For Stewart and Sara, always,
and in memory of Wendy Weil
and Carol Houck Smith
CONTENTS
Prologue: Birds and Beasts Fly Out of Our Mouths Like Angels
PART ONE: COME WITH ME
Chapter One:
Gideon
Chapter Two:
Hoyden
Chapter Three:
The Reverend’s House
Chapter Four:
Celestial Guest
Chapter Five:
In the Reverend’s Study
Chapter Six:
A Single Eye
Chapter Seven:
Amanuensis
Chapter Eight:
The Country of Beth
Chapter Nine:
Means and Ends
Chapter Ten:
Return to Earth
Chapter Eleven:
Deciding on a Pose
Chapter Twelve:
Destinations
PART TWO: THE FATAL ROUND
Chapter Thirteen:
Consequences of the Fall
Chapter Fourteen:
Knit
Chapter Fifteen:
Hidden in Plain Sight
Chapter Sixteen:
Wedding
Chapter Seventeen:
Possessed
Chapter Eighteen:
Practice
Chapter Nineteen:
Wedlock
Chapter Twenty:
One
PART THREE: EARTH AND AIR
Chapter Twenty-One:
Exile
Chapter Twenty-Two:
Preaching Paradise
Chapter Twenty-Three:
Leander
Chapter Twenty-Four:
The Guest
Chapter Twenty-Five:
Inside
Chapter Twenty-Six:
Habitation for Ghosts
Chapter Twenty-Seven:
Small Red Room
PART FOUR: POPULATING PARADISE
Chapter Twenty-Eight:
Bricks and Mortar
Chapter Twenty-Nine:
Rites of Passage
Chapter Thirty:
Annunciation
Chapter Thirty-One:
Visitation
Chapter Thirty-Two:
Nativity
PART FIVE: PROTECTING PARADISE
Chapter Thirty-Three:
Naming
Chapter Thirty-Four:
Alliteration
Chapter Thirty-Five:
Laying Stone
Chapter Thirty-Six:
Fortress
Chapter Thirty-Seven:
Questions
Chapter Thirty-Eight:
Leaving
Chapter Thirty-Nine:
Raking Ashes
PART SIX: BREAKING THE SILENCE
Chapter Forty:
Dash
PART SEVEN: AFTERLIFE
Chapter Forty-One:
Working from Life
Acknowlegments
Love, it is said, was the inventor of drawing. It might also have invented speech, though less felicitously; Dissatisfied with speech, love disdains it, it has livelier ways of expressing itself. How many things the girl who took such pleasure in tracing her Lover’s shadow was telling him! What sounds could she have used to convey what she conveyed with this movement of the twig?
—JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU,
“Essay on the Origin of Languages in Which Something Is Said About Melody and Musical Imitation” (from Rousseau: The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch)
Build therefore your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON (from Nature)
THE LANGUAGE OF PARADISE
PROLOGUE
BIRDS AND BEASTS FLY OUT OF OUR MOUTHS LIKE ANGELS
SOPHIA, July 1838
SUMMER IS THE SEASON OF UNVEILING. THE BED CURTAINS came down last month, the carpets have been rolled up, straw matting laid on floors that hold the winter chill. Every door is open. The hall has been transformed into an airy cloister, a whole other room where the family sits on humid nights, enjoying the crosswind. It is possible to walk from the front path straight through the center of the house and out into the garden. Sophy Birdsall does that now, just because she can.
She is conscious of a certain impropriety. A few weeks along as she is, she should not be carrying herself like a bride walking down the aisle. She should not be sweeping, even if the infinitesimal weight makes her feel majestic. She’s always been a scanty little thing, a light craft at the mercy of every current. Now that she will soon have a prow, she feels for the first time like a vessel of substance, balanced even in unsettled waters. She believes she has finally grown into her proper name. She sees it inscribed on the stern of her boat in majestic, undulating cursive: Sophia.
The hall mirror stops her in mid-stride; these days she can’t pass by without measuring her silhouette. She steps away with a gasp—Mama draped the glass with muslin to keep fly-spots off! That won’t do, the soon-to-be-ample Sophia will not be reduced to a ghost! Her white dress has faded away, but her face and neck and hands show through the gauzy cotton, ruddy with a life of their own. Like a nun bathing in her shift.
She doesn’t know where the thought came from, but before she can ponder it, a nun confronts her from the clouded depths of the mirror. Eyes staring straight ahead, hands moving furtively over the wet cloth.
Sophy’s mind has always been prone to strange couplings. In her girlhood she would speak what she saw without hesitating, the words darting from her brain to her tongue in a single headlong swoop like birds lighting on the nearest branch. People might laugh or shake their heads—“Sophy,” her brothers would say by way of explanation, shrugging, as if her oddity were its own excuse—but at times these unlikely matches were even taken for wit. Then they came like gifts on the wing, quick and airy. Lately they barge in like intruders and harden to images that haunt her for days. Sophy supposes it must be her condition. She wishes she could ask Mama, for all the good it would do. Mama, who is no more troubled by unruly thoughts than she was by morning queasiness.
Gideon would never imagine his little wife could be prey to such unwholesome fancies. He assumes that her inner landscape is as sunny and placid as a baby’s. It suits his purposes to think so. An hour ago over breakfast—as avid for the quiet of his study as she was for his company—he gave her a commission. “Why don’t you paint me a soothing scene to contemplate while I work?”
“You would do better to look out the window,” she told him. She meant only to disparage her own talents, but he is not a man to take words lightly.
“I’m not asking for a view,” he said, peevish. “If I wanted a prospect, I would climb a hill. Just paint what you see, as you see it, and for the Lord’s sake, don’t try to get it right. Remember what Leander told you. Perspective is the Devil’s trick.”
Leander Solloway, the schoolmaster, is a man of strong opinions, and he is not shy about sharing them.
With effort, Sophy fixes her attention on the rectangle of garden framed in the back doorway. There’s a painting begging to be made here, if only she had the skill. Her brushwork isn’t deft enough to catch the conversation between sun and shadow, liquid gold and new green. She would approach it too earnestly, try to catch the movement and reduce it all to blotches.
On the back stair, she pauses to tent her eyes. The sun is a force today. Even in summer the Hedge farmhouse is dark, shrouded in old shade trees that reach above the roof. Her late Rev
erend Papa, a practical man, was thinking more of warmth than light when he put the windows in. Since childhood Sophy has moped through the winter—an eternal night in New England—but today she is grateful for months of cold and gloom. Contrast is everything, playing with paint has taught her that. Would the roses and sweet peas seem so bounteous, the foliage so lush, if it were brighter indoors? She and Gideon echo these contrasts, in their way. Sophy won’t go so far as to say that she is spring, he winter. It would be blasphemy to think so—not with his cornsilk hair. But his character she thinks of as wintry. Singleness of mind. A gravity rare in one so young. A stern and probing eye that pierces through the world’s seductions to the greater glory beneath. With these virtues to gird him, he hides himself in the study on this brilliant Monday morning, snatching a few hours at his desk before going off with Mr. Solloway to finish the house where the three of them will live one day. She is not permitted to know their intentions. They’re preparing a grand surprise for her, Gideon says: a sanctuary where she can paint from nature all year round.
Today she is glad enough to work outdoors. Her easel is under the copper beech, but she walks past it to the outbuilding Papa built for his study. Since the days when she and Gideon were courting, it has been a little home for them. Sophy can’t resist a peek through the window. She rarely has her husband to herself nowadays; if she can’t be at his side, she must settle for a glimpse of the back of his head.
By his own choice, his desk faces the far wall. The light that trickles through the small panes is barely sufficient for the minuscule print he pores over hour after hour; her beloved astral lamp—a wedding gift from Papa’s congregation—burns all day next to his open book. Its crystal drops hold rainbows she could look at for hours, but the colors are wasted on Gideon. Sophy would love nothing better than to slip in behind him, clasp his temples in her cool hands, ease his poor laden head back to rest against her. She would remove the spectacles that grip his nose like pincers, and rub the clefts they leave, and the ridge between his eyes. But she knows better than to interrupt him at his work.
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 h
er 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
GIDEON 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.
The Language of Paradise: A Novel Page 1
