The Language of Paradise: A Novel

by Barbara Klein Moss

  Caroline steps back for an overall view. “We can make something of you, Sophy, and we will! When Mr. Birdsall opens his eyes, he’ll look upon a vision and think he’s gone to Heaven after all.”

  CHAPTER 10

  ____

  RETURN TO EARTH

  GIDEON WAS BACK IN HIS CHILDHOOD BED. THE COMFORTING weight of the quilts over him, the

  feather pillow under his head. Soon his mother would come in with a tray of something nice to tempt him, melted cheese or a sunburst egg on a slice of toast. She would put her cool hand on his forehead and tell him he must stay home another day.

  “Mr. Birdsall, are you awake?”

  Sophy sat in a rocking chair near the bed, poking a needle into a piece of embroidery. Sophy, or someone who resembled her—she looked older, but perhaps it was her hair, which had been pulled straight back from her brow and twisted into a topknot. The short strands had been pinched into commas that circled her face, and worst of all, her ears stuck out, a plaited loop of hair draped around each like a garland around a horse’s neck. Where were the wings he loved? He wondered if he had traveled from the past to the future, losing the years between. In some netherworld he had finished his studies, courted Sophy and married her, entered into a settled life.

  “Where are we?” He tried to sit up, but his neck and shoulders were painfully stiff; he must have been lying in one position for a long time.

  “Sam’s old room. Lately, Mr. Unsworth’s.” Sophy rose, letting her sewing fall to the floor. She ran over to plump his pillow, slipping another behind him to support his head. “You have been here for nearly two weeks. We’ve been terribly worried. Mama believes it’s all Papa’s fault for working you too hard. She made him feel so guilty that he went and fetched Dr. Craddock. She wouldn’t leave you alone with the poor man, though; she watched him like a hawk. In her view physicians are medicine men in frock coats, on no account to be trusted.”

  “And what did the shaman conclude?” Gideon was still very weak, though he felt well enough. His head no longer hurt, and he had the odd sensation of resting comfortably in his skin, as if he had been exiled from his body and come home.

  “He thought it began as influenza and migrated to the brain. You kept crying out. You were very eloquent, Mr. Birdsall! I’m sure I could never think of such wonderful things, even in the best of health. I wanted to write them down, but Papa said it would be disrespectful—that we should let your soul unburden itself in privacy, for you might be conversing with the Lord.”

  “Maybe one day you will tell me what I said.” Gideon’s eyes filled with tears. He knew it was unmanly—what indignities must she have seen while tending to him?—but he couldn’t help himself. It had been so long since he had been cared for. He had forgotten how it felt. “I owe you all so much. How can I ever repay you for your kindness?”

  Sophy put her hand over his. “We were glad to do it. Mama and Papa would tell you so, if they were here.” She paused, hesitant. “We would have brought your own parents to comfort you, but you never spoke of them, and the seminary has no record.”

  “There was only my mother, and she is dead,” he said.

  “We are both orphans then. I felt that it must be so.” She nodded, patting his hand. “It’s a strange thing to belong only to oneself, isn’t it?”

  Until this moment, he hadn’t been sure she had been told the circumstances of her birth. “I suppose,” he said. “I’ve never known any other way.”

  He had only meant to state a fact, but Sophy was all sympathy. “You are a member of this family now—if you want to be. We’re awfully odd. I think poor Caroline is intimidated by us. It’s too late to break the engagement, and she does love James, so she has decided that her only recourse is to improve us. Improve me, that is. Mama and Papa are fixed in their ways, Reuben is too wild, and Micah—well, he is as God made him.”

  “I see she has started with your hair,” Gideon said, more drily than he intended.

  “It was very generous of her. She spent hours, and used quantities of her own floral pomade.” Sophy touched the topknot gingerly with a forefinger. “It’s quite remarkably stiff. Indifferent to weather. A great storm could blow me from one end of the county to the other, and not one hair would stir. If only it didn’t itch so.”

  Her expression was so serious, her tone so full of solemn wonder, that Gideon could not help grinning. Sophy pressed a hand to her mouth, and began to laugh through her fingers. He laughed too, until a fit of coughing overtook him.

  When he could speak again, he said, “Let it down.”

  “What?”

  “Your hair. Free it from its bonds. Liberate it.”

  “I would do anything you asked, Mr. Birdsall, but don’t ask me to do that. I’m trying to preserve it until next Sunday, so Caroline won’t think her labor was in vain.” Sophy knelt and scooped her sewing from the floor. “She gave me this rose pattern so I could practice my needlework. Do you see how far I’ve gotten? Two miserable petals! It’s not in my nature to do stitch after stitch—it makes me feel like a chicken pecking for corn. And tell me, please, what is the use of sewing a rose? I would much rather plant one, or paint one.” She stopped suddenly, abashed. “You understand why I have to keep the hair. I mustn’t seem ungrateful.”

  “I command you.” His voice was firm and even. He had no idea where the sternness was coming from. He wasn’t in the habit of giving orders.

  Sophy stepped back from the bed, and reached up with both hands. Gideon could not see what hidden pin or clasp she removed, but its powers of restraint must have been heroic. Her hair sprang out about her head, wavy from long confinement. She ran her fingers through the mass and it fell in a torrent from her shoulders nearly to her waist.

  Gideon thought first how lovely it was, and then that there was too much for such a small person. When he called up a mental picture of her, her hair was always swept back in its simple, artless style, inseparable from who she was; even in his dreams, he had not imagined it loose. Certainly he could never have anticipated such a luxuriant crop. There was something feral about the face that peered out at him from the thicket: eyes wide and startled, mouth slightly open. He watched her cheeks fill with color as he stared at her, unable to shift his gaze.

  He had done this. He’d had his way with her—the leering phrase, wiped clean of smut and swagger and restored to brisk utility. The thrill of the transaction was still with him. And yet, even as Gideon admired what he had wrought, he saw that something had been lost. She was not quite the Sophy he knew, that being who was her own definition. As she relaxed, he could detect signs of the self-delight he had seen in other girls her age, the coquetry that had always provoked scorn in him. It struck him with a pang that even the Unsworths of the world might look upon her now and find her pretty. Her motion of a moment ago came back to him, magnified as if under a glass. The small breasts lifting when she raised her arms, the prim V at her waistline riding up.

  Neither of them spoke. He couldn’t read her expression. Her eyes were tender, but something hard shone in their depths: a victory she hoarded for herself. At last she said, very quietly, “That is much better. Thank you.”

  “What have I done to deserve thanks?”

  “You made me do what I wanted to do. I wouldn’t have had the courage on my own.”

  Voices could be heard outside, Mrs. Hedge talking to a neighbor. “The young man is holding steady,” she was saying. “The worst is past, Lord be praised.”

  A dubious gift, Gideon thought: to teach selfishness and the primacy of the will. He had chosen a fine way to thank Reverend Hedge and his wife for their attentions. The intoxicating power that had flared in him was souring to shame. He fell back against the pillow and turned away.

  Immediately, Sophy was at his side. “What am I thinking, chattering away, tiring you so? Please forgive me, Mr. Birdsall. And I forgot your drink! Mama made it specially and I was to give it to you the moment you woke up. You will find it very refreshi
ng—not medicinal at all.”

  She removed the cloth that covered a pitcher on the night table and poured a clear liquid into a tumbler. Bending, she held the glass to his lips, her hair falling forward as she stooped, the ends brushing his face. He shut his eyes and breathed in lilac, cool and sweet, and faint beneath the pomade, the warmer animal smell.

  CHAPTER 11

  ____

  DECIDING ON A POSE

  PROFILE. FULL-FACE. THREE-QUARTER VIEW. SOPHY IS ALWAYS turning Gideon’s head this way and that, as if it were a clay bust: observing it godlike from above, gazing upward into the sun of his countenance like a kneeling disciple, tilting it back so she can gauge the precise blue of his eyes and acquaint her fingers with the angle in his cheek. Since his return to seminary more than a month ago, she sees him everywhere—even in her landscapes, where his face has a way of rising to the surface of the canvas and obscuring the scene that is already there. When he appears in the flesh for his Sunday visits, she blushes to think of the liberties she’s taken. “Paint him,” Caroline urges. “A few sittings and you’ll have him for life.” Even if she were so shameless, how could she trap the whole of Gideon in a single portrait? She might manage a passable likeness of the serious young man she’s getting to know, but could she capture the vision she saw in the meadow?

  Caroline was right about one thing: his illness has brought them closer. He seeks her company now. Walking home after church, he falls in step beside her and makes conversation. It is all very proper, with Mama and Papa looking on, but lately he has asked her to walk with him in the garden after dinner. He speaks freely to her then, about his studies and his life at seminary and the work he hopes to do. Sophy says little, for fear of betraying her ignorance, but she listens with her whole being and takes in every word. Last week, in the exuberance of a rare sunny day, he grabbed her hand and swung her arm, and she thought, This is what lovers do, we must be in love, and that night in her room, she said the words aloud to her mirror, by way of experiment: “I love him,” and then, “I love you.” Her face in the glass looked the same, but speaking the phrase gave it substance, just as talking to God makes Him seem as real and solid as Papa.

  Love is a puzzle she will have to solve on her own. Papa must have courted Mama, but Sophy has never seen them caress and can’t imagine how they ever made children. If she had to wake Mama at night, she found them always in the same position: lying on their backs like loaves set out to cool, ready for the Reaper. Observing lovers doesn’t teach her much. James and Caroline, what do they feel, and do they mean the same thing when they say the word? Or the girls at church, flirting and mincing as they chat with favored boys after the service? Parasols, bonnets, fans—the drama is customarily enacted behind one screen or another, but as in a shadow play, meaning is conveyed.

  Sophy isn’t brash enough to say, He loves me, even to the mirror. Gideon’s feet might touch the earth as hers do, but his thoughts soar where hers can’t follow, and in those spheres he finds his true home. Majesty, Sophy has discovered, is a cold quality, whether possessed by kings or angels. More than once she’s stood inside the doorway of the study, covered dish in hand, waiting in vain for him to look up from his desk. One stormy Sunday she lingered for almost half an hour as the apple dumpling she’d brought him turned cold and soggy, and when she summoned the courage to call his name, the expression on his face—absent, uncomprehending—chilled her to the bone. Now she sets the plate on the nearest surface and tiptoes out.

  She knows this much: Loving a man like Gideon will require a special skill. The two sides of him must always be kept in balance, each given an equal weight. Caring for his humblest needs did not diminish the angel in him. She was happy to wipe the dribbles from his chin and carry out his slops, honored to hold the basin as Mama bathed him. His helplessness stirred her—that he should be burdened with a body as vulnerable as other men’s, and still cry out messages from another world.

  “DO YOU REMEMBER what I said?” He asked her this as soon as he was well enough to speak, and he goes on asking, as if repetition will spur her memory. Sophy always makes a fresh effort. She’d felt that same urgency asking about her mother: the desired object on some distant shore and the questioner in a boat, being borne away by time.

  “It’s like calling back a dream,” she told him one damp September afternoon. “I can feel its atmosphere in my brain, but I can’t bring it down to words.”

  Gideon had only recently been allowed to leave his bed, and was propped in the visitor’s chair, swathed in blankets he’d thrown off in his impatience to be well. He was thin to begin with, but the fever had burned flesh off him, and his face against the coverlets reminded her of a desert prophet’s, all sharp bones and glittering eyes. Only his hair was untouched: thick because it needed cutting and more abundant than before, as if it had profited from his misfortune.

  “Even fragments are valuable,” he said. “Dreams can be reconstructed from their traces. Maybe if you would sit and close your eyes . . . ?”

  Sophy obliged him, perching gingerly on the edge of the mattress in case Mama came in. She knew from long experience that she had no gift for silent contemplation. As soon as her lids dropped, the world she was trying to shut out elbowed her in the dark. A fly buzzed, sounding like twenty flies, all whirring round her head. Random cries, animal and human, taunted her from outside, and in the sickroom the very air joined the conspiracy, bathing her in an odorous broth of camphor, vinegar, and sweated sheets, the only window having been sealed against drafts. After a few minutes her back began to ache from her unnatural posture—a clerical daughter’s compromise, halfway between the propriety of standing and the license of sitting, and the worst half of each. She wished she’d worn her Sunday corset for a bolster. She could feel Gideon’s eyes on her. He had framed his request softly, but she’d heard the command in it.

  “You were agitated at first,” she said, stalling. She had given him all this before. “Thrashing and waving your arms about. The doctor said we must tie you down, but we hated to do it. You cried out in some strange tongue. Papa said your spirit was in travail—that good and evil were contending for you. He made us all kneel round the bed while he chanted a Psalm in Hebrew, loud enough to drown out the Evil One. You’d been panting, but then your breath faltered and sank deep in your chest. I started to cry. I thought you were dying.”

  The stark words brought Sophy back to that moment, when her sorrow had welled up and spilled over. Her eyes watered, and she squeezed them tighter to hold back the flood. Gideon said nothing, but she could feel the force of his attention. There was something pitiless about it—like a surgeon probing for a bullet, so intent on the object that he pays no heed to the patient’s pain. She wanted him to be consoling, to take her hand as the Lord had taken Doubting Thomas’s and put it to his beating heart, but he only waited.

  “ ‘The green. It’s too sharp, it hurts me!’ You said that!” The fragment came to her when she stopped searching for it. She remembered how his head had tossed from side to side and come suddenly to rest, struck still. “Then you begged for the scales to be removed, that you might look on it with eyes . . . unclothed.”

  The word he had used was sanctified in the Bible, but ugly in the mouth. Even at this moment of triumph, she hesitated to say it plain. The gaping na rubbing right up against the shaming harshness of the k—she never could speak it without seeing her child self crouching in the tub, goose bumps all over till Mama poured the water in. And the ed stitching her up in her skin, showing her that this was the sum of Sophy, this plucked, shivering thing. No wonder God had made garments for Adam and Eve!

  But “unclothed” sounded pompous, and it wasn’t what Gideon had said. He had cried out again and again, pleading with a desperate logic, as if he would wear the listeners’ hard hearts down.

  Sophy waited, hardly daring to breathe, but no more came. She opened her eyes and wiped away the tears. “The rest was like a poem. It washed over me. I can’t repeat it wo
rd for word.”

  Gideon was staring at her with a hunger so avid that she was frightened. She felt herself grow small in his sight, all her flaws magnified by the force of his attention. She spoke quickly to hide her unease.

  “Green, who would have imagined it? When I think of Heaven, it is always white.”

  There was a pause. She watched the ardor fade from his eyes.

  “Heaven.” He displayed the word for mockery. He shrugged his shoulders and laughed: a cool, dry sound, an antidote to fever. “My dear Sophy, I have no idea what color Heaven is, and I don’t much care. It’s the Garden I was talking of. Paradeisos! The common mind confuses the two, but you, with your clear sight—I thought you would understand.”

  Blood rushed to her cheeks. “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” she said. “You estimate me too high, Mr. Birdsall. I may be more common than you think.” They had been “Gideon” and “Sophy” to each other since the day he woke, though always correct in public. But now she regressed to formality, coasting right over his endearment. “We simple folk, we leave naming to the scholars. We don’t fuss about what the good place is called, so long as we end up there.”

  “That’s it, exactly!” Gideon started toward her, gripping the arms of his chair. “You and I have been lectured since infancy about this glorious destination we’re to strive for—always in the future, never in reach. If we’re sufficiently righteous, we’ll be admitted, but since our character is flawed, we must depend on grace. And if the Emperor should take a dislike to one of us and put his thumb down, we can still be turned away.” He seemed to quiver with some pent-up joke, a vein pulsing in his forehead and his mouth twisted in a grin. “Sophy, it’s all nonsense! The groveling, the infernal rules, the gatekeeper with his giant key. There are other paths to that good place. I have seen the green for myself, and I can testify—you won’t find its like in a forest or park, or a flower bed, or anywhere else in this pale imposter we dignify with the name of Nature. You will never find it on your palette. To call it a color is too weak. Too static. It is growth itself, made visible!” He reached out to her, his thin fingers cupped as if he would grip her from afar. “Come with me. We’ll walk there together.”