The Angry Woman Suite (44 page)

“There’s more to tell, isn’t there, Aidan? But not here, right?”

I invited Elyse and Magdalene to the cemetery.

Magdalene declined.

We sat on a bench beside the slabs set in the ground marking Matthew and Sahar Waterstons’ graves, and Jamie’s.

Elyse said quietly, “I think I know why you had Uncle Buster bring Daddy to Pennsylvania, Aidan, to the hospital here. You wanted to get Daddy away from Mother because she’s not who’s best for him—she’s too fragile. I get that now—but, Aidan, please … you look horribly sad. A part of you must’ve suspected about Daddy, but there’s no way you could’ve known that the auction would bring Lothian out of the woodwork.”

I reached into my breast pocket and withdrew the envelope, discreetly. I didn’t hand it to Elyse, sliding it under my trouser leg instead, away from the breeze. It was so remarkable, I couldn’t quite let go of it yet.

“Right,” Elyse amended softly. “You knew.”

“I never meant for Bean …”

“I know.”

“I only meant to lure Lothian—not for anyone to get hurt. I meant for Lothian to find my lawyers, because, look, Lothian had suspicions,” I allowed. “About Jamie and about my money, where I’d gotten it.” I took the plunge. “Because I was the one who gave Magdalene the money to buy Lothian out of Grayson House back in the 40's, after Jamie disappeared, when I got control of the Waterston estate.”

“You mean after you put Jamie in the Portsmith asylum.”

“
Hospital
—and Jamie put
himself
in the hospital. He made all his own arrangements; I just drove him there—and then kept his secret. But Lothian couldn’t move on after Jamie disappeared. She was a gigantic pain in the ass, nagging everybody about him. Why would he leave me? she’d ask. She blamed Magdalene. She blamed me, her mother, even Stella. So you can see why paying Lothian to stay away from me and Magdalene was worth every penny, even factoring in the possibility that Lothian might’ve connected the money to Jamie.”

“But no way did you want Lothian
confirming
such a connection, or maybe even tracing it to the Portsmith hospital? Any more than you wanted Lothian knowing
for sure
that you had the Angry Women—”

“And I just told you why. I didn’t want her on my doorstep.”

“Right … what you’d hoped was that Lothian would take the money for her share of Grayson House and take a hike.”

“Which she did—she took the money and gave up her claim to Grayson House. But then I
did
hear from her again. I heard from her way too often. And when I married Magdalene and converted much of the Waterston estate to cash, along with my own assets, I pegged Lothian for showing her hand once again, sooner or later. I preferred sooner. I wanted her taken care of once and for all.

“So I planned the auction, making sure I’d get the right weasel-like personality working it—LaFitte—plus enough publicity to pull Lothian in. Not that it would’ve taken much publicity. Just say the words ‘Angry Women,’ and I knew Lothian would link the auction to Jamie and inundate the auction house with questions about where he was, and/or who
exactly
had the authority to sell the suite for Jamie. So the auction house higher-ups had been instructed to refer Lothian to my lawyers while I was in California.”

Elyse bristled. “So coming to San Diego this last time was about Lothian and the auction? Not us? You came to California so you wouldn’t have to deal with Lothian personally?”

The dig hurt. I took it—but Lord knows I’d tried for amends. Despite having to alter some truths into acceptable lies, I’d seen to it that only good had come from my having the Angry Woman paintings. I’d tried fixing things.

But there was still much to do.

“You misunderstand. Magdalene and I
wanted
to see all of you very much—but I couldn’t negotiate with Lothian myself. I needed someone objective for that. So the idea was for my lawyers to offer Lothian a sizeable settlement …”

“To go away
again.”

“Far, far away … only this time to
sign off
on any future claims against me and Magdalene—that’s what was left out of the first agreement.”

“Or what? What did
you
have to hold over Lothian’s head?”

I met Elyse’s gaze unflinchingly. “Something never used before: the truth.”

“About her father, you mean? About Lear Grayson setting the fire? Which Lothian actually knew because she saw him do it, right? Making
her
the accessory, because she never told anyone the truth about what she saw.”

“That’s right.”

“Why
did
you do it, Aidan?”

“Which
it?
Threatening Lear, or taking the Angry Women?”

“Why’d you agree to help Lear steal the Angry Women in the first place?”

“You know why. My loyalties had become misplaced. I’d come to resent Matthew, as had Lear, because I’d stupidly believed Matthew had ingratiated himself with Magdalene. And Lear felt Matthew knew too much about shenanigans at Grayson Investments, things Matthew didn’t need to know. So when Lear asked if I’d help him get the Angry Women away from Sahar before she cut them to ribbons—”

“In order to save them for posterity, and the fortune they’d be worth when they saw the light of day again.”

“Yes, right—anyhow, when Lear came up with the idea of a fire as a diversion, and also as an explanation for the suite’s soon-to-be faked demise, I of course agreed to help him, no questions asked, thinking—if I thought at all—that Sahar had bought the paintings back just to destroy them anyway, so where was the harm in taking them? That was my second mistake, not realizing the extent of Lear’s conniving. I’d absolutely no inkling he would try to erase the so-called blemish of a handicapped daughter by blaming Stella for everything and allowing her to be locked away for good! But my first mistake was switching loyalties. No—my very first mistake was not realizing Sahar and Lear were both insane.

“So, hell no, nothing went as planned—and neither did my plan to flush out Lothian. I hadn’t counted on Lothian starting an affair with LaFitte first, ducking lawyers second, or even thinking to check out the Portsmith facility—but that was LaFitte for you, his idea, checking the Portsmith hospital for Jamie. And I definitely hadn’t counted on Lothian running into
Francis
there and being nutty enough to think she’d found Jamie instead! And then there was your unfortunate experience with Francis in California just before—and, well, put it all together and that’s where the forks in the road merged—”

“At Portsmith. Where you’d had Uncle Buster stash Daddy.”

“Right, at Portsmith.”

“How much does Magdalene know?”

“Not as much.” I extracted the envelope from under my trouser leg and handed it to Elyse. It contained the Samuel Adams letter Lear had given me at the start of the World War I. Its most recent appraisal had come in at a half-million dollars.

Elyse didn’t open the envelope. But her lower lip quivered, reminding me of Francis—and sadness, knife-quick, cut me. I caught my breath and squinted into the horizon, and I imagined I saw the renegade yet soothing Brandywine even from this distance. A river, its history, its battleground, all the wars it had seen: that was
my
comfort world, the only thing I’d ever thoroughly understood in life.

Suddenly, in a farther-off distance, I spied someone: a boy, maybe even a man, I couldn’t tell, he was too far away. He stood stock-still in the shadow of trees rimming the river’s outer bank, eyes fastened on the opposite bank, at the river’s crossing. And whose wouldn’t have been? A woman stood at that crossing. An angel in white, or an angel in a snit, as Francis had once described her. Hard and soft at the same time. Austere smile. Caressing eyes. I looked harder, bewitched, and then I looked back at the boy, marveling at his obvious connection to the woman, jealous of it, and I saw the beginnings of a familiar smile: the way his lips turned up at the corners and the skin around his eyes crinkled—pulling at my heart. His spider fingers reached for the sun and the moon and the stars, stretching across the span of river, touching home.

He laughed then, and the woman laughed with him, and then she turned and smiled directly at me, lighting the river separating us—and I suddenly recognized how I’d gotten where I was and how far that was, but that
she,
out of everyone, remained the same, only better, and I’d been the god of scarcity, forgetting it for even a minute.

We’d had losses: Matthew, Jamie, Earl, Francis, Bean. And we’d had murder. But we still had Elyse. And we still had Stella—and we had each other. And we’d learned a few things.

We weren’t a total loss.

I smiled back at Magdalene, but that was when the outline of the boy-man began receding, diverting my attention. Even as he dimmed, his eyes, oddly, grew larger, more intense, like magnets, drawing me so close inside his head that I almost disappeared with him, just as Jamie had disappeared into Francis, and Francis back into Jamie, so that even I hadn’t been able to tell the two apart at the end. It was with only the greatest effort that I averted my gaze, back to Magdalene.

Or was it that Jamie and Francis finally let me go?

But now I couldn’t find Magdalene. She’d also disappeared. I got up and began walking. Slow walking, because I had to save my strength. One doesn’t get this old without knowing the fragility of peace and family, the ins and outs, the darks and lights, the ups and downs. Already the battle cries from across an ocean could be heard. I looked into the river, as into tea leaves, foreseeing the din riding on the backs of clouds, carried by wind across the wires, sweeping the globe, taking up residence and putting down roots even on the banks of my beloved Brandywine, site of all our battles. I heard the protests on the rushing water. A new war was being heralded: Vietnam.

I suddenly remembered Elyse and turned back, offering my arm, which she took. “There are all kinds of freedoms,” I said. “None perfect and all fleeting. Think about that, my girl. And think about that envelope I just gave you. Please tuck it away, will you? You’re making me nervous, waving it around.”

“I’m not waving it—what’s in it, Aidan?”

“A fine education and then some. Teach you how to dot all the
i’s
and cross all the
t’s
on that thesis you’ll someday write about the Great Battle.”

Her arm slipped from mine. “You know?”

I took her arm back. “Know what? That you want to write it? Walk with me.”

She was too young—only eighteen—for sadness to be etched so deeply around her eyes. She said earnestly, “I
do
want to write about history.
You
made me love history. From the first time you told me the story of the Brandywine, in Biloxi. Do you remember?”

“Yes, of course—thank you very much.”

“So, yes, a thesis …
and
maybe someday a story about you and Daddy and Jamie, and the Brandywine. I’ll write that one for Bean. If she’s in a story, she’ll be forever.”

I put my hands on Elyse’s shoulders and turned her so that we were facing. “Elyse, reach inside yourself and know just this one thing.” Something made me look past her: a premonition of the woman in white—but I said to Elyse, “You can’t always get what you want.”

“I know, Aidan.”

Magdalene, shrouded in mist, had almost caught up to us, and I said quickly, “But if you aim for something, you’ll generally find what you need.” I took my eyes off Magdalene for a second and beamed at Elyse, waiting. There it was: a tentative smile, the first in weeks. Then a hand over her mouth. Then the exclamation.

“The Stones?! You
know a Rolling Stones song, Aidan? Well—sort of. But, Aidan, you hate the Stones!”

Eyes back on the horizon, I murmured, “Nonetheless, theirs
is
music at its freest. A laudable thing, that, thank you very much.” The mist grew thicker—Magdalene had disappeared again. I turned and stumbled.

“Magdalene!” I cried. “Come back, Magdalene!”

I heard Elyse ask, “Is he okay?”

But then I heard Stella’s voice. “There you are!”

Stella had found Magdalene, and Magdalene had found me again and
she
wasn’t a daydream. She was real life; sincere, intelligent, and splendidly complex. She was
the home, the center,
the
splendor … yet, were I allowed another lifetime of loving her, I’d still be unable to navigate her world without faltering. Only that one time had she allowed me anything less than perfect honesty. But she’d always pushed
herself,
especially with those tentative first steps, taking a peek into the murky truth surrounding what had happened at the mill house the night of the fire. Oh, I’d seen her agony about her father then—and God knows she’d never been above distancing herself when
I’d
disappointed. And, oh, how I’d been capable of disappointing! But Magdalene knew about snowballing. And lucky for us both, she’d invented forgiveness, because we
had
betrayed Jamie, and we’d failed Earl, and in the end we’d failed Francis, too—Francis, my boy. We’d failed Francis spectacularly. Everyone had failed Francis. Everyone connected with him had either been too angry or too worn out, too busy, too proud, or too disbelieving to acknowledge the truth about what Lothian had been doing to Francis.

I looked into the mist trying to make out Magdalene’s face, and I was struck by another thought and it was this: I wondered if that very moment Francis was looking at the portrait of his mother that he’d taken, searching as I was searching, working to understand the expression on that magnificent face—and I couldn’t help wondering if he’d sell the portrait, worth a fortune by now, to get the last word. Was that what he’d been thinking when he’d taken it? That he’d finally gotten the last word? Was Francis so much like his grandfather Lear, after all? Forget the colony, the brother-love. Hadn’t Lear Grayson and I,
from the start,
been about getting the last word?

Suddenly, I missed Francis
terribly.

And then more questions. Did I have enough left to give another child? Another as complicated as Jamie and Francis? How much of the book I’d helped write could I change by simply starting a new chapter?