The Angry Woman Suite (30 page)

My confusion thickened. “For?”

“Honesty,” Jamie said simply. “Dad believes you’ve got this huge capacity for truth—but his Angry Women are sending you a warning:
Watch your back with Sahar Witherspoon Waterston.”

“I can’t believe—”

“Mother knows when my dad starts pulling back,” Jamie argued. “She even knows he pulls away because he’s trying to save himself from her.
That’s
what makes her desperate. What you see in some of my father’s other works—his music pieces, for example? You see a connection he was looking for with me
and
a solace he found, and that made Mother crazy because he found the solace
without her.
Just as it makes her crazy that he paints her darkness.
Their
darkness. The bottom line is that they’re adept at driving each other insane.”

“But back to the fall,” I mumbled.

“Oh, so now you want to talk about it? Well, apparently my father had started pulling back more than usual. And so Mother pulled off the stupidest stunt of all time, making it so he could
never
leave her—which he never would’ve anyway, despite other women, because what if?
What if my father weren’t able to paint without his muse?

“I know, it’s sick, isn’t it? He can’t leave her because he thinks he can’t paint without her craziness to inspire him. But she
did
do it,” Jamie insisted. “My mother
did
throw herself down a staircase, and then blamed everyone else on the planet for what she did—but she’ll never admit to it. Just as my father will never stop trying to make her come clean, or warning others to steer clear of her. Hence, the Angry Woman pictures. And that, my dear Aidan, is the whole story of how wrong you are about Magdalene and my father.”

“But you forgot two things,” I said hoarsely.

“What?”

“Lear Grayson. Your father
refused
to show me the completed suite until Lear was home from France. So answer me this: what do Lear Grayson and this so-called warning about your mother have in common?”

Jamie’s eyes glittered. “Don’t have a clue. Only my dad knows the connection to Lear Grayson.”

“No, Magdalene knows it, too. Your father told me it was
Magdalene
who didn’t want anyone seeing the paintings until her father got home.”

“News to me. Do the paintings contain a warning about Lear too, then? Hell, I don’t know. What I
can
believe is that the suite has many fronts—lots of things in life serve more than one purpose. This suite
is
intended to salvage Grayson Investments, that’s its original front. And if my father
does
succeed in saving Grayson Investments with the Angry Women, we all benefit, because without Grayson this valley takes a hit, because we’re all invested in Festival now. Hotels, restaurants, crafts, food, livestock, history, the music, art, you name it, we all get a boost from Festival.” Jamie took a deep breath. “And your second point?”

“That last painting …”

“It
is
different from the others,” Jamie conceded. “It’s much more Magdalene than the others. I can’t answer to it. All I know is you’re giving my mother too much credit, and my father not enough. And I’m asking—no, I’m begging you, Aidan,
please
talk to my father. I’m begging you to put your idiotic, misplaced pride away and square things before it’s too late.”

I squared nothing. Cursory examination of Jamie’s extraordinary charge against Sahar proved too intricate, taking me too close to the uncomfortable notion that I desired only the unattainable: other men’s wives, their children, their best friends. So I packed Jamie’s warning up with his disdain—and it was a long time before I looked at either again.

Sahar enabled my isolationism by not inviting me to say goodbye to Matthew when he and Magdalene left for New York on tour, and by never questioning my silence. Nor, so far as I knew, did
she
even question why Matthew stayed away so long with The Angry Woman Suite, although I was aware she read the Philadelphia and New York papers too, and so she had to be aware of the veiled inferences being made about the beautiful model “helping” make Matthew’s introduction of the suite the phenomenon it turned out to be. The papers said Magdalene was “elusive,” but I could read between the lines. I could read she was the toast of New York. I could read that Matthew and Magdalene had turned their backs on us Brandywine people.

And that was how my isolationism, stoked by Sahar, and carefully tended by myself, grew. Until it became a mighty living, breathing thing, defining me.

So, really, what
was
there to talk about?

Nor did Lear say anything to me about Matthew and Magdalene after they left. He joined Sahar and me in going about life as though nothing were amiss—and I understood Matthew and Magdalene turned in equally good performances themselves, returning to Chadds Ford for our first festival following the war as if nothing had happened between any of us.

Matthew, I heard, made an appearance at the historical society while Magdalene, with Earl, checked into an East Chester hotel, where, Lear told me this much, Magdalene presented him with an incredible sum of money: the take on all but the last of the Angry Woman paintings. And so it was done. With the Angry Women, Matthew cemented his legacy as America’s foremost artist
and
put Grayson Investments back in the black.

He’d saved the Graysons from themselves.

I led the festival parade down Broad Street and oversaw the dance afterwards, and although I stayed on the lookout for Magdalene, I didn’t see her or Matthew at Festival that year, or the year after, or the following year either. I later heard that Magdalene and Earl had settled in New York City, and although I was aware Matthew continued going back and forth between the mill house and the city often enough to keep talk to a minimum, I was not invited over when he was in residence, nor did Sahar talk about him when he returned to New York.

Years passed and Lothian Grayson graduated from my schoolroom, retreating to Grayson House to wait for Jamie to make his mark on the music world and return for her. And for his part Jamie wrote often enough, considerate for one who’d had it up to his eyeballs with my “mule-ass tenacity.”

Although his letters were superficial in the beginning, I gleaned knowledge of Jamie’s frequent contacts with Matthew and, as time went on, I also knew of Jamie’s first band and of his first composition—“Dazed”—and when he took “Witherspoon” for his professional name, so as not to capitalize on his father’s fame. I was also one of the first to learn of Jamie’s breakthrough series of broadcasts over WWJ in Detroit, and I have to say this: the fissures that defined my heart were almost bridged when Jamie’s broadcasts proved highly successful at bringing him to the ears of a wider audience, when he started bringing
my
old dreams of traveling with a dance band to life, commencing with the collegiate circuit. And then, with his memorable engagement at the Metropolitan, my letter back to Jamie told of
my
own first broadcast in 1923, over the old Wanamaker station in Philadelphia, for the Boy Scouts of Delaware County.

Ancient hurts neatly closeted, parallel lives documented, my previous connection with Jamie was, I believed, reestablished.

But it turned out to be nine long years before the fog lifted completely. Nine years of a mostly flat life. Nine years before the biggest peak on my comfortable horizon was that of Jamie’s agent booking an engagement for him at The Eagle Club in New York, a prestigious slot for even a seasoned pro.

Nine years since I’d last set foot in Manhattan, the city where Matthew and Magdalene held court. A city I no longer had reason to avoid because Matthew and Magdalene were the one history lesson I cared nothing about.

In fact, I couldn’t have been less interested or invested in them. I was safe.

I wheeled Sahar into The Eagle Club, wishing she could walk on her own, not for my sake, but so the world would have to look up at her quiet beauty, not down. Sahar, though, didn’t seem to mind. She seemed entranced by the candlelight and glamor; the beautiful women with red lips and long cigarette holders, the handsome tuxedoed men, and large round tables dressed in linens and crystal and silver. I settled her in at a banquette, while Lothian, sliding in between Sahar and Lear, had eyes only for the stage and the last musician to appear: Jamie. The ballroom quieted when he bowed and took a seat at the piano, and at his nod the orchestra began “Any Ice Today Lady?”

I could hear Lothian’s deep sigh.
Everyone
heard it. Twenty-four then, in 1928, and at her loveliest, Lothian had recently bobbed and marcelled her blond hair, a style all the rage of the jazz age, and while it was a fashion I didn’t take a particular fancy to, preferring the upswept style of an earlier day, it highlighted Lothian’s small, pretty features perfectly, and the diamonds at her ears and throat. She reached into her evening bag and extracted a cigarette and long holder, another thing I was still unaccustomed to: women smoking in public. Her father lit her cigarette.

“He’s done it,” she said to no one in particular, exhaling. “Jamie’s really done it—and the thing is, he’s being broadcast all over the state—no, make that
four
states.
Right now, right this very minute!”

It
was
something, and I couldn’t help reminiscing about the lonely boy who’d begged me to teach him the violin, the piano, and after that the trumpet. I thought of the trip we’d taken to Philadelphia to see the Castles dance, and of his dreams of becoming an orchestra leader one day.

At the opening bars of “Dazed,” Jamie left the bridge to the orchestra, and crossed the whole of the ballroom with long, purposeful strides, the crowd on the dance floor parting for him. He knew exactly where he was going, knew exactly the impression he was making: cool, handsome and poetic. He leaned over us and grinned, and said just this one thing before striding back to his place on stage: “RCA Victor has offered me a contract. They want me to record ‘Dazed.’”

And that did it for me as well. I tapped my pipe into the ashtray, cleared my throat and excused myself.

With “Dazed” hovering in the background, premonition glanced over me. I watched my step, so disorienting was the disparity of light between the ballroom and the lobby. And that’s when I saw her. She stood alone in the lobby, swathed in white fur, watching me. I’d neither memory nor forethought, only awareness of the hand she held out to me.

“Well, well, well,” my own voice spoke for me. I ignored her hand. “Look what the cat dragged in.” It was not what I would’ve wanted to say had I planned it, which of course I had, a thousand times. “How long has it been, Magdalene? Five, ten, fifteen?” I knew to the day how long it’d been. Nine years. As if I cared.

She turned and walked away. I quickly followed, taking her elbow and steering her over to an alcove. We were alone. She scowled.

“I didn’t know you’d hate me,” were her first words to me in nine years.

I stared. Gone was the last vestige of small town girl, as well as any semblance of softness, the side of her that had made her opposite, her remoteness, so tantalizing. The woman standing before me was varnished, every hair in place, wholly composed, totally sophisticated. I wanted to hold her. I wanted to shake her. I wanted to muss that hair. I’d missed her.

“With a passion,” I replied.

“I’d have thought you’d realized—”

“Think again.”

Her eyes widened. “Aidan, have you been … well?”

To be in her presence was to risk being ambushed, ensnared, beat to a bloody pulp and left for dead—that’s how much
she
cared. Well, I’d have none of it. I would
not
be seduced.

“Did you think,” I said from between clenched teeth, “that I’d think you swell for going behind the back of the woman who took you in, who cared for your son while you—?” I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t give life to what she’d done with Matthew. Sahar never did and I wouldn’t either. Magdalene’s pale eyes darkened.

“Oh, for God’s sake, you’re not still on that train, are you?” She lifted her chin. “How’s my father?” Which was about the last thing I’d expected her to say.

“Answer the question,” I snapped.

“I’m here to see my father.”

“First, where is
he
?”

She had the temerity to look down, to stroke the ridiculous fur she wore. “I presume, by
he,
you mean Matthew Waterston.”

“You reek of cigar smoke.” It was about as stupid a statement as I’d ever made. “Where is he?”

Red blotches stained both cheeks, and I should’ve known. Caught, cornered, it made no difference; Magdalene, ever contentious, forever opposed to
something,
came right back.

“You can go to hell, Aidan Madsen. And
I
don’t smoke.”

I couldn’t control the grin that tugged at my lips—and it was because she was electric, pure life, mysterious and satisfying, like that first bolt of gin to the system. And despite the righteous indignation I’d so valiantly tried holding onto, I suddenly had to know where she was coming from, where she was going, so I could go, too, so I could keep feeling. I’d forgotten about feeling. I hadn’t even realized real feeling had been missing from my life.

“So you want to talk to your father? And this was the only way you knew to get his attention, lurking in ballroom lobbies? You don’t believe in telephones?”

She halfway smiled. “Don’t be mean. And if you must know, it’s Mother. I don’t want to talk with her. Not just yet. So when I got the invitation to Jamie’s opening—”

“Y
ou
got an invitation?”

Her slight smile vanished like spit in air and she tore into me like nobody’s business, informing me that
Jamie
, unlike me, did not think she was a pariah. In fact, Jamie was rational and practical and generous, not to mention sensitive. They didn’t come much more astute or sensitive than Jamie. And she was his father’s friend so far as Jamie was concerned, easy as that … and for my information I was a perfect idiot to believe she had not appreciated Sahar—but life was not simple, just as Sahar was not simple, and neither was I simple for that matter. What I was, was an ass, and I’d
always
been an ass, and I exasperated her.
Everybody
exasperated her. Every small, underused mind outside New York City exasperated her. Furthermore, she was
not
with Matthew, not in
that
sense of “with,” as if that were any of my business, which it most certainly was not.