(Theseus, Ariadne and the Minotaur)

If Maurice Hein had not been to a particular evening event at the Century club, his maze might never have been built. The speaker that night was Professor Hamilton Smyser, a Wordsworth scholar and expert on mazes around the world.

As Smyser talked on in his high pitched academic singsong, Maurice was taken back to his days at Columbia studying the classics of the Core curriculum. They were his happiest days and nights and were still vivid to him fifty years later. He thought of the maze with the terrible Minotaur inside, and how Theseus, with the help of Ariadne, slew the Minotaur and escaped the labyrinth. He remembered a picture in his text of Ariadne on the shore at Naxos and then he thought of his wife Susan and he decided to build a great maze on his property in Connecticut.

The Ariadne of the long ago illustration was bare-breasted, looking out to sea with her arms extended and folded over a rocky promontory. Some sheer drapery lay over her lower limbs and a bit of it blew up over her fair hair. One anxious foot was on tiptoe, the other looped around her calf, an uncomfortable position for an uncomfortable time, the time before the god came for her. He had looked at the picture many times.

Ariadne, in his text, did not look at all like Susan who had straight black hair down to her waist and dark Asian eyes that curved up. She had very white skin and reminded Maurice of an exotic ivory idol who had somehow padded into his life. Now, in the first months of her pregnancy, she had a belly that curved out like that of Ariadne in the illustration.

Hamilton Smyser was struggling to get the first of his charts up on the stand and one of the men stood to help him.

Yes, a maze. Brick walls, not hedges. Very high and perilous to intruders, as complicated and frustrating as possible. It would have statues, a Minotaur in the center. It would be large and frightening as the labyrinth of Daedalus at Knossos.

“The maze now is a symbol in a world that does not know where it is going,” Professor Smyser was saying.

Precisely, Hein thought.

After the lecture concluded, Maurice Hein asked Professor Smyser if he might recommend a book or two on mazes and also if he knew an architect he might consult for he was going to build the largest…

“I have one myself, a small hedge maze in my garden in New London. Jane and I are too old now to prune it.” He looked appraisingly at Hein, who also was of an age.

“Oh, I have gardeners already and I have decided on brick walls.”

Others were crowding behind him anxious to talk to Smyser and so, jotting down the titles of some books, Hein was off to upper Fifth Avenue, where he knew his wife would be sitting calmly on her silk cushions looking at once thirty-years-old and timeless.

Smyser sent him one of his maze books a week later, inside of which he wrote, “Along the mazes of this song I go/As inward motions of the wandering thought/Lead me, or outward circumstance impels”–the quote from Wordsworth, and wished him courage and luck with his project.

It took the architect Hein selected, two years and a great deal of money to build his maze. It was large indeed, a subterranean maze, with passages totaling a third of a mile. The floors were moss pricked with weeds, the walls were six to eight feet high. With a false and a real center, the labyrinth was a triumph of misdirection.

The local newspaper ran a three-page feature on the maze with an aerial photograph provided by its proud owner that gave no clues to what awaited. The men trucking in the 12-foot bronze Minotaur got lost and had to call the caretaker to guide them to the center. When the caretaker lost his way, Hein strolled in carrying his ice tea and led the workmen through.

For the first few years of the maze, Maurice Hein set aside a day a month when he permitted people from the town and others to take guided tours of the maze. Monthly magazines like Vogue and Vanity Fair ran articles, and once he allowed the Minotaur to be used for a photo shoot. He was horrified by the models in Versace goddess shifts and gold sandals who crawled and draped themselves all over the beast, leaving it streaked with their bronzers and grease. Thereafter, he refused all requests except for the monthly tour.

Of course, he brought his weekend guests, who felt obliged to attempt the labyrinth at least once on each visit.

“The way to get there is to go away from it,” Hein would say and “The way out is the way in.” It was not the way he had been able to live, but what he believed.

Being the kind of financial-trader-type men and women they were, they raced around and would not quit until they got themselves out—emerging sweaty and often annoyed. There were a lot of hedge fund jokes, though the walls were red brick and not box hedges. Those prone to claustrophobia and panic attacks took pictures of themselves at the entrance.

Hein’s daughter Penelope knew her way through the labyrinth by the time she was six. After the grand opening, Susan never entered the maze again, not even with guests or with Penelope. She had felt imprisoned that first time, as though the walls might topple inward. She hated the dead ends and feeling lost in this dark place. Malevolent spirits swirled above her and, as she spun around, her long hair had caught on the rough bricks. Then she was in the sunken center facing the beast’s haunches, the overlarge bronze testicles. The horned bull’s head peered down at her, mouth open for human flesh.

Humped and kneeling, Picassoesque, the Minotaur seemed to be waiting for her.

Susan had read the myth carefully. She realized that Ariadne had helped Theseus slay her own half-brother, for the Minotaur was conceived when Pasiphae, their mother, out of perverse lust, mated with a bull.

“Never go in alone,” she told Penelope, a disobedient child from the first, one to whom “no” meant “surely, yes.” Just as she was about to be expelled from the city’s best girls’ school, she was extracted and sent off to Deerfield Academy, where she flourished.

 

Over time, the legend of the maze would take over Maurice Hein’s life. After noting his business brilliance, the first thing anyone said about him was, “Did you know he has a maze?” Upon meeting him, one felt the very brownness of the man, crawling up from his shiny cordovan shoes to his brown suits, the long chin above the mouth with its cigar, up to the last bits of brown weaving through his hair. And then there was this extraordinary defiant thing.

As Penelope grew up, the maze aged, sunk even further into the ground, the bricks whitened and pitted with age, a few of them crumbled and missing. The floor of the maze swelled with the wetness of winters and sank with it depressions. Some of the more accessible outer walls were spray painted with the names of trespassers which Nick, the caretaker, power- washed away whenever he could.

By then, Maurice Hein was over eighty, unsteady on his feet and going less often to the country. Susan had always preferred the wilds across the street in Central Park. Once solved, many times revisited, the maze became at once overwhelming and boring to Hein.

It never lost its allure to the town. Along with various Revolutionary War sites, it was a famous feature of the area. Each crop of Joel Barlow High School juniors made a trip out to the estate. Nick guided them through to the center of the maze where, as a rite of passage, they took their selfies with the Minotaur.

Nick told them how Daedalus, the architect of myth, had built a labyrinth for King Minos and how he and his son Icarus had flown from it when they were imprisoned there. Then the hero Theseus had come and volunteered to slay the Minotaur, and the king’s daughter Ariadne had helped him by stringing a thread to its center where the beast lay.

As he spoke and they intently twiddled their phones, Nick, who once had taught school, was reminded of two old movie scenes: the students at the Planetarium in Rebel Without a Cause and the breaking the vinyl records scene in Blackboard Jungle and was glad he had turned his life over to plants.

Historically, the maze had been created to house a defective child (the Minotaur) and as a prison. To people from out of town, it was a challenge and a number of visitors to the area had trespassed, gotten lost, and had to call for help from its midst.

One night, Troy and Carmen Lopez, a couple from New London and the Coast Guard academy there, had come to Redding and gone out drinking at the Spinning Wheel. They made their way to Poverty Hollow and the one place on the estate that abutted the road. They had come with a ladder and flashlights, intending to hoist themselves over the wall and find the statue in the center of the maze.

Troy, scanning the pitted bricks scribbled with names and hearts and spewing male sex organs, held the torch for Carmen. Carmen wobbled over and, holding her platform shoes in one hand, began to climb. She scrambled over the top which was not as wide as she had thought and fell straight down 12 feet (the ground was especially sunken there) onto her head. Troy heard a thud muffled by the carpet of wet autumn leaves.

“Cursed,” Susan told Maurice, “by your… your hubris.”

It was a word he had taught her but he did not remind her of that. They decided not to tell Penelope anything about the fatal fall since she was doing well at school. Maurice did what he could with the local police and the New York papers and it never made it to The Post.

 

Alexander Evans, forced to leave Choate in the middle of the semester, wound up at Deerfield after the January break.

Whereas everything about her father was brown and dry and everything about her mother was incomprehensibly exotic and therefore embarrassing to Penelope, everything about Alexander was golden, especially the way he paid her no attention at all.

Even in the smallest seminar when they were only eight students, and which he dominated, he disregarded her. She had one of those immediate violent crushes that happen with full force at fourteen. Love streamed from her eyes. Love beat in her blood, burning her face and making her wrists ache.

At the end of winter, Alexander turned around in the hall and spoke to her for the first time.

“I hear your family has a maze,” he said and dropped a little smile and brushed back his hair, which was dark and too long, “I’d like to see it.”

That night Alexander, with a backpack holding crackers, weed, and wine with a screwtop, went to Penelope’s room. The rules said they had to have the door open the width of a trashcan and the lights on. Alexander closed the door went straight to her bed where they stayed for the rest of the night, somehow undiscovered.

“I’m going to Harvard,” Alexander said waving his smoke out the window. “And then I may kill my father.”

 

“Whatever,” said Penelope, not believing him at all and not caring.

Alexander told her all about his travels, how he had been unable to stay still, and now would be leaving school. With each adventure he described, she loved him a bit more and wondered if that was possible.

They made plans to go to see the maze, driving down in Alexander’s vintage Volvo P1800 which he kept, against all rules, in a garage in town.

“My mother used to make me do mazes in a workbook when I was like two, he told her. “She sat me down and I did the whole book. When you think about it, the maze is just the external manifestation of our intestines. Maybe that’s why they make people uncomfortable, they are touring themselves.”

To Penelope a phrase like “external manifestation” tossed into a sentence was  further proof of the casual brilliance of Alexander Evans.

They took a taxi to town, Alexander with a duffel so large it was clear he was never coming back.

Penelope had never been in a car with a stick shift. Everything about Alexander was new in a way that frightened her just enough. The car made a roar as they headed through the town for the highway with his hand on her knee until he had to shift.

She looked at his profile and decided she never would be as happy as this again.

Penelope knew the key for the entrance to the maze was in her parent’s bedroom where a large Buddha in an altar faced the bed.

They walked through the snow which had formed a crust and Alexander held her close to him. He told her he would go in alone, she was not to tell him about the maze, the two centers or any of the tricks. He wanted no help at all.

“What should I do with your Minotaur?”

“I hope nothing at all. My Dad is going to kill you already…”

“What’s the quickest anyone has gone through?”

“Thirty minutes. That’s what my Dad does and I can, too. But you can’t run now with the snow. If you get lost I will have to come find you.”

“I won’t get lost, babe.” Alexander liked to say retro things like “Babe” and play weird music like Chet Baker and Miles Davis. He was the most different boy she had ever known.

He was out in 25 minutes, panting, his jacket unzipped, his hair hanging in ringlets, the tip of his nose red, his eyelashes like points of a star around his blue eyes.

She could see something was wrong. In her family, each of them was quick to sense when things were wrong.

They went back towards the house.

“You father did a real thing there, you tell him I said so.”

Alexander was standing by his car, a hand on the door.

“I could take you out for hot chocolate but then I’d be late. Be a good girl Penny and make me some for the road.”

She turned to go inside and, as she faced the door with its bronze winged Daedalus door knocker, she heard his car start up and saw him leaving in two arcs of white gravel and snow.

Late that evening, when Maurice and Susan Hein arrived, they found Penelope sitting in the window seat looking out and only Maurice knew just where he had seen that image and expression of abandonment before.

“He was the fastest of all,” Penelope said.

In the Spring, the first visitors to the center of the maze found a rose hanging from the Minotaur’s mouth. It was long dead.

 

BACK TO CONTENTS