The Angry Woman Suite (7 page)

Grayson House and its occupants were the worst things possible: pretenders gone to seed.

“Francis! Don't you be roughing up those shoes! Those've got to last you, what? You think money grows on trees? You get in the house and put your old shoes on!”

Stella was in her garden, the only beautiful thing left on Grayson Hill, on her hands and knees most likely, which was why I hadn’t seen her. But I should’ve known. Weather permitting, Stella was
always
in her garden, that square of land below and to the side of Grayson House, west of the vast, unkept groves of apple, peach, and cherry trees. Stella stood up and took off a glove, pushing pale hair back under her hat.

“Go on with you,” she said.

Stella was one of my two aunts, and it’s strange that despite the women’s penchant for rules, I wasn’t raised to address my aunts as Aunt Stella or Aunt Lothian—I always called them by their first names. And right then I wanted to tell Stella that these were old shoes too, and that everything we had was old, but I didn't dare risk being called a sassy-mouth because that could be just the very beginning. Although Stella never got
really
mad at me, I’d seen her at work, screeching and running her number on the other women, and I wanted no part. I hated screeching. It terrified me.

I rearranged my face and squashed my feelings, squinting up at Stella, noticing how the distance between us and the shadow made by her hat almost hid her harelip and rough skin that made me think of long-standing oatmeal.

Stella was the oldest of Grandmother’s three daughters, before my mother and then Lothian, so I’d hazard a guess she was thirty-six back then, but already her back had the start of a hump. She had narrow shoulders and big bony hips, which her shapeless cotton dresses couldn't quite hide, and long arms, the longest I'd ever seen, and wide hands—big as hams, Mother said.

“I'm going, Stella,” I said softly. Stella’s narrow shoulders sagged, which meant she was already feeling awful about talking aggravated to me—I was Stella’s pet.

“How was the first day?” She walked beside me, inside the fence made of weathered pickets with broken tips. Where the bottoms of the boards had rotted away she’d wired screening between the slats to keep rabbits and gophers out of the vegetables; hence, the holes in the screening around Grayson House’s portico. To someone unfamiliar with Stella, her words might’ve sounded like, “Ow us ta fis ay?”—and Stella
was
hard to understand, I’ll give you that. She had a speech impediment, the result of a cleft palate, a harelip, a thing that shamed her, which I knew by Stella’s never, ever wanting to go to town. Not that it would’ve mattered had she even wanted to, because Grandmother said going to town was hoo-ha, and Grandmother always had the last word on everyone, Stella especially.

“Good,” I answered firmly.

Stella's eyes were a watery blue, and she had long pale lashes that stuck out straight, not curly. She looked at me sharply. “Where's your brother?” This sounded like “Airs er uh-er?”

“I don't know,” I replied, unable to keep the sullenness from my voice.

“Ah.” Stella reached across the fence and crooked a finger under my chin. “I see.”

And I suppose she did.

“You're an angry boy,” she said matter-of-factly, and just like that my anger was superseded by an inexplicable desire to reinstate my worthiness in Stella's eyes. I say “inexplicable” because Stella had never even insinuated that anger was unattractive. But the point was, regardless of what the women permitted themselves,
I
knew anger, and not humming or slouching, to be the unattractive habit.

“Not really angry,” I lied in a small voice. The shadow shifted and I looked up into Stella’s homely face. “They hated me. All the kids at school hated me.” There, I’d just revealed what I’d said I wouldn’t—but I got the desired commiseration. In fact, I got more than I’d bargained for. Baggy dress hitched up to her knees, Stella was over the fence then, all over me, smothering me, covering my face with kisses, murmuring unintelligible things, until, perversely, I wanted to twist free of those groping arms and run away. I couldn’t breathe, and it didn’t matter right then that Stella knew everything about being hated. What mattered was there was no place to run, to breathe, no place to hide, from
her.

I’d no idea what had happened between the women and I’d stopped asking ages ago, when Grandmother had made it abundantly clear that gentlemen did not ask questions that were “improprieties.” But it was impossible to live in Grayson House with all those women and not feel the rabid resentment they had for one another.

My mother was a widow, the only one of Grandmother’s daughters to have ever married, a fact that counted like the Holy Grail with women, I could tell by the things they said about my mother. And never mind that Mother’s “ne’er-do-well,” what Grandmother called him, had run off when my mother was about to have Earl, deciding a war in France was more rewarding than zings from those sharp-tongued women—even though my mother always pointed out that the “ne’er-do-well”
had
returned, regardless that it took him ten years, and just in time to get
me
started, so there.

Which meant there were no actual men in my life, my father having ultimately died from sharp tongue-lashings (how I explained his demise), and my grandfather, Grayson House’s builder, having been a suicide, in all likelihood goaded into it by the women. In fact, it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn the women had loaded the gun before handing it over to my grandfather—that’s how much they disliked men. No, I knew women only (and Earl didn’t count for shit), and the sure truth that any male having a thing to do with them eventually chose death over life. That’s what existing with women was about: watching, waiting, gauging, and then dying. For instance, my grandmother was formidable enough on her own, but put her together with the other women, and I lived in awe of what she could unleash, of what she could walk away from.

My mother was the no-nonsense worrier, a hard worker, the one who didn’t have time enough for me unless Lothian had time for me. Mother was also in charge of the Grayson finances, meaning the little bit of stipend we got from my father’s death benefit, and the littler bit that still trickled in from Grayson Enterprises, the investment firm my grandfather had started, which was mainly bookkeeping, not investments anymore, because who had money to invest? And the little bit Lothian earned, which, combined with my father’s death benefit and the Grayson Investments trickle, was our entire income, and that, as I was to hear a hundred times a week, wasn’t enough.

One time, many years ago, Earl phoned me in California to say he’d had revelations about Mother and men and our paternity. What a joke. As if, by then, I hadn’t known the truth for years. My daughter says I was curt with Earl on the phone, that I “ranted and raved for hours afterwards.”

Did I mention Elyse is full of shit?

But, again, I digress.

My mother wasn’t ugly like Stella. Mother had a beautiful secret-like smile—which is how it had been painted in her portrait. And her nose was straight, not hooked like Stella’s. Mother had Stella’s pale hair, but whereas Stella’s hung to her waist when she let it down from the knot at the nape of her neck, Mother had cut hers into one of those bobs fashionable in the 1930's. I guess you could say Mother was very pretty; she had good skin, pale like mine, but on her it looked nice, and she had amazing cheekbones. She had the most amazing table manners too, holding teacups just so, dabbing the corners of her pretty mouth ever so genteelly with our old monogrammed linens—which I thought was just Mother putting on a show for Lothian. Still, I was at a loss to explain the significance of constant cleaning, or of ironing pillowcases and underwear, all of which Mother also set great store by, but all of which Lothian couldn’t have cared less about. We couldn’t afford men to take care of the grounds anymore, and Earl being useless, it seemed stupid to me, all that worrying about the insides of things when the outside of Grayson House was falling down around us—not to mention nobody ever came around to see how we were living anyway. The wings of Grayson House had been closed off, but the old mahogany furniture on the three floors of the main house gleamed from frequent polishing, and the wood floors shone too, where they weren’t covered with the intricately patterned rugs Grandmother said had been in her family for eons. Grandmother loved putting my mother and aunts in their places, saying everything in Grayson House had once belonged to
her
mother. Everything, that is, but Lothian’s massive RCA and Mother’s portrait, which Mother had hung directly over Lothian’s RCA, if only to have something of hers topping something of Lothian’s was my best guess.

The night of my first disastrous day of school, in the biggest of our two parlors, I stretched out on one of Grandmother’s rugs while the women cleared the dishes, tracing a loop-de-loop design in the pattern, thankful that neither Earl nor Stella had told of my humiliation at school. “Off the floor, Francis,” Grandmother ordered, entering the room. The other women trailed after her, Lothian and Stella seating themselves at opposite ends of the largest mohair chesterfield, loath to sit close enough to even accidentally touch, and Mother went to the other chesterfield. Grandmother took her place in her chair, in a far corner, and then the women raised the lids of the boxes at their sides and took up their needlework.

“Gentlemen,” Grandmother said, as I knew she would, “do not lollygag on floors.”

Earl, sitting in a chair in his corner of the room, smirked.

“That's right,” Lothian chimed in. “Gentlemen do not lounge, Francis. They sit in chairs. Look at Earl.”

I didn’t want to look at Earl. I wanted to smack him. Instead I got up and sauntered over to Lothian’s RCA, knowing full well I was pushing my luck, purposely adopting an “I don’t care” stance, staring blankly at the RCA’s mesh-covered grill.

“Don’t wander, Francis,” Grandmother reproved.

I glanced over my shoulder and noted that the sharp planes of my mother's face had gone soft. “It’s a Waterston,” Mother murmured. I faced the RCA again, hot on the scent of this thing that had gotten Mother to notice me. But it wasn’t Lothian’s stupid RCA. I looked up.

Mother’s portrait.

“It’s a Waterston,” Mother repeated. I stared at this painting as if I’d never seen it before, like I suddenly, passionately cared.
Waterston
sounded familiar.

“What’s that mean, being a Waterston?”

“It means a man named Matthew Waterston painted my portrait. He was very famous. Still is, I should say. This whole area is filled with famous artists, Francis. Has been as far back as I can remember: Howard Pyle in Wilmington, N.C. Wyeth and his brood in Chadds Ford, and then Matt—”

“That’s enough, sister,” Grandmother interrupted. Grandmother never called my mother by her given name—Magdalene. It was always “sister,” and said like she had something sour in her mouth. Her knitting needles flashed in and out of the piece she worked on, fast, like thin silver daggers, and I wondered why she didn’t stab herself with those daggers, and then I hoped she would; and then I wondered why Grandmother had said that was enough and why she wanted to switch the subject. I opened my mouth to ask Mother who Matthew Waterston was
exactly,
and why in the world he’d have wanted to paint a picture of
her.

Lothian cut me off. “He’s gone,” she said, not looking up from her needlework. “Matthew Waterston is gone because of your mother.”

Interesting—mere mention of Matthew Waterston made
both
Lothian and Grandmother edgy.

“Not true,” Mother said.

“Is true. And children are to be seen, not heard,” Lothian added.

I stared at Lothian rather pathetically, manipulating for more of Mother’s attention. Small and delicate like a doll, with skin nearly translucent, my younger aunt looked liked she might break. Her teeth were almost clear too, like old porcelain, but whiter, and I often wished she’d bite down hard on something and all those teeth would crack right off, sparing me. She had a job at the Western Union, which made her the only woman to go into East Chester on a regular basis, and I thought it intriguing, one of us having a life in town apart from Grayson House—it was a mystique only heightened by the arguments I overheard at night, invariably started by Lothian. All the women would end up getting involved though, and while I could never make out
everything
that was said, let alone understand what any of it meant, the argument went something like this: Lothian once had a young man who’d gotten away from her and it was all Grandmother's fault he’d gotten away. Lothian would shout next that it had actually been
my mother’s
fault the young man had gotten away. At which point my mother would point out that
he
existed only in Lothian’s head.
He
didn’t exist anymore! And then Stella would screech at the top of her lungs—what Stella always did when things got out of her control. And that’s when Grandmother, in her most imperious voice, would tell everyone to shut their traps. But Lothian, shooting for the last word, would yell it had actually been Stella’s fault that her young man had gotten away—and, in fact, everything was
always, always
Stella’s fault, starting with Matthew Waterston. And
that
was the real reason Stella had “more than a nodding acquaintance” with the loony bin! Because of what had happened to the Waterstons!

It worked. Mother intercepted my pathetic expression. “Never mind,” she said to Lothian. “He's my son. I'll tell him when to be quiet.”

Lothian smiled. To the untrained eye it probably looked like a sweet smile, but I knew better. My stomach started churning and I wanted desperately to hum. Mother got to her feet.

“Sister,”
Grandmother warned.

“Why,” Mother asked her, “do you encourage Lothian to mock me?”

“You made your bed,” Grandmother said calmly, needles flashing.

“That's the problem,” Lothian said conversationally, getting to her feet and smoothing her sweater over her hips. “Magdalene made a bed. Several of them, I hear. Isn't that the problem, Mama? Tell her, Mama.”