ALTHOUGH THE RAIN had stopped, sun was just beginning to penetrate the clouds; the sky had taken on a pearly, luminous sheen. The air smelled pungently of grass and herbs. Gideon took deep breaths, drinking in draught after draught, as if he had been deprived of oxygen for weeks. The freshness was intoxicating. It went straight to his stuffed head, clearing out the crusty residue of dinner chatter, odd bits of Hebrew, months of stale thoughts.
He understood, with clarity he’d been incapable of moments before, that what might trouble the parson about Caroline Mills was not too little substance, but too much. In the voluptuousness of her pampered flesh, she embodied all the excess that Hedge had trimmed from his lean and dutiful life. He had loved with ardor once, as James loved now. Romance, with its minions of lust and poetry, had come back to haunt him by way of his son.
Gideon remembered what the parson had confided to him on his first visit to the study: how he and Fanny had made a laboratory of their kitchen, coaxing the liquors from humble garden produce and fermenting them into wine. He’d had to hold back his laughter at the time, and had even thought of gaining some favor with his classmates by embellishing the story at dinner: Hedgehog and his functional Consort infusing a little spirit into their conjugal arrangement. He was glad that he had resisted such meanness. It might be the air, or his strange malaise, but the Hedges’ vegetal alchemy no longer seemed amusing. The thought of the couple communing over their pots, measuring and mixing, straining and boiling, made him want to weep. Their long patience, and their zeal to extract from arid virtue a few drops of the elixir of love, struck him as more miraculous by far than Jesus’s water trick at the wedding feast in Cana.
CHAPTER 8
____
THE COUNTRY OF BETH
REVEREND HEDGE HAD SET IT ALL OUT FOR HIM. GIBBS’S translation of Gesenius (“A punctilious scholar in the Germanic tradition, but his work is tainted by the rationalism of his countrymen. On guard, Mr. Birdsall!”). The lexicons: Greek and Latin, Chaldee, Syriaco-Arabic. The parson’s notes, which had been jotted on scraps thriftily culled from the bottom halves of lists and the last pages of sermon drafts, and secured under a brimming pot of ink. A cherished hand-hewn pen, laid at an alluring angle atop a stack of paper.
The bounty was lost on Gideon. He lifted the pen and put it down. He opened Gesenius to B, but his eyes refused to penetrate the mesh of fine print. The magnifying glass made things worse, the enlarged words leaping up at him like trolls from behind a rock, leering and grotesque. His head was aching again. So many characters so close together, coating each page from top to bottom. So many words. Far too many, it seemed to him now: countless thousands through the ages, chiseled on tablets, contorted in scripts, inscribed on the hides of sheep and goats, set in iron and pounded mercilessly onto paper, ordered and analyzed until the breath of speech was pressed out of them, clapped between covers like dried specimens in a drawer. When did it all start? Where would it end?
He pushed the book to the far corner of the desk, leaving the paper in the cleared space before him. Hedge had meant the blank sheets to entice, but Gideon felt only an irresistible desire to rest his head on top of the stack and go to sleep again. There was something peaceful about these fields of white, an emptiness that soothed his eyes; it seemed a shame to deface such purity with scribbles. The world of letters that had dominated his life seemed absurd to him. He thought how liberating it would be to bypass this arbitrary code—what was it but a go-between, a cumbersome intermediary?—and make pictures like Sophy. To plunder your imagination for forms, or render what you saw as your eye took it in: a man, a tree, a horse, a hill. His infatuation with language had begun early, but as a child he had liked to draw. The instinct must be in him still, atrophied from neglect.
Gideon took a single sheet from the top of the stack. Dipping the nib of his pen in ink, he drew an experimental line across the whiteness, and where it ended, another line straight down. He could feel his wrist loosen with the long strokes. He had created a sort of lean-to, the corner of something afloat in space. Under these he drew a third line, extending it a little behind the first two, as a child might indicate the ground. Now he had an enclosure, open on one side. He remembered well enough what ought to follow. The sealing wall. The triangle of the roof, topped by a crooked chimney and a thin curl of smoke. Inside, three rectangles: a pair of windows and a door. But his hand refused to carry out his orders; it seemed to be telling him that the house, such as it was, was complete.
He stared at the stark lines for a long time, compelled in a way he could not explain. Their very simplicity shimmered with mystery. At last it dawned on him that his half-house was actually the letter Beth—or rather, the letter was a house, taking its shape from the most primitive form of shelter. He laughed out loud to think he had missed the obvious; he should have known that more wonders lurked in the Hebrew alphabet than could be contained in Hedge’s stable of beasts! Aleph, Hedge had explained, was not yet a full-fledged letter, but rather the intention to speak: the ox might lift its ponderous head, trying to communicate its bestial will, but such was the order of creation that the brute could produce nothing more coherent than a bellow. The true first letter of the alphabet was Beth. It was no accident that the book of Genesis began with a B. Bereishit. In the beginning. The words were perhaps the most familiar in the Bible, dulled by repetition, but as evocative in their way as “Once upon a time”—and far more potent. It had never occurred to him that the first lines of the oldest story might refer to a dwelling that could be entered, that the ancient letters might be a code.
His thoughts were coming very fast now, starbursts arranging themselves into orderly constellations as he watched. From a distance he observed the shortness of his breath and the trembling of his hands. Symptoms only—at his core he was perfectly calm, fixed on his task. It was as clear as a mathematical equation. If he could find a way into the House of Beth, he would discover its secrets.
His house had no door, but there ought to be a handhold to guide him into the interior; he had neglected to install it. He bore down with his pen to make the dot in the center, inking it over until he had a nice solid knob. He wasn’t sure how to grasp it, but this seemed of no consequence, a minor difficulty that would resolve on its own. The solution would be simple, because, at root, the nature of life was simple. For most of his youth he had striven to master one complex system after another: languages ancient and modern; the thousand-and-one theologies by which men parsed God. He had lost sight of the quest he’d set himself before he could even read. To get behind the scrim of print and into the story.
The answer to his problem came to him without effort, as he had known it would. He was to grasp the knob the only way he could—with his eyes.
The dot beckoned. He focused on it with all the concentration he could muster, envisioning his own black dots, his pupils, as a pair of hands, turning, pushing in. There was no movement that he could detect; the knob sat firmly on the surface, where he had placed it. After a while—how long he had no idea—the throbbing in his head sharpened; it seemed that staring at the dot with such fixation had worked a dot-sized hole between his brows. His attention started to flag. Worldly concerns intruded themselves; any minute the parson could come in, full of anticipatory zeal, and catch him meditating on a blotch of dried ink. Once, twice, he tried to turn away, only to be brought back.
The change, when it came, was so gradual that Gideon thought his eyes must be playing tricks on him. The dot seemed to be sinking ever so slightly into the white background. The white itself had taken on a subtle shine, like the reflection of light on the surface of a cup of milk. His heart stopped when he saw it: a little pause, a hyphen between beats, as his body registered the surprise.
He blinked and rubbed his eyes, shut them tight, opened them to the bare wall behind his worktable. Hedge had stationed him in a corner of the study where he would have no distractions, but after weeks of work Gideon had come to know the wall’s every crack, bu
lge, and stain intimately; he saw as many shapes in the plaster as children saw in clouds. The lobster was still there, and the hunchbacked bird, and the hot-air balloon, just as they had been last Sunday, and all the Sundays before.
Although his chest had tightened of its own volition, he refused to surrender to excitement. He meant to examine the evidence slowly and deliberately, like a natural philosopher peering through a lens at a specimen on glass. He lowered his eyes. One look was enough to confirm that the letter had returned to its original state, safely on top of the paper, just as he had drawn it. What he had seen must have been an optical illusion, the result of eyestrain and a wretched headache.
He supposed he ought to feel relieved. After a brief holiday, his heart was ticking again, steady as a Hedge timepiece, and the earth was turning at its usual monotonous pace, while gravity, faithful lackey, kept the current population securely pinned to its crust—where the lot of them belonged, the good Reverend would say.
Gravity, whose roots were planted in the grave.
Cosmic etiquette be damned! The drawing enraged him now; he could hardly stand the sight of it. His day’s work. The façade of the House of Beth, as plain and smug as Hedge’s white-shingled church, promising mystery but filled with nothing but air. The letter had drawn him in, but only to deceive. And his own curiosity was to blame—his infernal need to dig deeper, see under, know more. He took the pen in one fist, and plunged it into the pool of ink with such force that drops spattered onto the table. His intention was to obliterate the letter with slashes, but first he wanted the satisfaction of stabbing it through the heart. He poised the pen over the black dot.
It was too quick for him, sinking with a sucking sound, so that even as he gave chase he was deluged by a sea of white that poured in on him from the letter’s open side. He wanted to cry out that this was all wrong. He had intended to stride through on his own two feet like the Hebrews crossing the Red Sea, shoulders squared and eyes fixed on the Promised Land. Instead he was plunging headfirst, limbs flailing, pen and papers flying, adrift in the deep with the Egyptians, their horses and chariots.
CHAPTER 9
____
MEANS AND ENDS
“
MAY I CONFIDE IN YOU, SOPHY? I BELIEVE IT’S PROVIdential that poor Mr. Birdsall has been laid up in the bedroom for so long.”
The request is moot, for Caroline has been confiding for much of the past hour while reclining on Sophy’s bed in a pose that invites intimacy: legs stretched out, petticoats spread around her, stays loosened after Sunday dinner. She hasn’t bothered to remove her kid slippers, and is gazing at them now, turning her feet this way and that.
“Providential?” Sophy has discovered that she only needs to parrot one or two words of Caroline’s latest revelation to give the appearance of attention. She is sitting in a straight-backed chair, as she has sat for days by their guest’s bedside, and imagining how she’ll describe the scene to him. She might have been confiding in her feet, Mr. Birdsall, for she looked at them more than she looked at me. They’re small and neat, and she’s quite proud of them—with reason, I’m sure. But don’t you think it’s funny to tell secrets to your feet? Mr. Birdsall won’t answer. He is mostly asleep, but Sophy feels that it’s good for him to hear her voice. More than once he’s seemed on the verge of floating away and she has pulled him back to earth with her chatter.
“I don’t mean that Mr. Birdsall should be sick for my sake,” Caroline goes on. “Heaven forbid! But his misfortune has got me to thinking that James and I should wait to marry until our house is finished. Your parents are the souls of generosity to invite me to stay, Sophy, and I would, gladly, if the first months of marriage weren’t so precious. Better to start fresh in our own dear little home.”
“Have you discussed this with James? It could be months,” Sophy says.
Caroline added yet another improvement this afternoon. She must have a piazza. A grand Italian porch to match the Greek columns at the front entrance. None of them has ever heard of such a thing, but she deems it essential, for where else will their future children play?
“Oh, Sophy, he took it very hard. He called me selfish! He said I loved comfort more than I loved him. Can you imagine your brother being so harsh? He drove me to tears, and when I cried, he was shattered and begged me to forgive him.” Caroline’s chin begins to tremble. She sits up straighter and clutches her knees. “You’re the one who is being selfish, I said. You’d deny my poor parents a few more months of my company when they’re soon to lose me for good. You’d burden your family with another guest when they’re worn out with caring for Mr. Birdsall. And what if the poor man doesn’t recover, I said. Shall we spend our wedding night in a bed recently occupied by a—well, you know. What kind of omen is that, James Hedge?”
“He will recover,” Sophy says. “He is better every day.”
Was it her face, or the steel in her words, that betrayed more than she intended? Caroline had been galloping along like a Valkyrie, fire in her eye and blood in her cheek, and she has stopped short; Sophy can hear the snorting of the horse, see its hooves pawing the air.
“Did you and James make peace? I hope so,” she says quickly.
“In the most magnificent way. He knelt before me and promised that if I would honor him with my hand, he would work even harder to raise a house fit to receive me. He spoke plainly but from his heart, and it was poetry to my ear. What were a few months, he said, when measured against the years of happiness we would share? I raised him up, Sophy, and we embraced. We are closer than ever!” Caroline sighs, lost in bliss recollected. “And really,” she says in a different voice, “it’s much nicer to be married in the spring. November is such a drab month.”
Caroline reaches for her sewing; she finished her wedding dress long ago, but to fill the time, she is scattering rosebuds across the bodice. Sophy makes a token stitch or two in the pattern of a full-blown rose that Caroline brought her, and wonders whether she will still be required as a confidante, now that her companion is playing Queen of the May. Some of the afternoon might still be salvaged for painting. She takes the pattern out of its ring and puts it in the sewing box.
Caroline raises one eyebrow. “I hope Mr. Birdsall’s illness hasn’t altered his good looks. He’s quite handsome, don’t you think?” She makes a knot at the base of a flower and delicately bites off the thread. “I speak as one with no personal interest. I prefer strength to appearance in a man. It wears better.”
“He is very thin,” Sophy says, “but still handsome.” The wrong word, she thinks. Many are handsome, few are beautiful. “He looks even purer now. Mama says that when the flesh fades, the spirit shines through.”
“Oh, is that what it is? He seemed a cold sort of man to me. Taken with himself—the opposite of my honest James. You don’t find him standoffish?”
“I don’t find him any way at all. I hardly know him.” Sophy speaks sharply to counter the blush that might be rising.
“I saw him looking at you that day at dinner,” Caroline says. “Are you really such a goose that you didn’t notice?”
Goose she might be, but if Mr. Birdsall had looked at her that way, Sophy would have noticed. Once or twice—not counting Mr. Unsworth—young men have paid her some attention. Ezra Keene, the shoemaker’s son, hung about her last summer, cornering her in the churchyard after meeting and seeking her thoughts on universal salvation, but he was so awkward and pimpled and doggedly earnest that she was tart with him, assuring him she had none. Poor Ezra had mistaken her church face for piety. The truth was, her look of rapt attention had nothing to do with the sermon. No sooner did the Reverend clutch the pulpit and cast a glacial eye on his flock than his pagan daughter flew away to tropical climes.
“I’m sure you’re mistaken,” she says. “Mr. Birdsall has his mind on higher things. Philosophy. He is far beyond the likes of me.”
“Sophy dear, you’re an innocent. Men may be philosophical, but they don’t want philosophy in
a woman, any more than they want a hump on her back or a wart on her nose. They want to be flattered. Looked after. Nursing Mr. Birdsall has given you a great advantage, you know. He’ll remember how tenderly you cared for him.” A sly smile. “And there is the other thing they want. I suppose Mother Hedge has had a talk with you?”
“She says I have enough ideas in my head. When there’s something to tether them to, we’ll talk.” Mama is frank about animals and female complaints, and will tell Sophy what she needs to know when she needs to know it. Monthly bleeding was briskly dispensed with, but they’ve made scant progress since.
Caroline nods, commiserating. “Mothers are not always the best to ask. I learned much more from my Cousin Isabel, who married last year.” She inches closer, almost to the edge of the bed, and leans toward Sophy. “Izzie told me that the pain is dreadful at first, but we ought not to fear it for it is the Portal to Bliss.”
Absorbing the awe that Caroline breathes into the phrase, its fantail of seductive sibilants, Sophy pictures a natural wonder on the order of the falls of Niagara. A door in a mountain, perhaps, opening to a cave of sparkling crystal.
“But it’s no use dwelling on that now,” Caroline says. “If anything is to happen, we have work to do. Stand up, and let’s have a look at you.”
With a grunt, Caroline swings her legs down from the bed. She stands a few feet from Sophy, folding her arms over her voluminous skirts. Her eyes are a guileless blue and round as a child’s, but they penetrate. Sophy is transfixed, rooted to the spot. She has endured plenty of criticism about her character, but no one has ever appraised her outer layer so coolly.
“Your hair is good, nice and thick, but the style is too strict and old-fashioned . . . We must shorten that forehead—such an expanse, it makes you look simple . . . Your eyes are your best feature, though a little far apart . . . I envy you those lashes, we blondes make do with peach fuzz.” Sophy’s nose and mouth and chin and neck are passed over, apparently unworthy of comment. “Your bosom is not much, but that can be remedied, and you’re not straight up and down, I spy a waist!” This last sung out in triumph, with a wag of Caroline’s finger, as if Sophy had been concealing the indentation all along.
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