The Language of Paradise: A Novel (14 page)

Neither of them spoke. He couldn’t read her expression. Her eyes were tender, but something hard shone in their depths: a victory she hoarded for herself. At last she said, very quietly, “That is much better. Thank you.”

“What have I done to deserve thanks?”

“You made me do what I wanted to do. I wouldn’t have had the courage on my own.”

Voices could be heard outside, Mrs. Hedge talking to a neighbor. “The young man is holding steady,” she was saying. “The worst is past, Lord be praised.”

A dubious gift, Gideon thought: to teach selfishness and the primacy of the will. He had chosen a fine way to thank Reverend Hedge and his wife for their attentions. The intoxicating power that had flared in him was souring to shame. He fell back against the pillow and turned away.

Immediately, Sophy was at his side. “What am I thinking, chattering away, tiring you so? Please forgive me, Mr. Birdsall. And I forgot your drink! Mama made it specially and I was to give it to you the moment you woke up. You will find it very refreshing—not medicinal at all.”

She removed the cloth that covered a pitcher on the night table and poured a clear liquid into a tumbler. Bending, she held the glass to his lips, her hair falling forward as she stooped, the ends brushing his face. He shut his eyes and breathed in lilac, cool and sweet, and faint beneath the pomade, the warmer animal smell.

CHAPTER 11

____

DECIDING ON A POSE

P
ROFILE. FULL-FACE. THREE-QUARTER VIEW. SOPHY IS ALWAYS
turning Gideon’s head this way and that, as if it were a clay bust: observing it godlike from above, gazing upward into the sun of his countenance like a kneeling disciple, tilting it back so she can gauge the precise blue of his eyes and acquaint her fingers with the angle in his cheek. Since his return to seminary more than a month ago, she sees him everywhere—even in her landscapes, where his face has a way of rising to the surface of the canvas and obscuring the scene that is already there. When he appears in the flesh for his Sunday visits, she blushes to think of the liberties she’s taken. “Paint him,” Caroline urges. “A few sittings and you’ll have him for life.” Even if she were so shameless, how could she trap the whole of Gideon in a single portrait? She might manage a passable likeness of the serious young man she’s getting to know, but could she capture the vision she saw in the meadow?

Caroline was right about one thing: his illness has brought them closer. He seeks her company now. Walking home after church, he falls in step beside her and makes conversation. It is all very proper, with Mama and Papa looking on, but lately he has asked her to walk with him in the garden after dinner. He speaks freely to her then, about his studies and his life at seminary and the work he hopes to do. Sophy says little, for fear of betraying her ignorance, but she listens with her whole being and takes in every word. Last week, in the exuberance of a rare sunny day, he grabbed her hand and swung her arm, and she thought, This is what lovers do, we must be in love, and that night in her room, she said the words aloud to her mirror, by way of experiment: “I love him,” and then, “I love you.” Her face in the glass looked the same, but speaking the phrase gave it substance, just as talking to God makes Him seem as real and solid as Papa.

Love is a puzzle she will have to solve on her own. Papa must have courted Mama, but Sophy has never seen them caress and can’t imagine how they ever made children. If she had to wake Mama at night, she found them always in the same position: lying on their backs like loaves set out to cool, ready for the Reaper. Observing lovers doesn’t teach her much. James and Caroline, what do they feel, and do they mean the same thing when they say the word? Or the girls at church, flirting and mincing as they chat with favored boys after the service? Parasols, bonnets, fans—the drama is customarily enacted behind one screen or another, but as in a shadow play, meaning is conveyed.

Sophy isn’t brash enough to say,
He loves me
, even to the mirror. Gideon’s feet might touch the earth as hers do, but his thoughts soar where hers can’t follow, and in those spheres he finds his true home. Majesty, Sophy has discovered, is a cold quality, whether possessed by kings or angels. More than once she’s stood inside the doorway of the study, covered dish in hand, waiting in vain for him to look up from his desk. One stormy Sunday she lingered for almost half an hour as the apple dumpling she’d brought him turned cold and soggy, and when she summoned the courage to call his name, the expression on his face—absent, uncomprehending—chilled her to the bone. Now she sets the plate on the nearest surface and tiptoes out.

She knows this much: Loving a man like Gideon will require a special skill. The two sides of him must always be kept in balance, each given an equal weight. Caring for his humblest needs did not diminish the angel in him. She was happy to wipe the dribbles from his chin and carry out his slops, honored to hold the basin as Mama bathed him. His helplessness stirred her—that he should be burdened with a body as vulnerable as other men’s, and still cry out messages from another world.

“
DO YOU REMEMBER
what I said?” He asked her this as soon as he was well enough to speak, and he goes on asking, as if repetition will spur her memory. Sophy always makes a fresh effort. She’d felt that same urgency asking about her mother: the desired object on some distant shore and the questioner in a boat, being borne away by time.

“It’s like calling back a dream,” she told him one damp September afternoon. “I can feel its atmosphere in my brain, but I can’t bring it down to words.”

Gideon had only recently been allowed to leave his bed, and was propped in the visitor’s chair, swathed in blankets he’d thrown off in his impatience to be well. He was thin to begin with, but the fever had burned flesh off him, and his face against the coverlets reminded her of a desert prophet’s, all sharp bones and glittering eyes. Only his hair was untouched: thick because it needed cutting and more abundant than before, as if it had profited from his misfortune.

“Even fragments are valuable,” he said. “Dreams can be reconstructed from their traces. Maybe if you would sit and close your eyes . . . ?”

Sophy obliged him, perching gingerly on the edge of the mattress in case Mama came in. She knew from long experience that she had no gift for silent contemplation. As soon as her lids dropped, the world she was trying to shut out elbowed her in the dark. A fly buzzed, sounding like twenty flies, all whirring round her head. Random cries, animal and human, taunted her from outside, and in the sickroom the very air joined the conspiracy, bathing her in an odorous broth of camphor, vinegar, and sweated sheets, the only window having been sealed against drafts. After a few minutes her back began to ache from her unnatural posture—a clerical daughter’s compromise, halfway between the propriety of standing and the license of sitting, and the worst half of each. She wished she’d worn her Sunday corset for a bolster. She could feel Gideon’s eyes on her. He had framed his request softly, but she’d heard the command in it.

“You were agitated at first,” she said, stalling. She had given him all this before. “Thrashing and waving your arms about. The doctor said we must tie you down, but we hated to do it. You cried out in some strange tongue. Papa said your spirit was in travail—that good and evil were contending for you. He made us all kneel round the bed while he chanted a Psalm in Hebrew, loud enough to drown out the Evil One. You’d been panting, but then your breath faltered and sank deep in your chest. I started to cry. I thought you were dying.”

The stark words brought Sophy back to that moment, when her sorrow had welled up and spilled over. Her eyes watered, and she squeezed them tighter to hold back the flood. Gideon said nothing, but she could feel the force of his attention. There was something pitiless about it—like a surgeon probing for a bullet, so intent on the object that he pays no heed to the patient’s pain. She wanted him to be consoling, to take her hand as the Lord had taken Doubting Thomas’s and put it to his beating heart, but he only waited.

“ ‘
The green. It’s too sharp, it hurts me
!’ You said that!” The fragment came to her when she stopped searching for it. She remembered how his head had tossed from side to side and come suddenly to rest, struck still. “Then you begged for the scales to be removed, that you might look on it with eyes . . . unclothed.”

The word he had used was sanctified in the Bible, but ugly in the mouth. Even at this moment of triumph, she hesitated to say it plain. The gaping
na
rubbing right up against the shaming harshness of the
k
—she never could speak it without seeing her child self crouching in the tub, goose bumps all over till Mama poured the water in. And the
ed
stitching her up in her skin, showing her that this was the sum of Sophy, this plucked, shivering thing. No wonder God had made garments for Adam and Eve!

But “unclothed” sounded pompous, and it wasn’t what Gideon had said. He had cried out again and again, pleading with a desperate logic, as if he would wear the listeners’ hard hearts down.

Sophy waited, hardly daring to breathe, but no more came. She opened her eyes and wiped away the tears. “The rest was like a poem. It washed over me. I can’t repeat it word for word.”

Gideon was staring at her with a hunger so avid that she was frightened. She felt herself grow small in his sight, all her flaws magnified by the force of his attention. She spoke quickly to hide her unease.

“Green, who would have imagined it? When I think of Heaven, it is always white.”

There was a pause. She watched the ardor fade from his eyes.

“
Heaven
.” He displayed the word for mockery. He shrugged his shoulders and laughed: a cool, dry sound, an antidote to fever. “My dear Sophy, I have no idea what color Heaven is, and I don’t much care. It’s the Garden I was talking of.
Paradeisos!
The common mind confuses the two, but you, with your clear sight—I thought you would understand.”

Blood rushed to her cheeks. “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” she said. “You estimate me too high, Mr. Birdsall. I may be more common than you think.” They had been “Gideon” and “Sophy” to each other since the day he woke, though always correct in public. But now she regressed to formality, coasting right over his endearment. “We simple folk, we leave naming to the scholars. We don’t fuss about what the good place is called, so long as we end up there.”

“That’s it, exactly!” Gideon started toward her, gripping the arms of his chair. “You and I have been lectured since infancy about this glorious destination we’re to strive for—always in the future, never in reach. If we’re sufficiently righteous, we’ll be admitted, but since our character is flawed, we must depend on grace. And if the Emperor should take a dislike to one of us and put his thumb down, we can still be turned away.” He seemed to quiver with some pent-up joke, a vein pulsing in his forehead and his mouth twisted in a grin. “Sophy, it’s all nonsense! The groveling, the infernal rules, the gatekeeper with his giant key. There are other paths to that good place. I have seen the green for myself, and I can testify—you won’t find its like in a forest or park, or a flower bed, or anywhere else in this pale imposter we dignify with the name of Nature. You will never find it on your palette. To call it a color is too weak. Too static. It is growth itself, made visible!” He reached out to her, his thin fingers cupped as if he would grip her from afar. “Come with me. We’ll walk there together.”

Sophy knew that she ought to quiet him with soothing words, coax him gently back to bed and run to the pantry for one of Mama’s anodynes. Fever had roiled his mind, and only sleep would smooth it out again. But she didn’t dare stir from her chosen seat, though the crick in her neck had progressed to a zigzag streak between her shoulder blades. She had never imagined such a Paradise as Gideon spoke of—had never thought of Paradise as a place at all, except in a storybook way: more real than Camelot, not quite as substantial as Bethlehem.

Gardens were more familiar. Each spring, since she was old enough to pat seeds into earth, Sophy had been given a square of soil to transform according to her own notions of beauty. Having created so many Edens single-handed, she was strongly tempted to compare her handiwork to the original. She wasn’t sure she believed in this good place of Gideon’s, but she believed in him who told her of it. The green he described brought it nearer than the Bible ever had. It was as if he offered her a souvenir of his travels: a tuft of grass that would never wither, or a few leaves plucked from the Tree of Life.

Gideon fell back against the cushions. His hands rested on his knees, palms up, fingers extended; he meant to show her that his invitation still stood, though he could not. His languor was at odds with the fervor in his eyes. For all his weakness, a royal will emanated from him: she
must
see what he saw. Sophy had never felt such sureness, even about things readily observed and touched. His faith was different than Papa’s, which was heavy and unyielding, a massive stone such as might have plugged the door of the empty tomb. Gideon’s truth was all motion. He was asking her to accompany him on a journey, and she had never taken one in her life. She wanted to go, but she was afraid. Already her restless mother was mocking her timidity, making prickles up and down her spine, goading her. If Sophy were to get up now, she would walk to Gideon with arms outstretched. Put her wrists in his bony shackles and let him lead her—where?