The Maze at Windermere

by Gregory Blake Smith

  She said she was greatly reliev’d to hear me speak so. That she had been in a Fright that I would be forc’d into such an unsuitable and uncomely Marriage. That a maid like myself would be quickly ruin’d. That she would help me hold out. And more of the like, her face growing flush as she spoke, and little laughs spilling out of her as if a string of Beads had broken and she could not gather them up and stop them falling. From down on the floor little Ruth and Sarah look’d up at their Mother in wonder at such an unwonted Fit. For she was giddy as with a Deliverance, which Agitation was most unlike her.

  But that is not the Strangeness. I pass’d on to telling her of Charles Spearmint. I do not think I wanted her Advice, but rather just to tell her, and perhaps to marvel with her, and know from her: Was there such Love in the world? That a man might sell himself to have a Wife as Jacob had done? But as I told her of my two Interviews with Spearmint, and as I set out the Terms he offer’d, and the History with Father as I understood it, and my talk with John Peele, she grew more and more (how shall I say it?) more Dark in her Thought. The giddiness that was formerly in her left her as if Flush’d out a drain. I tried to rouse her and bring her back. Was this not good news? I ask’d her. Was this not a way I might tread water until (I did not say until John Pettibone grew up!) until I was old enough? I might after all have Ashes’s help for the whole of the seven years. Toward the end of which I might marry more fit, and so have made my way through this Vale of Tears.

  She did not speak for a time, and when she did said that she did not Advise me to it. Had I not said that I thought Father would be against it? Did I want him to return and find I had acted so rashly, lessening our Estate when there was no need to? And did I really want to bind myself to such Articles? For having escap’d the frying-pan of Edward Swift, did I want to fall into Charles Spearmint’s fire? But in all she said I could not rid myself of Misgiving. For she seem’d to make her Argument not as an Address to my Wants, but to her Own! I know not why I thought this, for how could my selling Ashes be a Hurt to her? How could my signing such Articles with Charles Spearmint injure her and hers? Yet I felt it, a Mistrust I know not how to explain.

  Oh, it is good there is no Pillory for what one thinks. For would I not be stood in it expos’d for such ungenerous thoughts, so ungrateful a Heart?

  5th Day

  O! just so! Unhasp the Pillory and stand Prudy Selwyn in it!

  For how wrong and stinting have I been! This Mistrust I have had of Jane Beecher, how it is reveal’d now as a painting I have made with the colors of my own spiteful Spirit.

  For she has laid before me a plan that will help Dorcas and Ashes and me through these coldest months. She has done so at some Bother to her and her own. For she proposes that Dorcas and I close up the house and move in with her for these next two months. The firewood is low, and it is most dreadful cold. Why keep two houses with fires in their fireplaces? she says. Why heat water for two laundries? Why keep two stoves simmering soup? It is easier to make porridge for a single household of six than to make it for two households of three, she says. Why can we not, the six of us women, she says, live together until the warm weather comes? We will split the cost, and we will both of us have savings. It will be a trial for my Separatist nation, says Jane. We will be like the Amazons, she says.

  Hers is a house smaller than our own, not big enough for six, tho’ there are those about the town who live with more under less roof. Still, there are no men, so privacy is no matter.

  We spent the afternoon going through the house, and she pointed out how things might be. We would bring over Dorcas’s trundle-bed that she might sleep in the same room with Sarah and little Ruth. Ashes may have the closet off the Kitchen, and Jane and I may share the great bed. The plan has a sense to it. We will unite our Troubles and our work so that our lives and our suffering may be lighten’d. We will use one-half the firewood we would otherwise. And when the Spring comes we may disband our Amazon nation, Jane says, and we may look about us then, husband and Father unreturn’d if that be the case, and we may then plot and devise our way forward.

  I have thought on this for a full day now, and I think it is good and right. For I have not been able to come to a clear thinking on this matter of Ashes and Spearmint. And tho’ that may prove to be the only way out of this Wildernesse I find myself in, I cannot yet take that path. Perhaps in the Spring, if my Heart finally lets go of Father.

  7th Day

  I have told Ashes that she may inform Charles Spearmint that he must wait for his Answer. That it is yet too hard upon Father’s disappearance. But that he will hear from me a definite Answer, in the Spring, let us say when the Planting is done.

  We have moved everything into Jane’s house, our winter clothing and goods, Dorcas’s bed, what victuals we had, and I am come back into the house under pretense of bringing over some favour’d cookware. But I am here in the dying warmth of this my home instead to write what will be my last entry in this my Spiritual journal.

  For it has been a Failure, this attempt to find Light. It appears there is very little spiritual about Prudence Selwyn! I had made to record what movements of light I found within me that I might have a poetry of my Spiritual life, but what I have written is a prose (nay! an account-book!) of my Physical life instead. So little exercise of Grace do I find recorded here, so little the clarity of gift, but rather the Labyrinth of my fears and petty desires. It has been a Vanity I must give over. Let me say good-bye to my young Self, and close these pages.

  2011

  He couldn’t help wondering what the others thought, Margo and Aisha, the realization dawning on them that he wasn’t just hanging about, and Tom, who was down in New York and didn’t know anything about it—what would he think when he came back, found his sister lying on the couch drinking a margarita, sighing “abus de faiblesse” from time to time like a punch line and watching a movie with her head on the lap of that tennis guy?

  At the Casino, having her group doubles lesson, Margo just gave him a you-can’t-be-serious look, punched a volley right at him.

  Those first few days he wondered whether he shouldn’t just come right out and tell Alice about Aisha, say that it was all part of this mixed-up summer, part of his homelessness, and let the chips fall where they may. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He didn’t want to hurt her, didn’t want to add himself to her personal injury list. In a drunken moment, in a hurt, diminished moment in his life, he had taken custody of Alice du Pont’s broken body and her breakable heart and he would do everything he could not to manhandle them.

  And anyway only Aisha knew about Aisha, and she had her own reasons for keeping that under wraps, didn’t she? And the whole Heiress’s Dilemma thing? Well, there would have to be some new testimony introduced to change that. He would have to be revealed as some talented schemer thinking several moves ahead so that the original renunciation was a way of building credibility, of laying the groundwork for future maneuvers. And honestly, did anyone think that he, Sandy Alison—he who lacked (didn’t everyone know it?) the killer instinct—did anyone see him as capable of that sort of strategy, that sort of chess playing? What new development could possibly make it appear as though he had the wits to manipulate the Heiress’s Dilemma until—brilliant tactic, if he could only claim it!—until it became evidence in his favor?

  In the meantime, there was Alice: funny, weird, electrocuted Alice! He still had to show up at the Casino every day, put in his time, but afterwards they went about the island like teenagers looking for places to make love. His place was too grotty, and Windermere was off-limits whenever Margo or Aisha—and now Tom—was around. (And motels were too Margo-ish, Alice said.) So it was off to the Norman Bird Sanctuary, to Rose Island, the grounds of St. George’s (the darn mosquitoes!), and once like a return to Where It All Started out at the breakwater at midnight with the land and the lights behind them, an occasional car motoring past, and nothing but the bl
ack ocean in front of them and the black breeze blowing against their bare limbs. And how in these moments—really, he’d never seen anything like it—how she gave her body away! Gave it away as if it wasn’t hers, this thing that had fought her her whole life, gave it away without reservation, as if in his arms her body could stop fighting, could stop trying to be something it wasn’t but could just be—cerebral palsy and all: loved, possessed, thrilled.

  One thing he did was, as a kind of apology, he texted her to be outside her house one night—two a.m., he said—and he had come by on the Indian (no need to sell it, after all), come by and swept her up, and with her holding on for dear life had brought her down to the Point, where he’d pulled out a pint of bourbon just as she’d done that awful night, and started walking her through the squirrely streets under the gaslights, calling her Watson and pointing stuff out, asking her out on the Elm Street Pier if she could hear the tolling of the Rose Island bell, dismantled in 1912, hey?

  He didn’t get everything right (“I believe, Sherlock, it’s that house where the Vicomte de Noailles lived”), but he did his best, pointed out the street where all the Newport cabinetmakers had had their shops, the houses where the British officers had been billeted during the Revolution, the Creole witch’s house, the house of the Quaker girl whose household account book was one of the Redwood Library’s prized possessions. She played beautifully along, pretended to be Sandy Alison the local dolt. It was dark and cool and deathly quiet.

  In the North Burial Grounds—after they had looked over the slaves’ tombstones, read the Quaker inscriptions by moonlight—they lay down in the dewy grass and with a mourning dove moaning in a nearby tree did with each other—“I say! Holmes!”—what you were supposed to do when you were young, in the summer, in the playground of the rich.

  She took his education in hand, said if he was going to join the landholding class of Newport (she was always saying stuff like that, those first couple of weeks, as if she were daring him), if he was going to join the local nobility, then he would have to acquire at least the patina of noblesse oblige, that and some V-necked sweaters, she said.

  She took him to the Coggeshall House and the Hunter House, to the King’s Arms Tavern, where the lowlifes hung out during the Revolution. He had to survive quizzes on wainscot and carved shells, follow her pointing finger through a slanting rain and name a gambrel roof, a hip roof, a fanlight. True or false: The whale oil chandeliers in the Touro Synagogue were financed from profits in the slave trade. True or false: The cowrie shells uncovered during the restoration of the Selwyn-Lyman House were of a type found not in New England but in Senegal. True or false: Sandifer was a dim bulb.

  (She had taken to calling him Sandifer, having asked once whether Sandy was a nickname, was it short for something? Sanford? Sandifer? Sandcrab? Surely his parents hadn’t been so déclassé as to name him just plain Sandy! Again, if he was going to join the moneyed class, he would have to have a highborn name. Sandstone? Sandpiper? Sandweasel?)

  One of the places she took him for his education was a funeral home on Spring Street where Henry James had lived as a teenager. They had gone inside and when the funeral director approached them with his clasped funeral director’s hands she had lit into him for having removed the magnificent stairway that had once led to the second floor. Did he have no sense of history? she asked the bewildered man. This was Henry James’s house, William James’s house.

  Back outside, she told him Henry James had had a sister named Alice, and that William James had married an Alice. Which made for two Alice Jameses in the same family.

  “Which,” she wound up, “is too many damn Alices.”

  She was, she said, a Manic-Depressive, jg. (“Junior Grade,” she explained. “That’s military talk, son.”) Bipolar disorder nowadays, though she preferred the whiff of the antiquarian, the name Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton knew their illness by. She had at various times over the last twelve years taken lithium, Stavzor, Depakote, alprazolam, Abilify (great name, eh, son?), and for the last eighteen months Symbyax. Sometimes she took her meds and sometimes she didn’t, she said.

  And indeed she still had moments when the Mad Heiress peeked out. They might be in the dark of the White Horse Tavern or leaning against a ferry railing or sitting on Da Silva’s Terrace, sunlight on the bobbing masts, pennants flapping in the wind, and her spirits growing more and more elated until some point was passed and a kind of hysteria crept in. And then it would all collapse on itself—the giddiness, the fun, the blending of their moods—and she would start to watch him as if from a distance, as if she were looking out a back window at some trespasser on the edge of her territory, moving from tree to bush to gate. She would grow quiet, and her hair would fall about her face in that way she had, and the old, reckless, lacerating tone would emerge. She would throw her hair aside and make some cutting remark—What did he think he was doing? Amusing himself with the Plastics Princess? Did he think she didn’t know?—as if she wanted him to hit back, to hurt her, as if the dissonance between what he professed her to be and what she knew herself to be was too much for her to bear up under.

  He would try in these moments to keep steady, to reassure her, to talk her down off what she had once called the ledge of self-hatred. Or not even talk really, but just be there, big and male, Sandy Alison with his sun-bleached hair and the muscles in his forearms, those absurd quads emerging out of his shorts. Let the shrapnel hit him. It wouldn’t hurt. It wouldn’t do damage. Show her that he wasn’t going away, that, hey, he was still there, until the second collapse came—the little volleys of viciousness spent, the fight in her drained away—and she would let him hold her, half crying, half laughing, kissing him, calling him her Clutch Cargo.

  Winterbourne, Sandifer, Clutch Cargo: okay, he could be whoever she needed.

  (Though sometimes when he was alone, back in his asphalt-shingled, cigarette-smelling, bathroom-down-the-hall boardinghouse, he found that the shrapnel had hit. Was he serious? Did he mean to go through with it? Margo as his sister-in-law? Aisha with her knowing looks? The world with its knowing looks? Was he just proving to himself that he had the killer instinct after all? Or had he—almost while he wasn’t looking—actually fallen in love with the strange creature?)

  1896

  Franklin and Mrs. Newcombe had just come from the little crooked houses of the Point, where they had—with other members of the Ladies’ Anti-Indigent League—distributed a wagonload of groceries to the poor, going from house to house with their smiles and their kind words. Franklin had never before walked about the Point and he was struck by how mean and close the houses were. In some earlier century they might have been charming, he supposed, filled with plain-dressed Quakers and Puritans forever sweeping their floors, but now they were given over to hordes of Irish children with their smutched faces. It was all Franklin could do to stand politely in the front room while the wagon driver and his boy carried boxes around to the kitchen.

  Afterwards they had taken tea at Baylor’s Coffee House, and then, when the children and their governess arrived, had walked down to the wharves, for there could be no trip to town without James wanting to see the ships and the railroad cars. Ellen had her parasol up, and Franklin his cane, and as they went there was a consciousness between them, Franklin thought, of how like a family they were. James led them onto Long Wharf and then alongside the railroad yard, only prevented by the governess from running to the roundhouse with its turntable, behind which was the chuffing stack of a waiting engine. Out past the roundhouse one of the New York steamers was docking, the wharf filled with hacks and carriages awaiting the disembarking passengers.

  He had survived Mr. Ryckman. Whatever the man thought of him, whatever final interview had occurred between him and his daughter—Franklin liked to think that Ryckman had had to listen to Ellen enumerate Franklin’s many fine qualities—he had not managed to persuade her to abandon the path she was on, or
even to retreat. Indeed, if anything, she looked at Franklin now, spoke to him now, as if they had come through some trial together, as if her father’s opinion of him had only served to strengthen her purpose. She was not, after all, a shrinking woman. She had her own money and her own station, which was now, frankly, above that of her father’s. Perhaps the man cared only to deliver himself of an imprecation and, having done so, had withdrawn with his hands washed. If that indeed were the state of things, then was not the last impediment removed, and did not the way to Windermere truly lie before him?

  He took in the woman strolling beside him. Strange and unexpected thing! For he found he rather liked her. She with her homely face, and her fierce love for her children, and her simple honesty. Just the day before, as if she had been laboring under some scruple, she had felt compelled to explain to him why she had undertaken the planting of the maze. It was a last gesture toward her late husband, she had said with a nervous glance at him. For the maze had had its genesis during their honeymoon in England. She and her husband had been so taken with Hampton Court that they had vowed they would re-create its maze on the Newport property that had been a wedding gift from her father. But oh! children and architects, and setting up house in New York, and then the work of building Windermere itself (there was the old Doubling Point cottage that had first to be pulled down) had delayed them. And then her dear husband had sickened! It was, she said—she meant the planting of the maze; she had turned to look wistfully at it, for they were strolling upon the lawn at Windermere—a living monument to him, in memoriam, she meant. She hoped he did not mind.