The Last Killiney
Page 81
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The next day, when asked by Reverend Wells what she’d call the child, Ravenna hoped Paul heard when she gave his name to their son. What had he said on that train to Dublin? It’s a family name, she told the reverend.
Christian came unglued.
They had a tremendous fight over it, Christian and she, right after the reverend left the room. Sniveling with that voice which she couldn’t stand in her depression, Christian cited his father’s name as the only choice, not Elijah Paul, and he demanded Ravenna call the reverend back to tell him this was so.
She refused. All those images of Paul, Paul in heaven, Paul in the corner watching over his son and sleeping in her bed, Paul keeping Christian at bay with his spirit between them, all this came over her with the force of her exhaustion.
She broke then. She lost all reason. Christian took a step toward her with malice in his eyes, and in her unbearable state of mind, she thought nothing of throwing a knife from their breakfast table at him. She didn’t care if she did make a gash in his hosiery, or that he bled all over the carpet brought from Launceston.
With her shrieks filling the house, James was upstairs in an instant. He didn’t step beyond the threshold of her bedroom door, however. Christian was dabbing at his shin with a napkin, calling her the crudest names as he ducked the silver candlesticks she’d thrown from the mantel, the fire poker, the gilt-framed landscape on the wall, and still James stood there quietly as she raged on and on. Finally Sarah came in, begging her to stop even as James looked on in astonishment, for when the maid took up the baby and cradled him tight, only then did it occur to Ravenna what she was doing.
And she left, pushing past James in a stagger as the tears came down like an iron fist with the pain of it, crushing her with the idea that she lived as she lived with Christian, that Paul was irrevocably dead and she would see his face only in his son’s little features.
She went down to the music room, barely able to walk after the pain of childbirth. Swaying before the window, sobbing in screams and hard-won breaths, she stood before the storm raging outside and knew at last that this was the moment she’d glimpsed from the future. This was the grief she’d seen, crying beside the piano, slowly and steadily dying beneath the weight of Paul’s absence and the realization that this, Christian and everything about Christian, was all she’d ever know.
She remembered Paul’s words in that moment, maybe for the first time since he’d died. Promise me that if something happens, you’ll carry on, you won’t top yourself, you won’t live out your life in a mental ward.
Calm down, she told herself, this is postpartum depression and that’s all it is. Christian isn’t so bad as he seems. Knowing it was true, having faith in the memory of Paul’s voice so clear in her mind, she relented and gave up her crying. I’ll try, she told Paul, spoke to the glass as if it were the veil that held him back in death.
And she went upstairs to soothe her crying baby.