The Angry Woman Suite (33 page)

And I saw her, oh god, did I ever, knowing her as the other side of me—and my arms went around her again—but this time it was different.

Francis, to this day I cannot imagine how we put Jamie aside for even a moment—I mean, how
did
we forget him?
We loved him.

I only know I forgot Magdalene Grayson had ever hurt me, because I was lost in seeing the real her. I forgot so many things, lost as I was in loving her and showing her I
had
seen her many, many times.

I got lost in my dream—a dream of desperation that lasted until fire flared into my consciousness, when I’d been propelled back to the loathsome reality of who and what I really was: the wrong man for the right woman, gone too far, way too far, and way too late to take any of it back.

Yet if it hadn’t been for saving The Angry Woman Suite from Lear Grayson, I’d have never gotten a stab at redemption. Of course I wouldn’t have needed it, either. Funny how things work out.

That is, if you call hypocrisy and murder funny.

After shifting blame for the fire to Stella, Lear had made the mad dash for Matthew’s studio.

“Let’s go!” he’d yelled over his shoulder, even though the fire had started moving the other way, toward the trees. Dazed, reflexively, brain muddled at how quickly things had gotten out of control, I ran after Lear. I watched him fish the key from his pocket and unlock the doors to Matthew’s studio, shouting directions, snatching an Angry Woman painting and wrapping it in his overcoat, galvanizing me out of my paralysis. I grabbed another painting and covered it with the blanket I’d taken from Washington’s Headquarters, and helped Lear make a half-dozen frantic trips back and forth across the road, putting all of Matthew’s Angry Women in my spare room, ripped not only by new fear while doing so, not knowing if Magdalene was watching from my bedroom window or if she’d managed to slip away without her father seeing, but also by a daring inspiration.

Because I’d changed my mind: Lear would
not
have any parts of these paintings, I’d see to that. Because too much had become way too smelly: the fire, and now accusing Stella, when I knew better.

Stashing the last painting seconds before fire officials screeched to a halt in front of the mill house, I ran back across the road while Lear talked to them, and upstairs to my room. Magdalene had gone—and I’d no idea how much she’d seen.

After I told Jamie this, I needed to hear him say he
hadn’t known that his mother had dispatched Lear to return the Angry Women to her, to be destroyed. At which point I‘d explain why it behooved us to maintain silence while the public was informed the Angry Women had been re-purchased by the Waterston camp and subsequently lost in the mill house fire. We would not deny such a story, I’d tell him. And, second, I’d tell him why, in the meantime, the best place for the suite was at Washington’s Headquarters—until we trotted it out again, years and an obscene amount of money hence. And, third, I wanted to discuss the injustice that made it necessary for me to shut out Lear Grayson.

And I wanted Jamie convinced that Magdalene would be protected, and that Stella, in time, would see justice.

But I never even got to first base. Lips drawn into a tight line, Jamie held up a hand, as if daring me to open my mouth.

“You know what I’ve been standing here thinking—and it’s not the first time I’ve thought it?” It was a question not looking for an answer. “I’ve been thinking, Aidan, that if you
hadn’t
judged Magdalene so harshly, you might’ve had to love her instead. Now isn’t that funny?” The air between us went suddenly and piercingly thin, like the horrible spasms twisting down my legs.

“I’ve been thinking that if you hadn’t been
visiting
with Magdalene the night of the fire, you might’ve had time to glance out a window. You might’ve even seen the fire when it took hold. You might’ve even been able to put the fire out yourself—the meadows are new; it must’ve taken a while for this fire to really get going. You might’ve saved two lives … ah, but I forgot, Aidan:
you were busy.”

I gestured helplessly.

“I see.” Jamie touched his forehead gingerly, as if feeling for a new wound. And then he shocked me further.

“Look—Aidan, there’s another reason for today. I’ve signed papers making you custodian of the Waterston estate. It’s what my father wanted.” Eyes shimmering with what looked to be the beginnings of an unspeakable pain Jamie then delivered his
coups de grâce.

“I will expect
you
to take care of Magdalene’s child. But you know what’s really disgusting? My father was wrong about you. I’ve never known anyone
more
afraid of truth, Aidan.”

“Jamie, please—”

“Don’t. Life won’t be easy for Magdalene—but then, who has an easy life? You’ll have to right that too, Aidan.
Because you owe me.”

“Jamie, if you’d just—”

“It
is
unfair that someone so humane should have to suffer so much. Magdalene wouldn’t have gone to you if she hadn’t been suffering. She did, didn’t she?
She
went to you.” He jammed his hands into his pockets and took a deep breath.

“No, no details. I have to believe I’m partially at fault here. Because I
couldn’t
convince her that she was more important than California or Lothian or a few hundred other things …” He made circles in the dirt with his shoe.

“And I couldn’t because I couldn’t convince myself. I
did
have Lothian, and I
do
want this break, Aidan.
I want California
. I want to be the best popular musician this country’s ever had. I want it more than anything. I want people talking about me a hundred years after I’m gone.
Me.
Not Jamie Waterston, son of the artist. But James Witherspoon,
the
musician.
The
orchestra leader.” He looked up. “And that, Aidan, is why I’m going to believe I’m partly to blame for you and Magdalene. Otherwise I’d never speak to you again.”

And he left then. Just left. Never once looking back.

So he didn’t see me sink to my knees at the edge of that charred meadow, and he never heard my broken whispers of protest, or pleas for forgiveness.

And I never understood—not for years—that Jamie, my dear boy Jamie, engineered his freedom by manipulating Magdalene and me. I never saw it, couldn’t have believed it, wouldn’t have accepted it, because I
was
just too damn guilty to put blame anywhere but square on my own shoulders.

Ensconced within a gin-fueled haze, I pictured Jamie walking all the way to California.
Stomping
is more like it. From Chadds Ford back into town, then onward across the whole country. Stupid, I know, but it’s the way I imagined it. I imagined it was his disappointment in me pushing him on. His crushing anger at my treachery. First for shutting his father out, then for loving Magdalene. I imagined so much that I made an unendurable pain even more wicked. And I began hearing voices: Matthew and Jamie’s expressing the same thought about injustice being that which formed Magdalene. Those Waterston voices banged around like crazy inside my skull, talking over each other, and I drove myself to the point of exhaustion trying to shut them up, busying myself removing every shred of evidence of the mill house, which I started on right after the sheriff gave me the go-ahead to begin bulldozing.

Which happened right after Stella Grayson confessed to the murders of Matthew and Sahar Waterston.

***

I fired a letter off to Magdalene outlining the parts of the Waterston trust pertaining to her unborn child, as stipulated by Jamie. I told her a sufficient amount of money for the child’s care would be left in a post office box each month. But the transactions were to be our secret. I told her it was best we avoid personal contact—and she knew why—but that she was free to correspond for business purposes, although I stressed she should keep the correspondence discreet and to a minimum. For two reasons: I’d no intention of doling out money willy-nilly. The Waterston estate had to last a lifetime. Better yet, it had to
grow
. And I didn’t want Lothian knowing I’d been tapped to oversee the vast Waterston holdings, otherwise she’d likely regard me as her personal conduit to Jamie and harass me to death.

Alone as I was, my drinking got out of hand. I grieved for Matthew. I grieved for the Sahar I thought I’d known, and the Lear I thought I’d understood. I longed to forget how horrifically it had ended for Matthew and Sahar. I couldn’t forget. But I was determined to forget my night with Magdalene, how we’d betrayed Jamie. I needed to stop hungering for Magdalene.

And I had to forget how I’d finished it with my one-time friend, Lear Grayson.

I missed Matthew, did I mention that? I missed
us.

I made a stab at retirement. I petitioned the town council to find another schoolmaster. I canceled band practices. Festival no longer mattered. I closed my museum, pulling the heavy draperies across the windows and putting a “Not Interested” sign in the front yard. I did have one last thing to do, though, before totally burying myself with the hidden Angry Woman paintings at Washington’s Headquarters, along with my dead dreams and deader relics, all soaked in gin: I had to attend a hearing for Stella Grayson—it was the first of the many debts I had to pay.

***

It was still morning, but I was already drunk when I walked into the courtroom in time to hear a pasty-faced, hollow-eyed Lear tell the judge how, in locking up Grayson House the night of the fire, he’d begun by checking in on his daughters as was his habit, starting with Stella. Not finding Stella in her bedroom, he’d gone downstairs to the kitchen, then outside. Stella had a tendency to wander. It was as he reached the bottom of Grayson Hill that he’d smelled the fire.

Dull and bleary-eyed, I sat on a folding chair, registering that Magdalene was a no-show, and that Elizabeth Grayson seemed diminished, small and pale. I even registered Lear’s predictable rationale that Stella had only meant to frighten Matthew Waterston, not kill him and Mrs. Waterston, “because of,” and here Lear cleared his throat meaningfully, “my middle daughter’s condition.”

The judge made what I heard to be an appropriately sympathetic noise, which Lear apparently took to be more of an invitation. He should’ve seen it coming, he said. No, not about Matthew and Magdalene, everyone had
always
known about the two of them. But about Stella. Stella had never thought right. Stella couldn’t put two and two together. Stella didn’t connect dots. Stella was simple. Stella had believed her sister injured by Matthew Waterston, so she’d wanted to get back at him, to injure
him.

Going strictly by appearances, it didn’t take a genius to conclude that the humpbacked, hare-lipped giantess with the downcast eyes sitting beside Elizabeth Grayson at the front of the Delaware County courtroom had never connected a dot in her life.

But Stella wasn’t calculating either, Lear stressed, as if that hadn’t just been established. Which was why it was the right call to
not
send her to prison. People who couldn’t connect dots didn’t belong with murderers in prisons. They belonged with other people who couldn’t connect dots, in “safe houses,” where they could be watched.

Stella belonged in Portsmith’s asylum.

Lear’s voice broke when he said, “It’s clear we kept Stella at Grayson House too long. But we wanted to protect her. Stella’s our child. You understand … what kind of people give up on their child?”

I shrank down farther in my seat, and then I heard the word, “Guilty,” mangled to sound like, “Ilty.” I opened an eye. Stella stood before the judge—but he hadn’t called on her.
What was she doing?

“I’m done,” Stella said in her garbled way. A lone tear slid down a pitted cheek. “I’m done being talked about.” She lifted her chin and attempted straightening her back, shoulders pumping, hump remaining. “Ilty, ilty, ilty …”

I jumped to my feet and made a beeline for the exit.

“Mr. Madsen!” Lothian was at my side like a shot, taking my arm as if we were friends, never once breaking stride walking us outside.

“It’s not to be stomached,” I growled.

“
Magdalene
let Jamie get away,” she said once we’d cleared the courthouse, as if that and not the extent of Stella’s mental deficiencies were being determined in that courtroom. “Because she hates me. Because she wanted to hurt me.” Her look was cagey. “
But I know about the fire
.” She then dropped my arm as quickly as she’d taken it and walked back toward the courtroom, leaving me more bewildered.

What
could
she know about her father and the fire?

I was sure it had been Lothian on her bike who, following Magdalene and seeing her go inside Washington’s Headquarters with me, had witnessed the spread of the fire as Magdalene and I slept. But Lothian couldn’t have seen her father and me take the Angry Women because she’d been on her way to town to report the fire. So
that’s
how much Lothian knew. But where
had
Stella been that night? Had Stella, on foot, been following Lothian follow Magdalene? Damn—was it impossible for a Grayson to stay in at night like a normal person? Were they all night prowlers? A chill ran down my spine, imagining Stella watching her father and me skittering here, there, everywhere, clandestinely stowing the Angry Women at Washington’s Headquarters, looking for all the world like thieves in the night.

As if we were
stealing.
As if murder had been the plan.
Was that what Stella had told Lothian?

No, of course not. No one but Magdalene had ever understood anything Stella said.

Staggering home from that joke of a proceeding, I marveled at Stella Grayson’s decision to shield her family by giving herself up to the asylum in Portsmith—and then I couldn’t help thinking of Matthew again, and how despite being barely able to walk he’d made that brave last stand against the fire—a fire that would
not
have spread had I not fallen asleep, because it
had
been my assignment to stamp it out.

I went around the corner, off Broad Street and into an alley, sliding on gravel, crumbling into a heap against the side of the five and dime, shaking not only because the booze was wearing thin, but because there was sudden music. Someone had put a nickel in the jukebox.