The Maze at Windermere

by Gregory Blake Smith

  When his cell phone rang he felt like he’d only been asleep for a couple of minutes, but when he looked at the clock on his nightstand it was three thirty. He scrambled out of bed, flipped open the phone. There was a young woman downstairs who wanted to see him, the concierge said. No, she didn’t want to come up, she wanted him to come down. So he pulled on his clothes—Margo?—went down the hall, and got in the elevator. He dropped the two floors and when the doors opened—a few seconds before he actually saw her—he knew it was going to be Alice.

  “Hey,” she said when she saw him.

  “Hey,” he said. She was still wearing her green gown, but she had on a plastic see-through raincoat over it. And absurdly, a deerstalker hat, her long light-colored hair pulled behind and down her back. He walked her a little ways away from the concierge. “You’re drunk,” he said.

  “I’ve come to fetch you.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “A necessary ontological state,” she said, and she pulled a pint of something from her raincoat pocket. “Necessary for you too.” And she handed him the bottle. He handed it back.

  “I was sleeping.”

  “The game’s afoot, Watson.”

  “I was sleeping.”

  “I’ve come to awaken you. I’ve come to awaken you from your benighted state.” And she took a step toward the door that opened onto the courtyard and held her hand out to him. “The fog’s come in,” she said. “The ghosts are walking. I’ve come to fetch you.” And she waggled her hand in the air. “Come on.”

  He let her lead him out into the courtyard, but stopped once they were outside. The winches on the boats at the fish pier had vanished. There was no traffic and the quiet was eerie. Every ten seconds the foghorn out on Goat Island sounded, and then in the distance like an echo, a second horn.

  “That’s the Newport Bridge horn,” Alice said. Then: “Ssshh.” They listened. She raised her brows like: Did you hear it? But he hadn’t heard anything. She waited and then raised them again, and this time he thought he had heard something.

  “That’s Fort Adams,” she said and started down the street. When he didn’t follow, she waggled her hand again. He had either to make a fuss or give in. Beneath the hem of her gown he saw she was wearing orange sneakers.

  “What are we doing?” he asked when he’d caught up to her.

  “We’re walking.”

  “Where’re we walking?”

  “From the twenty-first century backwards,” she said. She fished in her plastic raincoat and handed him the bottle of bourbon again: “This helps the ghosts come out.”

  He touched the bottle to his lips, tilted his head back, but he didn’t actually drink. He didn’t want to be drunk; he wanted to be back in bed. He was going to have to humor her and then somehow get her back in a taxi.

  They went out to Storer Park where it overlooked the harbor and the Pell Bridge. But there was nothing to see, no bridge and no harbor. Sandy could barely make out the basketball court where some nights after work and a frozen pizza he came and waited for the townies—mostly black guys who called him Larry and tolerated his jump shot—to let him play. It was one of the spots Aisha and he had arranged as a kind of meeting place: weeknights, at dusk, with plausible deniability should someone see them. Now Alice led him over to the seawall where they stood on one of the huge granite blocks looking out into the gray nothing.

  “Do you hear that?”

  He didn’t hear anything. Just the three foghorns. Close. Far. Farther.

  “What?”

  “That,” she said. Again he listened. “That’s the Rose Island bell. Hear it?”

  He didn’t hear any bell.

  “Taken down in 1912,” she said. “Replaced by a steam-powered horn, in turn dismantled in the early seventies.” She turned her face up to his, smiled—was he going to play or not?

  “Look,” he said. “Why don’t you come back to my place. I’ve got a pullout couch.” And when she lowered her chin, gave him a disappointed look from under her brows: “You’re drunk. I’m tired. And this is a little nuts.”

  “Not nuts,” she said. “Adventurous. Stimulating. An unconventional yet memorable evening spent in the company of a charming young lady.” And she snugged her deerstalker hat down on her head. “I didn’t think you’d be such a buzzkill, Watson.”

  He held his breath, looked down at her like he was going to give her what-for, then blew out his cheeks like okay, fine. “Whatever,” he said, and he swept his hand in an after-you gesture. “Lead on, Sherlock.”

  And for the next hour he let her take him through the narrow seventeenth-century streets of the Point, in and out of the driftways and along the buckling sidewalks under the gaslights. She had a story for every spot: the pirates hanged on Gravelly Point, the Depression-era nuns living in Hunter House, the Quakers in their prim, small-windowed homes. Every so often she’d take out the bottle of bourbon and drink—“The trick, Watson, is to maintain a steady state of inebriation”—and then carry on. She showed him some of the houses her grandmother had been involved in saving, one of them the house where the Vicomte de Noailles had lived during the Revolution, another a tiny building on Willow Street where there had lived an infamous Jamaican slave who announced to anyone who would listen that she was a witch. At one point they walked out the length of the Elm Street Pier until the shore vanished behind them and there was nothing but vacant gray in front of them and the bleating of the foghorns. They stood and listened. It was eerie, even for Sandy.

  “We might be the only two alive,” Alice whispered.

  They just stood and peered into the emptiness. Somewhere in the gray a dog barked. Alice seemed to have stopped breathing.

  “We can’t see them,” she said after another minute, “but they’re there.”

  Back on the Point she conjured for him the carriages and oxcarts, the cobblestones, the high tides that crept up the driftways, the wharves with their hogsheads and wheelbarrows. He had to forget tennis, she said, forget the Casino and the Hall of Fame and the houses along Bellevue: they hadn’t been built yet. “Forget the rich people,” she told him, “forget you and me.” They didn’t exist. There was nothing but sheep out on the Doubling Point meadows. He needed to imagine that this was the world: these little houses, the narrow streets, the Quakers thee’ing and thou’ing each other and the slaves speaking their creole. It was a foggy night in—oh, 1706, she said—and everyone was sleeping. Up there, she said, and she pointed to the little half-windows of a third floor—slaves sleeping three to a bed and dreaming of their homes in Africa. Of their mothers and fathers. Of the village girl they used to watch.

  He looked down at her when she said this.

  “It’s a moral obligation,” she said. And she peered up into his face to see if he understood. “They’re dead. We’re alive.”

  At which she slipped her hand under his arm, started him down the narrow street.

  From the Point they went out to Battery Park and then across the railroad tracks and across Farewell Street into the North Burial Grounds. They passed the modern headstones (“Cheap thrills,” said Alice) and then wandered in and around the older grave markers with their slate death’s-heads and angels’ wings. It was too dark to make them out, Alice said, but there were gravestones that had soul effigies with African features—noses and lips and hair—and up behind God’s Little Acre there was a string of small stones that marked the graves of Isaac Da Silva’s servants, nominally Jews, she said, but not allowed in the Touro cemetery. It was hilarious, wasn’t it? That a crypto-Jew in Portugal should have slaves who were crypto-Christians in Newport, hey? Outcasts all, she said. And she closed her eyes, seemed to sway on her feet. And then without warning she plopped over backwards onto the cemetery grass, sat there on her fanny with a stunned look on her face and her expensive green dress hiked up around her knees.

  “Ever been
an outcast, Watson?”

  He took a step toward her, stood over her. “Let me take you home,” he said.

  “Motorcycle too noisy,” she said, wagging her index finger in the air like no, no, no. “Mustn’t wake Margo.”

  “Then let me walk you to the taxi stand.”

  “I’ll just take a little nap here,” she said, and she leaned back, laid her head on the ground so the deerstalker hat went askew. Sandy kneeled down beside her. The grass was wet.

  “You can’t sleep here,” he said. She was going to pass out. “Let’s get you a taxi.”

  At which she smiled, still with her eyes closed, said something he couldn’t hear. A minute passed. There was the sound of a car going past on Farewell Street. Then there was a dog barking. After another minute she said: “The world’s still there.”

  “Come on,” he said.

  “In a minute.”

  He wondered if he could carry her if he had to, and how far. She was breathing regularly. He could see her chest going up and down inside her plastic raincoat. Should he make her get up? Make her walk? But after another minute she stirred.

  “You said something to those boys.”

  For a moment he didn’t know what she meant—or rather, thought she somehow meant one of the graves around them.

  “You were defending me,” she said. “You were defending my honor.”

  She meant of course the boys at the ball. Was she making fun of him? Of his having ridden to her rescue?

  “They were just kids,” he said because he felt he had to say something.

  “Just kids . . .” she repeated in a faraway voice and she smiled again. And then in the same dreamy voice she said, “You’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever known.”

  He didn’t know what to say to that, so he didn’t say anything. She had this calm little smile on her face, her hands folded across her stomach, legs out straight, hair in a swirl on the grass. He wondered what time it was. Five or so? He had to be at the Casino at nine o’clock.

  “Confident of awakening into eternal life, here reposeth Alice du Pont.”

  Another car went past on the road.

  “The Plastics Princess.”

  “Come on,” he said, and he leaned over her, slipped his hands under her arms, under her raincoat, and started to lift her up. But she made herself deadweight, the smile broadening, and he had to do it for real, get his legs under him and lift her onto her feet. At the last moment she staggered, and then—how exactly had this happened?—she was in his arms, pressing herself into him, her good palm against his chest, the side of her face on his shoulder. He had dropped his hands almost instantly, but then—whether out of reflex or because not to do so would have been too insulting—put his hands on her shoulders, but he did so lightly, tapping her like hey, okay, that’s enough, let’s go. But she kept herself pressed into him. A few awful moments passed, and then she spoke into his chest.

  “Sometimes I’d give anything to have a man hold me.”

  This, of course, was what he had been fearing ever since he’d met her. That a wrong signal would be sent, that something would get out of hand, that he’d have to hurt her, that without ever intending to he’d have to add himself to the list of hurt the girl had sustained.

  “Let’s go,” he said softly, as gently as he could.

  “Kiss me first.”

  She had pulled back a little, was looking up at him.

  “Kiss me,” she said again. “It doesn’t mean anything. I know that. But kiss me.”

  He could think of nothing to say, could do nothing but look down at her. Had he not told Aisha that she was pretty? In a nervous, edgy, hopeless sort of way? But it didn’t matter, couldn’t matter.

  “It won’t count,” she was saying. “We’ve stepped outside the world. You can kiss me. I won’t hold you to it.”

  He tried to smile down at her, down at her upturned face, but couldn’t quite pull it off. And then—horribly!—he found himself leaning over and kissing the top of her head. Kissing the part in her light-colored hair as if she were a child.

  She went stiff in his arms. “Oh!” she said and she shut her eyes. And then she was pushing back, away from him, out of his arms. He took a step after her, but she said “No!” and walked away as quickly as she could manage, over the wet turf, between the gravestones, away.

  “Alice!” he called. But she kept on—blindly, drunkenly—and he knew there was no going after her, no making it better, that the sexual gulf between them had been exposed and there was no undoing that. There was nothing for him to do but watch her go—her poor, hitching gait: electrocuted!—watch her work her way farther uphill, farther into the cemetery, farther away from him, until the taller gravestones began to hide her, and then the fog.

  He sat back on one of the old grave markers. On the ground there was her deerstalker hat still.

  1896

  When finally Franklin wheeled Mrs. Newcombe’s bicycle into the semicircular drive that led up to Marble House, he was tired and sweaty and thirsty and in a foul mood. The bronze front doors (they were reputed to weigh one and a half tons apiece, the weight of an elephant, Mrs. Belmont had told him)—the front doors were wide open and one of the footmen came out to greet him and to take the bicycle from him. He let it be known that it was Mrs. Newcombe’s bicycle, to which the footman replied, “So I understand, sir.” (Was he, then, an object of derision among the staff? He would fix that when he was Mr. Newcombe—; that is, when she was Mrs. Drexel. Good lord!)

  He took a moment to straighten up in the mirror under the massive staircase and then walked through the enormous hall—marble everywhere!—to the doors that opened out onto the acres of greensward that fronted the ocean. There were children with their nannies and governesses playing a game of croquet on the lawn, and in the distance the bright red Chinese teahouse Mrs. Belmont had absurdly built when she was still Mrs. Vanderbilt. It sat with its roofline like a vizier’s helmet and its dragons and griffins and lord-knows-what anchored to the rocks overlooking the surf. He could see guests milling about on the pagoda-like veranda. He slowed down as he crossed the grass. He prepared a smile, summoned his jovial self, and called out a hearty “Give it a good thwack!” to the children.

  And just as he did, one of the women he had taken for a governess turned to him. It was Mrs. Newcombe. She had changed out of her bicycling outfit. Her children, of course, were part of the game. “Mr. Drexel,” she said and he found himself begging her pardon, though for what he couldn’t have said.

  “I hope you didn’t find your ride too trying,” she said with a moue over Mrs. Belmont’s behavior that she seemed to think they would both understand.

  “I flew like Hermes!” he said and smiled.

  Odd how unattractive she was. There was not, after all, anything hideous about her—she did not have hair sprouting out of her chin—but her parts did not coordinate. Her nose did not quite make it all the way up to her forehead, the corners of her mouth resisted her smile, her hair seemed to want to escape from off her scalp. And her expensive clothes—the simple day dress she had changed into was quite exquisite for its type—instead of helping hide her lack of grace, seemed rather to draw attention to it. She had at least, he acknowledged, fine manners, studied though they might be.

  “Is that your boy then?” he said, following her eyes out to the children. The boy looked to be six or seven, dressed in a wide-collared, bottle-green Fauntleroy outfit. Some of the other children were so small as to need the help of a nurse in swinging the heavy mallets. “He’s a well-made lad.”

  “Ah!” she murmured.

  He turned with what he intended to be an indulgent smile at her maternal pride, but he was struck by the expression on her face. She had turned on him a look of—of what?—of gratitude, he supposed, as if his praise of her child had meant something beyond simple courtesy. She was even no
w trying to conceal her reaction by pointing out her daughter—a girl of four toddling in the grass with her nurse—but he was left with the impression that he had glimpsed something of her private self, something she had prematurely exposed.

  And then it came to him that his was not the only campaign Mrs. Belmont was waging. That for every tête-à-tête he had had with her about marriageable women, Mrs. Newcombe had had one about marriageable men. He had, in short, been described to Mrs. Newcombe. The handsome gentleman from the Baltimore Drexels. The amateur watercolorist. The witty gentleman. The gentleman with the beautiful manners. He had—it gave him a strange shiver—been in Mrs. Newcombe’s thoughts without his realizing it. And one of her thoughts had evidently been what would the gentleman with the beautiful manners think of her children. The gentleman who was a bachelor and several years her junior. The gentleman was not, it amused him to realize, the only one coloring the gray in his hair.

  They had begun to stroll. And whatever awkwardness had come between them was dispelled by the sight of Mrs. Belmont’s tea train starting its trek across the lawn. For Mrs. Belmont, in building her teahouse with all its architectural flair, had neglected to include any facilities for actually making tea, and had then remedied this oversight by installing a miniature railroad that carried the tea things from the main kitchens out to the teahouse. TOWN TOPICS had been merciless in its description. And to see the white-gloved footmen seated one to a car, each holding a silver tray with its paraphernalia, eyes forward, back straight while the toy engine chuffed along on its rails, was a sight indeed. “Poor souls,” Franklin couldn’t help remarking to Mrs. Newcombe, “for I suppose even a footman has his dignity. And the smoke must get in their eyes.” When the little train had finished its hundred-yard jaunt and blown its whistle, applause burst from the teahouse.

  “You missed, I think, Mrs. Lydig’s last party,” Mrs. Newcombe said. He understood her to be taking up his remark. The Lydigs had thrown a party in which actors and actresses had been hired to impersonate royalty—one could dance with a string of duchesses, Franklin understood, or have a cigar with the crown prince. His own name had not been included on the guest list. “I wonder sometimes what we are about,” she added with a glance up at him.