The Angry Woman Suite (15 page)

Mother, though, remained Papa’s biggest regret in life, which is why he threw himself into learning to pay attention. And by the time Papa trained himself to see through people, Francis had arrived on the scene, and Papa’s initial disapproval of Francis had been justified. But what Papa hadn’t seen the day he saw Mother and me and Bean off to Biloxi, fear shimmering in his eyes, was the awful thing Bean would do. But, really, who could’ve? Even if Papa had been looking straight at Bean, which he hadn’t been. Even if he’d had x-ray vision magnified times ten. Or, for that matter, who could’ve foreseen that Francis would get himself so mixed-up in his head with Jamie that he almost became Jamie? I mean, who could’ve seen
that
one?

Papa saw, of course, that Francis had a huge capacity for loyalty, but he also saw his cunning. That’s what Papa had been looking at that day we left for Biloxi: the cunning. But Papa could only see so far through that murk, into that foreign place called Francis. And that’s because Papa had one flaw as a seer: he wasn’t bad enough—that’s why he’d never known about Nellie hitting Mother. And while he could anticipate chaos emanating from the kind of cunning Francis had, in order to completely understand the elements
within
that chaos he’d needed to be
fluent
in something other than the language of a good man.

And that’s where Aidan, another complicated man, comes back into the picture—or, rather, where a very important
link
, called Aidan, actually begins.

AIDAN
Pennsylvania 1900–1916

Everything dates from the beginning, but this beginning has had many false starts. I began writing this journal in 1932, after seeing you and your mother in town one day—you’d have been about four then, Francis. And I’ve rewritten parts of it many times over the years as I grew to know you; as I continued peeling away the layers of rationalizations. In fact, I’ve reworked these first few pages many times, but the heart of this story I have let flow, never looking back.

Already, Francis, I see the tendrils of a growing cancer. An unavoidable situation maybe, given your beginning, but a situation that doesn’t have to be terminal given the potential of your sensitivity. Because you
do
have a great potential, Francis, and when I say
potential,
I’m not referring to any material success that
may
result from your unquestionable talent. All I’m saying is you will touch others; you will affect them, because you’re an artist. So it’s important that you realize that the power you have be tempered, because like many artists you have a twin soul, and that twin is a child and it has a dark and reckless nature. It is also highly imaginative.

You
must
stay with the music, Francis. Music by definition is sensitive, but it takes discipline to become a top musician—and so that is your medicine. Music. To stay disciplined, to stay on top of your game,
to stay the cancer
. And then you must understand your beginning, Francis. All of it. Which means you must understand
my
beginning, all of it.

That said, we begin.

***

In the beginning, in 1900, I was drawn to the hamlet of Chadds Ford in Delaware County for four reasons. Southwest of Philadelphia, Chadds Ford had been the setting for the famous Battle of the Brandywine, and being a history aficionado, especially regarding the Revolutionary War, I believed Chadds Ford offered myriad opportunities for exploration. Secondly, the village of East Chester in Chester County, a mile or so from Chadds Ford, had an opening for a schoolmaster. The East Chester town council was desperate, and I, a recent graduate of West Chester Normal School, was inexperienced, hungry, and equally desperate.

The third reason was the unsurpassable beauty of the Delaware and Chester counties. I got off the train at East Chester, walked out on a bluff and gazed into the distance. I squinted, adjusting my spectacles, for I was—and am—short-sighted, the result of a boyhood injury. Still, I saw clearly the streams that cut into the lush land settled by Germans and Quakers, their neat farms and magnificent barns, and just below, in the nearer distance, the town of East Chester. Under a blue Indian summer sky, the oyster-gray Brandywine Creek rolled around the town’s edges, and outside its banks there nestled tidy rows of simple brick buildings shaded by old maples. There were church spires, a tiny square on a main thoroughfare, specks of people scurrying about—and I couldn’t help imagining their lives, content and circumspect, one day flowing into another, like brooks into the Brandywine. I was captivated, and I pretended I was king of that bluff, pretended all that clean, fresh quaintness below me was mine and mine alone, and that I’d only need to come down off my hill and register my claim to make it so. But I stood longer that day, inhaling the heady fragrances of old summer and new season—gifts that seeped under my skin and promised to hold me together forever.

And then I struggled against them.

But I had reasons for struggle. I was not
just
a fledgling teacher—a vocation to fall back on—I was also a musician. And my twenty-year-old heart yearned for adventure and travel, and bands, on the road more often than not, meant just that: travel. Mostly self-taught on instruments left behind by a wayward musician father, I played several admirably well, the violin being the one that really counted, for violins were the focal instrument of dance bands in those days. Plus, I wanted to write. I wanted to write all the music that was in my head. Music that had resided there for as long as I could remember. But there were other things residing in my head as well: voices.

An only child growing up in the village of Mont Clare, I’d been gangly, bespectacled, shy, appallingly poor, and, not surprisingly, ostracized. My father was absent, maybe even dead for all I knew, and my mother, a laundress, was perennially tired and short-tempered. Books were my sanctuary, my passion. History books mostly, and the voices in those books moved into my head, right along with the music: General Washington, Lafayette, Green, Wayne, Weedon, Maxwell, even Cornwallis, all those revolutionary era characters, they became my friends. I identified with their heroic fight because their fight spoke to my own inner turmoil: I
also
wanted to be recognized as a person to be reckoned with—but, first, I just plain wanted to be recognized. And then, if I were to get
that
validation, I wanted to be left alone to make my music. But more than anyone else, I wanted my sad mother to leave me alone. I couldn’t rescue her from her hopeless life. I couldn’t even keep my own head above water. So when the day finally came for me to go away to school, to West Chester Normal on a music scholarship, I set a new speed record getting out of the town of Mont Clare, leaving my mother quickly, even joyously.

Then after graduation from West Chester Normal, instead of cutting loose and heading out with a band as I’d wanted, there I was on a hill overlooking a placid valley. And that’s where the fourth reason for being in East Chester came into play: my mother again, from whom there was no great escape. While I’d been away, she’d become older, slower, even sadder, and unable to work as much—and I’d become her sole living relative. So that day on the hill I put my dream of traveling with a band aside
, for just a time
, and that was the first of my rationalizations, telling myself I could have the best of both worlds; that indeed I
would
travel, only it would be throughout the land my history book friends had walked; land they had shed their blood on—
but
, I also told myself, I
could
have my music, too. King of the mountain that I now was, I listened to the sounds of my subjects, the birds and cicadas and the soft sweep of breeze, the rustle of crop and foliage, and I hummed along—like you do, Francis.

Like Jamie did.

I accepted the schoolmaster position in East Chester, and began sending money home to my mother in Mont Clare. I was also able to save some of my $45 monthly wage and I lived independently those first few years, in Chadds Ford, renting a room in an old boardinghouse. It was an even smaller village back then, Chadds Ford, but there were two railroad stations, a creamery, a grange hall, two churches, and a barber shop, so we weren’t entirely insignificant. East Chester, the bigger town, was down the road a piece, and it had lumber and coal yards, plus the grocer was there; the bank, the schoolhouse where I taught, and
three
churches, meaning I’d plenty of company whenever I desired, which wasn’t often. I played the organ for church services when asked, if I felt like it, and the violin at dances. The Chadds Ford and East Chester citizens let me know they appreciated my music and the care I gave their children, and they appreciated my passion for history, too. The East Chester Historical Society welcomed my requests for articles and books on the Battle of Brandywine, and I combed the immediate Chadds Ford area, collecting artifacts and hoarding the coins and letters and bits of uniforms I found, in crates, filling a dozen, stacking them one on top of another, until they reached the ceiling of my room.

Eventually, the time came when complete responsibility could no longer be put off, and in November, 1905, an aged, cranky Mary Madsen arrived in Chadds Ford with two large trunks and a satchel. The trunks held crockery, utensils, linens, sheet music, a graphophone, five Victor recordings, a cornet, flute, saxophone and a trumpet—my father’s old instruments. Via my association with the Delaware County historian, I’d learned that the Washington’s Headquarters house, just east of Chadds Ford, was for rent for $7.00 a month. Once owned by Benjamin King, a prosperous Quaker farmer, it had been considered imposing for its day; constructed of stone, two-storied, with white-painted shutters and a front porch. It was the house where George Washington himself had slept; where Washington and Lafayette had plotted the astonishing Battle of Brandywine. Two giant leafy trees shaded the front of the house and then, as far as the eye could see, with the exception of the old Turner mill house across the road, was gently rolling land thick with grass and wild flowers; land on which the battle had been fought.

I jumped at the chance to live in this historical house—and, amazingly, my mother did
not
interfere in my life the way I’d feared. Maybe she’d finally realized I was a grown man; maybe she’d been afraid it was her last chance with me, maybe she’d realized I was the roof over her head, maybe she’d been plain worn out, maybe
I’d
mellowed, maybe all of the above; I don’t know the answer. At any rate she gave me a long tether, busying herself setting up house; even, eventually, taking time out to help me gather souvenirs and mementos from the Great Battle. The last things I moved into Washington’s Headquarters were my crates, unpacking and reverently arranging the relics I’d collected over the years, filling one side of the good-sized front room, whereupon my mother took one look at my huge collection and put up a sign in the front yard announcing, “Brandywine Museum.” To my surprise, people actually stopped by, interested in looking at my things. Word spread, and more letters and maps and crockery and clothing and weapons were donated to my little enterprise, and there grew a steady stream of visitors and tourists curious to learn about the events leading up to the battle between the British and Colonial forces.

At the heart of it, she wasn’t a bad woman, and many said my mother was the reason I never married. They said our relationship was so close and my interests so focused that a wife could never have figured into the picture. I take comfort in the perception that my mother and I were close. I believe that means I appeared kind. I certainly tried hard to be. But I wasn’t kind, not really. My mother and I had history, as they say—a history I rarely overcame. The way I saw it, she’d always wanted more than I could give. It’s a ludicrous expectation for women to have of men, thinking they live to fill their empty spaces. So I blamed my mother for my father leaving before I’d the chance to know him. I blamed her for my childhood poverty, and I suppose I even blamed her for not having other children, companions for me. I certainly held her accountable for not being a
real
woman, whatever the hell I thought that was.

And so, on my forays into Philadelphia, I had real women. Women who laughed and played and teased. Women who were the polar opposite of my mother, except they were
more
unacceptable for different reasons. Women who suited me just fine. Women who required nothing more than a little money, and who didn’t care to know me any more than I cared to know them. But the truth was, naturally, I’d resolved to never marry. I didn’t deem children of my own necessary for a meaningful life. And I wasn’t lonely. Marriage, then, was superfluous—although I did carry a picture in my mind of the way the perfect woman for me might walk: the way she held herself aloof, regal, and the way her pale blue eyes, restless and intelligent, looked past me, into a world I was mere steps from discovering for myself. I knew everything about her, this tantalizing challenge of mine—and yet, of course, I’d never even seen her.

Conveniently for me she didn’t exist. Or so I thought.

And I didn’t
really
see her until the summer of 1918, when I was thirty-eight and my mother had lived with me for nearly thirteen years. By then my teaching career was firmly established and my student band was up and playing—started with those instruments my mother brought with her from Mont Clare—and my museum had become
the
cultural hub of our two counties. I’d long since put my old dream of traveling with a band away, right along with the picture of my lovely challenge. In short, I’d accepted my life. But then the unexplainable happened. The recalcitrant Magdalene Grayson metamorphosed into the unattainable, and when I saw her for who she was, I was completely dumbfounded.

She’d been my pupil for over ten years, and although I’d never had an overwhelming number of students, given that many children those days went to school only a few years, I’d just the one vivid recollection of Magdalene Grayson. That memory is rooted in 1916, on a June afternoon a few weeks prior to graduation day. I’d dismissed class, locked up the schoolhouse and begun my own trek home, back to Chadds Ford. I turned a bend in the lane and saw her on the side of the path where the land fell away in a sharp decline, sitting on a fallen tree limb, gazing out over the valley, crying. I wondered where Lothian was and why Lothian and Jamie had left Magdalene by herself, when Lear Grayson’s instructions were written in stone: his daughters were to walk home from school together.