The Angry Woman Suite (16 page)

“Magdalene,” I called out. “What is it, child?”

Startled, she jumped to her feet and turned her back to me. “Nothing. Really, it’s nothing, Mr. Madsen.”

And from the back of Magdalene I could tell nothing. I saw only a fall of long blond hair, the way she straightened her broad shoulders and the dirt on her skirt from where she’d been sitting. And that she wanted to be left alone. But I waited. And when she finally turned back around, her pale eyes were anguished. Other than that, she looked fine, same as always, large and awkward for a sixteen-year-old. What I
didn’t
see was that Magdalene Grayson’s bigness was smooth and symmetrical, even classical. I didn’t see it because, primarily, Magdalene did not impress me, never had. And I had my reasons (and it’s a long list). Let me condense it for you: Magdalene was difficult. She was damn difficult. Even as a first-grader she’d been difficult, restless and moody, regularly declining participation in the schoolyard, not wanting to be in my band, looking at me with disdain, as if she knew more than I. And so I naturally proceeded to do what any overworked, underpaid teacher in my shoes would’ve done: I pretty much ignored Magdalene Grayson. For ten years—and although it’s been said that teachers have their favorites and I’d like to say that isn’t so, I’d be lying if I did. I’d had my share of favorites over the years, and my favorites, then, were Lothian Grayson and Jamie Waterston. Especially Jamie.

Jamie had been twelve the summer of 1915, the first time he’d visited his father at the mill house across the road from Washington’s Headquarters. I’d felt sorry for the boy, stuck out in the country with a distracted father and no other boys to play with, so I’d invited him for walks alongside the Brandywine, and in due time he’d become a regular at Washington’s Headquarters. He’d dust my artifacts and line them up just so, then stand before the phonograph, eyes beseeching—just as you have, Francis. And at my nod he’d carefully remove a record from its jacket, and when music filled the front room of Washington’s Headquarters, those great eyes of Jamie’s glowed with something wild. Oh, how Jamie moved me when he looked like that. I knew that look,
I felt it.
I showed him the new sheet music with parts for dance band instrumentation instead of just pianists. He was duly impressed by the “new” music—ragtime—and my collection of double-sided records featuring W.C. Sweatman, billed as the only man who could play three clarinets simultaneously.

One day Jamie asked if he could actually hold my violin, and then if he could touch the strings, and to my amazement he handled the bow as if born to it, a little tremulous at first, then assured, picking out notes, matching them to those of the recording on the phonograph. I was astounded, and when the music stopped and Jamie looked up at me, something huge clicked between us.

“He’s got talent, raw talent,” I said to my mother, watching the boy caress the bow of my violin. “I should try him on a piano. Just look at that stretch of his. Mother, his hands are amazing.”

I didn’t have a piano at Washington’s Headquarters, but when Jamie’s father returned to Maine at the end of that summer, he permitted Jamie to board at Washington’s Headquarters, to study violin with me. Of course I was overjoyed when Lothian Grayson took Jamie under her wing, showing him the ropes of the schoolyard, introducing him to their classmates and urging him to take part in their activities. And even more satisfied when my other students immediately took to Jamie, deferring to him, because Jamie was confident, different from anyone they’d ever known. A born leader, he exercised fairness and enthusiasm toward the shy ones and the homely ones, and was even accepted by the rowdies, who’d somehow gotten it through their thick skulls that here was one who was blessed, who was destined to stand apart, even above them.

Lothian Grayson was an extraordinary child as well. At five, she’d exhibited guileless precocity, and by thirteen she was undeniably the most popular girl in my school: straightforward, pretty, exquisitely tiny—so unlike her sister Magdalene, who lumbered about running into things, staring me down with those great pale eyes of hers, arrogant and closed-off and into herself: a carbon copy of her mother.

The girls’ mother, Elizabeth, was a recluse. But I’d met her when I’d driven a borrowed buckboard up to Grayson House to retrieve some relics Lear Grayson had collected for my museum. Like most everyone, I’d never had occasion or invitation to visit Grayson House, and never would’ve had Lear not heard of my museum and expressed an interest. I was awe-struck driving up to the grandly immense Grayson House—I was still, after all, a rube from Mont Clare. The woman who put her head around the front door and rather brusquely asked me what my business was put me in mind of a teacher
I’d
once had, the kind who makes you think you’ve done something terribly wrong, yet you’ve no idea what. “Oh
that,
” she said when I told her who I was and what I was after, and then she left me to wait in a foyer as large as my entire living room while she fetched Lear.

Although Lear Grayson’s family had been in the Chadds Ford area for years, and everyone knew who
he
was, I don’t think anyone could say they knew him well. He was distant, quietly officious in his duties as the Chadds Ford Historical Society president and well-respected, mainly because of the charities he patronized, and the churches he generously donated to, although he and his family never attended any of them. Neither did the Graysons socialize with the Wyeths, the du Ponts nor the Windles, the other bastions of the upper echelon who kept fine homes in the valley; indeed, aside from Lear’s business and civic activities, the Graysons appeared to live in a world apart from everyone else. Maybe, as many whispered, it was because Lear and Elizabeth Grayson had a third daughter, named Stella, older than Magdalene and Lothian, said to have been born in Europe, and an aberration: a monster with one eye smack dab in the middle of her forehead, who could neither speak nor hear, and had to be kept locked away at Grayson House lest she inflict grievous harm on herself and others. Of course no one had actually ever seen such a child, and I didn’t believe such a story for a minute.

I waited the better part of a half-hour that day, rocking on my heels in the Grayson House foyer, wondering at the silence, where the servants were, wondering what was taking Lear so long, even wondering where he kept his mysterious Stella tied up. I peered into the massive parlor I’d not been invited to wait in. It was richly furnished, elegant, as intimidating as the house’s rolling manicured lawns and well-tended shrubbery. When Lear did finally come downstairs to greet me, it was perfunctorily, and we went outside, straight to work, hauling boxes from the carriage house to the horse and wagon I’d left parked at the top of the drive. He offered me neither food nor drink. He spoke only as we were finishing up.

“The society has some new articles coming in from Philadelphia, Aidan. A shipment you might be interested in. I’d be happy to bring it to you when it arrives. Might be something there for your museum.”

I’d be happy to bring it to you.
I understood then that the woman who’d answered the door was Elizabeth Grayson, Lear’s wife. His embarrassment. I wouldn’t be invited back.

“Right kindly of you, Lear,” I answered politely.

He loaded the last of the artifacts into my wagon, along with a heavy chair his tall, lean frame easily handled, then stood back and looked at a place past my shoulder. “Elizabeth wasn’t always—” I waved a hand as if to say no offense had been taken. Lear’s long face tightened, but he continued. “We traveled everywhere, all over the world. When we returned here, home from Europe, I knew I’d rediscovered something special. I committed myself to raising children here, schooling them in this country, a place distinctly American, not foreign. I want my children to be Americans, Aidan.”

I’d misread Lear Grayson. He wasn’t so eager to be rid of me after all. He wanted to talk.

“It’s magnificent, Lear. Truly magnificent.” I looked about the grounds, the orchard in the distance, then back at the enormous house. It was a mix of architectural styles: Georgian, gothic, even traditional, complete with wraparound porch. Somehow it worked. Lear’s voice brought me back to the present.

“Sorry,” I said. “What was that?”

“But she never goes outside anymore.
Never.”

I felt a ripple of apprehension and adjusted my spectacles. “Mrs. Grayson, you mean?” It must’ve been the way I said it, because Lear’s face closed down completely.

“Things have a way of changing people,” Lear said crisply, turning away, adjusting the ropes around the bundles in the wagon.

“That they do,” I said with mock cheeriness. I fished for something safe: “The girls. I expected to see Lothian and Magdalene.”

“They stay in on weekends.”

Not a word about his much-rumored Stella, as if I really expected Lear to say he kept a little girl chained up in the basement and would I care to take a look? As if his Stella even existed.

“Lothian’s quite the girl,” I said, grasping at straws, wondering why I didn’t just leave. I mean, I
wanted
to leave. “A good student. So popular. Spirited. Quite the picture of industriousness. I can always count on Lothian. You must be very proud of her, Lear.”

Lear extended a hand. “I’m proud of all my girls. A good day to you, Aidan. I’ll be in touch about that shipment from Philadelphia.”

It was clear I’d been dismissed, and so I climbed into my borrowed buckboard and made my getaway, not acknowledging even to myself that I’d found Lear’s sadness threatening, even tiresome, and that by side-stepping it, hurrying him past it,
I
had been the one who’d put the skids to our meeting. I didn’t see that I was only for myself, and so it goes without saying that neither did I hear Lear say “
all
my girls
,
” and not “
both
my girls.”

The main thing was I escaped the oppressiveness of Grayson House with normalcy and dreams intact, but of course I didn’t realize either—how could I have?—that normalcy is only perception, and that dreams are merely illusions, not necessarily markers of anything that one intends to make real at all.

***

“What is it?” I repeated to Magdalene. I couldn’t leave her to sitting in the dirt, bawling her eyes out. I was the teacher, the authority. Until safely home, Magdalene Grayson was, technically-speaking, my responsibility.

I followed her gaze. We were standing on the crest of a small knoll. Just ahead was a rock ledge. Below it and to the right, in a golden distance, were small farms intersected by the curve of streams. To our left were dark clouds, a possible storm.

“Do you see?” Magdalene asked softly.

Did I see what?

“There’s a war going on, Mr. Madsen. The war is something almost … uncontrollable. And I was just thinking that those dark clouds over there are uncontrollable, too. Those clouds are like the war, and over there, farther, where the sun is still shining, do you see how the sunlight is getting smaller, how it is almost just a speck now?”

I squinted into the horizon, straining to see into those dark clouds, to see what Magdalene saw, although I guessed what she was implying. The war she was referring to was the fracas in Europe. She was intimating that the furor instigated by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Slav nationalist was a threat to us: an ugly idea, and a stupid one too, and I’d told her so in class.

“What do you see?” Magdalene whispered. “
Do you see what I see?
Do you see the encroaching savage? Can you feel the rain on
your
head? Or are you
really
just like the others? Do you see only what you want to see?”

I longed to tell her she was impertinent. I bit my tongue.
Fey
was the next good word that came to mind.

“Hear no evil, see no evil,” she murmured. “Isn’t that right? In that one tiny splay of light, you see a safe and glorious past—nothing more. You see only your precious history, don’t you, Mr. Madsen?
No
future.”

Worse than trying to bait me, she was now
reproaching
me—and so of course I wanted to shake her. Instead I delved deeper into my schoolmaster persona, dredging up what I thought were words of comfort, adult words, words that were my job.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of, Magdalene. War is a million miles away.”

She looked at me hard, and the disgusting thing was I thought I saw pity flash in her pale eyes. She knew I didn’t understand her, or even want to. She
knew
I was insincere. And that’s what she pitied me for. For being hollow, empty. I disliked her even more.

“I’m
not afraid,” she said, tossing her head. “I am
overwhelmed
by grandeur, Mr. Madsen. I told Lothian and Jamie to get lost because I wanted this spectacle all to myself.” She looked back over the valley, and her voice went soft.

“I wanted to watch the shadows chase down the light. You probably can’t understand that, Mr. Madsen. You’re not … contemplative. But I am. You don’t know that about me, do you? You don’t know
anything
about me. But it doesn’t matter. The thing is, I wanted to see what the light would do, how long it would take to seek out its freedom again, and how it would go about doing it—which cloud it would peek out from under, because it will, you know. It always does. And I wanted to watch it happen. I wanted to be
moved.”
She glanced back over her shoulder.

“I want to watch the future unfold, Mr. Madsen. I can scarcely wait for the next chapter, what will happen next … whatever it is, I want to be a part of it, everything! And I’ve nothing to lose by speaking my mind now. I’m
graduating,
Mr. Madsen!
I’m
free!”

Magdalene spread her arms then, as if embracing the world, and on anyone else, in any other place, the gesture could’ve been melodramatic. But it wasn’t, not on Magdalene Grayson, at least not at that moment. And that was the moment when I should have known what Magdalene would do to me—to us all. But, naturally, I couldn’t hold onto the moment. One never holds onto the moments one should. Instead something instinctive went off in me, a warning bell, and things fell right back into place, back to where they’d always been, and again Magdalene Grayson was the bane of my professional life: the fey child, the smirker, the one who’d believed herself superior. Exchanging nary another word with her, I’d walked her to the base of Grayson Hill, and when she graduated the next morning I silently declared her diploma
my
passport to freedom, a ticket out of the bondage that had held us together for ten years. But, even better, I was now free all the way around. It was officially summer. Teaching duties were over. I was free to tend my museum full-time, and to prepare for Festival. Best of all, I was free to prepare for the return, to the mill house across the road from Washington’s Headquarters, of Matthew Waterston.