The Maze at Windermere

by Gregory Blake Smith

  He had an impression, again, of the range of her selves: bowling shirt, I’m-already-brain-damaged, seventeenth-century Quakers, her research, her suicides. She was always ahead of him, ready with her wit, with her irony, with her—what else to call it?—with her depth. Sometimes he felt quite lost in her presence.

  “This is the place I call home,” she was saying, warmly, looking at him with meaning. “I can’t help it if it’s privileged. It’s my home. It’s where I was born. It’s where my mother used to comb my hair to calm me after we’d done my stretching exercises and I was crying. It’s where she died. It’s what I am.”

  And yet, in one thing he had been ahead of her, had been ahead of them all. For he had inadvertently passed the test of the Heiress’s Dilemma, hadn’t he? He hadn’t intended to, wasn’t even aware he was taking the test, but he had passed. She could not suspect him of being after her money. He had rejected her right from the start, had turned her aside, had caused her to slide into one of her depressions. She had placed herself in his path and he had treated her—almost cruelly, he saw now—as a kind of mascot of the world he found himself in: the Casino, Windermere, cars with U-WISH license plates. The result of which was that now—he could never have planned it so!—now he was perfectly positioned to make his shot if he wanted to. He had opened up the court; there was all that green into which to hit the ball. If he wanted to.

  “Because this is the thing,” she was saying. She had one elbow on the table, her chin resting on the crook of her bad hand. “The privilege is part of the beauty,” she said and leaned toward him. “It took me a while to see that. The guilt and the self-consciousness, the whispers at Miss Porter’s and college. It took me a while to realize that it isn’t just the warm brick and the seven chimneys and the leaded windows. It’s the air of privilege and leisure and fulfillment, of being there, of not struggling toward wholeness but already having it—that’s what’s beautiful. You can’t subtract the privilege from a place like Windermere without lessening its beauty, without injuring it.”

  He nodded, like okay, he got that.

  “That’s the paradox. If you love the place. I mean if you love the place aesthetically, you have to accept the privilege. You can’t put out the back of your hand and deny it. It’s part of the beauty. That’s why I want twenty kids.”

  At which he raised his brow. She smiled, closed her eyes, let her head sway as if to admit she was a little drunk.

  “That’s why Tom and Margo should be expelled from the garden. Will be expelled if I ever get married and have twenty kids. Aunt Margo and Uncle Tom will be allowed a three-day visit over the Fourth of July and that’s it.”

  And she held her hand out as if to forestall his objections.

  “What we’re talking about is a kind of high-level tourism,” she picked up after a minute. She opened her eyes and fixed him with a look. “Not the tourism of ogling the Eiffel Tower, but a tourism where you’re on the inside. Where the outside world, the literal world, is only a sign, an avenue, to an internal world. Like when you watch a movie or read a novel,” she said, seizing on the idea. “You’re a tourist, but if you’re reading right you’re a tourist simultaneously on the outside and the inside. You’re simultaneously yourself and someone else. Nineteenth-century Vevey, let’s say. The Dollar Princess and her exquisite clothes. Common enough when you read a novel or watch a movie. But what about life itself? Could you live your life while at the same time keeping an eye out for signs and symbols, for meaning, patterns, connections?” She sat back, smiled drunkenly at him. “To live your life and read it simultaneously. That’s what I would try to give my children if I had them. Not just Windermere here in the twenty-first century, but Windermere during the Great War and the Gilded Age. Even Windermere before it was Windermere, when John La Farge used to hike across Doubling Point looking for flowers to paint. Imagination. Empathy. That’s the moral act,” she wound up. “Not to live too simply, as if there was only this.”

  And with that last word she gestured at the room around them, only this time she didn’t seem to mean Windermere and all it meant to her, but rather the literal world and all it didn’t mean. He smiled and slid his empty wineglass over to hers and clinked it where it sat.

  “Show me those photos,” he found himself saying. “The house in the fifties. Your grandmother.”

  At which she smiled, leaned back in her seat, and closed her eyes. And then with a funny grimace at how sated she was—food, wine, the presence of Mr. Winterbourne—she made a show of the dicey business of standing up.

  Out in the wide hall he was struck by how large and dark and empty the house felt now with the sun going down. Even with Mary there somewhere, and up on the third floor presumably the Salve Regina girls. And who knew? Maybe Aisha was in for the night, being discreet in the bedroom that wasn’t quite hers. And yet it was so deathly quiet, and big, the ceiling so high the light from the wall sconces seemed to lose its way. He found himself strangely affected by the thought of Alice in the house all alone as she must sometimes be. What did she do with herself? Even when she wasn’t alone, what did she do? The house was simultaneously the emblem of privilege—of “being there” as she’d said—and a kind of mausoleum against which she fought with her bowling shirt and her sweetheart-of-the-rodeo clothes. Tom, Margo? One was utterly unlike her, the other actively disliked her. Even Aisha—who claimed to love her, and who he had come to see as using her—would one day leave Alice when the right opportunity presented itself.

  It had, of course, been staring him in the face all along. It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen it: the obvious solution, the simple answer. And yet he had never considered it, had never even picked it up, turned it this way and that. He had been too . . . what, too much of a gentleman? too used to better— Well, he was about to say to better women, but what did that mean? Prettier, sexier, more athletic, okay, but better? He gazed down at her there in the dark library, at her body quick and intent beside him. She was showing him the house in the twenties, thirties, the house reclaimed by her grandmother in the fifties and sixties, her mother in these wide-cuffed dungarees surrounded by workmen. No, it was impossible. It ran too counter to the idea he had of himself. He lacked the killer instinct, after all, had documented proof of that. And yet, why not? He was a little drunk himself, he’d admit, but really: why not? She was within the circle. Their bodies touched—were they both not aware of it? Each time she reached over to turn a page of the album, or leaned forward to point out her eight-year-old self in this or that photo, she made it so that her shoulder touched his upper arm or her elbow brushed against him. Could he not turn to her, pull her fragile body into him? Make her feel what it would be like? Feel himself what it would be like?

  He stole a glance at her—her sun-lightened hair, the nervous tautness of her face, the strange vitality she had in spite of her broken body. She was showing him a photo of her grandmother helping to lay out the maze with stakes and mason’s twine and someone manning a surveyor’s transit, then a photo of the hedge two feet tall, four feet tall, six feet and topped with snow. As if to camouflage his thoughts, he joined in, pointed out in the upper corner of one of the photos a 1978 Mercedes in the shadows under the porte cochere. But all the time he was feeling her beside him, allowing himself to fall under the allure of her body—her long hair, her thin arms!—the two of them alone in the dark library with its walls of books and leather chairs, and around the library the big house with its twenty-eight rooms, its banks of windows and ornate chimneys, and around the house the dusky grounds, the massive trees with their circles of bare earth surrounding the hundred-year-old trunks, and around the grounds the black wrought-iron fence tipped with gilding that told you this wasn’t yours, you weren’t invited.

  Could he bend himself to it? Could he say “love”—could he feel love—not just once in the eccentricity of the moment—Alice du Pont and Sandy Alison!—but again in the light of day, and then the n
ext day, and the next? Because there would be no “trying out” Alice as a girlfriend. That was a wrong within the other wrong that would be beyond him, fatal. The divide, once crossed, had to remain crossed. Did he understand that? Did he grasp that? There would be no going back, no return to the Florida camps, to the resorts on the Outer Banks, to the girls who showed up at the courts in their summer shorts with their bare backs and their hair dyed blond.

  Or was he just playing, a little drunk, holding his hand out over the fire?

  She had reached the end of the photo album and was now showing him the blank pages at the rear of the book. The blank pages on which were pasted photos of her kids, she said—here was young James trying to learn how to stand on his head, and Sarah with a croquet mallet too big for her, Judith playing in a mountain of Christmas wrappings. And look! here he was—Sandy Alison—in shorts and a tight T-shirt, reclining in one of the Adirondack chairs, a gin daisy held gingerly out over the lawn as if the naked baby tucked into the crook of his arm had just reached for it. And here he was again smiling through his sunglasses at the lovely—he could take her word for it—at the lovely photographer.

  In the library window he could see their grayed-out reflection, the two of them standing before the heavy oak table with its glass-shaded lamp and the big photo album spread out before them, and at the same time, behind them the south lawn sloping darkly down to the maze, still faintly visible. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply the still, silent air. There was the sound of the front door opening, closing.

  In a moment, he knew, he would kiss her. In a moment, he would turn her slender body into him, enclose her, and kiss her on the lips.

  1896

  A GAY WEEK AT NEWPORT

  Season at Its Height

  BALL AT PAVILION A SUCCESS

  COON BAND APPEALS TO “DEPRAVED TASTES”

  NEWPORT, R.I. JULY 25—The season is fully at its height and is being made the most of not only by society, but by that class of well-to-do people who are now thronging hotels and private boarding houses and registering at the Casino. Though it is remarked that the great difference between cottage life and hotel life, even at those hotels considered de luxe, is that a hotel may not discriminate against those deemed undesirable, still there is a great admixture of types, and we can report that not only has the high-water mark been reached for the present summer, but for any summer preceding it.

  The highlight of the week was the Masked Ball at Berger’s Pavilion. Though there was no reappearance of the Blue Domino who had so bewitched the ball last year, yet the costumes and the decorations were all declared a great success. The pavilion was transformed with red bunting and crimson tapestry divided by pillars of blue and white hydrangeas. The ceiling was festooned with silver maple and in among the branches small electric lights flashed, the globes being covered with red gauze. In these branches, too, were colorful birds whose wings had been clipped so as to prevent their taking flight.

  Notable were the floral decorations upon the supper tables, which formed aquatic scenes with garlands of lotuses and lilies cascading to the floor.

  As to the Four Hundred, they had vanished, and in their place came Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, Marie Antoinette and Casanova! The costumes were a marvel, as were the coiffures and wigs and headdress deployed. The Baird Brothers Dance Orchestra provided a most appealing accompaniment to the festivities.

  But the highlight—dare we say the lowlight?—of the evening was the appearance of Tiger Terry’s Sewanee Coon Band! Tiger Terry himself was there, fresh from his talking machine recordings that are become so popular among the lower classes. But what a shock to the Four Hundred! For at the opening strains of “The Darkies Awakening,” there were cries of horror and a general exodus from the dance floor. Seeing that the evening was in jeopardy, the organizers of the ball (take a bow, Mrs. Lydig and Mrs. Auld, if you dare!) attempted to dance to the jungle rhythms of “All Coons Look Alike to Me.” But it was not a success and the whole evening seemed on the verge of collapsing when Mr. Franklin Drexel led Mrs. Ellen Newcombe onto the dance floor, and along with her others of the young and daring and those desirous of being considered “up-to-date.” So it was that the Ariel of Newport—will he henceforth be known as the Caliban of Newport?—rescued the ball by showing the Four Hundred how to “cakewalk” and “coon dance.”

  Still, it was overheard among the older, more refined members of society, those who felt it their duty to uphold civilization (were they not Cardinal Richelieu? were they not Queen Elizabeth?) that such music had only “low-life” appeal, that it was not a boon to the Terpsichorean art, and that the banjo was an instrument only the infirm of mind could approve. The decision to foist such sounds upon the attendees of the ball by the organizers was deemed regrettable. Such immoral music, Joan of Arc was heard to opine, had no place in Newport. Indeed, we might remark, après “Carve Dat Possum,” could the deluge be far behind?

  Wherever one stood on the controversy, it could not be denied that the bringing of the new fad of “slumming” to the cottagers of Newport was a succès de scandale that next year’s organizers will be hard-pressed to surpass.

  1863

  ~I have spent the last several days considering whether I must give over my friendship with Miss Taylor. I was even twice on the verge of writing a note begging off accompanying her and her mother to the war hospital at Portsmouth Grove, but in the end I did not do so. Whether this is because I selfishly cannot deprive myself of the pleasure of her company, or because I have come around to thinking our colloquy on the hike back from the breakwater was but more of her satiric disposition, or whether there is something after all a little malign in me—that I would see where things led, though I would not lead them myself—I do not know. But I set my scruples aside and accompanied them on the expedition to the hospital. Now, returned, and seated at my writing desk, and taking up the notes I made this afternoon, I believe I have not erred.

  The party from the Ocean numbered two dozen in all, ladies mostly (the men perhaps feeling in any such outing a latent accusation). I was relieved to see that Miss Taylor and her mother had the good sense not to dress as if they were members of a boating party, for some of the others from the hotel were arrayed in colors and frills that would surely strike a discordant note when we were among the sick and wounded. We each paid our quarter-dollar and boarded the Perry and took seats on the open deck under the morning sun.

  I know I sometimes fall into the writing of a diary, and not the Writer’s Notebook I intend. Yet I find I cannot merely transcribe my notes without supplying them with the atmosphere that accompanied their making. And too: how can I know what detail, what undone button, what soiled cuff, altogether what glimpse of life as it is lived around me, may not unfurl a story? So I remake the world more fully here: the sparkle of the sun on the water as we made our way up the bay, the scream of the steam-whistle, the small clapboard houses along the shore each with its circle of life, unknown, unrecorded, unfathomable. Yet I must add too the tissue of my own life, and of Miss Taylor’s, for what is ordinary among us becomes fabulous when read by those distant from us in place and time. What wonders my breakfast (toast, Mother’s jam, a carved peach, and the kitchen table with its black ring where someone had once put down a hot pan) would hold for a reader in Moscou, or in centuries hence!

  The war hospital is sited at Portsmouth Grove at the northern tip of Aquidneck Island, next to the small islands with the old Puritan names Prudence, Patience, and Hope. It was low tide when we drew near the wharf, so our first sight of the hospital’s patients was of those convalescents who were able-bodied enough to be employed down in the mudflats “clamming” with their trouser legs rolled up. They stopped to look at the ferry and watch us disembark. They looked a sorry lot, though they were likely the best we would see.

  Word having been sent ahead, we were greeted by the Chaplain and one of the nurses. There were also those called
sutlers who attempted to sell us goods and little cadeaux that we might present to the invalids within. I had understood from Father (who had delivered a lecture at the hospital this past winter) that gifts would be appreciated, so I had come with a small satchel of pamphlets and newspapers and some books (including an inscribed copy of his own Substance and Shadow, just printed, the giving away of which I hoped would relieve me of the duty of reading).

  I must confess I did feel some inward discomfort as we were shown about, for it was very much as if we were sightseeing, Baedeker in hand, though the sights were human misery and suffering and sacrifice. The buildings all bore the mark (except the main administration building which had formerly been a resort hotel) of having been hastily thrown up, with no foundations to speak of, whitewashed so that the rough wood yet showed through. There were fourteen “pavilions” in all, our guide said, and they could hold as many as 2,400 wounded. Pointed out as well were the support buildings, the mess hall, the guard barracks, the stables, a laundry, bakery, blacksmith’s, etc. And there was a chapel where the convalescents might seek refuge and spiritual comfort, attached to which was a library where I left, discreetly I hope, Father’s book.

  Notable as we walked were the condition of the guards themselves, each of whom had suffered wounding or amputation, though now recovered. They called themselves the Cripple Brigade, one of the soldiers ruefully informed us.

  The Chaplain left us with the encouragement to go amongst the patients in their beds for, he said, they were always pleased to see visitors and to talk and to hear stories, and to receive our little gifts. Yet what a paralysis I felt! I, who have enough trouble speaking to the members of my own family, to be there amongst strangers, all of whom were so needing of comfort and I having no means to supply that comfort, and no words for them. The sutlers had followed us down into the great compound, knowing, I am sure, that we would want their wares now if we hadn’t before. And what misery we saw, and what disfigurement and bodily destitution! There were the most horrific wounds—limbs amputated, faces shot away, bodies luminescent with fever, wasted by bowel disorders. To those who were not so bad, or who were more along the road to healing, we spoke, and here I must say that Miss Taylor showed herself a most capable and forward nurse, for she gave to each invalid her most beautiful smile, and sat beside them and inquired of their names, and what town they were from, and how they had been wounded, and how they were getting on, and was there anything she could do for them. These were the most natural and simple of questions, yet how impossible I found it to ask them! And with what gracious ease did she do so! One soldier asked her if she might read a letter to him and from the condition of the letter we understood it had been read to him many times. It was from his mother, and Miss Taylor read it in a most lovely, calm voice, asking him when she was done about the various people mentioned by name and so giving the soldier, who was disfigured by a scar running from his temple to his Adam’s apple, the opportunity to talk of those whom he loved and missed.