The Maze at Windermere

by Gregory Blake Smith

  “Ah! I see!” she said when at last I lifted my eyes to her. Onto her face there pitched a smile more bitter than mocking: “It is not a light comedy, but a tragedy in which you have cast me!” And then, drawing herself up, she added pointedly: “In which you have cast yourself!”

  And she turned from me and began making her way out of the cemetery. I had not the power to follow her, nor the will. On the grass amongst the gravestones—like a stage property—lay her pheasant hat.

  1778

  June 15

  I have not written for these several Weeks for I have not been myself. What Wildness have I been possessed by! I have been as Lord Kittredge’s tiger, pacing from one end of the Cage of this damned city to the other, neglecting my Duties, or falsifying them so that I might go up the Neck, through the Sentries and the Fortifications to test how this country held me, and how I might break through. Though what I would break through to I do not know: what Fit, what Voyage into Ruin? For I have allowed myself to dream of that which I taunted the Jew with, that I might capture the Jewess, convert her, marry her, bring her as mine and Damn the world! I have been so afire with this Conception and yet with its Impossibility that I thought I must break in twain. So Estranged am I from the self I know to be me, and haunted by this new self who knows not how the Pieces move, and tries to jump his Bishop as if it were a Knight, who tries to add to the board Squares that do not exist, who does not seem to know that it is he who is Checkmated, however he might like to Strut & Insult. Yet when I feel myself coming out of the Fever, when I talk to Major Ballard as if he might heed Sense & Sanity, yet hard upon comes the thought of the Jewess and her dark Eyes and the Rustle of her skirts and the soft mass of her hair with its Jewels of Light, and then am I undone, and consumed by the idea of going to her, of fleeing with her, and with Fancies of how we might to Ireland or Italy or the coast of Bohemia, damn me!

  But I am come back to myself. The Fever is broke. If the Jew has beaten me, yet is his Victory like that of Pyrrhus at Asculum, for I have seeded in him Doubts that will eat at the Foundation of his house. Still and yet, I do not like to lose. Nor will I allow myself to acquire a habit of it. Aye, for there is another who has Betrayed me, a Serpent in my Bosom who has shown himself a Traitor and a false friend. It is the thought of Smithson and the Retribution that must be mine, that has helped restore me, brought me back from the Wilderness of my Loss & Madness. I must Retire into myself and think on this, and no more of the Fury & the Rage, but think on it with that Coldness & Precision I know to be mine. And then I must act.

  June 18

  Played Chess today. Am in the process of devising new moves, new ways to punish Incursions into my Territory. I find, after all, there are Squares off the board. Dark places onto which to move my Pieces.

  I have been down to the Taverns along the Waterside, have met up with some who must be Reckoned amongst the most unusual of His Majesty’s subjects. I went dressed as my Spies do, in the coarse linen Twill of the Colonials and for a lark affected their Speech. I went to stir the Dregs to see if I might learn something even here within our Fortifications. The War has been hard on these fellows, for their livelihoods are disappeared, the Distilleries & Ropewalks & the Shipping, so that they know not which way to turn, and lurk about the Wharves like Ghouls, ill-clad & unshaven. They would go to sea if they could, but with the presence of the Fleet and the closing of the Harbour, the city’s Commerce is curtailed. I did what I could, bought those I spoke with some Rum, tried to cheer them with some Hope of the future, all the while reflecting on what the sutler Da Silva said to me once. What would these men not do for a Purse with some weight to it?

  Came in a Wherry this Evening with six or seven Colonials. They come and they go in this War and we do not know who is a Combatant and who is not. It is not a war of Rank & Insignia, not a war of Equals. Yet a Gentleman might find a way to turn his language and his looks to his Purpose, to make, as it were, a Disguise of the Ordinary.

  June 20

  My Appointment does not come.

  June 24

  Tomorrow Smithson and I steal away to do some shooting out on Doubling Point. I affected a Bonhomie and painted for him the Pleasures we might have, how good it would be to be off and away and pretend we are back in Dartmoor. Carefree young friends, the greenery of Summer all about, Woodcock & Partridge, and afterwards some sherry and a girl in the Village.

  1692

  7th Day

  It is six weeks and Ashes and Dorcas and I are now back home. And I find I must needs take up my Journal pages again, for a most dreadful thing has happen’d, so dreadful and wrong and black in my thoughts that I cannot tell anyone of it. I cannot even write of it here, and yet must write of it, if only Sideways that I may deliver myself of it.

  Is it not enough that Mother and Father are taken from me, but that my great Protector and friend must be proved—ah! I cannot write it!

  The Lord has treated me as Job. I know not why. He afflicts and chastens me but I can find naught in my heart nor in my mind to understand why. Job’s faith did not waver. But I am not Job. I search myself for the stains that have occasioned the rod of the Lord, but I can find none. Mayhap it is this very Blindnesse, this Failing to see the inky blots set upon me for which I am punished. If that is so, then I pray for the Light by which I may see.

  But Jane Beecher! Can there be some so blasted with Iniquity and Godlessness, yet who go about in a Disguise of Goodness and Strength through which the coiled Snake must spring forth? And yet so sorrowfully! For afterwards what Despair was upon her! How moved and troubl’d and sorrowful was she, that she could not stop talking to me, begging of me, even as I would not listen! How her heart aches and into what Despair is she thrown! With what Turmoil and Horror of herself!

  I cannot, ever! speak to her again. I would not even let her help me carry our things back from her house, would not let her touch them, but must do it alone with Ashes.

  We did hear of such things, Martha and Hannah and me, but we understood not. There was that talk of things out at the Stoughton farm, but we understood not.

  4th Day

  Yesterday morning I tramp’d through the mud over to Ruth Dodson’s to borrow again some of the old books that I might remove my Thoughts, and I have been reading in Sandys’s Metamorphoses. And also I have read again of the Choice of Heracles and the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. Oh! for an Ariadne who might lead me out of this Labyrinth!

  6th Day

  I do not eat and I turn my hand to my work with no joy. At night I lift Dorcas out of her trundle-bed and carry her to my bed that I may have someone beside me.

  I have seen Spearmint at Meeting and about the town, but cannot meet his eye.

  I am gone like the Shadow when it declineth.

  4th Day

  This morning, pricked by the thaw, I went out of doors that the Spring-like feel of the Air might lighten my Spirit. I took Dorcas to visit Mother’s grave, for it has been a long time, and I felt as tho’ we had abandon’d her. When we came back to the house I had still in me the urge to walk, to be about, to be away from home and from our neighbor, so I gave over Dorcas to Ashes and set off by myself, without my pattens, wearing instead the shoes I had ruin’d that day after visiting Spearmint.

  I went north up the coast. I ought to have been cheer’d by the weather and the feel of the world, for the melt ran in little Rivulets and the Sun sparkl’d off the wet, and there was about the air the sound of Birdsong and of life returning, but it seem’d I alone was still in Winter. The long brown grass lay matted from the winter’s snowfall, and there was here and there in the Shadows a patch of blue snow. The Robins were about, and a family of Waxwings fluttering about a mulberry bush. I look’d upon these things as if I had been divided into two people. There was the old Prudy who noted them and did wish them well, and felt herself one of them, and all of us part of the glorious sailing Ship of God�
�s natural world. And at the same time there was the new Prudy who saw them as through a Glass darkly, where the blue sky was gray’d, and the bird breasts were dun, and the patches of Snow but dirty rags upon the Ground, and the birdsong and the tinkle of the melt muted and as if heard from underwater.

  I walk’d a good ways northward and only stopp’d when I espied a family down among the rocks (for it was low tide) who appear’d to be gathering Mussels. I stopped then and retreated a few rods until I was out of sight. I sat upon a Bluff that overlook’d the water, for I did not yet feel right enough to return home. I sat but could not think, and only star’d down at the gray water. I do not want to write too strongly what I felt then, for I think it was but the swelling of a Mood, but I did feel the strongest allurement of that water, of its depth and its Motion. Goodwife Pemberton it is said did purposely throw herself into the Bay two winters ago, she who had been for years given to Fits, and spells where she could not work, and yet who had a Husband and children. I was never about to do so, yet what strange dreamlike Power had that water, as if it knew my name, was my old friend, and call’d to me to come.

  When I was able again to think, this is the thought I had: that I have been remov’d from out of life. It is as Mother once did with a cup that had gotten a bad chip, which she had taken off the table board and put up high and in the rear of the cupboard. It was not so broken as to be thrown out altogether, yet neither was it any longer good for use.

  5th Day

  In my Despondency the other day (a Sadness and a Darknesse that lingers still) I did meditate some on this matter of Spearmint and Ashes. I have prayed for Guidance in this, to be shown the right and good thing to do. Yet the more I pray and the more I think on it (and not just now but these months past), the more I feel Ashes’s very life a reproach to mine own, as tho’ she were a finger pointing at me in Accusation! For having taken her from her mother and father, do we not now keep her from yet another she loves? Aye, I have a worldly, civil right to do so, but what natural right have I?

  If I must be remov’d from life, if I may not be happy, might I not at least give another Happiness?

  But this proposal of Spearmint’s, how ill it sits the more I think on it. To sell yourself back into Bondage! Is there no other way? What is it, after all, but a Debt? Ashes owes my family a certain sum of money. Might it not be paid as any other debt, without recourse to Articles of Indenture?

  Were she a man I might find her work outside our house, caulking at the Shipyard as do other Africans who then turn their Wages over to their Masters. Still, might that not serve as a Type of an Agreement? Might Ashes work in the household and workshop of Charles Spearmint and pay Dorcas and me some portion of her wages over the seven years until the debt is paid off? These wages would be a type of smiling Duplicity between us, for she would be Spearmint’s Wife and not earning any such. But the money would come to Dorcas and me all the same. There would be no Signatures, but rather a handshake between us.

  I would be burdened with all the work in our household, and the raising of Dorcas. But what of it? If Jane Beecher can do it, can not I? Tho’ it be untimely, am I not become a woman?

  6th Day

  If there is no one to take me down from the Cupboard, then I must take myself. But how? I must do, but what?

  2011

  He began helping Alice with her CP exercises. This had been one of Aisha’s jobs, he knew, and before Aisha, her mother’s. She would lie on a roll-up mat in her bedroom and close her eyes and concentrate while Sandy flexed her leg, stretched her wrist forward and back, provided resistance for this or that muscle. He would touch her as gently as he could, trying his best to do a good job, keep a buoyant manner even though he knew he was hurting her. There was something about it, something about the touching and the trust and the pain and the vulnerability of it all, that was more intimate than the other intimacy.

  She showed him what she called her “retard bicycle,” which was this adult tricycle that was supposed to be part of her exercise program back when she was a teenager. She’d ridden it exactly once, she said, and it had sat in the carriage house ever since. Sandy had wheeled it out into the daylight, and over her protests—it was just too uncool, she said, it was a fat lady’s bike—hosed it down and set it in the sun to dry. And then he went back into the carriage house and got out Tom’s old racer, oiled the chains and derailleurs: hey?

  At first she’d only ride up and down the driveway, but in time he coaxed her out onto the sidewalk along Bellevue, and then down Coggeshall. She had a hitching way of pedaling—good leg, bad leg—and went so slowly Sandy had to keep circling back to her. All the same they made it down to the Forty Steps once, once to the Redwood Library, and then, for her chef d’oeuvre, the three miles out to the Brenton Point breakwater, where they had a picnic on the lawn with the ocean in the distance, the salt smell of the air and the screaming gulls, and a dozen colorful kites overhead like fireworks.

  On their way back he told her that he loved her. It had just come out of him, unbidden, unplanned. He had been circling back to her on his bike, swooping around behind her tricycle, and there they were, the astonishing words. He circled back again, and then again, and each time he said it—“I love you!”—she had this little smile on her face like “Well, of course you do!” After the third time he took off down Bellevue as fast as he could go, feeling the burn in his muscles, the wind in his face—amazed at himself, and stupidly happy, and stunned all at once.

  It was a few days afterwards that something happened, or rather, something was revealed. Something Sandy wasn’t quite sure how to take. They had gone—the three of them, Aisha too—to Cardines Field for a baseball game, sitting in the old wooden grandstand under the lights with the sun going down, and the bush-league loudspeaker, and the moths, and the swallows dive-bombing the outfield, and the players’ girlfriends down along the first row. Sometime around the fifth inning Sandy went to the men’s room and when he came out Aisha was there. She made it look like she was coming out of the bathroom herself, but she wasn’t. She stood before him in that pose former lovers have: arms folded across the chest, head cocked in a question, body there but no longer available. “I see you’re developing a killer instinct after all,” she said, and she gave him this sardonic, meaningful smile.

  “Whatever you think it is,” he found himself answering, “it isn’t.”

  “Good” was all she said.

  “I love her.”

  “Good,” she said again. “That will make things easier.” And before he could respond she turned and began walking toward the exit. “Enjoy yourself,” she called over her shoulder.

  But that wasn’t the thing that happened, the thing that was revealed. That was back in the grandstand after another inning or two. He and Alice had barely spoken, just a kind of summery contentment between them, the sky over the third-base line darkening to purple. Aisha had left her sweater for Alice and Alice put it on now against the chill, tried to pull the cuffs down, made a wry face at Sandy over its being too small for her.

  “She’s such a shrimp,” she said and, when Sandy merely smiled in response, cocked her head a little as if debating something with herself, and then added: “She’s my heir, you know.”

  He allowed himself a little quizzical look, but inside he felt a stirring, as though something that had been vague and uncertain before, something he had only barely been aware of, was on the verge of announcing itself.

  “What?” he said.

  She turned back to the field, watched a batter strike out, and then started in on how she had a list of things she had to do at least once every summer. Every summer she had to tell the docents at Touro Synagogue they were immoral for never mentioning the slave trade, and she had to go to the Historical Society to see the cowrie shells that had been found in the Selwyn-Lyman House, and have dinner with the cherubs in Da Silva’s sitting room, and sit quietly in the Quaker Meeti
nghouse, and go into Henry James’s Funeral Home, and out at the Burial Ground say a prayer over the slave gravestones. And every summer she had to thank Aisha for saving her life.

  “Those are the coordinates of my being,” she said. “You might want to know them.”

  Still he kept a guarded smile. He was trying to figure out his own reaction. Why so struck? Why did he feel as if some suspicion had been confirmed?

  “Does she know that?” he asked finally.

  “Does she know about the coordinates of my being?”

  “Does she know she’s your heir?”

  She kept looking straight ahead, watching the game, enjoying the drama. “Yes,” she said finally.

  “You told her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does Margo know?”

  At that, she turned to him, looked him over. “No,” she said. “Nor Tom.” And then, as if she meant to lay out the ground between them: “I’ve got bequests for a lot of things. The Redwood Library, the Whitehorne Museum, Vassar, the Restoration Foundation. But as long as I’m single and childless, the house, and a trust to keep it up—that goes to Aisha.”

  He pursed his lips, nodded. Was he being imprudent? Was he open to misapprehension?

  “She saved my life,” he heard her say again. “Twice. At college and then that night. Me and Isolde and our Liebestod.”

  At which he had enough sense to take her hand, hold it in his lap, and when the seventh-inning stretch came put his arm around her while the crowd sang “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

  But afterwards—after he’d brought Alice home, kissed her under the porte cochere—he couldn’t escape the suspicion that he had caught Aisha out, that a curtain had been pulled aside and he’d seen something he hadn’t been meant to see. It had left him with an impression, something that made him so restless that when he got back to the asphalt-shingled nightmare he couldn’t settle and so had headed off down Thames Street to where the people were.