The Angry Woman Suite (25 page)

Suddenly I understood and I moved past anger, into rage.

“You’re setting this up for
your
amusement!” I yelled. “This is a game to you, having
nothing
to do with Lear or saving Grayson Investments! You could give a shit about the money, Matt! What you care about is playing Magdalene! You want to game her! To see what you can goad her into doing, so you can paint it—whatever
it
is!”

“You misunderstand, Aidan.
I am an artist.
And the artist is always seeking the spirit, what’s
already
there …” His smile was meant to coax. “Give me a little credit.
I’ve no intention of hurting Magdalene.”
He looked at me more closely. “As if,” he added softly, “
she’d
allow herself to be hurt again.” He pointed at the ashtray on the table. “May I?”

“Well, I hardly want you to burn the house down,” I snapped.

Matthew spoke softly. “I would think you,
of all
people,
Aidan, would recognize Magdalene’s kind of damage. She may let something out, but she won’t be letting anybody
in
for a long time, if ever again. You do realize that, don’t you?”

I was suddenly afraid Matthew knew I wanted Magdalene Grayson more than I’d ever wanted anything before—even more than my youthful dream of traveling with a band and becoming a world renowned musician.

And I couldn’t stand the idea of Matthew Waterston pitying me for playing the fool.

I just couldn’t stand it.

***

Not a week passed before I’d convinced myself Matthew’s knowing look hadn’t been one of pity. Instead he’d simply been reiterating what had gone into shaping Magdalene, things he’d learned from
me.
I was the one who’d told him Magdalene had been left pretty much alone as a youngster; not shunned exactly, but she hadn’t made for a particularly good mixer, either. Plus she’d been saddled with the myth of a horribly deformed older sister. But the myth of Stella hadn’t stuck to Lothian the way it had to Magdalene. Lothian had gone out of her way to be likeable, whereas Magdalene had a
honed
look,
as if laughing her head off at a hypocritical world a joke was being played on—a joke she, Magdalene, had been in on from the get-go. And it was unnerving, I’d told Matthew, a youngster looking and acting as if she knew
everything.

So, regardless that Magdalene had since transformed into a sylphlike creature, Matthew realized the business of growing up as a Grayson had to have been tough on someone as intense as Magdalene. Things get stuck on prickly people, that’s just a fact of life. So, of course Magdalene was wary. Of course she was suspicious. Of course the best approach with her would always be the indirect one, the one that outflanked her at every turn. A good challenge would
always
trump Magdalene Forsythe Grayson’s inbred reticence with people.

It also suddenly didn’t matter that Matthew was after bigger gold than just helping Magdalene turn her father’s business around. So what if Matthew wasn’t altogether altruistic? Who was? If Matthew pulled a drop-dead suite of paintings out of his hat, something that would leave people talking for generations and that suite also managed to rejuvenate Grayson Investments, then Festival would also be saved. Did that make me a bad person, being newly able to see that Magdalene working for Matthew was something that also worked to
my
advantage
?

It was much easier viewing things in this more flexible light. Much easier than maintaining a grudge. Besides, nursing a grudge would’ve had to mean giving up Sahar and Jamie along with Matthew, and they were family. I’d already begun missing my walks across the road for morning coffee, and cocktails in the evenings. And so I walked and Matthew saw me coming.

“Pot’s on,” he said, acknowledging the truce by meeting me at the front door. “Today’s our first go at the suite. Magdalene and Earl will be here shortly.”

A smile softened Magdalene’s face when she arrived and saw me, reassurance she didn’t hold me personally responsible for Matthew’s churlishness, or their “forced” arrangement.

Subsequently, on other mornings, Magdalene’s smile seemed wider, friendlier, and I couldn’t help thinking she was warming to
me
specifically, and I don’t mean as her old schoolmaster or her father’s partner in Festival. There were those sideways glances that I interpreted as more than a little prurient.

I began indulging in fantasy. In one, Lear had returned home (as I was sure the French would give an “undesirable” his walking papers any day) and I’d stated my intention regarding Magdalene, asking his blessing, while Magdalene waited eagerly in the wings of Grayson House, impatient for me to take her away.

Naturally, in real life, I didn’t make a move toward Magdalene. And neither did I say anything to give myself away. Not one word. Beyond a healthy fear of rejection, and the paradoxical assessment that Grayson House was the epitome of everything I’d never have (so why would anyone want to be taken from it?), lay another truth having less to do with ghosts and paradoxes than with perhaps the real dilemma Magdalene Forsythe Grayson presented, and what Matthew might really have pitied me for.

In real life I was old enough to be Magdalene’s father. I’d been her teacher, and although she’d repelled me then, I wanted her now … yet, would anyone believe I had
not
been drawn to the child?

Reputation, if it’s a good one, is not something to play around with.

Some weeks later, Magdalene asked me to join her for a walk after her sitting.

“They’re
his
paintings,” she fretted as we strolled the meadow ringed by cedar and scrub oak adjacent to Matthew’s studio. “It doesn’t seem quite right … all the money he’s paying me.”

I knew Matthew was inside working, and I imagined sheets of white light streaming through the windows and skylights, illuminating a portrait of Magdalene. I saw him lean in and dab more light onto Magdalene’s pale hair, brushing soft tendrils onto her cheeks, down her neck, softening cheekbones cut just sharp enough to prevent Magdalene from ordinary beauty, like Lothian’s. He grazed the dark arches of brows, startling against Magdalene’s white skin and light-filled hair, and pale eyes starred with equally dark, thick lashes. His brush dipped to lips that curved upward in a secret smile, and an unlikely square jaw; then, in a more unlikely finish to all that angularity, a delicate chin, slightly pointed, definitely girlish.

“Matthew’s doing all the work, and for this I’m feeding my family, paying bills,
and
getting Grayson Investments off the hook?”

So she wasn’t calling him “Mr. Waterston” anymore.

I said, “He needs you, you need him. It’s that simple. You have a look he likes.”

“So he said.”

“You’re not mad, then?” I ventured.

“I was at the start.”

“Of course.”

“Well, who wouldn’t have been? The more I thought about it, the way he talked to me that first night, the madder I got. But later I realized I wasn’t so much angry as I was …
ashamed.
You heard right. Ashamed of Frederick—of my father too, Aidan.” She looked at me sideways. “You’ve been wanting to ask me something.”

She’d caught me off guard.

“It’s written all over you, Aidan. You want to know about Frederick, don’t you?”

I fumbled, asking, “Were you … happy, then? You
seem
happy now.”

“Happy?” She toyed with the nosegay of wild flowers she’d picked. “You mean, forgetting the fact that he was a thieving scoundrel, how could I be happy
without
Frederick if I’d been happy
with
him?” She seemed to ponder. “I don’t think I’ve ever been happy, Aidan. I thought I was once, but I was wrong.”

I didn’t understand her. It was the great American dream, being happy. “But … you loved Frederick?”

She threw her nosegay in the air and twirled, holding her skirt out like a child celebrating the first day of summer.

“I hated him!”
she cried. “Oh god, but I hated Frederick Forsythe with a passion!”

I stared, alarmed by words and action that didn’t square. Magdalene continued twirling, staggering up against me, grasping my vest, laughing and crying at the same time.

“Oh Aidan, I was such an idiot!
Did you think I didn’t know?”

Know what?
I clenched her upper arms, barely able to think, between her scent and histrionics and those pale eyes so close to mine.

“Of course I knew,” she whispered before my lips could touch hers. She turned her head slightly. I pulled back too, imperceptibly, as if I hadn’t been at all close to kissing her.

“Do you know why I married Frederick? Because I was tempting the fates. And I was curious! I wanted to see if someone could make
me
smile the same stupid way she did.” Her lower lip trembled and her hands slid down my vest. She moved out of my arms. “She didn’t deserve to smile,” Magdalene said petulantly.

I held myself straight, arms stuck safely at my sides. “Your mother, you mean?”

“Of course my mother. She had a thing for Frederick. She was unfair to my father …”

And just like that I was put off—put off by her pettiness and recklessness, by her sheer waste of time and self, and the fact that I
had
been right about her from the start: Magdalene
was
serious trouble, and even more fey than the usual meaning of the word. Worse, she was theatrical. I hated theatrical. Theatrical belonged in Philadelphia. It belonged on the cheap women I knew there. It had even belonged on my mother, she who feigned sadness to pull me in, to keep me from living the life I’d dreamed of, in music. It was unbecoming on Magdalene. It was disappointing.

It was relief.

I said dully, “So you seduced Frederick and took him away from your mother because she didn’t deserve him? And because you wanted to feel her passion.” I laughed; a bitter sound to even my own ears. “Maybe your mother
did
deserve him, Magdalene.”

Her expression was equally withering. “And you think maybe I deserved him, too.”

“Does your father know … about your mother and your husband?”

She surprised me again, this time hanging her head. “You know,” she whispered, “
I
didn’t know for sure about Mother and Frederick’s affair until …” She looked up. “And you know what else? I really only wanted to play grown-up, that’s why I married Frederick. Isn’t that insane? But it’s the truth. God, Aidan, but my family’s a rotten mess, a real rotten mess. Except for Stella. Stella’s not rotten. But Frederick—damn, he was the rottenest of us all. But once I knew what I’d gotten myself into, did I give him a run for his money! Did I ever!”

“Did you now?” I said, irritated at her anew, sidestepping my questions. “But what about Lothian? Surely Lothian’s not rotten?”

Magdalene’s gaze turned cool. “What a fool you are, Aidan. Can’t you see anything?”

I was getting pretty sick of this question from everyone. “Fine one you are to talk,” I shot back. “Marrying Frederick Forsythe!”

She laughed then, and I mistakenly thought her amused. “That’s very good,” she retorted. “I like a man who says what he thinks. So many don’t.”

As if she’d had a world of experience with men! And then, perversely, I began laughing too, even as she began crying again, even as I began realizing what it was about Magdalene that kept drawing me in.

It was her transformations. I’d seen them many times by now, notably on a long-ago moment we’d shared on the crest of a small knoll overlooking a golden distance—but what I understood
this
very instant, with no small pang of thrilling anxiety, was that Magdalene’s way, this switching back and forth between worldliness and vulnerability, was
the
seduction, making me want to change nothing and everything about her.

“I’ll tell you about Lothian,” Magdalene said, walking ahead, seemingly impervious to the pull she was exerting on me. I stepped quickly, keeping pace.

“She’s like the rest of us. She’s
not
what she seems. I’m probably not what I seem, either. Neither are you. Ever think of that, Aidan?” Her backward glance was oddly knowing.

“But on the inside I believe Lothian to be …
seething.
Yes, that’s a good word, teacher, don’t you think?
Seething.
And for many reasons. Our parents for two, because they’ve been so wrapped up in hating each other over Stella. Plus Lothian hates that
I
got to choose the role of the renegade, leaving her to play the part of Miss Goody Two-Shoes—which, by the way, Lothian
does
excel at.” Magdalene walked faster. “I’ll never marry again, you know.”

My heart thudded. What nonsense was she talking now? Women
always
married.

“I know nothing of the sort,” I said, keeping up.

“Marriage isn’t all it’s cut out to be—besides, I don’t think I’m the marrying kind.”

“You just said you didn’t marry the right man.”

Magdalene faced me. Red splotches stained both her cheeks. Oh god, but she
was
angry. Gloriously angry. “Oh, but I think I did,” she enunciated clearly. “I think I got just what I deserved. I got a faggot for a husband, not to mention a cheat and a thief; and a failing business—plus a mother who hates me to death. I’d call that poetic justice. Wouldn’t you, Aidan?”

I worked my throat and not just because I’d never heard a woman say
faggot
before. One didn’t hear the word much in old Quaker territory, even from men, but it could be heard plenty in Philadelphia. No, it was because I’d finally stepped far enough outside myself and what I
wanted
to hear, which was that Magdalene was attracted to me, to be able to hear what Magdalene was
really
saying, which was that she had taken stock of herself and fallen short. So, actually,
none
of anything she’d said had been theatrical. Instead, just the opposite. It had been
real.
Everything Magdalene said and did reflected her truth as she knew it at a given moment. And the truth was I wasn’t anything special to Magdalene—except maybe a shoulder to lean on.

Her pale eyes darkened looking at me, and that’s when I knew Magdalene knew
I’d
known about Frederick’s preference for men. How, I’d no idea, but I knew it as sure as I knew there would be ice on the Brandywine come winter—and having never been pegged as a particularly insightful man, that’s how well Magdalene managed to convey that she was still and always one step ahead of me.