The Maze at Windermere

by Gregory Blake Smith

  Okay, Aisha was Alice’s heir, but so what? How was that anything more than just another extravagance of Alice’s, another grand gesture? Yes, Aisha had seen fit to withhold the information from him, but what was she supposed to say? Hey, I’m in line to inherit a ten-million-dollar house? It was no business of his. Bad form, really, if she had let him know. Evil to him who thinks evil, Sandifer.

  And yet, and yet. He remembered something Aisha had told him about that night, the night of the suicide attempt. This was when she was telling him the whole story, how she’d heard the music, come out of her room, found Alice. Tom had been in New York, she said, but Margo had been home. And here was the thing, she had said with a penetrating look: Tom and Margo’s bedroom was closer to the alcove, and yet it had been she, Aisha, on the other side of the house, who had awoken and wondered what the heck? and had gone out, down the hall, and around the corner and found Alice on the wicker couch, blood everywhere. Was Margo that heavy a sleeper? she’d asked Sandy, and she let the implication hang in the air between them.

  And now, as long as he was thinking evil, he might turn that implication back on Aisha. That night—morning, really—after the Champions Ball when Alice had come to her and told her what had happened in the cemetery, why had she up and left for Brooklyn a couple of hours later? Knowing what she knew about Alice, did she think it was safe to leave her alone? No worry of an encore performance of Tristan?

  Single and childless, Alice had said. And he understood suddenly something that had happened a couple of days ago. They had gone out to Bailey’s Beach—the three of them plus Margo, Aisha, Tom, and a couple of Tom’s clients—had spent the afternoon there, and afterwards walked back to Windermere along the Cliff Walk. Tom had been sort of needling Sandy the whole afternoon. Didn’t Sandy really belong on Reject’s Beach? he’d asked with his smile, Reject’s being the public beach adjacent to exclusive Bailey’s. When there was more of the same up on the Cliff Walk—this time Tom telling his clients the story of the heiress Doris Duke running the car over her upstart chauffeur, name of Sandy, he believed—Alice had stopped walking, turned a withering look on her brother, and then, in front of everybody, had asked Sandy did he have a condom? Margo had rolled her eyes, said something about Alice being off her medication, eh?

  “I believe the well-appointed gentleman always has a condom about his person,” Alice had said. “Wallet?”

  It was one of her drama queen moments. There was nothing for it but to play along. So Sandy had fished out a condom and Alice had taken it with her good hand and frisbeed it out over the cliff down toward the water, as if to say to them all: Get it?

  He hadn’t gotten it, but now he saw what she had meant. She was staking a claim. A claim to him, to Windermere, to the future, to this new world of Mr. and Mrs. Sandy Alison and their twenty kids. And what did Tom and Margo think of that? And Aisha, in line for Windermere and its trust fund if Alice remained single and childless—what did she think of that?

  III

  The Maze at Windermere

  June 25

  I have just returned from the Synagoge where I have delivered the body of Lieut Smithson. I have made my report to Genl Waring and am back in my Quarters now but in too Antic a state to sleep, and so will recount what I told to Genl Waring, so that I may Marvel at myself.

  We had set off this morning as we had planned and I affected a goodly Pleasure at our being away from the War, if but for a day, that we might step out of the tight Garment of our Posting. Smithson fell in with my Mood and agreed that the lack of Action and the close Quarters of this little seaport town had worn on us all. We walked down the Peninsula until we gained the rough Meadows that lay south of the city and there we divided so that we might serve as each other’s Beater. From time to time we would halloo that we might not stray from one another. I took note of where the Cliff gave way and where I might later report having seen a Skiff or Cockboat or some such that was pulled up onto the Shore, but which at the time (I would tell Genl Waring) I did not think of any import. We went on, shooting, giving a berth to the occasional Farmhouse, and all the while I was in a kind of Fever of Anticipation.

  Toward the early Afternoon I heard a distant shout and then a Piece discharged that I understood at once was not Smithson’s. I waited a minute or two and then clambered through the Brush & low Greenery until I came upon Smithson lying wounded in a marshy swale. He had his eyes upon me, and his mouth worked tho’ it gave no sound. I pretended to give chase toward where I heard a receding movement, acting my Part even unto the discharge of my Piece tho’ I had only dust-shot. I waited then some several more Minutes, that the Life might run out of Smithson, for I did not Wish any more of the look of his eyes.

  When I returned to him he was lifeless.

  Too unkind! I told the General, to leave Smithson alone in that marshy land! Yet to carry a Corpse for any distance, even such a one as dear Smithson (whom we did lovingly call the Dwarf, I said with a sad smile), is no Task for any but the strongest man. And so I marked where Smithson lay by breaking the top of a tall Sapling so the lighter green of its upturned leaves would be as a Pennant, and set out toward where we had last passed a Farmhouse. After an hour or so, and having to Circle back on myself, I came upon one such, a sorry white-washed, low-roofed Hovel with chickens and dirty children about the Dooryard. I approached and was met by a Man, and behind him his Wife. I told them as briefly as I might what had transpired, and asked them did they have a Horse & Wagon with which I might carry my dead Friend back. They said they had no horse, but that they had a Mule. I gave the man a guinea, and told him where he might collect his Mule the following day.

  When I was finished my tale, Genl Waring asked did I think it worth the while to dispatch a Party that we might flush out these Rebels, these cowardly Murderers, he said. But I told him that I was of the opinion that they were long gone, that the Skiff I noted was surely theirs and that it betokened the Impermanence of their Presence, and having worked their Mischief they had no Doubt fled. He regretfully agreed, and touching my shoulder in a fatherly fashion said he was sorry for my Ordeal, and that I had done all I could. And that the Rebels were making Bold, and that he supposed there was an end to any such Excursions for his Officers. I requested that when Genl Pigot wrote to Lieut Smithson’s parents, that I be allowed to include a Missive of my own, attesting to their son’s Valor and my Friendship and the apt Execution of his Duty.

  And now I am returned to my garret upon the Point. And there is no Smithson, and there will never be again. He is a taken Piece, and has been removed from the Board.

  ~These last several days after my extraordinary interview with Miss Taylor in the Hebrew cemetery, I have kept to myself, indeed kept to my small room, so mortified, chagrined, lost am I! I am forever beginning a letter to Miss Taylor in which I try to explain myself, and when it proves a cul-de-sac, begin another in which I beg her forgiveness and tell her that I would, indeed, be honored to be her husband. And then I stand up and pace about the room, pick up Chateaubriand, put him down, pick up Mrs. Eliot, then my law book, then reread these miserable pages that seem now so fraught with misapprehension, culpability, blindness.

  There is one thing I have fastened upon, for I am struck by what I wrote when I visited Wilky at Camp Meigs, the portrait I painted of the sunburned young men bathing in each other’s attention, as if they had submerged their individual selves in a pool of manhood. How beautiful I thought them! And yet, though I might admire and yearn, feel the exclusion of my observing self from their camaraderie and ease, yet I would not be of them. And not just because I am no soldier, but because I would not lose myself, would above all keep the sovereignty of my mind, even if in order to do so I must doom my body to being unloved, untouched. Is that not a horrible thing to realize?

  How the future opens before me with all its appalling infinitude! For this proposal of Miss Taylor’s comes to me with the certitude that if I do not ac
cept her, if I do not act now and stride down the well-trodden avenue onto which face the homes of the happy, that I sentence myself to being forever alone, forever removed, taking notes upon life but never living it. And yet what have I begun to understand this summer if not that I cannot engage myself with the ordinary scrum of life? It is not just that I do not feel what other men feel—that is a texture of my make-up about which I can think no further—but that the artist’s life upon which I have embarked requires the very withdrawal which so terrifies me. And yet if I am to do what I have set out to do, become what I have set out to become, do I not need to be above the roil of the world, to be un-implicated as it were, watching from outside the chalk lines that I may take the game I observe—life!—and shape it into a thing whose beauty and meaning are mine?

  But to do so, to live so, to remove oneself so! Is it not a kind of monastic cell to which I doom myself?

  2nd Day

  I am in a most downcast and hopeless State. For who did the Lord put in my way today but John Pettibone. All Winter I had seen him each first day at Meeting, and sometimes down a cross-street or along the wharves, tho’ we never talk’d or even dared look at one another. But today as I was coming out of Samuel Judah’s shop where I had just purchas’d some Thread to do a bit of work Esther Pennington has charitably given me, I did nearly run straight into him. We each of us gave a start. He has grown the way boys do. His nose is bigger, like his Father’s, and he is near a half-foot taller than me. He did seem most discompos’d to see me and was at a loss for what to say. Perhaps I was no better, but I did manage to say hello and to ask after his family. Gone, it seems, is the free teasing of our Childhood. He would not look at me, almost rudely I thought, and hasten’d to say something of how he was about an Errand and must be gone. He turn’d his back to me and went into the Shop.

  That was some time ago and I have been most downcast since. The wild thoughts I have had! And the Despising of myself that I used to spy on him from Mother’s window, and that I did once think, that I did once hold some hope that he might be a path out of the Wildernesse I am in. All my foolish, girlish hopes! And I thought how he had not come to me all Fall and all Winter, never even to offer his Sympathy, and I came to see with a new and sudden clearness, and said to myself that he is embarrass’d at our old childish Friendship and sees that it can be no more without becoming the other, which he does not want. He does not want it! I said to myself aloud, over and over, until I realiz’d Ashes must hear me. And then instead I wrote it over and over, which I have now cross’d out, and broken my Quill doing so. And now I don’t know what to write. I have sat here these five minutes recutting my Quill, but there is nothing to write.

  And then the thing that had always been there, the thing Sandy had been obscurely waiting for, half expecting, happened. Or rather seemed to happen, for that was part of it: he didn’t know for sure.

  He and Alice had spent the last week of August on final preparations for Champagne at Windermere, which would come off the Saturday of Labor Day weekend. There was the readying of the grounds to be overseen, arrangements with the company that would provide security, the rental tent erected, phone calls to be sure that the plates and champagne flutes were lined up, and finally the first-floor rooms—which would be open to the public—cleared of everything personal. Sandy did what he could, mostly moral support while Alice bustled and phoned and directed the Salve Regina girls and a handful of volunteers from the library. Tom was back in New York. Margo seemed always to be smoking a cigar on the veranda. Afterwards, after it happened, Sandy would think back to those days—how busy Alice had been, how abilified, and yet wired, anxious, a little wild-eyed, not sleeping. Had it all been a kind of manic buildup? Should he have seen what was coming?

  How it started was simple enough. Alice didn’t answer his text. He didn’t think much of it at first. They were in the habit of texting stupid stuff to each other, and maybe she was too busy, maybe she was lining this or that up, didn’t have her phone with her. So the first day went by and it was no big deal. But then an e-mail went unanswered, and when he called her cell he got shunted to her message box. He backed off a bit, let another day go by. One of the things he’d learned in relationships was to slice the backhand when your testosterone was telling you to rip it crosscourt. At the Casino he looked quizzingly at Margo on the other side of the net, but there was nothing forthcoming from that quarter. He let another day pass, checked his phone every half hour, but there was nothing.

  Right from the start he had been a little chary of seeing her too often. Maybe it was just an Heiress’s Dilemma tactic, but he had decided early on to let the thing develop at Alice’s pace. He was scrupulous about never just showing up at the house, tried his best to keep a low profile around Margo and Aisha, not to mention Tom. It wasn’t always easy to do. Alice seemed to want to flaunt him, was always coming over to the Casino, calling him, texting him, taking his arm when the others were around, teasing him into taking her somewhere, throwing condoms into the ocean.

  And now this. A sudden and absolute silence. Something had happened, but what?

  Well, he would go out to the house. If she’d found out about him and Aisha, okay, so be it, but he couldn’t just wait. And maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe she really was a Mad Heiress. But he would find her, talk to her, learn what had happened—or at least get a sense of what had happened—and then back off if that was what she wanted. If it was all over—if there were to be no V-neck sweaters in his future—then fine. Well, not fine—he would miss her, he knew, he could feel already the beginning of a hole in his life where she used to be—but he would have to live with that. He would go back to his old life, or his new old life, but first he needed to know.

  It was one of the Salve Regina girls—not the one who’d told him about the maze that day, the homely one, but the other one, Rachel—who answered the door.

  “Good day, sir,” she said with a look that was halfway between prim maid and snarky punk. “I’m afraid Miss du Pont is not at home.”

  Whatever he had expected—and he’d imagined all sorts of things—it wasn’t this. Like he’d been expected, like someone had written a line for the girl to say. He made a face at her, as if to get her to drop the theater-major thing. But the girl didn’t bite. So he tried again, asked did she know where Alice was? But she would have none of it.

  “I’m afraid Miss du Pont is not at home to you.”

  He noted the “to you.”

  “Did someone tell you to say that?” he asked, but she didn’t answer, kept up the front of the disinterested maid.

  “Come on,” he said, working up a smile like they were comrades-in-arms, both on the outside looking in. “Did Alice tell you to say that?”

  “That’s how it was done in the Gilded Age,” the girl said, still sounding like she was reading from a script. “With the social climbers, I mean. One could find oneself quite destroyed.” And Christ! if she didn’t start to close the door right in his face! He reached out to stop it, pushed back with a little too much force so the big oak door swung inward with a shudder. For a second the girl looked frightened, but then she resumed her act.

  “I’m afraid Miss du Pont—” and she paused queerly, as if gathering strength for the truth, but then said simply— “is not at home to you.”

  ~ And now: how all the confused striving above has been put to rout! For yesterday as I was attempting to write to Miss Taylor, I heard Mother suddenly call from downstairs, and then Father as though he were struck like Saul, and O! how then did Life intrude upon me!

  For the horror we have been dreading all summer is upon us! There are in the papers notices of a most terrible battle involving the 54th Massachusetts. They caution that the news comes from telegraph summaries of what is being written in the Rebel newspapers and so may not be accurate. But it seems the Negro Regiment has been engaged in a most bloody battle and is greatly decimated. I pray the repo
rts are exaggerated, or if true that Wilky is one of those who has come through. We can do no work but stare in front of ourselves and wait, all except Mother, who cleans the kitchen with Colleen, and then cleans it again.

  My letter to Miss Taylor, my vows, my cloistered life: how the world elbows its way in, plumps itself down on the divan, and will not budge!

  And now we have the accounts in the Times and the Tribune and the Traveler before us. And indeed Wilky is severely injured. One paper lists him as “Adj James (ankle and side)” and another as “Adj G. W. James (severe).” And young Robert Gould Shaw is killed. Father accounts Shaw’s parents as his friends and has taken himself off to write to them. And I am here writing because I don’t know what else to do. Mother is as a ghost, except when she scolds Alice for her morbidity.

  Minnie and Kitty have called, but even their beautiful spirits are dimmed.

  The news confirms the worst of the rebel sources. There was a great bombardment of Fort Wagner, which guards the city of Charleston. There were gun- and mortar-boats and five iron-clads, and two siege-batteries. This dreadful fire rained down upon the poor souls within the fort for a full day until it was deemed (by whom? Mother wants to know) that they were ready for the taking and so the order was given for the New York and New England regiments to advance. They advanced in columns, all but the 54th, which the papers make a point of saying was awarded the honor of leading the attack. It is just this that we had so feared, that the notoriety of the 54th, the great moral weight given it for being the first colored regiment, would cause it to be ordered into some gallant action so as to serve as an example to the world. And so it has turned out, for the papers are filled with lofty praise of the Negroes, of their courage in the face of what appears to have been a most horrific slaughter. Mother says the Union makes its metaphysical point upon the physical grave of her son. That a symbol has killed her son. But he is not yet dead. Ankle and side, it is not head and heart! Mr. Russell departs tomorrow to go in search of his son, Cabot, who it is hoped is in one of the hospitals upon the coastal islands, at Hilton Head or at Beaufort. He will look as well, he says, for our Wilky.