The Language of Paradise: A Novel (2 page)

Gideon is unveiling words, peeling off layers of meaning encrusted over centuries—barnacles, he calls them—to get to the pure image at the core. His interest is more than scholarly, his ambitions infinitely higher than the usual reverend gentleman’s. Papa’s thick black dictionaries and works of philology line the walls of the study. Mausoleums for language, in Gideon’s opinion. Words are alive, they carry the breath of Creation. Is it any wonder they turn to ash in such sepulchers? Sometimes, after supper, he opens one of the tomb-tomes and chooses a word at random—a choice morsel for Mr. Solloway’s delectation. Last night he was hilarious over “baboon,” pursing his lips and reciting each stage of its etymology in a pinch-nose drone. “
The syllables
ba, pa,
naturally uttered in talking, are used to signify the motion of the lips, or the lips themselves, especially large or movable lips, the lips of a beast.
Arriving at the end, he’d paused and heralded the words with a sputtering fanfare: “
An animal with large ugly lips when compared with those of a man.
” When he clapped the book shut, a puff of dust rose from it. “Pity the poor beast,” Gideon said gleefully. “Summed up for all eternity in such an epitaph! I ask you—who is the monkey here?”

Gideon likes to call himself a naturalist of the chairbound variety, who prowls for specimens in the dictionary instead of the forest or jungle. In truth, his aim is so lofty that the thought of it prickles the skin on the back of Sophy’s neck. The object of his investigation is nothing less than the language spoken in man’s first home. Gideon believes that the world God spoke into being—the tender new world that he trusted Adam to name—is as round and real as their little village of Ormsby, Massachusetts, but sunk deeper than Atlantis beneath eons of careless speech. The great task, then, is to raise up this fallen garden by the same means as it was created: word by word. “Delving” is his name for this process—an anointed form of digging, it seems. If he can trace even one or two words back to their original source, reclaim a microscopic fragment of that sacred green, he will have done his life’s work. The thought of it carries him away. “Imagine the conversations we will have. We’ll go Adam one better, Sophy—we won’t just name the animals, we’ll speak them. Birds and beasts flying out of our mouths like angels!”

It is hard for an ordinary mind like hers to grasp. “What will it be like to live there?” she asks him. “How will it be different?”

Then he paints for her a picture she could never reproduce on any canvas, had she a thousand times the skill she was born with. Colors so radiant that the brightest hues appear sickly gray in comparison. A preternatural clarity of light: each man and beast and tree cut cleanly against a sky of purest crystal; each the ruler of its own small kingdom, inhabiting its allotted space with authority and grace. And yet, a harmony of which man can only dream, all these potent singularities joyfully subservient to the whole—
immersed
, he says, and bids her think of a pastoral landscape reflected in a lake, the forms distinct but liquidly blending into each other.

The present world is only a covering. Gideon often says so, and she knows it must be true. Yet, looking around her now—the garden at its peak, all her roses out at once like suitors contending for her favor, the stone wall giddy with honeysuckle—Sophy thinks this ought to be enough. Is it a shallowness of soul that her longings are so easily satisfied? She can’t quite stifle a wish that he might sit beside her on the stone bench as he used to when they were first acquainted, the two of them gazing out at the trellis as if their joined lives were twined there. On a day like this, the troubles that beset them these last months seem like relics of a dark age. The summer has come, Gideon is himself again, and she is as she was meant to be: as filled with life as the rest of creation.

SOPHY SETTLES INTO HER CHAIR
, the afternoon heat, heavy with fragrance, gathering around her. The painting on the easel has preoccupied her for the last week. She has been trying to capture that section of the garden where the land rises ever so slightly to meet a wall of wild roses and honeysuckle. The illusion of height seems to promise some marvel just beyond the bushes: a still lake or a verdant valley, a meadow rolling in rhythmic curves to a gently lapping sea. She’s done well by the foliage—she will grant herself that—and the effect of light and shade is the best she’s ever managed. Today, though, the painting doesn’t draw her in. There is a flatness to it, a mincing correctness that Gideon and Leander will mock. She can’t lift her brush without their voices resounding in her ear. “Imagine you are Mother Eve, gazing at the world for the first time.”

She has what they call an
innocent eye
—or so they tell her. It is an affliction she was born with—not so inconvenient as a wandering eye, or so noticeable as crossed, but of particular interest to Gideon and Leander.

“Are you trying to tell me I paint badly?” she asked when they first began to rhapsodize about the phenomenon. “There’s no need to mock me. I know that already.”

Between the two of them, they’ve decided that she is a simple, natural creature who can shrug off experience as easily as changing a dress. She feels a sudden sympathy for the maligned ape, doomed to be defined by the terms of others. Who is the monkey here? She thinks she knows. True, she hasn’t delved as deeply as Gideon, or explored as much of the world as Leander, but she’s seen things. Her eye is more weathered than they realize. That being so, how is she to fool the jaded organ into discovering this scene for the first time when she’s been contemplating the same patch of garden for days?

They’re right, of course. Exactitude isn’t truth. Something more than accuracy must have pulled each name, full-blown, from Adam’s throat as the parade of beasts passed before him. An urge to play is pulling at her now—overflow from the beauty of the day. She stares into the painting and introduces, in turn, a small ruined temple; a pillar, behind which a hunter lurks; a fleeing nymph; great bloated clouds hanging placidly above, indifferent to the chase. The drama plays itself out while her hands are still folded in her lap.

When at last she picks up her brush, it is to paint a single figure: a few quick strokes that make a man. She places him at the highest point of the hill, with the roses at his back. He stands alone for almost an hour as Sophy squints at him and makes timid dabs at the angle of his head. By four o’clock his mouth is wide open, and poised on his lower lip, like a diver about to leap into the brink, is the small but scrupulously rendered figure of a baboon.

CHAPTER 1

____

GIDEON

G
IDEON BIRDSALL—BENT OVER ONE OF THE WEIGHTY
black volumes he professes to despise, trying to ignore the doubled radiance of the July day and his wife’s bright face at the window—might remove his spectacles to rest his eyes and reflect that he owes his present existence entirely to his gift for Hebrew. It was his facility with that ancient tongue that commended him, a scant two years ago, to the notice of the Reverend Samuel Hedge.

His first sight of the man whose acquaintance would alter the course of his life was not promising. The Reverend Professor Hedge had chosen to welcome the new crop of students to Andover Seminary with a sermon on Divine Election—hardly a theme to mesmerize a group of raw seminarians sweating through their first chapel service on a sultry day in September. The Reverend was sparsely made, sharp-featured, his black coat well brushed but rusty with wear, and when he began to speak, his voice was as meager as his person. “Strive to enter in at the strait gate, for many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in and shall not be able . . .” An exhortation—yet his tone was both flat and hollow, as if the marrow had been scooped out of the words, leaving only brittle casing; his voice rose on the last phrase in a verbal flinging-up-of-hands. It seemed clear that he had little hope for one such as himself, and even less for the sad specimens before him. He paused and sighed, lost in morose contemplation, and the seminarians, Gideon included, shifted in their seats and waited for it to be over. The Reverend looked up then, impaling the lot of them with his pointed gaze. “For STRAIT is the gate, and NARROW is the way, which leadeth unto life, and FEW THERE BE THAT FIND IT!” He drove the words in like nails, and, having secured his listeners, proceeded to transport their rigid forms through a veritable Red Sea of flame, the Chosen marching single file like miners in a shaft, eyes straight ahead, hands locked in prayer, while on either side of them the sizzling multitudes begged for mercy. When he finished, an hour and a half later, more than a few of the young men were shivering as if an early frost had descended.

That evening, sleepless in his narrow bed, Gideon wondered why Reverend Hedge never said a word about where the Redeemed were headed. Toward some vaporous mist, apparently, not unlike the formless matter from which God made the earth. Why had the parson poured all his eloquence into the torments of the damned and saved none for Paradise? Gideon had been asking that question since he was very young. Alone for the first time in his own room, he’d awakened in the night to pure black and cried out that he was blind. His mother had to light a candle to prove to him that he could see. After that, he would burrow under the covers and, in the shelter of a more intimate darkness, try to imagine a paradise of pure light. The preachers at Sunday meeting gave him little to build on. Heaven was only a name to them: the featureless opposite of the other place. The horrors they warned of seemed garish and exaggerated, no more real than the stories boys told about ghosts and bogeymen. Gideon was not frightened of Hell. He was frightened that there was no place as light as the dark was dark.

He had grown up poor, the only son of a widowed schoolmistress. His father had died before he was born—“lost at sea,” his mother told him when he was old enough to ask questions. If Gideon pressed her, she gave him more—releasing each fact with a curious reluctance, always defining his father by what he was not. Good-looking, but “his features were not as noble as yours.” Intelligent, but “had not your refinement of mind.” In time these negative attributes condensed to a comfortable absence in Gideon’s thoughts. As he became more conscious of his own place in the world, his curiosity dwindled. Clearly, his father’s purpose in life had been achieved in creating him. Other boys might make heroes of their dead fathers, but Gideon was not like other boys. A man so inconsequential wasn’t worth mourning, and, as his mother often said, “We make our way well enough, you and I.”

When she was done teaching for the day, his mother tutored him herself, but his knowledge of Latin and French soon exceeded hers, and larger schools in neighboring villages had little to offer him. He had few friends—his intensity struck children of his age as strange and his precocity intimidated the local teachers—but he learned early to cultivate the regard of men of influence. A local mill owner, a wealthy and pious man whose daughter had been taught by Gideon’s mother, saw to it that he was tutored in the classics, and sent him first to Harvard and then (judging the Divinity School too liberal) to Andover Seminary as a living tithe. Such a scholarly boy must surely be destined for the church.

If, at Harvard, Gideon had been considered too serious, wanting in humor and high spirits, at Andover he was among peers. Yet even in this natural habitat, he held himself aloof from the irreverent joking that lightened the long days of his fellow seminarians. The classroom was more sacred to him than chapel, and the men who presided there, eccentric and fallible as they sometimes appeared, emanated the power of shamans, dispensing knowledge as priests dispensed the host. Of all their teachers, the Reverend Hedge was most often mocked—in part because he was feared—but Gideon couldn’t bring himself to call the master of Hebrew and Greek “Hedgehog” and “Prickles” and “Porcupine” as others did. It might be true that the professor’s rare words of praise concealed a stinging quill of reproof; still, Gideon coveted them, and worked hard to merit them. He moved ahead quickly with his translations, from sentences to verses to psalms, English to Hebrew and the reverse, and eventually his papers were returned to him without corrections, and even a “Well Done” in the professor’s angular script. Emboldened, he decided to attempt a longer translation from the Hebrew on his own time. He kept hidden from himself his desire to present it to his teacher as an offering—pride, he knew, was his besetting sin—but agonized over which passage to choose as if Hedge’s gimlet eyes were already boring holes in the page. After much deliberation, he settled on ten chapters of Isaiah, beginning with God’s mockery of the idols of Babylon and ending with 55, a chapter he loved for its exuberance, the mountains singing and the trees clapping their hands.