Blake Smith

  And how strangely passionless she was! He didn’t mean during lovemaking—that was a different kind of passion. But she was always on such an even keel. Nothing ruffled her. Even just now, what he’d told her about Alice, how calm she’d been! For all her far-out jewelry, and her mermaid, and her dreadlocks, she seemed to approach the world more like an MBA than an artist. It was as though upon meeting him she had wondered how he might be of use to her, and having figured that out, she was keeping him around for some motive that was not visible to him, but which was there all the same. Maybe he was just being snarky, paranoid, hurt, but he always felt that she was two steps ahead of him. That she was never just with him, but always weighing how this or that might play out. She was ambitious, he knew—she readily admitted it—but he could not see how he figured into her ambition. Or maybe he had hold of that by the wrong end of the stick. Maybe he didn’t figure into her ambition and that was the problem. She wasn’t going to saddle herself with someone who was so distinctly not going anywhere. Which meant she was not so far from Margo as he had thought.

  “They’re using you, douchebag,” he said to the reflection of his face in front of him. “They’re having sex with you,” he said, and the reflection had no answer to that.

  1896

  “She has shown it to me, my dear boy, your gift!—she has it hanging in the library at Windermere. You prove yourself quite the tactician.”

  Mrs. Belmont was speaking of the aquarelle Franklin had made for Mrs. Newcombe—“Ellen” to him now—or more precisely, she was speaking of what the aquarelle indicated: his genius for the business of wooing, the little gifts and asides, the doting touch, the planted detail. Or to put it another way: his talent for deceit, for duplicity, the treachery of his smiles and—lately—of his kisses. But he chose to misunderstand her.

  “You are too flattering of my watercolors,” he said and he inclined his head in a little bow, as if accepting Mrs. Belmont’s flattery all the same. “They are poor things. Though genuine expressions of my affections.”

  “Ah!” said Mrs. Belmont knowingly.

  He had spent the last month learning to ride a bicycle. The accompanying humiliation—how he had smiled the whole time!—had been for him the figure of his surrender, the compact to which he affixed his name, the covenant (oh, he could go on!) by which he sold his life as the Free Young Man, and put on the Uxorious Harness. The whole time he had kept up a cheerful dim-wittedness (it was, after all, her dead husband’s bicycle he was learning to ride: there was an indecent metaphor somewhere there, by god!), had even apologized profusely to Mrs. Newcombe’s footman—poor Hobbes!—who had had to run alongside him those first few days, steadying him as he pedaled, Hobbes with his stiff collars knocked awry and his beautifully polished shoes scuffed. They had kept at first to the walkways of Windermere, then when that grew tame had ventured out onto Bellevue and Ochre Point, until finally as his chef d’oeuvre they had bicycled out to Ocean Drive in the buffeting wind, lunch-basket strapped to Mrs. Newcombe’s machine, the two of them in their bicycling outfits, seagulls laughing overhead, the occasional carriage or trap passing, everyone hooting hello to everyone.

  The aquarelle he had made of that day—and which was now hanging in the library at Windermere—had been of the breakwater where they had had their lunch. He had used a good deal of yellow ochre that the day might appear golden, the breakwater jutting into the sun-spangled water, and two figures—a man and a woman—out at the very end of the jetty, seated facing away from the viewer, the silver surf threatening to souse them, the distance and their postures making it impossible for the casual viewer to identify them—they were merely an emblematic couple—but that of course was the beauty of the gesture: she knew who it was who sat there in intimacy, in the exquisite gold of the moment. (The damned bicycles he couldn’t help putting in—like the devil in a medieval panel—an infernal suggestion in the lower left.)

  “You should not minimize your achievement in painting,” Mrs. Belmont went on to say. They had stopped at a little gazebo that sat quaintly on the grounds of Belcourt.

  “My achievement?” he said with a wry look. He merely painted charming scenes, he said, gave them round to friends.

  But the remark was but a prelude, for she went on to wonder (all the time appearing to be spontaneous, to be thinking out loud): Could he not collect together fifteen or twenty of his pictures—she would lend him her own Angel in a Snowstorm, as would (she was sure) Mrs. Newcombe her Lovers upon the Jetty—and could they not persuade the Athenaeum to mount a show of his work? Did not Mrs. Newcombe sit on the board of directors? Ah: there was an idea! They could get up a fund-raiser for the Redwood Library, a charity event, champagne and cakes to be served, all proceeds benefiting etc. Better make it twenty pictures.

  He saw what she was after, the tentacled Monster. He was, as he had said that first day to Ellen, a flanking action in Mrs. Belmont’s war, and this show of his paintings would be yet a further advance. How the woman worked! Miss Alva Smith of Mobile, Alabama! (He called her that from time to time, when he was being the dear bad boy.) When she had first married into the Vanderbilts, they and their dirty railroads were not included among the Four Hundred. Yet she had worked it so, induced her husband to build a fabulous mansion on Fifth Avenue (Franklin had twice been inside), and then let it be known that she would be giving a masquerade ball that would surpass any other such affair. She had planted delightful rumors, little anxieties, and when expectation had reached a frenzy had said, alas, she could not invite Mrs. William Astor’s daughter since Mrs. William Astor had yet to call on her in her new home. And that had been that. Mrs. Astor had come like the Pope to Napoleon, and Napoleon had lifted the crown off Mrs. Astor’s head and lowered it onto her own. Now with her divorce and her remarriage to O. H. P. Belmont (who was forever away riding his horses and sailing his yachts and shooting his guns), she meant to destroy the world of the Four Hundred. Or at least to so remake it in her own image—season it with suffragettes and artists and the Political Equality League (with the occasional moneyed divorcée sprinkled in)—that it would be unrecognizable to Old New York. Was not the twentieth century just around the corner?

  Well! he did not mind! If he was a profiteer in this war, if she promoted him for her own reasons—Franklin Drexel with his looks and his charm and his watercolors—that suited him. If it meant he must assemble his ink drawings and his aquarelles—she was already telling him to make a list of those to whom he had given pictures: she would prevail upon them—then so be it. Such a public show (it was unclear to him whether it was for the benefit of the Redwood Library or the Athenaeum: what the devil was the difference anyway?), such a show would have the double-barreled virtue of assigning him an identity as both artist and as a member of the benefactor caste. It would be yet another golden light in which to allow Mrs. Newcombe to see the fineness of his features.

  Mrs. Belmont asked him now whether he would be at the pavilion ball ten days hence. They had started down the long drive toward the gilt-tipped gates that opened onto Ledge Road. He was, he supposed, being dismissed.

  “Mrs. Newcombe will be going, I know,” he temporized.

  “Then you must be of my party. There will be a passel of us. Strength in numbers.”

  He inclined his head, acknowledging her generosity, accepting. “I believe,” he said after a minute, “her father will be there.”

  “Mr. Ryckman?”

  “He’s coming up from New York.”

  At which she raised her brow. “To meet you?”

  He equivocated. “I’m told it has been the old gentleman’s custom to spend some time each summer at Windermere with his daughter. And of course, his grandchildren.”

  “He’s coming to meet you,” she said in her blunt way. “Depend upon it.”

  He let that pass, said instead that he believed there were, in these matters, always fathers with which to contend.

>   “He may not,” he pointedly intoned, “be coming to affix his signature to the deal.”

  She waved him away. “Mrs. Newcombe is a grown woman. She has two children. She is not a debutante. She does not need her father’s approval.”

  For once—in his manner, in his speech, in his thought—he was the sober one. “He is the kind of man, I’m led to believe, who will have made inquiries.”

  She turned a clouded face to him. What was he saying?

  “He will no doubt have discovered that I am—” he let the possibilities hang dangerously, deliciously, in the air—“that I am not of your . . . of Mrs. Newcombe’s set. That I am—” he wielded the term like a bludgeon—“what is commonly referred to as a ‘remittance man.’”

  “You are an artist.”

  “Is Mr. Ryckman such a great lover of art?”

  She pursed her lips as if she saw how that line led to an unpleasant check. “Let me work on him. Mrs. Auld and I. And I believe he is an acquaintance of Mrs. Lydig’s husband.”

  “Ah!” he intoned with a grateful bow of his head. “But let me first find out which way the wind blows. Let me meet Mr. Ryckman, see if he is immune to my particular charm.” And he smiled at her, clicked his heels like a Prussian officer. “I shall report back.”

  “If you think so,” she said.

  “I would prefer—” and he paused, as if thinking through a delicate point—“I would prefer that Mrs. Newcombe believe that she has won me on her own. That it is a matter between the two of us. A matter exclusively of the heart. If that’s not possible, there will be time for you to bring up the horses and cannon.”

  They had come to the gates. She stopped and extended her hand to him, and when he shook it, held on to him meaningfully. She turned her pugilist’s face up to him.

  “I must say, my dear boy, I did have my doubts about you.”

  “How so?” he charmingly wondered.

  She had not been convinced, she said, of his determination, of his ability to set his shoulder to the work that must be done. She lifted her face, seemed to smell the breeze as if it were the smell of one of her successes.

  “In short,” she said, “I was not sure you possessed the instinct to—” and she paused as if in search of a word, or perhaps to judge him one last time—“the instinct to go in for the kill.”

  1863

  ~We have had to postpone our excursion to the Point, for the weather has turned inclement. Instead I accompanied Miss Taylor and her mother to the Redwood Library, where we viewed the pictures. Such Old Testament grandees and patriarchs were these ancient Puritans and Quakers! We had a laugh and a wonder that such grim men and women walked the very streets where now we walk, and where the beau monde takes its pleasures in the Newport sun without a thought to the salvation of its soul. I was engaged in making just such amusing remarks to Miss Taylor when, upon exiting the gallery, I saw my brother and Sarge Perry sitting in the Reading Room, evidently having just lowered their newspapers at the sight of me. They gazed from me to Miss Taylor, back to me and then back to Miss Taylor, each with the look of a stunned fish. And then as we moved toward the door and Miss Taylor took my arm (with Mrs. Taylor behind us like the duenna in a Spanish tale), they must collapse in mirth.

  And now, of course, I have had to endure an afternoon of being called Lothario and Lochinvar and Don Juan, endure William and Sarge remarking upon Miss Taylor’s physical beauty and asking had I attempted any familiarity with her, and would I like some advice on how to do so, and what they would do if given half the chance. It was all, I suppose, meant good-naturedly. School-boy stuff as I had often heard in Geneva (there was that Heinrich who would go on so about Madame Beauvoir’s bosom!). It is not that that has disconcerted me, but rather why I do not wish the things of which they speak. Nor is it the first time I have so wondered about myself. For to hear the boys I have grown up with—William and Sarge and oh! how Will Temple used to speak of Missy Gardiner!—the hold that female beauty has over them is absolute. They live as willing slaves to the female form. So why is it not the same with me? For I must confess that I have never felt what they evidently feel—neither for a woman nor I hope (as I have most horribly heard of) for a man. And Miss Taylor? She whose beauty is beyond dispute, and whose intelligence and gay satiric temperament are to me so fresh and beguiling. What is it that is wrong with me that I do not wish what other men wish?

  And yet I do want very much to be in Miss Taylor’s company. To surround myself with her rich femininity, with her beauty and grace and wit. But in the privacy of this notebook I will confide that that desire grows not from these other natural wants, but rather out of the desire to watch her, to observe her, to make of her a presence in my consciousness, that I may later call on her, know her, use her.

  ~I have, in a state I can only call disturbed, reread the above. There is so much more I could add, but for now will remark only this: that it was Mr. Hawthorne and his curious tales that first caused me to think of the eye as a moral faculty, and to consider that watching, observing, marking, had an ethical dimension. How chilling is his depiction of the soul who watches without sympathy! Wherever it takes me, this incessant looking, this watching without doing: it must not take me there.

  ~We have now had our outing to the Point with its quaint houses with their backs bent and their shoulders rounded with age. We went up and down the straggling streets, past the little cent shop and the gingerbread shop, past a cabinetmaker’s with his double doors thrown open and the smell of fresh-sawn wood, and farther on a stonecutter’s yard with a bank of blank slate gravestones awaiting purchase and the engraving of a name. Alice (for she and young Harry accompanied us, as did Mrs. Taylor) was much taken with the latter. She worried over them in her queer way. Which would she choose for herself? she wondered. Which suited her? Which was most like? When Mrs. Taylor attempted to draw her away, telling her there were yet “years and years and years” before she need fret over a marker for her grave, the dear thing cast a fond, longing gaze at the row of stones and said she certainly hoped not.

  Curious, I’ll remark again: Miss Alice Taylor with a Harry for a brother; and Mr. Harry James with an Alice for a sister. Though the mirroring ends there: one cannot imagine more unlike families than the Jameses late of Union Square, Paris, Geneva, and god-knows-where-else, and the Taylors of Waterbury. The “Brass Valley,” she says they call the region. They are all gears and bearings and clockworks, and we are all books and idealism and importuning spirits.

  (By the by, I have righted myself and put behind me—indeed, have even crossed out—the questions I worried over in the entry above. For need these matters enter into my relations with Miss Taylor? Can I not simply be her friend? As I am of Minnie and Kitty Temple?)

  Back at the Ocean we had an ice on the long third-floor veranda. We were delightfully tired from our tramp and had a lovely desultory conversation. Down below, the thoroughfare was being watered to keep the dust down and there was the sound of horses trotting past with the jingle of harness bells (for the hotels “get up” the poor creatures in the most elaborate ways, with braided manes and combed tails, and their noble heads adorned with colorful ribbons and plumes). We had the rooftops of Newport all before us, and the bright blue harbor with its myriad sails and water sparkling in the sun. We spoke of the upcoming Soirée Dansante and then of Dan Rice’s Circus (notices for which were pasted up and down the Avenue) and then considered where we might venture next, for our first excursion had been such a success. Miss Taylor proclaimed that she would not go to the beach, for she had been once and had been appalled to see the manner in which it was overrun by carriages and ladies on horseback and bathers drowning themselves in white trousers and red frocks. Was there not some part of the ocean unpolluted by society? she wondered with her characteristic satire. I suggested several alternatives, recalled how when we lived in Newport before the war one could take a ten-minute sail from Bann
ister’s Wharf to Fort Adams, where one might walk about the ramparts with a lovely view of the town and the harbor and the bay, but that I believed the fort was now closed to the general public, serving as it did as the Naval Academy.

  “But if you are in the mood for indiscriminate democracy,” I said with what I hoped was my own satirical hue, “the island is studded with wild footpaths that Alice and I and our brothers are in the habit of following where they may lead. We might make it out to Lily Pond, or Doubling Point, or even as far afield as Purgatory Bluff. Would such a trek suit?”

  And more of the like. It was most free and delightful. Yet all the time we talked and bantered I was listening to the conversation of those at the table next to us, for I felt in what I overheard the stirrings of a subject which (to return this Notebook to its proper purpose) I will record here.

  The conversation was between two men. Their wives were present but they did not partake. They were medical men, as I made out. They were comparing notes as it were, speaking of medicaments and febrifuges administered and of seeing patients in their surgeries. But what struck me was how one of them laughingly confessed to intensely disliking one of his regular patients (he described the man’s brows and his ill-humor) and how it was all he could do to set aside his dislike and tend professionally to the man. Indeed he said he sometimes amused himself (and here one of the wives interjected her disapproval), amused himself with the ways in which he might, in the guise of giving physic to the man, instead undermine his health. The two doctors found a good deal of mirth in the conceit.

  But here is my story. For it so happened that as I listened I was following with my eyes on the avenue below, in the near distance, a group of wounded soldiers the like of which are sometimes to be witnessed about Newport, having come down from the convalescing hospital at Portsmouth Grove. And the confluence of these two unlike apprehensions (and I suppose the lovely presence of Miss Taylor) has impregnated me with a subject.