The Language of Paradise: A Novel

by Barbara Klein Moss

  “Tell me about my mother,” she begged Papa when she was younger. “Tell me what she was like.” In those days he was her best friend, taking her on long walks in all seasons and pointing out small marvels she might miss on her own, beetles and bird’s nests and garish orange fungi that sprouted like Gypsies in their damp New England woods. Papa would sigh and offer words so sparse that Sophy couldn’t patch a picture out of them. “She was small like you. Full of life, always happy. A sweet singer.” If she pressed him for more, he turned away, a pinched look on his face—miserly, hoarding his memories of his only sister, keeping them to himself. The last time she questioned him, he said, “I was wrong to burden you with your beginnings when your own life is forming. No good can come of it. Don’t ask me again, Sophy.” That was the end of the confidence between them. He looks at her now with narrowed eyes, always on guard—against what, she isn’t sure. Some unseemly thing that’s been growing inside her since she was born and might erupt any day.

  From the woman she calls Mama, she has gotten even less. A tart look. Hands on hips. “Your mother is the one who did the work of raising you. Be thankful, girl, and don’t brood on the dead when you can be useful to the living.”

  How to conjure the author of one’s being from scraps? And yet, her mother will not be subdued. The older Sophy gets, the more boldly she asserts herself—or perhaps it’s only that Sophy recognizes her now. The oddities that people have marked in her since she was a child—the likenesses she sees, the way words turn to images in her head—what can these be but her mother trying to escape her unnatural confinement, reminding Sophy she’s still here? Some in the congregation might call this possession, but there’s nothing dark in it. If a spirit inhabits her, its nature is joyful, verging on the wild. Sophy will be sweeping the kitchen, or sitting quietly in a corner reading, and suddenly she’ll feel a shimmer through her body, as if the blood running in her veins has turned to silver. She has to get away then, somewhere she can be alone. A meadow faces the front of their house, a farmer’s field abandoned for as long as she can remember; Papa talks of acquiring the land and putting it to good use. Meanwhile, the grasses are tall, the flowers are thick and wild, and sated bees circle crazily, drunk with sweetness. A garden of glorious neglect.

  Sophy gazes out the window. Ahead are hours of sitting still in the front pew, her sides compressed in the stays Mama makes her wear at meeting to improve her posture and concentration. Hours of Reverend Papa droning on about sin and salvation and the next world, while spring exults outside. The torment won’t end at dinner: Papa is bringing one of his students home, and they’ll be theologizing all afternoon, possibly in Hebrew or Greek, and she’ll be expected to help Mama serve, and pretend to read her Bible after, and speak when spoken to, if anyone bothers to address her. There will be no time to paint at all.

  Mama is upstairs in her usual state of distraction, making Micah presentable as she parleys between James and Reuben, who are having one of their disputes.

  “I’m just going out for a bit,” Sophy calls.

  “The wild asparagus should be up. Pull some if you can, but don’t be long. You’ll make us late.”

  IN A MONTH OR TWO, the meadow will be its own seclusion, the grasses higher than her knee. Now the green is new and tender. To be safe from prying eyes, Sophy has to tramp halfway across, crushing violets and dandelions underfoot.

  Once the spot is chosen, she plants her feet firmly and raises her face to the sun, letting the stillness fill her. Unhurried, she waits for what will come. The only movement is her breath: her mother defying the laces, buoying her from within. Her arms lift of their own accord. The first steps are decorous, a ballroom twirl in a bell-shaped skirt. But the circles get wider. She spins faster, her feet thrust and kick, her head whips round and round until her soul—that cumbersome catchall she’s toted since infancy, subject of endless admonition—sails off her like a hat in the wind. Oh, the lightness! Though the dance is always different, its end is the same: the body exalted, her true and only home. She would keep on forever, but too soon she is still again, her heart hammering, her ribs straining against her stays.

  Behind her, a disturbance of the air. If her senses weren’t overkeen from her exertions, she wouldn’t hear anything at all.

  A man in a white shirt is watching her from the road. He is very fair, his light hair swept back from his brow, and even at a distance she can see that he is beautiful. The startling perfection of his face clashes with the hanging shirttail, the loose cravat—as if (she will affect later, musing on him in church) he pulled those coarse garments on in haste to cover telltale wings. His coat is suspended from one hand, held up stiffly like a sign. He lowers his arm, slow and rigid, and Sophy is seized with fear. If the apparition has a message for her, she is in no state to receive it. In a blind panic, she turns and runs for the shelter of the house.

  Mama is waiting at the door. “Where have you got to? Look at you, you hoyden! No time to fix you now, you’ll have to go as you are and shame us all.” She clamps Sophy’s bonnet down, hard, and whisks the loose strands underneath.

  CHAPTER 3

  ____

  THE REVEREND’S HOUSE

  THE CHURCH WAS FOUR MILES FROM THE SEMINARY—NO great distance, but the day was warm, and after an hour of brisk walking, Gideon’s best shirt was soaked through. He had shed garments along the way, tossing his jacket over one arm and stuffing his cravat in his pocket so his shirt gaped at the neck. When the parsonage came into view—a square yellow structure with an off-center chimney, a raffish touch like a feather in a straw hat—Gideon recognized it immediately. Its design and raising, its furnishing and maintenance, its conveniences and solid comforts had been a constant theme in Reverend Hedge’s lectures and sermons. He had managed to insinuate its virtues into all manner of topics, from the dangers of breathing stale air while sleeping to the building of Solomon’s Temple. Gazing at the house now across a meadow dotted with dandelions, Gideon felt that he knew every jot and cubit of its interior without having ventured inside. He stopped under a tree to mop his face and make himself presentable, and saw that he was not alone.

  A girl in a blue dress stood very still in the meadow. She seemed to be gazing intently at the sky; he couldn’t see her face, only the back of her head, with its gathered knot of light brown hair at the nape. The scene satisfied his eye in a way he could not explain. It was as though God had arranged the composition just for him: planted the girl in this field of yellow and purple and green, and posed her so Gideon could take pleasure in the sun on her hair, her sloping shoulders, the half-moon of white rising out of the scoop of her neckline. As he watched, hardly breathing for fear of startling her, she spread her arms and brought them slowly into an arc over her head. His first thought was that she must be doing some sort of calisthenics, in the manner of the ancient Greeks. But she began to spin in place, then to whirl in widening circles, lifting her leg so high that he could see her ankle in its white stocking. She raised her skirt with both hands, as if wading through a stream, and executed a series of rapid kicks, whipping the grasses. She arched her back, reached up to the heavens, dropped down into a deep curtsy. Gideon had never seen a dance so stately, yet so abandoned. Her movements were as spacious and flowing as a Maenad’s. He had no idea what god she might be invoking, but knew at once that it wasn’t the one he worshiped on Sundays.

  If the Reverend had not been waiting, armed with sermons about squandered time, Gideon would have been content to lean against the tree for the rest of the morning, lost in the spectacle before him. The dancer spared him that choice. Her gestures grew more circumscribed, and in a moment or two she was as he had first seen her. It seemed that the dance had finished with her and let her go. He kept his eyes on her as he took his cravat from his pocket; a superstition had come over him that if he looked away she would vanish into the ether. He made a dumb show of knotting his tie, stretching out the habitual movements until they felt as ceremonial as her own. With in
finite care he lifted his coat from the branch where he’d hung it. The small motion was enough to alert her. She crooked her head like a wren—one long look that took him in whole—and flew off toward the house.

  Gideon stood for a moment staring after her, trying to apply his powers of reasoning to the vision he’d just seen. She had fled on her own two feet toward a solid destination: therefore she was neither sprite nor spirit. She was most likely a member of the Hedge household, but in what capacity? A servant? His intuition told him she was not; there was a gentility about her, and besides, she was too free. A daughter, then. For all his awe of his professor, the idea was absurd. He would sooner believe she was a wood nymph! It went against the laws of nature that something so wild and lovely could have sprung from the parson’s loins.

  ONCE GIDEON CROSSED the meadow, he found that he was part of a procession. The Reverend had no doubt been at church since dawn, but the rest of his flock were straggling in more slowly. Gideon thought he sensed some reluctance in their halting gait—a disinclination to be raked over the coals on such a splendid day. From the looks of them, they were mostly small farmers and farmworkers, perhaps a few tradesmen and shopkeepers. Ormsby was a rural town, hardly more than a village. Andover was like Athens compared to it—a seat of culture, a fountain of intellect. He wondered why a man of learning would choose to settle in such a backwater.

  The meetinghouse was as expected, all straight lines and white shingles, but Gideon was impressed by the height and handsomeness of the steeple. He had a weakness for grandeur, and secretly envied the Catholics their stone cathedrals and festooned altars, their ceilings that soared like the dome of Heaven; he had even questioned whether it might be easier to pray in a setting that costumed Divinity in the vestments of earthly glory. The stark Congregational interiors he’d grown up with had turned God into an abstraction, chilly and remote. Even now, committed to a career in the church, Gideon had yet to feel the intimacy that the great preachers spoke of, had never known that unalterable transformation of the heart. From time to time he tried to work up an appropriate panic about the state of his soul, but these attempts usually ended in frustration. How could he inspire others when he had no tools but dry Scripture? Would it really be such a sin if the Blessed Assurance were embodied in a statue or mediated through stained glass?

  He knew what Hedge would make of such reflections. From his place at the end of the queue, Gideon had plenty of leisure to observe the Reverend as he presided at the door. On the pretense of shaking hands, Hedge immobilized each person’s forearm in a wrestler’s hold as he bestowed a few words, then propelled the congregant into the sanctuary with a firm pat on the back.

  “Welcome, Mr. Birdsall!” he said when Gideon’s turn came. His grip was powerful for such a small man. “We are looking forward to your company today. My wife pillaged the garden as though we were having three guests—or one very large one. I made the error of telling her you were on the thin side.”

  “I’ll try to do justice to her expectations,” Gideon said, realizing at once that he should have said, “generosity.” But even as he amended the word, Hedge was launching him into the church. Passing through the door, he was uncomfortably reminded of the sermon about the strait gate. Here was no magnificence to lift his spirit, only a narrow aisle separating rows of boxlike pews, and an elevated pulpit, from which height the Reverend would look down on his flock, peppering them with wisdom. Unlike the dusky cathedrals of Gideon’s dreams, the interior was very bright. Light streamed through the long windows and rebounded from whitewashed walls. If the theater of the Roman church required darkness for its effects, and smoky incense to conjure mystery, here all was exposed—most particularly, the souls of those assembled.

  Today the light was Gideon’s friend. A quick scan of the aisles revealed his dancer in the front pew—unmistakable in her blue dress, though a straw bonnet eclipsed his view of her face. The church was filling up, but he managed to squeeze into a space only two rows behind her. An older woman sat to her left, nearest the center aisle, and a veritable phalanx of tall young men filled the rest of the pew. It had never been Hedge’s habit to speak as freely of his family as of his house. The name of one son or another would surface at times, flotsam in the vast sea of his household innovations. If he mentioned his Consort, as he called her (pronounced with ponderous gravity, as if it were a royal title), it was usually in reference to a task they’d shared, or to illustrate the virtues of a proper helpmate. These comments spawned a flurry of speculation among the students about the true nature of the serviceable Mrs. Hedge: she was a potted plant, a fruit-bearing tree, an iron cooking pot, a broom. Gideon couldn’t recall that Hedge had ever spoken of a daughter.

  The parson began in a benevolent mood. He preached briefly on God’s bounteous provision—“You who made your way here on foot no doubt beheld the lilies sprouting in our humble fields”—before veering into a rebuke of those misguided Boston preachers who, in addition to offering their parishioners the sop of universal salvation, had departed so far from the fold as to make an idol of nature.

  Gideon tried to listen attentively in case Hedge should question him afterward, but his mind wandered. He could not stop thinking of his own view of the field, and of the lily he had seen there. The girl was incidental, he told himself: one element in a charming rural scene. If he hadn’t caught her dancing—that extraordinary pagan ballet!—he might have forgotten her by now. One couldn’t cling to such beauty, and if she were indeed Hedge’s daughter, the illusion might be cruelly fleeting. He’d scarcely glimpsed her face; for all he knew, she might be snaggle-toothed, or sharp-featured like her father. Still, he kept his eyes on the bonnet and remembered the part in her hair—a marvel of geometric straightness, better achieved with a ruler than a comb—and the two perfect wings that followed the curve of her cheekbones and folded back over her ears.

  After the service, Gideon waited in the yard while Reverend Hedge took leave of his flock. People came out of meeting and drifted into clusters, greeting each other, gossiping. In this little village, everyone knew everyone else, and knew their places, too. It was as if they stood in trenches that had been dug before they were born. Sooner or later dirt would cover them, the parson would say a few words, a stone would be erected, and a new generation would sprout up in soil fertilized by its elders. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad thing, Gideon reflected, feeling like the outsider he was. He had never felt part of a community. From the moment he could think at all, he had seen himself as singular and self-contained, a collection of attributes making its way through the world.

  HIS MOTHER ENCOURAGED his independence. She had always stood aloof from her surroundings: dutiful and competent, immaculate in the remnants of her beauty, coldly civil to the matrons who condescended to her. She carried herself like a queen, but her pride was in her son. As a boy, he had quickly grasped that his gifts were all she required of him. The only way to thank her for her sacrifices was to forge ahead and leave her behind. Not until her death the year before—a sore throat acquired from a student turned to diphtheria and took her in a fortnight—had Gideon been haunted by a nagging, shapeless suspicion that he shook off before it could congeal into words. During the day he managed to keep it at bay, but at night it materialized like a demon, taunting him and troubling his sleep.

  “It is all taken care of,” she’d whispered at the end, clutching his fingers with a force she couldn’t bring to her voice. After the funeral, Mr. Pilkington, the mill owner, parroted her words. “Taken care of,” he told Gideon. “School fees, all of it. See that you make her proud.” And then he’d turned away and honked noisily into a kerchief—a bulky, red-faced, pragmatic man who quoted Scripture at every turn and had none of the polish he admired in others. Gideon was ashamed to call him a benefactor, but was eloquent in his gratitude nevertheless, mindful that important men like to be flattered. Only later did Gideon remember Pilkington’s periodic visits to his house during his school years—“to discuss you
r future,” his mother had explained—and how, instead of reciting a poem or showing off his Latin, he was always made to leave. He had resented these enforced exiles, especially during the winter, when it was too raw outside to walk, and he was banished to the icy schoolroom with nothing but a book to divert him. Once, when his mother came to get him, he flung his book to the floor in a temper.

  “Two hours! What do you talk about with that stupid man? Does he really have that much conversation?”

  His mother was always very quiet after the mill owner’s visits, but that afternoon there was an iron stillness about her. She folded her white hands and set her lips in a smile.

  “I sing your praises,” she said.

  THE OCCUPANTS OF THE FRONT pew were the last to leave the church. The older woman headed straight for Gideon, followed by the hulking youths and, a few paces behind them, the girl in the blue dress, who appeared to be encased in a dream. No one had deigned to notice the newcomer before, but now every eye went to him, as if he’d just arrived.

  “Mr. Birdsall? I am Fanny Hedge, and here are James and Reuben and Micah, and our schoolmaster, Mr. Unsworth, who boards with us. That moony thing there is Sophy, who isn’t always so bashful.”

  So she was the parson’s daughter, after all. The fact seemed no less fantastic for having been confirmed by a reliable source. He had read of spirits who took up residence in human form, though he had never expected to meet one. In the old stories, they fell in love with mortals. His fellow students would be gratified to see Mrs. Hedge, Gideon thought: she was as functional as they’d imagined her, a plain woman with a horsy, good-natured face and hands as broad as spades. The boys were clearly hers, but the moon-girl, who stood at a little distance watching two squirrels play hide-and-seek among the gravestones, bore no resemblance to her. Her mother had to call her twice before she came over.