The Angry Woman Suite (19 page)

“Color, sound, bells, chimes …” I said. “How—?”

“I’d hoped Jamie might be an artist one day, like his old man. Like his mother. Problem is, Jamie can’t draw himself out of a paper bag. But he can make music, something I can’t.”

“Oh, but you can. Jesus, Matthew, with these paintings, you
have
made music. With these, you’re a musician,
par excellence
.”

“I see,” Lear interjected. “This has to do with what we were talking about. Brilliant, old boy.”

We’d been talking about paintings and music. Fathers and sons. I racked my brain for Lear’s point, one Matthew seemed to have gotten because he was nodding, although, oddly, his dark eyes sparkled, his lips twitched. What was so funny? No, we’d been talking about war, and then
after
that, paintings and music. But what did war have to do with paintings and music? And when had war become so suddenly entertaining? What was I missing?

Lear faced Matthew, shutting me out. “Really, if you think about it, everything taken together is essentially the
same
story. Stories are about basic differences, like you and Jamie. And you and Aidan here. Your intrinsic different natures. And then on an even bigger scale, say, Germany and the rest of Europe,
their
differences, and there’s America, we’re even
more
different …”

Lear’s stupid war again. I tuned him out. Since getting it in his head
he
was Festival, he’d become a pontificating pain in the ass.

But Lear’s voice managed to pierce my protective bubble. “Of course, you’re right, Matt. First, there’re differences. Then, ideally, consensus. My point exactly. If one has the vision and works hard at it, one
can
almost always find common ground. But first we
must
sift through the diversity, like you have here with Jamie, with these paintings. So it makes sense—if there is such a thing as making sense of the insensible. We
will
be drawn into the war in Europe, Matt. We have a
responsibility
.”

No sense from the insensible, my sentiment exactly. I went deeper inside myself, back to thoughts of my museum. I saw queues of people admiring my relics from a war past, waiting for me to escort them across the road to the mill house, to the home and art institute of the great American artist who’d come to Chadds Ford to exercise the very essence of freedom: to reinvent himself and his art. And what better place to bring art and music and war together, I would ask that breathless throng, than right here at Washington’s Headquarters, where battle had once been waged for the very freedom Matthew Waterston now deployed?

My spirits suddenly soared, because it was so obvious
I
was the one with the capital, the
real
angles and the
real music. A million abstract paintings could never change the fact that
Jamie and
I
were inexorably linked by our common passion for music. A link that had
not
required force or fabrication.

I raised my chin. Having all that capital meant I was powerful. That I could more than deal with Sahar Witherspoon, too; maybe even put her to work for my museum. What I would
not
do, however, was deal with war. Real war was impossible, pure and simple, and that’s all there was to it.

***

I wanted to hate her as much as I wanted to use her. Sadly, my hatred was malleable. The first thing Sahar Witherspoon did right was not come between me and Jamie. The second thing was she did not put the skids to Matthew’s students’ parties. She’d one rule only: no smoking in the mill house. And turned out, despite being “new,” she also had an ear for a story, already fielding all the gossip out of East Chester and Chadds Ford, which was the third right thing about her, and although I tried wheedling sources from her, she demurred, infuriating me to no end.

I was drawn in.

“Thought you’d like her,” Jamie said. His expression was sly. “Everyone’s always liked my mother. She has a way with people. You do like her, don’t you?”

“Course I like her,” I grunted. “What’s not to like?”

“She’s almost perfect. Almost
too
perfect, don’t you think, Aidan? Don’t you think my mother’s too perfect? Too beautiful?”

“Don’t be a shit,” I said.

But, yes, Sahar was beautiful—a beautiful cripple. But what eventually kindled my full interest in Sahar was that I’d never known a woman to act so in love, especially a married woman. Sahar looked at Matthew
lovingly.
Yet she wasn’t the least clingy. I watched her mask her disappointment whenever Matthew excused himself, which was often, closeting himself in his studio for huge chunks of time. My eventual determination? Sahar was sporting. She was damn sporting. And she couldn’t have been more unlike my mother. She understood her husband was a busy, important man. She had common sense. She knew how to make do. Sahar Witherspoon didn’t make demands.

That summer, when it wasn’t too humid, Sahar wheeled herself outside the mill house and painted her “little pictures” in watercolors. Many afternoons Jamie and I met up with her after closing the museum, looking over her shoulder as she worked—and that’s when Sahar did the fourth thing right: she volunteered for Festival. Sufficiently thawed, I asked Sahar if she’d mind sketching Washington’s Headquarters, and in due course she began wheeling herself across the road to my house on a regular basis, handing out watercolors to any museum-goer who admired them.

“You could charge for those,” Jamie told her one day. “You could make money of your own.”

Something dark surfaced in Sahar’s eyes. “I don’t need money.” Jamie’s eyes also darkened.

“Of course you don’t,” he threw at her before stalking off. I stared after him, stunned, only brought back to Sahar by her large sigh. Her eyes brimmed with unshed tears, and I instinctively crouched and took one of her hands in mine, murmuring something—what, I’ve no idea. I just remember thinking she’d been dealt so much: an inattentive husband, the polio, still not being able to walk, and now a churlish adolescent in the mix.

“I’m all right,” Sahar said, dabbing at her eyes. “But, thank you. From the bottom of my heart. You’re a good man. A caring man, Aidan.”

And that was it, like an electric shock, the gratitude that engulfed me. A thrilling electric shock. It filled me up, making me feel more alive, and I suddenly wanted to embrace Sahar for giving me what I hadn’t even known I’d been missing. Of course I didn’t—embrace her, that is. I wasn’t that far gone. But I
silently
, fervently thanked her
.
I thanked her for allowing me to appear noble, a thing no woman had ever allowed me before, certainly not the easy, empty-headed women in Philadelphia, from whom it wouldn’t have counted anyway, and certainly not my martyr of a mother.

And that was how it started. How I appointed myself Matthew Waterston’s wife’s protector and helpmate.

The Waterston Art Festival of 1916 was a huge success, bigger, bolder and brassier than our previous four festivals put together. My mother, who’d chaired several committees, pleaded exhaustion and bid me good night as I readied the bandstand for the dance to be held on the old battlefield adjacent to Washington’s Headquarters. If I’d known—and I really mean this—that it would be the last time I’d see my mother alive, I’d have eschewed the banalities of festivals and concerts and lovely summer nights, and I’d have held her. I’d have held her tight, and I’d have smelled her fine scent, and I’d have pressed my face against her tissue skin. I’d have begged her forgiveness. I’d have let her know that without her I was exposed, that I had no beginning point, no reason for hiding, no reference for resentment, not even an inkling of what kind of man I was now supposed to be.

I’d have done everything right. I’d have been a good son.

“But would it have been enough?” Jamie asked, as if he could read my mind. “For either of you?” He’d stayed with me for three days, from the moment we’d come in from the dance and found my mother slumped in front of the fireplace, through all that gin-sodden night before her funeral. I stared at him, hurt.

Matthew said, “I’m sorry, it’s tough. Always tough losing someone.” I thought of Lear then, the pain he must’ve had tied up in the monstrous Stella, the daughter no outsider had seen. The dreams Lear must’ve had for her had surely died when he’d first laid eyes on her, I understood that now. I understood so much more now because of Sahar, because of how she never complained. This was my first experience with genuine angst, while people everywhere else were grappling with it every day of their lives.

“Is it guilt?” Jamie asked me the day of the funeral. I was thunderstruck. Was there to be no end to his probing?

Everyone had moved away from the yawning hole, my mother’s final resting place, leaving me remembering how I’d blamed her for killing
my
dreams of traveling with a band, and how I’d punished her with my railing silences. Only Jamie had stayed behind, as if realizing the last place I wanted to be was standing alone over that hole, weighted down by the self-imposed judgment of my sparse character, teetering on the brink of the chasm that my debilitating alienation from everything real had created.

I’d never felt more regret or guilt.

“Of course I don’t feel guilty,” I quickly denied. “Why should I?”

“Lots of people feel guilty,” Jamie said, giving me one of his sideways looks, “when someone dies or gets sick. They get to thinking that if they’d been a better person, they could’ve changed things. Sometimes it doesn’t even help believing no one has the power to change the unchangeable; people still think crazy things. I think you probably did your best, Aidan.”

I wanted to crawl in that hole with my mother.

“You
are
… susceptible.” Jamie sounded surprised. “But I know exactly what you mean, Aidan. I’ve never been able to talk about my mother, either.”

The wake, attended by nearly everyone out of Chadds Ford, East Chester, West Chester, and Mont Clare, by people I hadn’t even known my mother knew, was held in the great room of the Waterston mill house. I worked a path through to Lear, mindlessly shaking hands, accepting condolences. A stranger was with Lear: young, in his mid-twenties, fair-skinned, blond-haired and short, with regular, even bland, features. Lear introduced him somewhat apologetically:

“Our houseguest, Frederick Forsythe. Frederick is also our new assistant at Grayson Investments, Aidan. And this, Frederick, is the man I’ve told you so much about—
the
famous Aidan Madsen. Schoolmaster, band leader, curator of the Washington’s Headquarters museum, and head cheerleader for Waterston Festival. We’d be lost without him.”

Frederick Forsythe made the appropriate noises about my mother, and I nodded, noting his stubby fingers and well-manicured nails, detesting him thoroughly. I detested him for being there, for looking bored, which, given just that one time, shouldn’t have mattered. Frederick wasn’t the only stranger to me at my mother’s wake. But it was as if, in that minute, I somehow knew Frederick Forsythe would be ingratiating himself for a lifetime, not just that one day out of my life.

“I know, I know,” Sahar said soothingly. She’d taken to wheeling herself across the road most mornings to share coffee and gossip with me. “But look at the other side of this: Lear
needs
Frederick. Lear’s shopping more and more sponsors, and he’s inundated with all the paperwork. Did you know Lear’s got Coca-Cola signed for Festival next year, and on an even bigger scale? Borax, too. He’s got mountains of work, Aidan. Could you try thinking of Frederick as working for all of us?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because Forsythe’s a bastard.”

Sahar grinned. “Literally?”

“Probably.”

“And just how would you know this?”

“The point is, Sahar, I don’t trust Frederick.”

“And this is based on—?”

“My gut.”

But Sahar was having none of my prickliness. Which didn’t bother me in the least, because she had to allow it: she had no claims on me. Of course, in hindsight, I see what a complete and impervious idiot I was, the way I so easily and readily backtracked into the familiarity of that particular blindness that masquerades as reality: in this case, believing that Sahar Witherspoon was a safe harbor holding my best interests at heart.

What a joke that would turn out to be.

Matthew and I met for symbolic ritual: a last round of gins under the oak at the mill house—farewell to a year, a summer, to tourists and Festival, and to my mother, and although we would, in days to come, take our gins in front of roaring fires, gins on winter nights are never the same as gins shared out-of-doors under a shady oak. Already we wore sweaters. The school term was commencing and I was frenzied with lesson plans, and scores for my student band, lectures and tours of the battlefield I’d booked for the weekends; the constant care my museum required.

We’d just raised glasses when Lear and Frederick arrived. Frederick leaned against the big oak’s trunk, and immediately the hackles on my neck rose when talk turned to the war overseas.

Frederick said, “But if you think about it, war is a biological necessity.”

“How so?” Matthew asked, lips twitching under his moustache.

I watched Frederick carefully, not caring one whit about his opinion; instead trying to ascertain what it was about him that amused Matthew, but made
me
want to go inside myself, into a closet of some warm core of old certainty. I saw that even while he lounged, Frederick’s hands were anxious, his eyes restless.

“Nations,” Frederick said, “must move forward or rot away. And war is a natural instinct for moving forward.”

He was so full of pompous crap. “But we’re not animals!” I said. “You can’t compare Germany’s invasions to a fight for survival, like a wolf after a deer! Germany doesn’t
need
to attack, to dominate, to eat up, in order to exist! We’re supposed to be civilized, man!”

Frederick’s eyes landed on me. He said coolly, “We’re
supposed
to survive. That’s all,
man.
”

“Frederick might have a point,” Lear interjected, business-like. “For Germany, the choices
are
power or downfall, because to Germany power
is
survival. So far as America’s concerned, though, we’ll pay dearly for our isolationism. If not today, then tomorrow. Mark my words—and I hate it, just hate it. I hate knowing I’m right, but I’m afraid we’re going to
have
to involve ourselves.”