The Maze at Windermere

by Gregory Blake Smith

  He thought he saw on her face a wavering intelligence, as if she was trying to read him. How much did he know?

  “I haven’t seen her in a week, ten days,” she said finally.

  “And when you did see her?”

  “What?” she said and she raised her shoulders in interrogation. “It was like always. What are you after? What do you want from me?”

  “Not texting her? E-mailing her?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t heard from her. We go through spells.”

  He took a step toward her, leaned over her. She was so small, so slight, and he with his big athlete’s body.

  “Is that how she took it?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Is that how she took it?”

  Again, the peering at him like what was with him? “I don’t get it,” she said. “What’re you talking about? What’s happened?”

  “What’s happened?” he repeated. “You mean other than your telling Alice you and I were sleeping together?”

  For a moment she simply stared up at him, pulled into herself, with something like revulsion on her face. And then she turned and began walking back toward her building. He had to skip a few steps to catch up to her.

  “I didn’t tell her,” she said in a thin, angry voice as he walked alongside her. “One of the college girls did. The bitchy one. Rachel.”

  “You got her to tell. It was you, Aisha. You got her to tell.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “It was you,” he repeated. “You wanted her to know but you couldn’t tell her yourself so you got Rachel to tell her.”

  “Why would I do that? After all that time, all the trouble of keeping it secret. Why would I do that?”

  “Because it was worth a try.”

  “A try? A try for what? What are you talking about?”

  “You thought it might send her over the edge.”

  “Exactly!” she said. She was walking faster. “Exactly! Why would I do that?”

  “It would wreck everything you had with her. Get you kicked out of the Orangery, out of Newport altogether.”

  “Exactly!” she said again.

  “But that was a risk you were willing to take.”

  “Again, why would I do that?”

  “Because,” he said and he grabbed her by the elbow, made her stop. “Because if it did send her over the edge, you stood to inherit Windermere.”

  Her body hardened. Her eyes, her face, her lips—everything against him.

  “Windermere and its trust fund,” he said.

  She raised her hands—for an instant it seemed as though she meant to hit him—then closed her eyes, shuddered, turned her hands palm out in a gesture of refusal, of rejection. “I can’t listen to this,” she said and she began walking again. “I have nothing to say to you.”

  “And what I want to know is—” he went on, keeping pace beside her; he barely recognized his own voice—“is when did you first get the idea? When did it first come to you?”

  She kept her face from him, again made the gesture of disavowal, of pushing him away.

  “Did it only dawn on you when I started seeing Alice? Or was it there right from the start? Even that first day in the Orangery. You told me Alice thought I was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen. Did you get the idea then?”

  They were nearing her building. She got her keys out.

  “Sandy Alison the babe in the woods being set up?” he prodded.

  She started to open the door but he grabbed hold of her, held her by the wrists.

  “Sleep with the tennis guy. Figure out a way of getting him involved with Alice. And then pull the plug. Was that it?”

  She had turned her eyes hotly, furiously on him. “Let go of me.”

  “Why else would you get Rachel to tell her?”

  “Let go of me!”

  “Why else?” he said, and he tightened his grip on her wrists, pulled them toward him so that with a little cry she had to go up onto her toes. For a good half minute they gazed fiercely at each other, and then he threw her wrists down. She pressed herself back into the door behind her. Another minute passed.

  “You have seriously gone off the deep end,” she whispered finally.

  He closed his eyes, tried to even out his breathing, and then, in a low, precise, painstaking voice, said: “One more time: why did you get Rachel to tell Alice about us?” And he held out a hand in his own gesture of rejection: “And don’t tell me you didn’t.”

  But she still didn’t answer, kept her gaze on him hard and ungiving. They stayed like that for some time, for too long, but he wasn’t going to give in. Eventually she let out a long breath, dropped her eyes, and turned away, turned so he could only see the back of her head, her dreads where they draped over her narrow shoulders. A car passed in the street, and then another. When she turned back, a bitter smile had come onto her face.

  “Am I not allowed to have a guilty conscience?” she asked.

  He was pulled up by that. “What?”

  “The lying, the secrecy?” she said. “Which was all my idea, I admit. But I didn’t like it. I never liked it.”

  “That’s not it,” he said, and shook his head.

  “She had to know. I had to tell her.”

  He shook his head again. “Why not just come clean with her, then? Why get the college girls?”

  “Because I was ashamed!” she said. “She was my best friend!”

  “No,” he said, and he had to remind himself that this was who she was, cool, duplicitous, calculating: wasn’t she? “It was all you, Aisha. The tactics, the strategy, Windermere.”

  And at that she closed her eyes, made her hands into little fists, and pressed them over her ears. She seemed to sway where she stood. When at last she spoke, it was in a voice low and strained, almost strangling with anger.

  “I don’t ever want to see you again, Sandy. Do you understand?”

  He just stared at her.

  “Don’t come around. Don’t call me. Don’t text me. Do you understand?”

  “I know what you were doing, Aisha,” he said. “I’m the one who knows.”

  She had turned to finish unlocking the door, but now whipped around on him. “You?” she cried in a voice rich with disgust. “Sandy Alison, the Southern Gentleman? It was you who was trying to get her money! It was you, Sandy, not me! I had to tell her!” And she started to back through the doorway, still with her eyes fixed on him. “Evil to him who thinks evil,” she said, and then, with her voice thrilling: “As your former fiancée liked to say!”

  And with that she shoved the door open and disappeared inside.

  Franklin did not know where he was. His lovely shoes were ruined. His legs could go no farther. It was night and the ocean was somewhere off to his right, south, he guessed that was. But there was fog now, and he had left whatever path he had been on hours ago and now there was nothing around him but a waste of scrub bushes and sandy soil, and the occasional whooping of some nighttime bird to frighten him.

  So great had been the shock he’d received that upon leaving the Ocean he had walked as if only half alive, first down along the wharves so that he might be away from Bellevue, and then onto the Point, then in and out of the gravestones in the Jewish cemetery, and then through the mews and couloirs where the great houses had their stables (and where two summers ago there had been that lovely boy—lost! all lost!), walked in a kind of aimless panic until he had found himself on one of the paths leading out of town, going past the fort with its great berm and into the meadows and marshes and scrubby thickets beyond. He had been heading, he now vaguely supposed, toward the breakwater as if somehow—by necromancy, alchemy, hoodoo—he might find there the secret crux of the matter and so begin to think his way out. But the sun had set and he had gotten turned abo
ut—could he not simply follow the damned ocean?—and now he was tired and lost and it had begun to drizzle and his lovely shoes were soiled and wet through.

  He found a rock and sat down and for the hundredth time tried to calm himself.

  Oh, how his mind had ranged, how it had bolted, dreamed, hallucinated! But there was simply no way out, neither a way forward nor a way back. He could neither call Ryckman’s bluff—the man would not hesitate, even if it meant his daughter must bear up under the ensuing scandal, to do exactly as he said—nor could he go to the woman, explain himself, beg her forgiveness. And the idea of simply withdrawing—a delightful cousin was getting married in Vevey: had he neglected to tell everyone? Bah! it was all theater! the wild imaginings of Franklin Drexel upon the stormy heath! And theater would not do, not this time.

  How could he have been so foolish? He who had been so unfailingly strategic! There had been only a few months to make it through! Could he not have walked the straight and narrow until it was safe and Windermere secured? How foolish, reckless, blind! Hobson, Parrish, Briggs—they had all played at being rakes, wastrels, bons vivants. But he had always thought himself superior. He was not playing, he was, and they, poor toddlers . . . !

  And the woman, he thought with a horrible laugh. She loved him! Laughably, ludicrously, she loved him and now she would suffer her own humiliation, her own stripping away!

  What his mind kept returning to was this: if he did exactly as Ryckman demanded, if he ceased to pay his attentions to the woman (with whatever excuse!), and assuming he could trust Ryckman to keep his word, then he would be saved from absolute ruin. The nature of his life, his secret life, would not be exposed. So at first blush it seemed he was stymied only in the moment. The loss was confined to this particular campaign—Mrs. Newcombe, Windermere, the house on Sixty-Second Street. Ah, well: farewell to a dream! But he could begin again next summer, couldn’t he? A little more shoe polish on the gray. There would be another Mrs. Newcombe, wouldn’t there be? This time, preferably without a father.

  But each time he thought it, each time he beat his wings against that particular glass globe, a second, deeper, harder, more bitter realization set in. For there was Mrs. Belmont. Mrs. Belmont with her pugilist’s face. For him to leave the field of battle so inexplicably, to let fall Mrs. Belmont’s colors, was to commit a kind of social suicide. The mother-in-law of the Duke of Marlborough would never forgive him. More than that: she would cast him out without a second thought. Her house would be closed to him. Her patronage, her society. If he withdrew from his pursuit of Ellen Newcombe after Mrs. Belmont had selected him for her, he could not simply return to who he was before. There was no status quo ante available to him. He could not go back to being Franklin Drexel the lapdog, the gay gadabout. Having been crossed by him, Alva Belmont would drop him as if he were a sprig of poison ivy. He would never again be invited up Fifth Avenue, by her or by anyone else. He would be relegated to the second circle, perhaps even the third circle, where he would be a kind of curiosity, the man who had once made the Four Hundred laugh, who had sat in his evening clothes at their glittering dinner tables, stood on their lawns in his pale green suit, accompanied them to Bailey’s Beach in a top hat!

  Two kinds of ruin to choose from, one the ruin of the loud and obscene, the other of silence and exclusion.

  All of which left him—he had arrived here again and again the whole wretched night—left him washed up on the shore of a trembling possibility. The impossible possibility, he said to himself now.

  For if there was no way out, if it was all going to fall down around him, if he was going to be cast out, his name made unspeakable, then why not vanish? Give over all this gilding, this pretense, this duplicity, and without telling anyone cancel his life, change his name if he had to, and vanish. Zurich, Marseille, Constantinople, Marrakech: could he not go and live somewhere the life of a bohemian? He had seen men like himself in Paris, had he not? Artists, writers, social reformers who seemed to live openly, in acknowledgment of who they were. Could he not make do with just a room and a suit of clothes and his watercolors if it meant freedom? If it meant he might wear his thoughts out loud, breathe out loud? For a moment he stood giddily on that precipice—life as who he was!—but in the next instant it crumbled beneath him as it had the whole night. It would be one thing if he were truly an artist! But he was not. There was no such substance that might be depended upon, that remained whatever else might vanish. Indeed, what was he if not gilding? He was the very soul of gilding—Franklin Drexel the Gilded Man!

  And yet, and yet . . . Might it not be possible, even for a gilded man? If there was, after all, nothing else! To step into the shadows of the demimonde and stay there. To step behind the arras, to be done with duplicity, to enter the maze of who one was never to leave!

  July 10

  We have made Rehoboth and I am in my room at the Inn. ’Tis night, and quiet, and there is a great fog lowered upon the world, so it seems but half there.

  I have left behind in my Quarters at Newport my Regimentals and casual Possessions. And I have left behind a sum of money which, should I not return, will argue against any Appearance that my going was premeditated. The Sum is not what I would have wished in the Ideal execution of my Scheme, but wherefore I go (should I go!) and whereof I hope (should I hope!) I know not, only that I will need Gold & Silver for whatever it be.

  If one may not vanish in the midst of War, then when may one vanish?

  I concoct Tales, whole Novels of Incident and Deceit, of lives that run Parallel to this my own, of Rebel jails and escapes, of versions of myself as in a Glass. I would almost welcome a Court-martial, that I might set this Theater to spinning like a Whipping-top!

  Eight miles from here the Jewess sleeps in her innocent bed.

  I will not be a Coward.

  Tomorrow I step off the Chess-board.

  ~I have finally written to Miss Taylor. Without directly alluding to what transpired in the Hebrew cemetery, I expressed my sorrow that there had been a misunderstanding between us, or if there had not been a misunderstanding, apologized for having behaved in such a manner as to allow first her and then her father to misunderstand me. I then said that I had greatly enjoyed the pleasure of her company these several weeks, that I esteemed her a young lady of fine intelligence and character, and that I wished her every happiness in life. I said I hoped she would remember me with some fondness, as I surely would her. And I bid her adieu.

  Wherever the life of a writer takes me, I hope I will never again write so false a thing.

  After I sent it off, I picked up and went out walking so as to be away from the world. I set off southward and as soon as I could turned down some of the less-traveled paths. But instead of an exorcism (how the scene in Father’s library plays through me like a nightmare!), I spent the whole time reliving the episode (all the while tramping about in the mud; Mother says I have quite ruined my shoes), tried in short to explain myself to myself and to Miss Taylor as if she were somehow invisibly with me, until finally I found myself composing a second letter in my head. It was the letter I would have written if one could, in the heart of one’s heart, truly be oneself! I will do my best now (though it is late and I am indeed tired), my best to write out some version of what I composed and recomposed as a way of settling my mind and, perhaps, of forgiving myself.

  My dear Miss Taylor,

  The first letter I wrote you I composed to satisfy the requirements of our noontide lives. This I write to satisfy those lives we live as if in the gloaming.

  You are the first friend I have, as it were, earned. All others who I might account friends come to me through my family, are my cousins, or are the children of friends of my father. You alone have I acquired purely on my own, from the proceeds of my own worth, if that is not too bold a way of saying it. For the kindness you have shown me this summer in keeping me company, and for the honor you have bestowed upon
me (you know of what I speak), I am, and will always be, deeply grateful.

  I approached you in falseness. You were, for me, a model I allowed into the atelier of my nascent literary imagination. I looked to sculpt you into dramatic form, to subject you to slights and flaws and false positions that I might make a story of you. For, as I once obliquely admitted, my “research” into the lives of the resort hotels was not for some journalistic purpose, but rather the first toddling steps toward acquiring a novelist’s stride. But at every turn, from our first colloquy in the Jewish cemetery, to our wordless, yet confiding, hike to the breakwater, up to our last remarkable meeting, you have confounded my imagination. How sorry a literary inventor I turn out to be! And how the noontide tumult of reality embarrasses the thin inventions of romance!

  Ah! My dear Alice, I mistook life for art!

  I am guilty, I believe, of what Mr. Hawthorne calls the unpardonable sin. I have looked, and watched, and observed, and noted, as if the world were but an experiment in a philosopher’s laboratory. I have, in short, attempted to peer into the sanctity of the human heart (or what seems to me to be perhaps worse: attempted to imagine the sanctity of a human heart) without sympathy, without an extension of my own heart, without the warm and ruddy coal-fire with which Mr. Hawthorne says we must leaven the moonlight of our intellects. That I treated you as if you were the lead I would turn into gold (that for all my observing I could be so blind that I did not see you were already gold!) is the chief lesson of this summer of so many lessons.

  Unpardonable, yet you have (it seems) pardoned me.

  Here is what I will never forget: the image of you (if only I had Hunt’s talent!), you in your simple white dress, crossing the aisle to the Confederate wounded, and going from bed to bed while the rest of us pretended not to see. That was the moment my stories dried up and fell like dust at my feet. The nobility with which you faced life! How you shamed us! And how beautiful you were in the shaming!

  Why, then, as my father asked me in the presence of your father, if I find you so fine, can I not marry you? Why cannot Harry James, recently turned twenty years old, marry Alice Taylor, and live with her the searching, experiential, committed life she wishes to live?