The Maze at Windermere

by Gregory Blake Smith

  He had told her he found it charming, charming! And her loyalty to her late husband—how well it spoke of her!

  Now, walking beside her along the wharf, he wondered: Did it make it better that he actually liked her? Or worse? Would it—the thing he did; the life that loomed—would it, after all, be more easily accomplished, more easily endured if the woman were unlikable—vain, foolish, inconsiderate, a receptacle for his contempt?

  Not for the first time he entertained an idea: Was what he was doing—well, he wouldn’t use the word “evil” with its antique reek and its cloven creatures—but all the same, would not the world consider what he was doing immoral? Not his marrying for money, of course—people did that every day—but the other thing, the one great, deep lie, the duplicity with which he cloaked himself and which she would find out about only when it was too late. For had he not masked his true self with polish just as he did his graying hair? All his charm and his doting asides, his taking her hand, the chaste kisses. She would soon enough learn—dear God, that first night!—that they were not the prelude she thought they were.

  And was that evil? He supposed it was. The sheer amount of deception the thing entailed, the designing, the fabrication, the spinning of the web. And still he knew he would go through with it. He had never for a second wavered, was not wavering now. If the world had no place for him as he was, if it must call him the most vile names and force him into falseness and deception merely to exist, then did he not have the right to use that deception, that falseness, in the prosecution of his life—in short, to turn the rules of the game to his favor? And after all he was not planning on enslaving the poor woman. She would be quite free to live her life as she wished. She could continue with her reform movements, her gardening, her children. She could entertain, and visit, and drink her tea with milk as she did. And he would be there by her side when required, attentive, well-dressed, with always a charming smile for her and her guests. And who knew? He had heard that some women did not care for the bedroom, that the passions of their husbands were something they tolerated but did not encourage. He would hold on to that happy possibility.

  “It’s the Puritan,” he heard beside him. They had come down past the chandlers’ and the shipwrights’ buildings and were now where they could see the steamer at its moorings. He had booked passage on the Puritan’s sister ship, the Pilgrim, for the following day.

  “I won’t be gone long,” he said.

  “But a week,” she said with a pout she sometimes used and which did not suit her. “Does it need to be so long? The season’s passing.”

  They stood and gazed softly at each other. Little Sarah was holding her mother’s hand and asking could they not have an ice. Franklin let a thoughtful expression come over him, and then gazed away across the harbor waters down to the leadworks with its great octagonal shot tower.

  “It’s not just New York,” he said finally. “I must go to Baltimore. There is a matter of some importance about which I must speak to my father.”

  He let it hang between them, yet another filament. It was quite bracing, the discovery that one was capable of such spinning.

  1863

  ~I have been remembering something from childhood that might make a story, a story of Innocence and its benighted perception. I have had to consult Mother so as to know that what I remember was real and not some apparition of memory. For I had a playmate in our old Union Square days who was a colored boy named Davy. He and his mother were the servants of a Kentucky family who moved in next door to us and who spoke with the most outlandish accents, and who made sausages on their back porch. One day Davy and Aunt Silvie (for so was his mother known) simply vanished, and there was a great consternation over their vanishing, and only now do I realize, and Mother confirms, that they were slaves and that they had taken the opportunity of being in the North to run away.

  But ten years later how it lives still! The charming lilt of Davy’s voice, and the too big trousers he wore, and how little Alice asked him if his skin tasted like chocolate, and how he used to say “dog” as if it had two syllables.

  Imagine if one could record every thought, every occurrence, every person, every object, all the atmosphere of one’s consciousness—record everything one has ever thought or experienced and record it perfectly, in the fullness of its impression: the time of day, the feel of the breeze, the cat peering from under the porch, the rattle of carriage wheels on the cobbles! That one might make of one’s life a picture in words, so many thousand—nay, millions!—of pages long and so have one’s life preserved, its every instant varnished and immutable, like a work of art!

  In the meantime I have begun my story of the Doctor’s Dilemma. I keep to my room and hide the sheets when I finish. How difficult to extract an Eve from one’s rib!

  ~Dear queer Alice has set up a court in the garden. She says to me that I have studied the law, have I not, shall I not be the Prosecutor? Father is to be Judge, Mother the Plaintiff’s attorney; for Jury we have the Temple sisters and William and Sarge and Colleen. The crime (we are evidently all accused of it) is abus de faiblesse.

  William remarks it is a curious court in which the attorneys, judge, jury, are also the defendants.

  Alice says the whole world is the defendant, that we are only the world’s local representatives, and that we may now begin questioning her, for the charmante jeune fille is to be the sole witness.

  ~Father believes that in this dreadful war spirit will prevail over shot and ball, that the one side has a spiritual good at its core and so cannot fail of success. I cannot help but think of how in his stories Mr. Hawthorne has shown us just how evil may be the victor in a fallen world! Which makes me, once again, wonder at how little my mind and my mode of thought resemble Father’s. We have the same name, and are bookish alike, and though the penetration of his intellect and his moral passion, and still more the verve of his speech, have been the schoolroom in which I have been educated, still I am at times as unlike to him as hawk to handsaw. How I find myself more like to sit under the shade of Chateaubriand, he who seems to suggest that there is no meaning resident in the world, but that we export meaning from within ourselves and so live in a world colored by the paintbox of our hearts and minds.

  But Father would have us all be Swedenborgian Quakers awaiting an infusion of spiritual light. For him the self is the generator of delusion. He considers anything that has its birth in the individual self to be the offspring of evil, removed as it must be from universal truth. Even the physical world (though he seems enamored of it, does he not? the delight he takes in our garden and its bedewed spiderwebs) he says is but a pasteboard mask of a higher reality, a mere shadow of true spiritual substance.

  Yet how his son loves the real world, the beautiful, sunlit, myriad-voiced real world! If it is shadow, then for me shadow is substance. For I would live in large measure by my eyes, to look and to evaluate and to understand, and not have truth delivered by means of some metaphysical corridor to things beyond. Give me the rich tint of Miss Taylor’s hair, for that is all the experience of divinity poor Harry James needs! And though I would not disagree that action based upon the promptings of selfhood is the root of evil, yet I would differ with Father and the Swedenborgians in this: May we not combat such delusions by the moral engine that is our eyes? May we not look and apprehend and tell honestly what we see and so, in time, rid ourselves of delusion and gain clear sight? And there is this: Is not the world in all its rich progress a paradise of interest? Who would willingly live in a world where the peaches hang year-round in perfect ripeness upon their perfect boughs? It is in the gradations of behavior, in the shades of our motivations, in their inversions and variations, in the slow ripening and the quicker rotting, where lie education and insight, and a kind of artistic delight.

  ~Miss Taylor has been spending her mornings sitting for her portrait at Mr. Hunt’s. She is doing so upon my recommendation to her mother, fo
r I have told them of my sorry apprenticeship in his studio, and of how much I admire Hunt’s skill in capturing not just the likeness but something of the inner atmosphere of his subjects. This morning, to occupy myself during this dreadful wait for news of Wilky, I visited the studio and afterwards walked Miss Taylor back to her hotel. Of the remarkable revelations of that walk I will tell in due course.

  But how strange it was to be back in Hunt’s atelier! For over the years his studio has taken on for me something of the coloring of a sacred place. The canvases strewn about, the paints in their pots, the smells, this or that decorative accessoire cast aside or awaiting its place. How I once swooned over it all! What I had seen hanging on Parisian walls, and in Geneva and London, this was its source! That first year I hung about the studio so much Hunt took to calling me the Mooncalf. Yet how disappointing were my own attempts at drawing, how inferior to William’s, how Hunt’s attempts at encouragement fell limply onto the floor between us, until that last day when Gus Barker posed (dear Gus! dead!) and I simply could not create on paper the beautiful life I beheld before me. So has the studio become for me a place of initiation and of rejection (and so, of awareness; therein lies its sacredness!), and to be there again, with Miss Taylor (who was most beauteously arrayed for her portrait in a voluminous rose-colored gown), with this notebook the beginning of my own studio: ah, in those first few moments how disconcerted was I! I could scarcely attend to the pleasure of being once again in Miss Taylor’s presence.

  Hunt of course must take it upon himself to play the devil. For when I had seated myself he directed at me a string of questions regarding Miss Taylor’s face and figure. How did I think her beauty might best be caught? he wondered. Did I think he had it right? How was the light upon her cheekbone? And what would I say were the qualities of her beauty, he meant (he said) the moral qualities of her face and her dress, for he had heard from La Farge that I was setting out to be a writer (indeed he had read my theater review in the Daily Traveler), and therefore he wondered: what qualities of thought and character would I ascribe to her physical attributes? In short, how might a young belletrist paint his subject in words?

  It was Miss Taylor herself who came to my rescue (for I was blushing and stammering some answer) by saying surely Mr. Hunt did not believe that a person’s outward self was a representation of her inner life. Did all beautiful people possess beautiful spirits, and the homely ugly ones? Indeed why was it, she wondered, that painters were forever painting heroes and heroines as if they were gods and goddesses? Napoleon was, she believed, a short little man, was he not? Might not Joan of Arc or Cleopatra been squint-eyed? For herself, she said with a glance at me, she hoped she would be blessed with family and friends who did not mistake the fragrance for the essence, the shadow for its substance. If she was beautiful as Mr. Hunt seemed to think, and she did not for a moment believe him, then she would renounce her beauty if it meant her true self would be opaque to the world’s lazy gaze. She had to confess she had not thought Mr. Hunt such a shallow soul.

  The shallow soul was laughing the whole while. It was all true! he said whilst continuing to paint and looking up from time to time at his beautiful subject, but it was not just painters who so belied the world.

  “For Harry,” he said, “did not your father’s great friend write that Nature always wears the colors of the spirit? What is that sentiment but a way of saying that the natural world is the physical emblem of spiritual qualities? Don’t blame us poor painters, Miss Taylor, if great philosophers also mistake the rind for the core. And you are beautiful. Is she not, Harry?”

  I said she was, for we had slipped into a badinage that might serve as a camouflage for such an admission. But I wondered at Hunt that he, a forty-year-old man of the world, might speak so to a young lady. Indeed, much of what he said, though it was addressed to me, he seemed rather to say to her through me.

  A short while after this flirtatious exchange, Miss Taylor wondered whether Mr. Hunt might not emancipate a poor slave of a sitter so that she might have an escort back to her hotel. She felt like such a fool walking in an evening dress through the noontime streets, she said. At least if Mr. James accompanied her, he might divert some of the public’s ridicule. Hunt smiled and bowed and said he would not stand in the way of young love.

  Outside we walked in silence for several streets, during which time I could feel Miss Taylor gathering herself beside me, as if she had some subject she meant to embark upon. I did not speak, but instead waited for her. She had on the same pheasant hat she’d worn the night of the Athenaeum lecture.

  “Your Mr. Hunt tried to kiss me the other day,” she said finally. She turned her face to me to see how I “took” this.

  “The blackguard,” I said, as if I were a character in a dime novel.

  “Or rather, he did kiss me,” she said, with something like a look of contrition, though whether at her mischaracterization or the kiss itself I couldn’t tell. “I had never been kissed before,” she went on. “I allowed it as an experiment.”

  I wondered at her, for she seemed to be saying these things with nothing like indignation.

  “Have you ever kissed a young lady, Mr. James?” she asked when I did not respond.

  “I have not.”

  “Oh,” she said and she laughed, “don’t let your collar get all stiff! You have quite a way of getting stiff, you know.”

  I inclined my head, in acknowledgment, in acceptance, but I did not speak. We walked for a time in silence. The Jewish cemetery lay just ahead of us.

  “He’s quite a talker, your Mr. Hunt,” she took up when a minute or two had passed. And then she raised her voice, for a drayman’s cart was passing noisily alongside us: “He quite lay siege to my maidenhood.”

  “Miss Taylor!”

  “He attempted familiarities with me. I believe that’s how the novelists have it.”

  “Have you told your mother any of this?”

  She merely looked at me with a broad amusement, and yet there was something sharp, precipitous, in her look.

  “Shall we go in?” she asked, for we had come to the portal that led into the cemetery. I balked, shook my head no.

  “My father will be coming from Waterbury soon,” she said against my demurral. “I think you and I will not be seeing much more of one another. Indeed this may be our last time together.” She reached out and swung the gate back. “And I have more to say to you.”

  I felt a dim apprehension—although over what, I wasn’t sure—but all the same followed her in. We walked in a pantomime of that first night to the deepest part of the graveyard where we had spoken so intimately. Someone had recently scythed the grass. It lay in yellowing drifts upon the ground. Miss Taylor leaned against one of the gravestones, the bright rose of her brocade striking against the muted greens of the cemetery. She took off her hat and stroked one of its long feathers thoughtfully.

  “Do you remember that day we spoke of marriage?” she said after a time. “Coming back from the breakwater, that marvelous day?”

  “I do,” I said.

  “What I didn’t say that day, and what I have been thinking since, is that I should like to be saved in marriage, and in turn, to save someone.”

  “Save?” I repeated.

  “Yes. Do you not think that we all need to be saved?”

  “Saved from what?” I hazarded.

  “From—” and she seemed a moment to wonder at my not understanding her, and then indicated the gravestones around us, and then the world itself—“from emptiness,” she said. “From isolation and sterility, from the slavery of the conventional, from that which is not genuine, and from loneliness.”

  I gazed intently at her, but kept my silence.

  “There is a fineness about you, Mr. James,” she went on. “A fineness of intellect and character. And a seriousness of purpose, and a responsiveness to the world, and for all your doubti
ng of yourself, an ambition that I admire.” She paused a moment to let me take her words in, and then resumed with something of her old satiric tone. “And though you are short, and you stammer, and your hair already shows signs of your being as bald as your father—really you are altogether quite ridiculous!—still I find that it is you—” and here she peered intently at me and her mockery fell from her—“you above any other whose esteem I would wish to have.”

  With a sensation of something like the earth giving way under me, I assured her that she did have my esteem.

  “Ah! That is the very ridiculousness of which I complain!” she said, and then, pushing off the gravestone and coming toward me with the full force of her beauty: “I’m asking you to marry me, Harry.”

  I could only stand as I was, stricken, my throat swelling.

  “It will be our first step away from convention, the wife proposing to the husband.” And she smiled and then, shocking to me, reached out and touched my cheek. “Your spirit is alive, Harry. Do you not wish your flesh to be as well?”

  I could feel a deep flush overspreading my face.

  “For that is how I can save you!”

  And she peered at me with an intensity I do not believe I have ever seen in a woman. She searched my face for some sign, for something to read.

  “Will you not hold me?” she asked. “Will you not kiss me?”

  One of my legs was trembling inside my trousers, and I grew dizzy so I had to steady myself against a gravestone.

  “Will you not say yes? Not just to me, but to life! To life, Harry!”

  At which I cast my eyes down so that I must have looked like a shamed child. I wanted to speak, to answer her, to defend myself, but my mind was a tangle of guilt and terror and mortification, and I could not. Even now, writing, I have not the words. After a minute she let her hand drop, and I felt her pull back from me. Out on the street a carriage rolled past, the horses’ hooves pounding the earth.