The Language of Paradise: A Novel (36 page)

Sophy dressed quickly, declaring herself famished. Gideon’s queasiness had vanished; he was hungry himself. The dining table was set for three. Someone had laid a cloth over it and put a colored leaf above each plate, a small delicacy that made them both think of Micah.

“Your brother must have risen before us,” Gideon said. “I hoped he’d stay a day or two, but I suppose he’s fled back to the comforts of home.”

“He doesn’t like to leave Mama for long.” Sophy was glancing here and there, taking notice of the room’s features.

Privately, Gideon thought that, furniture or no, they were more civilized here than they had been under the Reverend’s roof. Looking around the sun-splashed room, he felt for the first time the pride of possession; he had never imagined living in such elegant surroundings. It was easy to imagine their lives prospering in these generous spaces; their plans, which had seemed far-fetched under Hedge’s roof, flourishing beneath these lofty ceilings.

“This is a gentleman’s house,” Sophy said. “James would not have been happy here.” Her hand strayed to the skirt of her wrinkled dress, one of two that Fanny had let out, thrown on in haste to see her through another day.

“You are the lady of the manor,” he assured her.

A manservant appeared, bearing Mrs. Hedge’s silver wedding tray laden with steaming dishes. Sophy gave a little cry and put her hand to her breast. Gideon stared.

“Good morning, friends. You’re keeping city hours, I see, and so you should while you can. I went out early, hoping to find some nice mushrooms, and found a nice farmhouse instead, and a most obliging lady who sold me some eggs and agreed to part with a few of her fine chickens, as soon as I get wire for a coop.” He set the tray on the table.

“And the lady had a pair of shears, and struck a bargain for your raven locks.” Gideon was just beginning to merge the clean-shaven stranger who spoke in his friend’s voice with the black-bearded man he knew. The reality of a shorn Leander seemed no less uncanny than the specter of a servant had an instant before.

“Never! I pruned my own foliage. God knows I’ve lived behind it long enough. I wanted to honor our new life by showing my true face to the world. The temple priests did the same.” Leander patted his head. “I’m not quite a Nazirite. There’s plenty left on top.” He smiled at Sophy, a bit tentative. “Your brother took one look at me and ran all the way back to town. What does the lady think? Am I more handsome now?”

“I think you should have thought less of the Nazirites and more of Samson,” Sophy said.

Leander winked at Gideon. “I’ll have to tread carefully, with such a wit to trim me down to size.”

As they ate, chatting about their plans for the day, Gideon struggled to keep his eyes on his plate and his mind on the matters at hand. Whenever he glanced at the naked face across from him, he got a small shock. The Patriarchs had been bearded, or so they were always portrayed. Yet he saw clearly now what he had only sensed before: the undefinable thing that marked Leander as an Israelite. It wasn’t the features—though the nose jutted more boldly without the cushioning effect of shrubbery—but the expression that overlay them. He recognized it, but couldn’t name it, quite. Skepticism, a kind of blighted humor, worldliness and weariness with the world—it was all these things and more, congealed into a cast that had hardened over time. What must it be like to know from your earliest years that you were not yourself only, but your history?

Gideon thought back to his first acquaintance with the Israelites, in the Bible stories his mother read him. They had been mythic characters, conquering Canaan, but conquered, too. Feisty rebels, at the mercy of invading armies and a moody, imperious God who vanished for long stretches, yet—how mean his young self had thought this—begrudged them their golden calf. Good companions for a fatherless child. From his boyhood, two tribes had lived side by side in him: the Hebrews in the stories and the Jews, who “kept to themselves,” his mother had told him after a peddler came to the back door. They were strangers wherever they wandered, she said. Leander had qualities of both. By virtue of his height and appetites, he was biblical, but his skills were those of an exile and survivor.

“Your pupils won’t recognize you,” Gideon said, feeling a new trepidation for his friend. Leander had resolved to teach until the new schoolmaster arrived at the end of November.

“They expect me to astonish them. I’ll tell them I said a magic word.” Leander caressed his smooth chin. His eyes were larger in the new face, more gold than green in the morning light. “In a week they’ll have forgotten I ever had a beard.”

Sophy rose and began to collect the plates. He and Leander both bobbed up to help her. “Stay where you are,” she ordered them. “I’m not infirm.”

She had a slight sway now when she walked, balancing her weight from step to step like a woman carrying a basket of laundry to the river. They watched her. These days they watched her whether she painted or not, though Gideon knew that it made her shy. Was every first pregnancy such a primal fascination, he wondered? Was every firstborn the first citizen of a new world?

“We are a small tribe,” Leander said, when Sophy was out of earshot, “but we are increasing.”

CHAPTER 30

____

ANNUNCIATION

B
ATHE IN IT, THEY TELL HER. ALSO, REST IN IT, TASTE IT
, breathe it in, dream in it, listen to it, learn from it, think about it, and then, don’t think about it. Apparently there are Commandments of Silence, written on air instead of stone, said air emanating from Gideon and Leander, who expend a great many words to describe the absence of sound.

They are silent on Sunday afternoons and at dinner three days a week. The sessions remind her of prayer, in all the worst ways: one might wish to set one’s mind on higher things, but even in this quiet place, the hum of the world intrudes. Contemplations are tolerable, even pleasurable, as long as she fills them with reading or painting. Evening devotions are what they have always been, though she has yet to see anyone open a Bible. Now that they don’t go to church, they’ve become their own Quaker meeting: she knits for the baby, enjoying the clack of the needles; Gideon pores over one of his tomes; Leander sits square in his chair like the Pharaoh, in one of his waking sleeps. Meals are a trial.

This Sunday, at table, they point to what they want—as the monks do, Gideon says, but she thinks, more like monkeys. Please and thank-you pared down to the stab of a forefinger. Cider! More squash! Mastication is a cacophony, every chew and swallow and swish of the tongue resounding. Bite into a hard crust and the crackle lingers like a curse. Leander makes a great show of savoring his food, chewing each mouthful slowly, pretending to muse upon its qualities before he releases the morsel to its destiny. For all his efforts to prolong the process, dinner is over in a quarter of the time it used to be. If silence is a sanctuary, no one chooses to shelter in it for long. Gideon says she must think of these interludes as islands in a sea of talk, but what if the islands should spread into continents? What if the chatter they’ve all bathed in since infancy should dry up?

“One of us could read aloud while the others eat,” she suggests when speech resumes. “We could take turns. The Bible, or whatever the reader pleases. Even the monks allow that.” She would happily listen to Papa’s Lexicon, let the Hebrew seep into her hungry ears and fly straight to her brain sans impediment—only a smattering of French to keep it company, and a few stray bits of Latin from the boys’ lessons.

“But Sophy, don’t you see—it wouldn’t be silence.” Gideon sighs and wrings his hands as if she’d asked for lettuce from the witch’s garden. Words often fail him nowadays; he looks to Leander to supply them. She feels that he is struggling to confide in her, but can’t find the proper expression.

Leander is never at a loss. “You must give yourself to it, Sophia,” he exhorts. “You won’t reap its benefits until you do.” He fixes her with his greenest eye, all glitter gone. She’s warranted the rebuke only once before, when Micah made a sheep-face at her across the silent table and—owing to her pent-up state—laughter spurted out. It’s like being observed through the wrong end of a spyglass, the object being to make her small. “If you can’t submit for your own sake, think of your husband! Think of your child! Measure your petty resistance against their well-being.”

“I would gladly give myself to
it
, if I knew what
it
was,” she says. “Perhaps one day you’ll enlighten me.” She turns to go, but not before catching the look that passes between them. She can’t help herself then. She throws a dart over her shoulder. “Who are you to lecture me about my family’s well-being? A bachelor with no family of your own. Did you think you could borrow ours?”

Sophy doesn’t stay to see the effect. She marches straight to the conservatory and slams the door as hard as she can. Glass shudders all around her, the tremor resounding in her bones. The fire in the stove has burned low, but she doesn’t mind. The cold is clarifying. She stands by the easel, taking an odd comfort from the sight of her breath on the panes. Her new painting repeats the view outside: a stark November landscape, black tree trunks reaching bony fingers to a pallid sky. The branches seem to be pleading.
Please
,
let us keep a few leaves to see us through the winter. Or, Please, help us shake these clingers off.

Strange that a place so exposed should be her only refuge in this house. The transparent walls don’t bother her—not even when she catches Leander looking in on his way to the woodpile. She likes being able to watch the weather, and has thought what a picture it would make if she could mark nature’s changing dress day to day, week to week, the costume gradually altering at the bidding of her brush. But then, what else would she ever paint?

With both hands she strokes the mound under her apron. She feels closest to the baby in this room; she talks to it and sings to it, always in a low voice to protect their intimacy. If it is still, she knows it’s listening, and if it moves, she senses a spark of will, a reminder that her tenant is restless, just as her mother used to be when she was in residence, and won’t be content with such modest accommodations forever. “Sometimes I wish you could stay,” she’d confided yesterday, and was answered with a flurry of kicks.

“We might as well do some painting while the light lasts,” she tells it now. The baby is a good companion while she works, though each week the distance between her arms and the easel seems longer.

A knock at the door. “Sophy . . . may I come in?” Hesitant, which means nothing.

She stands tall, armoring herself with the tatters of her anger. One look at Gideon’s face and she is seized with a need to apologize.

“I am sorry—” she begins.

“No, I am sorry. I should have spoken to you before. I was waiting for the right moment. I see I waited too long.”

She says nothing. There are other uses for silence.

He pulls the chair away from the easel and sits, gazing bleakly at the supplicating trees. “We—Leander and I—feel that an extraordinary child deserves an extraordinary upbringing. We have made special plans for the baby. For you, too, of course.”

“I’m happy to know our child will be extraordinary, but shouldn’t I have been consulted?”

“We thought it best to introduce you gradually. We hoped you’d take to the silences as we do—find nourishment in them, and pass that richness on to the baby. It gives me such comfort to think of our little one inside you, nursing on sweet peace.” Gideon scrutinizes her landscape as if it were a page of Aramaic. “Our aim—our
mission
—is to preserve that peace. To shield the tender new soul from pollution, once it is born into this babbling world. We’re the gatekeepers, you and Leander and I. But we must be united.”

Her skin goes cold. “Look at me,” she says. “Tell me plain.”

He turns to her. “We intend to raise the baby in an atmosphere of love and beauty, and answer its every need. But in its presence, we will—all of us—refrain from speaking. We’ll listen as we’ve never listened before, and record every utterance, from the first cries and gurgles to the first spontaneous word. Leander has presented me with a journal—a handsome one, worthy of its contents. The boards are the color of new leaves.” His face brightens. “Oh, Sophy, I dream of the day I make the first entry. Will it be a fragment of an ancient language or a tongue not heard since angels barred the gate of Eden? What an honor to be God’s clerk. His amanuensis . . . I like to think the Reverend would be pleased.”

“Are you saying we’re not to talk to our child? How are we to communicate? Will we make signs with our hands as they do with the deaf?” It is the extremity that keeps her calm. Her voice sounds like Papa’s, dry as dust, sorting out the facts of a parishioner’s calamity.

A flicker of uncertainty in his eyes. He seems to weigh the possibility that she’s being farcical.

“Some gesturing is inevitable,” he says, “but we mustn’t use our bodies as a crutch. The baby will see what we see and hear what we hear, lacking only words. It will be steeped in the sounds of nature and domesticity, as we are. Our paradise is earthly, so we can’t expect to shield our little one from the hubbub of daily life. Its first words may mimic the plash of water in a basin, or the call of a bird—or a dish breaking. Few believe now that speech began as imitation, but we’ll have an excellent opportunity to put that dusty old theory to the test—”