The Maze at Windermere

by Gregory Blake Smith

  I do not know how to answer this. Everything I might say, everything I have known myself to think on this matter, is cloaked in a kind of fog. Whether the fog is made of that which is inchoate in me, or unnamable, or unsayable, I do not know. But I have come to understand—and the realization has cost me and freed me in equal measure—that I will never marry, that I am not made to be a husband to a woman, father to a child. I cannot explain this, even to myself, yet the certainty has at last come and is now as absolute, for me, as day and daylight. Some things, even in the honesty of our hearts, even in the confines of a letter which will never be sent, never be read, must be left unsaid.

  My dear Alice, I cannot live my life out loud. If I am to have a life at all, it must be one of indirection, of deflection, of slanted truth. (I once played a game of chess with Alice—our Alice—and when the progress of the game turned against her she began to move her pieces off the board, because (she explained) there were squares out there too, you just couldn’t see them!)

  I wish to live my life on the squares out there. I wish to be free to observe life (I hope with the warmth of heart you have shown to me), and to translate what I see into something that might be called Art. For from out there I hope to be able to see in here. To see not just the artifacts of individuality (the different hats and hems and hairstyles we wear), but to see that which unites us, that which we share au fond. That this living of a life out there dooms me to being alone, casts me in the tragedy you foresaw that afternoon in the cemetery, terrifies me. But it must be so.

  It is something I have difficulty reconciling, this sense I have that the hundreds of millions of us who breathe upon the earth are each a unique flame, that we are each uniquely composed within the caskets of our bodies and our minds, that each has an experience of the world as different as that of a fishwife’s from a foundryman’s, and yet we all live the same life (millionaire, artist, soldier, slave), we each of us strive to understand who we are, why we are here, to love and be loved, and that for all that striving, we are each of us lost in the mystery of our own heart.

  Here is the story I would make of you, dear Alice, if I had the talent.

  A young lady lives in a resort town (Newport, Saratoga, Vevey) which is yearly visited by the wealthy and the famous. She is something of an oddity in the town, with a beauty of her own which not all can see, yet she is marred by innocence (as one may be, I believe). To this resort town comes a young man of some report (he has proved himself, let us say, in some field of endeavor), he comes to the resort, makes the acquaintance of our local young lady, but because of a flaw in his nature, he cannot see her as she is. He is struck by her unusual beauty, by the fashions she wears, by her curious behavior, finds himself inexplicably drawn to her, delights in observing her, but all the same he cannot see her. And in the end he does not realize that something in his observing, in his actions (I shall have to develop this), acts as a blight upon our girl, upon her goodness.

  She is, tragically perhaps, shorn of her innocence.

  This is what I fervently hope, that I may someday write such a story and that by writing it I may have, at last, a genuine relation with you. Ah! my dear Alice: grant me the artist’s hand, the poet’s voice! That I might make your story partake of that imperishable bliss I know to be the empery of Art, and so be myself assumed into the great Circle of life! For that is how you can save me!

  On the train back from New York Sandy watched the nighttime landscape going past, the lighted interior of the passenger car overlaid like a ghost on the world, the reflection of his half-lit face slipping across the Connecticut countryside, across the dark trees and bushes, the buildings in the distance, the moon behind the clouds.

  He had given up trying to understand. Whether he had just done something unforgivable, accused someone of motives so vile, so outrageous, so—there was no other word for it!—so evil, that there was no way to cleanse himself if he was wrong; or whether he had, in fact, seen something, seen how one human being had used another, had used him: well, he had given up. All the way from Brooklyn back to Grand Central, and from Manhattan to Bridgeport to New Haven, he had wrestled with it, accusing himself, accusing Aisha, laying out the evidence—Mitten, Rachel, Margo—but there was no way to truly know, no center of the maze he might eventually reach, and he had sunk into a kind of stupor. He, Sandy Alison, with his sun-bleached hair, who everyone liked to have around. For miles and miles he had sat there looking out the window at the other Sandy traveling parallel to him in the dark.

  Somewhere out there was Alice du Pont, damaged, hurt, in love with him though he didn’t deserve her, but out there somewhere. Even now, after everything, couldn’t he find her—surely, there was some way—find her and save her, save himself?

  He lifted his face to where the moon kept pace with the train. Cold, calculating, strategic, he had called Aisha. Maybe she was, maybe she wasn’t. But Alice, Alice was somewhere in the world. At Windermere still—hadn’t the doorman said so?

  But he’d no sooner felt a stirring inside him than he sank back in his seat, closed his eyes. She didn’t want to see him. Nothing could be clearer than that. Don’t come around again, Sandy. They’d both said that, Margo and Aisha, the exact same phrase, both of them. And Alice—just like Tom had said—was she not saying it as well?

  Out the window he could see the dark plain of the Sound and the ragged line of white where the waves broke against the shore. For a mile, two miles, he just listened to the clack-clack of the rails.

  Okay, fine, it was hopeless—but didn’t he still have to try? If only as a way of cleansing himself? Maybe a real letter this time, not an e-mail. Get Mary the cook to give it to her, or maybe walk around the Salve Regina campus until he spotted Mitten’s bike in some bike rack. He could station himself there until the girl showed up. Heck, he could do both, Mary and Mitten. He’d leave the envelopes unsealed so they could read the letter, see that he meant no harm, see that this was love. Surely one of them would manage to get it to Alice.

  Couldn’t he do that? One last try?

  She had been right. He was Mr. Winterbourne—blind, shallow, always facing in the wrong direction. He would tell her that in the letter. But he would tell her too that she had opened things in him, deepened him in ways he was only now beginning to understand. He would tell her that he had not realized that the life she had imagined for him that wonderful night in the library—the kids, the house, the gift of the world—that that life so removed from who he was, who he had always been, was the life he wanted, but now he could not rid himself of it. And he would tell her that he had this picture of the two of them: Alice du Pont a bright red spinnaker aloft in the wind and Sandy Alison her anchor. He would not deny that her money and her house and her privilege made it all the more enticing, but it was she, she with her lovely eyes and her manic depression and her bowling shirt, that he wanted. He would not give her up.

  He would wait for her on the breakwater at sundown. Starting the evening of the day she received the letter, he would be there. He would be there day after day, week after week, waiting for her. On the breakwater, he would tell her in the letter, where she’d said that first day that sometimes just being alive was enough. It might take a week, two weeks. It might take a second or third letter. Or him arranging for a taxi to pull up at Windermere every night just at sundown with express instructions to carry Miss du Pont out to the Newport breakwater, where a marriage proposal awaited her. But in the end, she would come, wouldn’t she? Was it not at least worth a try?

  With his eyes closed, the train rocking him, he jotted down in his memory phrases he might use in his letter. He could see it all in his mind’s eye, the breakwater, and the pounding surf, and the sun lowering in the west, the distant sailboats glinting in the last light. One night, two nights. One week, two weeks. But she would not be able to resist. A night would come—after he’d watched hundreds and hundreds of cars approach along Ocean Drive on
ly to pass him by—a night would come when a taxi would appear with its lighted sign and begin to slow down. His heart would give a little leap as it came to a stop at the side of the road. What would she be wearing? her bowling shirt? her Woodstock fringe jacket? Perhaps she would tell the taxi to wait as a sign she had not given in yet, had not yet forgiven him. But he would go to her, wordless, and he would lift her half-broken body in his arms and carry her out onto the rocks as he’d done that first day, and there he would tell her he loved her and he would ask her to marry him. It would be something they would tell their twenty children. (He’d put that in the letter.) Sandy Alison the tennis pro proposing to the heiress Alice du Pont on the Newport breakwater, at sundown, with the world a golden blaze behind them. And how she had said yes.

  These were the phrases he jotted down in his memory as he watched the dark landscape go by: bowling shirt . . . cloaked in a kind of fog . . . a spinnaker in the wind . . . breakwater at sundown . . .

  7th Day

  At first I thought he would not come. For I stood upon the Breakwater at sunrise in a most deathly Fog and waited and waited. I fear’d something had miscarried. Or that he had chang’d his mind, had been work’d on by his parents or his friends. But then a figure took shape out of the gray coming toward me over the rocks. My heart leap’d and I moved toward him until we stood face to face, John Pettibone and Prudence Selwyn. The Fog was so thick that it was as if Newport had vanish’d and there was just our selves, and the near rocks, and the gray of the water receding into a gray Nothing behind us. It embolden’d me, this Sense that there was no World but ourselves, and I spoke to him in a Manner I could never have done before.

  I told him I needed a Husband. I told him I had always lik’d him, and that it was he I wish’d to marry. I said all this without a blush about me, in an extremity of Honesty. I told him it was a like proposal that I had gone to see his Father about, and that his Father had said that he was too young to marry. Now I wish’d to hear it from himself. I told him I had a House of my own, with no lien real upon it, and that I own’d a servant too. That these came with me as a kind of Dowry, and that he was not like to do better. Then thinking that this was too brassy a thing to say, I smiled and said that he must watch out, for I was accounted a good Business woman these days, and that he must look to himself if he enter’d into a Transaction with me. Then I said I hoped he did not mind me speaking so plainly. I said that we were of the Society of Friends, and as such might we not conduct ourselves with a plainness that went beyond our manner of dress? Might we not speak plainly as well? If not, then I ask’d him to forgive me this straightness, but that he must needs understand that, for me, the time for Coyness had pass’d.

  He said then that I quite took his breath away. That he had overheard his Mother and Father speaking and had come with an amaz’d conception of what had taken place between his Father and me, but to hear me speak so, he said it amaz’d him further.

  I told him to not be too amaz’d, lest the time pass him by. Thee hast heard of Edward Swift’s offer? I ask’d, not because I thought he had, but so that he might learn of it then. And that it might throw a Fear into him if he did not act.

  He then gave out with a beautiful Rush of things! How he had always lik’d me. And that he thought of me often. And that hearing of this Business with his Father had made his heart run, and that he had been awake the whole of the night with the thought of seeing me and of what he might say. He did go on so, and there was none of the halting Speech I knew him for, so that I found myself in a Fury of feeling. Aye, we were young, he said. And it did worry him, he said. He would confess that, for it had worried him the whole of the night. As a man, he said, it came down to him. But he suppos’d he might get work with the woodcutters or out at the Ropewalks. Or he might go to the Sailmakers, or to one of the Distilleries. But he said these things in a way that I could see he was troubl’d. Would there be no help from his Father? I ask’d. Might he not forgive us and accept us and help us? We did then swirl around so with Possibilities and Ploys that in time I felt turn’d about and altogether lost. So I ask’d him what his own Hope was, what did he wish for himself? And I saw it disturb’d him to answer me, but answer he did. He said he was made for the sea, that it was in his family to go to sea, as it was in my family. That he wish’d someday to be Master of his own ship and sail in the trade with the Islands and along the coast, perhaps even to London or Portugal. That was what he had been brought up to and what he wish’d, and what he would throw over that he might have me. I ask’d was there no chance that this might still be, no chance that we could fit together a Livelihood until he became a Master? There was not, he said, even if his Father could be brought around, for the training was too long. He must go first as common hand, and then as a lowly Mate. He would have to work his way upwards and there would be no real livelihood for years. How many years did he think? I ask’d. With a look most desolate, as though he had betray’d me, he said it might be as many as six or seven.

  I held him then by both wrists that I might bring him back to me. And I ask’d him did he want to marry me. These other troubling Matters aside, did his Heart want it? Did he wish me to be his Wife?

  He said he did.

  I ask’d again: would he marry me if there was a way to be found? Would he be my Husband?

  He said he would. And he said it with an oath that shock’d my ears, and yet made the blood rush through my parts.

  Then thee art mine! I told him, and I stretch’d up and kiss’d him there in the fog with the water at our feet. For I know a way, I whisper’d in his ear, and I held him to me and felt in my breast a great burst of love for Ashes and Spearmint and the whole lighted world! I know a way how we may get through the first seven years!

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Laura Goering, Bonnie Nadzam, and Scott Carpenter for their insightful readings of earlier drafts of this book and for their many helpful suggestions.

  And for their expertise and faith, I extend my gratitude to my agent, Barney Karpfinger, and my editor, Carole DeSanti.

  And finally, I would like to acknowledge the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts and Carleton College.

  About the Author

  Gregory Blake Smith is the award-winning author of three previous novels, including The Divine Comedy of John Venner, a New York Times Notable Book. His short story collection, The Law of Miracles, won the Juniper Prize and the Minnesota Book Award. He has received a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and the George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush Foundation, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. Smith is currently the Lloyd P. Johnson-Norwest Professor of English and the Liberal Arts at Carleton College.

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