The Maze at Windermere

by Gregory Blake Smith

  He straightened up, listened as if the still air had something to tell him. She had been there. She had heard him coming and had avoided him by going out of the maze while he came in, stepped into this or that dead end as he’d gone past. It gave him an eerie sensation. As if he’d been unwittingly observed.

  Well, he would leave the briefcase all the same, place it on the chaise longue with its quote from Daisy Miller and leave it there for her to find. She could accept it or not, but he would have at least made the gesture.

  Back out on the lawn he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched from somewhere. He looked along the veranda, at the banks of windows on the second floor, shot a glance at the Orangery. Down along the Cliff Walk there were the usual tourists on the other side of the fence. When he climbed onto the Indian he had the sense that he was done. He had made a break; he was done with them all.

  It only remained to tell Margo. And he did that two days later. He didn’t know what he’d expected from her, some imperious scene perhaps, but she took it way better than he’d thought she would, even stopped him with a smile and a shush when he started overcomplimenting her, telling her how great it’d been. She seemed more amused than anything, and he had the thought that he’d simply anticipated her. The summer had begun to turn anyway. It had the curious effect of freeing them to talk a little. She asked him what his plans were, managed to let him know (this was the only thing she said that had a little edge to it) that he probably wouldn’t be coming back to the Casino next summer, but by then he’d have a proper position, a college job—right?—and to that end she’d be glad to use her board of directors stationery to write him a recommendation, a character recommendation she meant, not a tennis one. He’d be fine, she said. He’d land on his feet.

  That evening he put an ad on Craigslist to sell the Indian—the Holy Grail of Cruisers, he called it—then went and played basketball with the Storer Park crew. When it got too dark they walked over to the Brick Alley for pitchers of beer. It was the first time he’d ever been out with them. They talked nothing but sports. It was his new life.

  When he checked his phone he had three calls about the Indian. Back at his place he went down the driveway to the side of the garage where he kept the motorcycle. Before he could call anyone back he needed a gut check about whether he was serious. He let his eyes run over the sleek antique thing with its chrome and valanced fenders. It was dark and so it took a moment for him to realize that there was a piece of paper—a note—tucked behind the throttle cable. It hadn’t been there earlier when he’d taken pictures to upload with the ad. He pulled the note out and brought it over to the light. It said simply, Thank you. He eyed it, eyed the grammar-school cursive. He didn’t need to wonder who had put it there. Margo or Aisha thanking him for the time they’d had together? Not likely! It seemed to put a final bit of punctuation to everything. She had accepted his apology—not just the briefcase but the Daisy Miller note he’d put inside—but she was not about to see him again or take up where they’d left off. She was still hurt, and although she seemed to understand that that hurt had not been his doing—not his intentional doing—she still felt it.

  That, at any rate, was his reading of the note—its clandestine appearance, its reticence. So he wasn’t prepared the next day when he found a second note. Same paper, same handwriting, this time tucked into the Indian in its parking place at the Casino. She would have reciprocated one’s affection, it said. He looked around as if she were there somewhere, watching him, seeing how he reacted.

  She would have reciprocated one’s affection. It was from Daisy Miller, of course. He’d check when he got home but he was pretty sure Winterbourne says this, realizes it, at the end of the book. Was she simply repeating the valedictory, regretful tone of his note—standing over the grave of her affection for him, throwing in flowers? Or did she mean to reopen things between them? Whatever it was, he wasn’t going to respond. Indeed, there was no way to respond. He wasn’t about to write notes back.

  The next morning when he went out there was another. He stared at it a moment and then plucked it from behind the throttle cable.

  Half the time she doesn’t know what she’s saying.

  Okay, so maybe what she was doing was supposed to be funny, self-cuttingly funny, but funny nonetheless. It was Alice in Aliceland, as Aisha used to say. He could take that. He understood that.

  But the next morning he came out and found, It was evident that Daisy was dangerously ill. Which didn’t seem so funny, seemed in fact something like a threat.

  And even less funny was the note he found out at the Casino when he was done for the day: Her grave was in the little Protestant cemetery.

  What on earth was the girl up to? He had meant his note to say simply—what? Well, what it said! That he would have appreciated her esteem. Meaning, that he respected her, that he liked her, and that he would have appreciated a reciprocal respect. It was meant to acknowledge—to apologize for and yet to continue to maintain—the distance between them, and that though he could not kiss her he would have liked her friendship nonetheless, and that he was prepared to give his in return. But this! She was taking bits and pieces of the story and rearranging them so she could act the part—wittily? cuttingly? manipulatively? ominously?—of a deceased Daisy Miller.

  The next note was: Through the thick gloom . . .

  And then: It’s so plaguy dark.

  He looked each and every one up. None of these originally—in the book itself—pertained to Daisy’s death. She was appropriating them, taking the elements of one story and shuffling them into another. Was this creepy or was it funny? Was it dangerous or was it paradoxically—Daisy speaking from beyond the grave, ha-ha—a sign of health even in her hurt? He didn’t know what to do, whether doing something was even called for. Two days went by with no notes. Then:

  He seemed to wish to say something.

  And two days after that, after he hadn’t said anything:

  It had ceased to be a matter of serious regret to him.

  He got the damn book out, the library’s copy he hadn’t yet returned, and read through the final scenes, keeping an eye out for something susceptible to a double meaning. But he did not, as she’d once told him, view things sufficiently metaphorically and he had to settle for her mystifying manners . . . , copying it onto a piece of scrap paper and tucking it under the throttle cable. When he came out the next morning it had been turned over and on the other side he found:

  . . . may be viewed this evening, at seven, in the maze. Casual dress. No gifts.

  Meaning her mystifying manners might be viewed. If one cared to. Which one didn’t.

  But of course he couldn’t just let her sit there alone, the sun going down, slowly realizing he wasn’t coming. So when the time came he climbed on the Indian and roared down Bellevue. He found her just as she must have been that other day, seated on the chaise longue at the center of the maze, a summer drink on the iron table beside her. She was wearing a bowling team shirt. White and starchy looking, too big for her, with HARRY embroidered in red above the breast pocket and NAPA AUTO PARTS on the back. And she had on pedal pushers, tight around her calves with little bows of yarn lacing up the side vents. He expected some clever remark, some retooled Daisy Miller quote, and failing that some bipolar moment, but she just put her book down, smiled, and said simply: “Hi, sailor.”

  She made no mention of the briefcase or the notes, treated it all as if it hadn’t happened, or rather as if it had been a kind of secret handshake, acknowledged at the time but not afterwards referred to. Instead she launched herself into being “the perfect hostess,” seizing the maze as the nearest topic and telling him about her grandmother—the non–du Pont grandmother who had bought Windermere in the fifties when the great Gilded Age properties were going for fire-sale prices—her grandmother who had replanted the maze based on old photographs and now it was the thing Winder
mere was known for. Had he come to Champagne at Windermere last Labor Day weekend? she asked with her hostess face. There’d been so many people in the maze you could barely make it through! she said with a laugh and he realized with something of a shock that she was nervous, like a girl on a first date.

  (Although as they walked back out of the maze he noticed that the book she’d been reading—like a stage property, like an elbow to the ribs—was The Wings of the Dove.)

  For the next half hour they strolled along the sloping lawn, going from place to place as he’d done that first day with Aisha. There were the tourists down along the Cliff Walk, the red teahouse a quarter mile away, the Adirondack chairs, the flowerbeds. Every now and then they would turn and catch sight of the magnificent house with its chimneys and richly weathered shingles, its long veranda and countless windows. The whole thing was like a parody of that day with Aisha when he had felt so overwhelmed by the beauty of the place: the ocean, the sky, the lime rickeys. Only Alice couldn’t know about that, right? The parody, the palimpsest to use one of her words—the overlay of one day on the other and the felt connections—they were all his.

  Once when he held back and she went a little ahead of him, he noticed that the logo on the back of her bowling shirt had been markered so that NAPA read NADA.

  She took him inside the Orangery and he had to pretend he had never seen the place before, the mandrels and rows of hammers, the little anvils and casting equipment. There was the big green tank of oxygen he’d helped Aisha move that first day, and the little narrow cot. She showed him the pieces Aisha had made that summer, holding each necklace draped over her forearm or up to her neck for him to admire. He looked for signs that she was setting him up, that she knew about Aisha and was checking to see whether he’d lie about her as he had about Margo. But there was nothing he could see in her manner or her voice. Rather, she seemed intent on putting him at ease.

  Back outside they strolled along the curving pebble path that led up toward the house. He wondered whether it was intentional or just reflexive that she kept to his left as they went, so that her bad side—the hitching foot and the hand like a shepherd’s crook—was away from him. Up at the house he saw that someone had come out on the veranda. For a second he thought it was Margo, but no, it was the caretaker’s wife. Mary, he thought her name was. She was cook and housekeeper, supervised the Salve Regina girls. Alice gave her a little wave and the woman went back inside.

  “Oh, dear!” she said when they reached the porch steps. She was looking down at her pedal pushers. One of the bows had come undone. For a moment he didn’t get it. And then he realized she couldn’t tie it, couldn’t—he shockingly realized—probably even tie her own shoes.

  “Here,” he said and he knelt down, took up the two wayward ends.

  He tied the bow quickly, and then had the strange sensation that this was the moment—in his normal life, in the normal course of things—when he would have touched the woman for the first time, touched her bare calf—lightly, meaningfully—and then waited for the reciprocating feel of her fingers in his hair. He made a show of tugging each of the bows in turn—like a parent! there!—and then stood back up.

  She fixed him with her strange light-colored eyes. “Thank you,” she said simply, and she started up the stairs. She took them one at a time.

  On the porch they turned to look at the view. There was the green slope of the lawn and the tumble of salt-spray rose that grew around the Cliff Walk fence and in the distance where it was sunny still the sparkling water dotted with white sails. He remembered Aisha that first day saying how it was like you owned the summer itself. Now it was growing dusky and there were swallows diving through the air, and a racket of birdsong from the boxwood hedge of the maze. Alice strolled down to one end of the veranda, stayed there a few minutes, and then came back and stood beside him.

  “Can I quit now?” she said. He turned and gazed down at her, at the blondish wisps of hair at her temples.

  “Quit what?” he asked.

  “Quit reassuring you that I’m not the Mad Heiress.” She looked at him with a grim smile.

  “Has it been so hard?”

  She hiked herself onto the knee wall, crossed her arms, didn’t say anything.

  “A real stretch?” he prodded.

  She smiled, not at him exactly, but a smile anyway. Behind them one of the French doors that gave onto the dining room opened and Mary came out with an open bottle of wine and two glasses. She set them on one of the little tables that dotted the veranda and without looking at them—without looking at Sandy—went back inside.

  “You know what’s wrong with this place?” Alice asked, still looking away, not acknowledging the wine but aware, he thought, of his questioning eyes on her. “No kids,” she said.

  He let that pass.

  “I’ve got a lot of things to hold against Margo, but that’s the biggest one. If you’ve got all this—” and she gestured at the veranda, at the lawn—“and you don’t want kids. It’s immoral.”

  “I can’t fancy Margo a mother,” he said a little stiffly. She turned her face to him, suddenly fierce.

  “If it was me I’d have twenty kids! They’d be falling down the stairs and tumbling out the windows and getting lost on the third floor. But they’d be here! They’d be loved! They’d be living in all this beauty and I’d make damn sure they knew it!”

  He just looked at her, nonplussed.

  “Now you have to stay for dinner,” she said. She gestured at the wine bottle and glasses as if they were evidence of his staying. “I was supposed to ask you earlier, but I didn’t have the nerve. Mary’s made something special, and it’ll be super embarrassing if you don’t stay. And yes, this is very manipulative of me.”

  He pursed his lips, didn’t say anything. She went over to the wine bottle and with her good hand poured a glass, poured another, and held the rich red liquid out to him. He felt the need for a show of some kind of resistance.

  “And Margo and Tom?”

  “They’ve gone up to Fenway. We have the place to ourselves.”

  He held out a moment longer—long enough for her to understand whatever it was he needed her to understand—and then took the glass from her.

  Inside they sat in the window seats in the hall with its rich wood, its chandelier, and the wide stairway opening onto the second floor. He found himself telling her—he had to get it out of the way—telling her that he’d broken it off with Margo, that he should’ve never let it go on for so long, but now it was over, done.

  “Why tell me?” she asked when he’d finished.

  “Because,” he said; and when that didn’t seem enough: “Because I lied to you about it, and because I’m not proud of it, and because one discovers, after all, that one would appreciate your esteem.”

  He expected some sort of smile at that—it was the first time either of them had gestured toward the notes—but she kept a sober look, sipped from her wine. “She’ll be lying in wait for you,” she said after a minute. He held his hands palm out in a no-foul gesture.

  “She said she’d write me a recommendation.”

  At which a string of laughter spilled out of her. “I’d pass on that if I were you!” she said, cocking her head at him and smiling as if—once again—marveling at his innocence. “Honi soit qui mal y pense,” she went on, and then: “You don’t see it because it’s not inside you and so you don’t recognize it in others.”

  He stiffened. “What’s the ‘it’?” he asked.

  She worked her way off the window seat and stood up. “You don’t even know what the ‘it’ is.”

  He held back. And then he knew what she was telling him, what she meant. “Enough with the killer instinct,” he said.

  She crossed to him with that electrocuted grace she had, stood in front of him, and with the back of her hand—her bad hand—with her knuckles, brushed h
im daringly across the cheek.

  “That’s a good thing,” she said. “Maybe not in sports. But in life. Don’t let anyone tell you it isn’t.”

  “And you,” he said, still resisting her. “Have you got the killer instinct?”

  She turned her face to his and for the first time he had the impression that her eyes had a way of changing color, as if there were some molten substance inside her onto which her eyes gave that was dissolving and remaking itself.

  “Only toward myself,” she said.

  And something of the old wound, the impulse to self-hatred he’d seen when he first met her, resurfaced. She kept her face turned to his and for some moments she did not try to hide the emotion there, seemed even fiercely to want him to see that she loved him, that she was his if he would just take her. He was aware of a certain peril in the moment, of trespassing onto ground upon which he should not tread, and still he felt moved to take her hand, gently as he had done that very first night in Margo’s SUV. He held it softly a moment, and then with his other hand touched the scar on her wrist, placed his palm over it as if he meant to press the life back into her. She dropped her eyes, seemed to shudder inside her clothes.

  From down the hall came Mary’s voice saying dinner was ready when they were.

  1896

  They made a bathing party out to Bailey’s Beach, Mrs. Newcombe and her children, Mr. Ryckman with his eyes on Franklin, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Garrett and their children, and some of Franklin’s friends—Parrish and Briggs and that whoremonger Hobson who had managed to smuggle in a couple of Smith girls. They had taken three carriages out—Mrs. Newcombe’s and the Garretts’ and Briggs’s mother’s—but having determined they would afterwards join the hoi polloi and return to Windermere along the Cliff Walk, had sent two back. The third would carry back the children and their governesses.

  He had apprised Ellen of his conversation with her father. She had inquired anxiously, hopefully, and he had managed to say, without disclosing just how objectionable the interview had been, that it was his, Franklin’s, opinion that her father did not relish the idea of Franklin as—and he let the phrase as his future son-in-law hang a moment between them—and then said instead “as a regular dinner guest at Windermere.” He tried then to ameliorate her dismay. He would kill her father with kindness! he exclaimed. He would continue to be his light, airy self. Had not one of the society columns called him the Ariel of Newport? Oh, he would treat her father with all the civility and charm and delight at his disposal, not—and of course he did not say this to her—not because civility and charm and delight would win the man over, but because they would win her over.