The Angry Woman Suite (28 page)

“Been busy,” I said. “You might’ve heard. I’ve done well for myself, Aidan.”

There was a commotion from inside the house; heavy, pounding footsteps, the front door swinging open.

“Francis!” Stella squealed, flying off the porch, and before I knew it, Stella was all over me, covering my face with kisses and clutching me in an embrace no man could’ve been expected to survive.

I was home.

The next part is more of a blur, like a dream. I see that the screening around the porch has been removed, which is why the portico looks grand, and the shutters freshly painted. And then Mother is ushering me and Elena into the foyer of Grayson House, and I am vainly trying to grasp
why
Stella is clinging to my arm instead of being holed up in the nuthouse, while Mother is trying to get my attention, telling me something about Grandmother.

Something’s not right, something even more than Earl’s missing arm and Stella not being in the nuthouse. “A month ago,” Mother is saying. “Your grandmother passed a month ago. A stroke.” I nod at Mother, as if I understand; as if it’s been two minutes, not two years, since I left Grayson House for Festival.

But the next part is
very
clear. My voice echoes through the foyer and into the front parlor, all the way up the stairwell and back down again.

“I’d like to introduce Elena Fitzgerald,” I say.

“Yes, yes, yes,” they all say, crowding around Elena and stroking her hand, her shoulder, reverently, as if she’s gold. “We know Elena’s records. Beautiful voice. Such style.”

“Originally from these parts,” Aidan says. “I taught Elena in the first grade.”

“My fiancée,” I say.

And then I see the sudden horror on Mother’s face.

And I see Aidan recoil as if struck.

***

Aidan crossed the threshold of Portsmith’s reality with me, striding corridors redolent of old urine and spent dreams, taking me to meet the patient known as James Madsen.

“His room is there,” he pointed.

“You’re not coming?” I despised how desperate I sounded.

He said he’d been many times and he wasn’t looking to get hit over the head by a baseball bat again, thank you very much for asking. There was no cure for Huntington’s disease, he said. But this is what I deserved to know so I’d know how to plan the rest of my life, even though it wasn’t a done deal that Huntington’s would get me the way it had my grandfather, Matthew Waterston, and his son after him.

Aidan was considerably kinder than he’d been earlier, when he’d marched me outside Grayson House and given me a talking-to about responsibility; how it wouldn’t have killed me to write home once in a while, especially seeing as how my mother had enough on her plate without having me on it too, he said. Earl had come home from the war with a serious drinking problem, and Lothian had up and quit, first, the Western Union, then Grayson House itself when conservatorship of Stella had passed to my mother following Grandmother’s stroke, which was when my mother had arranged for Stella’s release from the Portsmith asylum. That’s also when Lothian had left home. No way, she’d said, was
she
staying on at Grayson House with Stella living there, too.

Especially since she’d been so nicely compensated for her share of Grayson House.

“Bad blood between those two,” Aidan said wearily. “Lothian and Stella.”

“Three,” I corrected—later wondering why I hadn’t come right out and asked where the money to buy Lothian out of Grayson House had come from.

I suppose it was the way I was raised: gentlemen did not ask questions that were improprieties.

Aidan grunted. “How’s that?”

“There are
three
sisters. And bad blood between them is a fact of life.”

“It wasn’t when they were kids. Your mother and Lothian got along fine then.”

“Well, it’s been bad blood for as long as I can remember.”

“About bad blood,” Aidan whispered then. “You can’t marry that girl, Francis. You can’t marry Elena. And it’s not just your age …”

And that’s when Aidan
confirmed
who my father was.

I slipped into the room. It was semi-dark. I waited until I could make out the bed: guard rails on all sides, and filled with movement.
Lots
of movement—and not for the first time I considered forgetting all of it and hot-footing it on to Jersey to rejoin my band. But I made myself move forward. I sat down on the chair next to the bed and reached for the gooseneck lamp on the side table, adjusting the light so it shone on his face.

It was incomprehensible, beyond eerie, looking at a reflection of years and years of a pain that never heals.

His skin was smooth. Not a wrinkle—and he met my gaze, appearing lucid enough, and for a long, breathless moment in time, a moment I will never forget, Jamie Witherspoon’s eyes stayed locked onto mine. I reached under the blanket, seeking a hand. It wasn’t hard to find—it was tied to the rail and it twitched incessantly. Folding the blanket back, I untied him and wonderingly palmed that shaky hand.

It was a spider
hand.

I’d never seen another. With long musician fingers exactly like mine.

I tentatively touched his brow, running my spider fingers down his nose, lightly; the cleft above his quivering upper lip, the tip of his shuddering chin. His eyelids flickered, sloughing tears. He moaned. But even if he
had
been able to speak, there could never have been words big enough because it
was
unbelievable.

Jamie Witherspoon Waterston and I were mirror images.

We were twins, the one indistinguishable from the other.

Aidan said I actually got Jamie at a good time. When Jamie was volatile, it was unbearable having to feel his pain. Even with the significant loss of mental function, the result of brain-cell death, Jamie Witherspoon still had enough in him to know his loss, and he cried, and it broke your heart every single time, feeling his agony, remembering the way he’d been and knowing he could remember it, too.

I sat beside my father for an indeterminable time that day, my mind by turns blank and racing, wondering what it must’ve been like to be twenty-five and famous and about to disappear, never to be seen by anyone again. Except by my mother, who’d loved him beyond imagining, was how Aidan put it. And by Aidan himself, who at Jamie’s behest, had committed Jamie to Portsmith under Aidan’s surname, not Witherspoon or Waterston, in order to circumvent discovery, exploitation, and maybe most of all, Lothian. Coincidentally, many years later, while incarcerated at the same hospital, taking
my
punishment for pummeling Lothian, Stella had actually seen Jamie there.

“A fluke,” Aidan described it. “Both were being transported, and there was a traffic jam in the corridor. Jamie looked straight at Stella, and a staffer said Stella shouted,
‘He didn’t get away, he didn’t get away!’
”

So Stella had known all along what had become of the one who’d “escaped.”

And now I wondered what was to become of
me.

Aidan told me about the rumor mill following Jamie’s disappearance. When Jamie had failed to show for a concert in Baltimore, the talk had been it was booze bringing him down. Everyone had seen Jamie’s trembling hands and intermittent confusion. Weeks later and still no word, there was suspicion he’d met with foul play, even that his body was encased in cement at the bottom of the Brandywine. For what reason, no one could say, but that was still the big rumor. What others had said—and this was the story Aidan himself put out there—was that after his parents’ deaths Jamie hadn’t felt up to the business high jinks of the music world any longer, and he’d escaped to Brazil, choosing the music of a simpler life.

And I knew Aidan’s version to be the one Lothian had latched onto because it parlayed so nicely into my memories of the angry women who’d punctuated my miserable childhood with accusations and recriminations about a mysterious male who’d lucked out and gotten away from them.

I left Aidan’s journal at Grayson House that day, which explains how it ultimately fell into my mother’s hands, and later how my daughter Elyse got it—Elyse, who would later use it to try and one-up me. Elyse was like that,
always
trying to one-up me. That girl literally drove me to drink. But back then I saw no point in keeping the journal. I’d no more questions about anything, let alone “murders,” that word Aidan had thrown at me as if I’d known what the hell he was talking about—which, with hindsight’s clarity, I
would’ve
had I ever finished reading his damn journal.

I told Elena nothing about why Aidan and I’d left so suddenly “for a drive,” and nothing about why we were departing Grayson House so quickly now. I drove furiously, silently, as if the devil itself were on my tail, out of Pennsylvania and into New York, straight to Elena’s aunt’s house in Queens.

I pulled up to the curb—and then someone else moved into my body. And as Elena listened to this other side of me, her almond eyes widened with shock. My old self took notice,
naturally,
and wrestled with my new self, aching to hold Elena and reassure her that this crazy other fellow didn’t mean a word he was saying. But my brand new self was formidable, fueled by fear of the 50/50 chance it had of inheriting my grandfather and father’s Huntington’s disease, that rare and fatal genetic disorder characterized by uncontrollable spasms and emotional instability.

I could never risk that truth getting
out there—
but
I also wouldn’t rig my own disappearance as my father Jamie had done—there
had
to be newer treatments available. Besides, I
was
symptom-free. But I could never risk marriage either, inviting children. And I wouldn’t have Elena sacrifice having children. I didn’t want that kind of sacrifice on my head.

“Please get out of the car,” I said to her.

“But I don’t … Francis, what is this? I don’t understand! Is there … someone else?”

I wouldn’t be responsible for false hope, either. Even if it meant losing a name vocalist. There were other vocalists.
I
was Francis Grayson, after all. The star, the brains, the genesis, the whole
reason
for the Francis Grayson Orchestra.

“I’m sorry, yes … I thought by telling my family we were engaged, I could move on. I can’t, Elena.”

She cried like a whipped puppy, clawing at my real self’s heartstrings—and gathering up the things at her feet, she shoved one of her parcels at me.

Beat up and exhausted, I decided on a room before continuing on to Jersey. I bought a bottle of Scotch and chugged it in the car, welcoming the sting, which was like nothing compared to what followed when I checked into a hotel, when it
really
stung, when I realized there would be no Elena, no Buster, no family, no band mates in the rooms next to mine, no nothing.

For the first time in my life I was really alone.

I went up to my room and continued drinking straight from the bottle, all the while playing with the pictures in my head, understanding more the drunker I got.

I saw Mother’s portrait hanging at Grayson House, that strange half-smile on her face—and the boy in the backdrop of the portrait. Then me lying in bed listening to women scream at one another.

Then another picture, this one of Stella loving me one minute and boxing my ears the next, and then one of Lothian gnawing on me until I’m a bleeding, grizzled mess—but over and under and through all those pictures flipping through my head is music. Wonderful, haunting music, and always, always Aidan looking at me over his spectacles teaching me the music, blue eyes penetrating …

And I see he is afraid of me.

I drank more, making a considerable dent in the bottle before remembering the parcel Elena had shoved at me. I tore the wrapping off and opened a box, revealing the watercolor Aidan had given me before my move to New York. I’d pawned it back then, getting all of two dollars for it. I wondered what Elena had paid to get it back, and how excited she must’ve been at the prospect of returning it to me. It was unframed and smelled of lilacs, like Lothian used to smell. I’d never noticed they shared the same scent, Lothian and Elena—and Sahar, too? Perhaps all women did? I held the thick paper out at arm’s length—then turned it over. My hands trembled, like Jamie’s did, terrifying me.

On the backside Elena had written, “For Francis, Moonlight Serenade forever, to the end.”

And that was when I cried, the child inside me downtrodden by the unjustifiable, by Lothian, by the women who hadn’t wanted me to begin with, and by
all
women who give birth to disease and evasions. I drank and wept that whole night, passing out at dawn and sleeping straight through my gig in Jersey.

AIDAN
Pennsylvania 1919–1928

None of it went the way I’d hoped. Lear returned a changed man, and yes, certainly I’d expected his time in France to affect him. I was a historian after all, a student of the Great Battle, and so I knew war did things to men. Still, I was ill-prepared for what met us on the train platform that day in June of 1919. Lear was gaunt; his eyes sunk deep in their sockets. He barely acknowledged me or Matthew and Sahar, and then left almost immediately with his family—and we didn’t see him or Magdalene again for days, a time wherein I agonized over Magdalene’s absence and wondered what all
had
happened to Lear overseas. And we all wondered just
how
Magdalene was telling her father of Frederick’s deceit, and Matthew’s bailout plan for Grayson Investments.

It was nearing July when Lear and Magdalene cut across the meadow in front of the mill house. Matthew pulled chairs out from the lawn table, but Magdalene, who’d begun chatting with Jamie, demurred, while we older men circled Sahar and shook hands and raised our drinks.

“I heard what you’re doing for us,” Lear said to Matthew. “And I don’t know how to—” Lear’s face was drawn, and I had a sudden urge to knee him in the small of his back, to get his blood moving, to make him look normal again. Matthew waved everyone in the direction of the carriage house.

“Finally!” Sahar laughed. “We’re to see the great suite!” I grabbed the handles of Sahar’s wheelchair and turned it wide, and she and I led the procession, joking as Matthew unlocked the carriage house doors, blinking into the brilliant sunlight that poured into his studio from the overhead windows, extinguishing the last of a cigar haze—and then our laughter died.