The Maze at Windermere

by Gregory Blake Smith

  To Ryckman’s questions he trotted out the unexceptionable—if unexceptional—members of his family. His father a banker in Baltimore, his mother of the Louisville Nesbits, his sister married into a Main Line family. He himself had a quiet place down below Union Square (he didn’t say just how far below), though every year it seemed another old family quit the tiny streets and moved up the wide avenue, and another building was hung about with bohemians. Still, it suited him, a good bachelor’s flat, he said, drawing on his cigar. Ryckman kept a steady gaze on him.

  “Ellen tells me you’re a Princeton man. The classical languages, was it?”

  “Ah, Princeton!” he said with a smile for the memory of his dear old alma mater and his own undercooked self. He had a soft spot for Princeton, he said. Princeton would have made him a man, he supposed (with a laugh: because, of course, here he was a man, smoking a cigar, by god! surrounded by dark wood and glinting silver and leather seats, and about to marry your daughter, eh?), Princeton would have made him a man if he’d stayed. But in his third year he’d had the opportunity to travel and he had taken it. Had visited all the great cities of Europe, had spent afternoon after afternoon in the museums (he enumerated them like a list of references: the Louvre, the Alte Pinakothek, the Rijksmuseum, the Uffizi). It had been a great education in itself, he wouldn’t trade it for any number of Princeton degrees. For travel was a great educator, didn’t Mr. Ryckman agree? Indeed it had taught Franklin that he was no artist! Ah, it had indeed! He might have continued on at Princeton, or at the Pennsylvania Academy, and never—until it was too late—discovered he had not the dark, honest soul of Rembrandt, nor the daring of Titian, the fury of Turner. And then there was his discovery of the Parisian dealers! Oh, what they were showing in their shops! The color, the light, the splendor of life! It was still a scandal what was going on in Paris! But he had loved it, even while he had felt himself diminished. Diminished and enlarged at the same time, that was the thing! For travel was the natural enemy of small-mindedness, of prejudice and intolerance and vanity, didn’t Mr. Ryckman find it so? Ah, he had always intended to return to Princeton, to finish his studies—non scholae sed vitae discimus—but he had not been able to see his way to it. Not after Europe. Not after the experiences he had had there.

  “And Ellen—” he said and caught himself. Should he go back? Correct it to Mrs. Newcombe? Or let the intimacy hang like a challenge between them? “Ellen speaks very warmly of the tour she had of the great European cities after Miss Porter’s. She was—what, twenty? That was very generous of you. And wise if I may say so.”

  At which Ryckman eyed him, sending his tongue behind his teeth as if some food remained there and letting his gums make little sucking sounds. Franklin kept his smile on his face, the smile that charmed the world, waiting for Ryckman to speak, to pick up the conversational thread and get knitting with it. But the man didn’t—pointedly—and Franklin found himself a little nonplussed, casting about for something further to say.

  “Looking back,” he went on, and he allowed a quizzical, amused look to come over him, splashing the ash off his cigar, “I suppose it was fortunate that I didn’t go over to the Academy as I had planned.” He had never planned any such thing. “This was ten or twelve years ago, just shortly before the scandal with Mr. Eakins.” And he looked for a response. “Perhaps you don’t recall the incident? It was in all the papers. It got Eakins dismissed from his post.” And now the pause was to call attention to his interlocutor’s ignorance. “Well, picture this. It appears that one day in the drawing studio Eakins had removed the loincloth of one of the male models. And this while there were female students present, you understand. And it wasn’t the first time such a thing had happened. I had it from some painter friends of mine that when one of the female students had inquired about the movement of the pelvis, Eakins had taken her into his office and stripped to show her! How’s that for education!”

  And again he looked for some reaction from the man. A look of dismay at least. But there was only the appraising gaze. Franklin felt a queer, prickly heat about his collar, and a smile going stale on his face. And still Ryckman kept his eyes impassively on him.

  “There’s a rumor about,” the man said finally—he drew fatly on his cigar, threw his head back, let out a great cloud of smoke, and then returned to appraising Franklin—“a rumor that you’ve set your sights on my daughter.”

  Franklin had obscurely known that something of the sort was coming and so managed to keep the small slight smile on his face from vacating its post. “I’m not sure I have ‘sights,’ as you say,” he responded after a moment. Ryckman waved away the objection.

  “That you intend to propose to her,” he corrected all the same.

  “I have come to value Mrs. Newcombe’s friendship extremely. She seems to me an altogether fine woman.”

  “D’you not find her remarkably homely?”

  At which Franklin felt himself visibly start. Was this the tactic then? To discomfit him, to rattle him in hope of shaking something loose?

  “That’s an odd thing for a father to say,” he responded coolly.

  “You do not deny that you are courting my daughter?”

  Still he equivocated. “I have been keeping company with her.”

  “As a prelude to marrying her?”

  At which he kept silence, though that silence felt like an acquiescence all the same. Yet why should he not acquiesce? It was just the man’s damned manner that was objectionable.

  “It’s not illegal, I hope?” he said finally. Ryckman knocked his ash off, all the time keeping his gaze fixed upon Franklin.

  “You will recognize my right to inquire after your finances.”

  “Your right?” Franklin repeated. “Is not Mrs.—” with an emphasis on Mrs.—“is not Mrs. Newcombe of age?” he said with a meaningful smile. “At any rate, I have yet to ask for the honor of her hand. Perhaps you could wait until I do.”

  “I don’t wait,” Ryckman replied. “I haven’t the habit.”

  You’d better damn well acquire the habit, Franklin wanted to say, but he held off. “I have a small income,” he allowed. “Enough to keep me in a gentleman’s ways.”

  “Enough to keep a wife as well?”

  “That would depend on the wife,” Franklin said, and then—there was no point to this coy parrying; it was just the damned fellow’s manner: “Mrs. Newcombe, I understand, is quite capable of keeping herself.”

  “Aye, that’s the game, isn’t it?”

  “I beg your pardon!” Franklin heard himself saying. It had been an outright insult. Ryckman had finally a smile on his face. They fronted each other for a good half minute, and then Ryckman gestured with his hand.

  “Your cigar’s gone out, man.”

  Before he could tell himself not to, Franklin turned the thing around and looked at its gray tip, and then stupidly drew on it. There was nothing. And Hobbes had vanished.

  “I knew there’d be someone,” Ryckman was saying. “After James—after Mr. Newcombe died. I knew there’d be someone. I just didn’t know it’d be someone like you.”

  “Someone like me?” Franklin found himself repeating.

  “Aye.”

  “Meaning what, sir?” What did the ogre know?

  “‘They toil not, neither do they spin,’” Ryckman said, narrowing his eyes.

  But ah! if it was just Franklin’s lack of a profession! If that was all! He summoned back his smile, let it mingle with the candlelight and the glinting silver, and then said handsomely: “They only require a good tailor.” And then, pushing back his chair: “Now, if you’ve finished insulting me—”

  And he let the words hang between them. For he had seen the way forward. He would refuse to engage. There clearly would be no winning the man over, but he might let his beautiful—infuriating!—manners forever put Ryckman in the wrong and he, Franklin, in the right.
For only that would matter to Ellen.

  “If you’ve quite finished insulting me,” he repeated, still with his handsome smile but now standing up, “shall we join the ladies?”

  1863

  ~We selected Fort Adams, and if we proved to have the strength, the breakwater beyond, for our next outing. Alice (my Alice, that is) and the other Alice’s brother Harry, and Mrs. Taylor, once again rounded out the party. We had a basket with sandwiches made up from the Ocean’s kitchen. I doubted Mrs. Taylor would make it to the breakwater, but I kept my reservations to myself and we sallied forth.

  In Geneva I used to think of New England as gray and solemn, lugubrious even. For at that distance I overlaid Mr. Hawthorne’s somber tales of the Puritans upon my own memories. But the walk southwest with the land falling away to the sail-studded and sun-spangled water was most bright and pleasant. One of the steam ferries was coming in, hooting its brassy horn, and some of the passengers at the rail hailed us. We kept to the grassy path, Miss Taylor and myself in the front, followed by Alice chirruping at young Harry, and then Mrs. Taylor.

  As the land veered southward we paused to look back over the harbor at that notable prospect of the town the point affords. At the sight of the dozens of pleasure craft in the harbor, I mentioned the steam organ concert of a week past, said that I had seen Miss Taylor there on the wharf, and wondered did she think it was fit, all this seeking of pleasure in the midst of war. She cast a wistful gaze out over the patchwork of masts and sails, the breeze blowing a strand of hair into her face, so that she drew it back from her lips with her fingertips.

  “People will have their frivolity, I suppose,” she answered, “even in these terrible times.”

  Mrs. Taylor seemed to hear a criticism in my remark, perhaps of their partaking of the frivolity of Newport, and asked did the war not affect me more than it seemed, did I not intend to enlist? She did not say this like an accusation exactly, but still there was a meaning to her tone.

  So I told them (we had begun walking again) the history of how William and I had wanted to “join up” in the first heady fervency of the war, but had been prevented by Father, who in those days held that Mr. Lincoln was no better than a slave-driver that he did not free the slaves instantly. But as was characteristic of Father, I hastened to add, within the year he had changed his mind about Mr. Lincoln, but by then I had injured my back while helping with a fire pump, an injury that persisted, even now.

  “But my two younger brothers have enlisted,” I said by way of covering what must have seemed an excuse to malinger; and then like a coup d’éclat: “Our Wilky is adjutant to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw of the 54th Massachusetts.”

  “The Negro regiment?” Miss Taylor asked in surprise.

  And so as we walked, and the great stone battlements of the fort hove into view, I found myself telling them (dear pixilated Alice must have wondered at me, for I spoke more that afternoon than she’d heard me speak the past month!), narrating how Wilky and Bob, since our return from Europe, had been students at the Sanborn School in Concord and had breathed in the air of Transcendentalism along with the odes of Horace. Mr. Emerson’s children had been sent there, I told them, and the poor orphaned daughters of John Brown. They had all imbibed Abolitionism there and when the daring scheme to raise a Negro regiment and put at its head the best sons of Boston was bruited, Wilky had volunteered to serve in that regiment though he was but seventeen at the time. I described to them my visit to the regiment’s encampment at Readville, and what a sight it was, all the Negro men in their uniforms, and their white officers.

  “They are now down in South Carolina. We’ve had a letter from Wilky. There is a grand action in the offing, but he could not say what.”

  “We are greatly afraid for him,” Alice put in. “All we do is sit in the garden and wait to hear something horrible.”

  “But you must be very proud,” said Miss Taylor. “There was such a ruckus in the papers about the morality of a Negro regiment.”

  We went on in like manner, talking of the war as we walked along the great broad face of the fort wall, inside of which were those functions of the Naval Academy that had not been moved to the Atlantic House. Miss Taylor’s older brother was with a Connecticut artillery regiment, but thankfully (Mrs. Taylor said) he was stationed along the Potomac, guarding the capital, though he wrote them there was a great deal of disease in camp. We had our sandwiches on the grounds of the commanding officer’s house, and so fortified, began the traipse across the neck for the breakwater. It was a lengthy hike and we soon fell into that pleasant silence that can be part of a good walk among friends (though every now and then Alice would pipe up with one of her extraordinary remarks).

  I tried to judge the paths correctly, for though I have been all over the island with William and Wilky, with dear Sarge, and with cousin Minnie and pretty Kitty, yet the island is crisscrossed with the most wild, rambling footpaths. From time to time we would hear the sound of the surf when the breeze came from the south, and now and again, when we were climbing some hillock in the interior, we would catch sight of the great blue blaze of the Atlantic to the east. At one of these blessed sightings I looked at Miss Taylor and she smiled most beautifully at me. Above us the clouds scudded like music.

  “When I get tired or ill,” we heard Alice say behind us to some complaint of young Harry’s, “I simply abandon my body. Let it suffer as it will. I myself pass on.”

  And a little farther along: “I find one must choose between muscular sanity, and mental. Don’t you?”

  Behind them Mrs. Taylor paused now and then to wipe her brow, but she was proving herself a true Yankee matron, a matriarch of the Brass Valley, no mere resort dweller.

  At last the vegetation grew more sparse, and the ground underfoot took on a more sandy character, and when we came up over a ridge we saw the great violent imaginary seam where bay met ocean. We grew revived at the sight of it, and with the fresh strong wind blowing straight into our faces, hurried down to the little bluff that fronts Brenton Point. Below us the granite breakwater was like the spine of a great Saurian lurking underwater. The waves from the Atlantic broke against it and sent spray up its side.

  Alice declared that she believed the boulders would be too much for her and that she would wait for us, and that we shouldn’t hurry on her account. Mrs. Taylor said she would keep Alice company and allow the breeze on the bluff to refresh her. So Miss Taylor and her brother and I made our way down the escarpment and up onto the first stones of the breakwater. Young Harry went ahead of us. We told him to be careful and followed more slowly, Miss Taylor holding on to my arm as we maneuvered from rock to rock. There is not much to write: it was all in the impression of the moment. The breeze and the bright sun, the booming surf, the schooner-rigged boat in the middle distance placed there by some divine compositor, and of course the company of a pretty and intelligent young person, the wind blowing her hair where it escaped her bonnet and pressing her dress against her. We did not speak except to caution against this or that rock, the slippery surface, the little pools of stranded water. But there was between us, I felt, a fellowship silently acknowledged, and which did not partake of romance but rather of a yet rarer quality: the colloquy of two souls who recognized one another, who found themselves in the ordinary world to be obscurely trapped, yet in each other’s presence (for the moment, come to the end of the breakwater with the sea spreading perilously before them, and the careless clouds forming and re-forming in the blue overhead) to be free.

  1778

  Apr 23

  What does the girl imagine? I have for so long occupied myself with how I might Fortify my positions, throw up a Redoubt, engineer a Breakwater, take possession of a forward Position, that I have hardly thought of what the Jewess is about when she is alone with her Thoughts. What pictures does she paint herself? What does she make of my Confession of love? What Future does she see? She must think my Intent
ions honourable (for she is not a slattern about the Taverns), but how does she explain to herself the Secrecy of our looks? Does she think I adopt this Duplicitous pose because I understand that her Father would never countenance a Gentile? And that the Ruse itself, which must be abhorrent to one of my principled Nature, is yet perversely a Testament to my passion that I am willing to so compromise my Virtue? Well enough. Plausible. But what then? Does the girl imagine life as a Noblewoman back in Devonshire! Lots of nigger servants about, and a Stallion out of the Studbook upon which to canter through the Vale at dusk! In short, does she think that I would marry a Colonial girl (a Jewess!), bring her home to my father Lord Stevens, and have her sit in the same room drinking tea with my Mother & Sisters? Can she be so innocent of the world, and of the Restrictions placed upon the Public behavior of someone of my Station? And of her own station of being a Jew?

  Or does she fancy herself an Adventuress in a French novel? And our Passion an illicit yet chaste relation painted in oils by Fragonard!

  But damn her and her eyes!

  We are never alone and I have no opportunity to deploy the Feints & Ploys of the Book of Seduction. Her beauty! my inflamed Passions! And oh, my captured Heart!

  (The island is lousy with 8000 troops. One may not piss without a Dozen eyes upon one! How to effect the final Assault?)

  Apr 24

  This day being Friday I endeavored to be free of any Duty in the afternoon so that I might station myself on lower Jews Street (and with such a fluttering heart: am I a girl?), where I thought she must surely pass on her way to the Synagoge from her house on the Wharf. And indeed in time I espied her, and with Phyllis accompanying. The hub-bub of the town is such all Sights are to be seen, yet I had some Trepidation, for I did not know how we could go about together, given her youth and beauty (however disguised!) and that business at Burgoyne’s Assembly linking our names. I made it so I was rounding a corner that it might appear we met by Chance. I even said something of the like, that we might keep a Pretense, even to ourselves. But she did not fall in, neither did she Scruple or play the coy Maiden, but rather looked me honestly in the eye, as if she meant to affix the Sanction of her will to whatever was to come.