Secrets of Eden

by Christopher A. Bohjalian

  THERE WERE A half dozen boxes of familial history that wouldn’t be sold in the estate sale that followed my parents’ deaths. There was their wedding album and a long shelf of college and high-school yearbooks. There were scrapbooks and photo albums. And there were the long trays of slides, many of which had belonged originally to my grandparents: my father’s mother and father. These cartons, after the house in upstate New York had been sold, were stored in the attic in my aunt and uncle’s home in Fairfield, Connecticut.

  I had been out of college and living alone in a small studio in a corner of Brooklyn not quite a dozen subway stops from lower Manhattan when I came across a Bell & Howell slide projector with a carousel in the window of an antique shop in Bay Ridge. It was twenty-five dollars, which seemed like a lot of money for a piece of technology so profoundly useless in the advent of the digital age. But I recalled those yellow-and-blue cartons of slides in the attic in Fairfield, some holding thirty images and some holding forty, and how I hadn’t looked at any of them since one New Year’s Eve when I’d been in the sixth grade. It had been at a dinner party, and my mother had decided in the period between dessert and the moment when the grown-ups would all stand in front of the television with champagne flutes in their hands to watch the ball drop in Times Square that it might be fun to savor the fading Kodachrome images. In all fairness, a great many of the slides would include my parents’ friends who were with them that evening, so the idea wasn’t as self-absorbed and egocentric as it might sound.

  And it proved to be a lovely idea. The grown-ups were just tipsy enough to be moved, but not so drunk that they would pass out in the dark. My father set up the white screen in front of the bay window, and we—a dozen grown-ups and the two Laurent daughters—positioned ourselves on the couch and the floor and the dining-room chairs that we carried into the living room. We stopped watching a few minutes before midnight only because the adults felt a moral obligation to bear witness to the precise second that the New Year was commemorated on Broadway.

  And so I decided there on the street in Brooklyn to buy the projector and carry it back to my studio. It must have weighed twenty-five pounds, and my apartment was on the fifth floor of a five-story walk-up. The five flights were, in my mind, a great gift: They helped keep me in shape, and the apartment that awaited me at the top was high enough that I could see a part of the bay (though not the Statue of Liberty) through a sliver between two taller buildings to the west.

  A few weeks after I bought the slide projector, I went to my aunt and uncle’s for Thanksgiving. When I returned that evening to Brooklyn, I brought with me a dozen trays of slides in a canvas bag. Amanda, who was living in Boston at the time, hadn’t come to Connecticut that year. None of the slide trays had been labeled, but my selection hadn’t been entirely random. I’d made sure that I had images that covered the early years of my parents’ marriage as well as ones highlighting Amanda and me as little girls. (By the time we were in elementary school, even my father—who had savored his use of slides as the family documentarian—had boxed away his slide camera and was using only film.) And then the next evening, completely alone, I allowed myself to study for long moments the man who had murdered my mother and then killed himself; the woman who would die at the hands of a man whom, I have to assume, she had once loved and with whom she had expected to grow old; and their two little girls, each of whom was transformed by their parents’ deaths in ways it would take years to fully comprehend. That night I used a white bedsheet for a screen.

  What struck me most as I sipped a glass of wine and studied the images was how charismatic and elegant my parents had been. The colors were faded, which gave the two of them an even more retro sort of allure: Rock Hudson and Doris Day. My father was more robust than I usually thought of him, though my mother was exactly as beautiful. In some of the slides, when she was just about my age then, she was decked out in dresses with pointed collars and cuffed sleeves. In others, as the 1960s became the 1970s, she was in gold-sequined bathing suits on the white sands of Palm Beach and the farthest tip of Long Island, her skin nearly the red of a lobster. Meanwhile my father, who appeared in considerably fewer photos than my mother, would be decked out in beige trench coats and black wing tips, in charcoal gray business suits, or in tennis shorts and navy blue sweaters. In one shot, years before I was born, he was wearing a salmon-colored Nehru shirt and a peace medallion the size of a coaster, and my sense was that he was at a Halloween costume party. My father with a peace medallion? Had to be his idea of irony.

  And there were the cars with their fins and the convertible my mother had loved when I’d been so very small and remembered now only in terms of its inviting red leather seats and how invigorating the breeze had felt in my hair in the summer. And there were my sister and me. In prams. In matching bathing suits (but never gold-sequined). On, I have to assume, Amanda’s first day of school: I am beside her, looking up at her, and my face is a combination of longing and awe. She has a lunch box and a small backpack that is shaped like a monkey. Curious George? Perhaps, though I have never had any recollection of either of us having had a special fondness for those yellow books, and when I asked Amanda about it, she was characteristically evasive, clutching her memories close to her heart. I was pleased that her hair had been brushed before school. Our mother was mercurial, and some mornings she simply couldn’t cope—all the energy she had expended the night before battling with our father would leave her a rag doll—and our hair had been rats’ nests.

  Ah, but in the evenings? That was when both of our parents would experience their strange and unpredictable transformations—their all-too-frequent transmogrifications. They were vampires. Werewolves. The night changed them. But they didn’t instantly become monstrous. Often there was, first, those long hours of celebrity-like glamour. That night in Brooklyn, I held the stem of my wineglass between my fingers and gazed at a slide of my parents arm in arm on their way to a black-tie dinner, my father in a tuxedo and my mother in a strapless gown that shadowed her collarbone. They were in control—of their lives and of their emotions. They were in charge. They could have been movie stars.

  In that image they were standing in front of our house on a summer evening, the convertible with red leather seats parked in the portico just to their left. One of our magnificent weeping willows is over their shoulders. When we sold the house, my aunt told me, the roots of those trees were just starting to burst through the cement floor of the cellar. She thought this was rather funny, an indication in her mind that Amanda and I were getting out of the house just in time. Although in hindsight the violation of the structure from the inside out and the bottom up can only be viewed as a metaphorical sledgehammer, it is nonetheless telling.

  But there was one more detail to that aging Kodachrome slide that caused me to sit forward on my couch and then, a moment later, to put the wine on the floor and approach the sheet. To actually run my fingers over the cotton. To press it flat, to understand if what I was seeing was merely a wrinkle in the fabric or an illusion caused by something behind the sheet. A picture hook in the wall, maybe, or a dimple in the Sheetrock. What was there? What was drawing me to the makeshift screen I had hung on a wall in my tiny apartment? There in the window of my childhood bedroom, standing in profile and gazing down at the corner of the room in which I knew had once sat my small white bed—absolutely oblivious to the slide picture being taken outside the house—was an angel. I could see the tips of the wings, her shoulders (and she was a female angel), and the hair the color of corn silk. I could not see her face because of the angle.

  Angels demand nothing from us but faith, and I should have known then that there was no reason to doubt the image on the wall. I had been saved by an angel five years earlier: What grounds had I to mistrust what I was seeing now? Why should I have wondered that she had been looking out for me even then, when I was a small child? But I did wonder, I did doubt. And that was my mistake. I took the slide from the carousel to see if I could see the ang
el on the actual slide. I turned on the lamp by the table, pulled off the shade, and held the slide near the bulb. Of course the angel was gone. Evaporated like a splash of water from the concrete lip of a swimming pool under a hot summer sun at midday. When I placed the slide back in the carousel, there was no longer a trace of her. The window was dark, and that little girl I had been long ago was, once again, all alone in that bedroom.

  THERE WERE MOMENTS when I was fascinated by the way Stephen’s fertile mind worked. One morning when I awoke, he was still beside me in bed, but I could tell that he had been awake for a while. It wasn’t quite seven-thirty, and the sun was turning the seraphim in my chandeliers the color of pearl. I burrowed into his chest and asked him what he was thinking, expecting perhaps an account of a dream or an analysis of the independent film we had seen the night before at the Angelika. He pulled me against him and said simply, “There were no secrets in Eden.”

  I liked the idea that we were alone in my bed and he was contemplating Eden.

  “No,” I agreed, “there weren’t. What made you think of that?”

  “Eden? Isn’t it enough that I have a beautiful woman curled up beside me?”

  “Thank you. And I’ll accept that my presence was a part of the inspiration.”

  “But only a part.”

  “Yes.”

  I rested my hand on his heart and watched it rise and fall on his chest.

  “Genesis is a blunt instrument,” he said after a moment. “Especially the story of Adam and Eve. The symbolism is pretty heavy-handed. Obvious.”

  “Is a sermon forming in your mind?” He shook his head. “No. I was just contemplating what an arduous burden a secret is. If I were the storyteller, I would have spent more time in what had to have been that nightmarishly stressful period between when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge and when God confronted them with what they had done. Just imagine how oppressive the wait must have been. There the two of them are, cowering in the garden, just waiting to be discovered.”

  “Genesis isn’t known for character development.”

  “No. But the beauty of Adam and Eve’s nakedness? It’s that they haven’t any secrets at all. Not a one. And maybe that’s the magic of Eden—and what we’ve lost forever.”

  There was a ruefulness to his tone that was endearing. It made me want to hold him—and be held by him—forever.

  I HAD THE sense that the investigators wanted to find parallels between the ways my parents and the Haywards had died. Why not? It was, in part, those rudimentary similarities that had drawn me to Haverill that first July afternoon. But as I learned more and more about the Haywards’ marriage, I was reminded that even batterers and drunks have their distinctions and quirks. The biggest difference, it seemed to me, was that although my father’s behavior was indefensible—and I am not even referring to the reality that in the end he would murder the woman he’d married—my mother was no picnic to live with. She drank too much and had a tongue that was poisonous. She could be desperately loving with Amanda and me, but she seemed to take pleasure in the ways she could verbally emasculate our father. I remember the first time I saw Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, I thought it was a home movie.

  From what I learned about the Haywards, Alice had spent her life trying her best not to antagonize the beast that was her husband. My mother, on the other hand, was poking hers with a sharp stick. That doesn’t excuse the fact that my father would hit her. It isn’t a justification for homicide. But the auras of both of my parents were sad and grim in ways that were unlike the auras that must have shrouded George and Alice Hayward and kept their particular angels at bay.

  I WAS IN a vintage-clothing shop on lower Broadway when Stephen called me on my cell phone. I was in the dressing room—a dark and musty little cubicle with a fraying curtain the color of subway-track muck—wondering if I was still young enough to pull off a sleeveless black sheath from the 1960s or whether it made me look like an amazon. I was in a very good mood, a little giddy even. It was late afternoon, and when I saw that it was Stephen causing my phone to chirp, I may even have allowed myself a little extra sigh of contentment. We hadn’t been apart long, but already I missed him madly, and our tentative plan was that he would return to Manhattan that weekend and stay with me. We had ruled out my coming to Vermont until he had a better sense of whether he was capable of resuming his duties in the pulpit. The idea that he was continuing to live in the parsonage though he was no longer serving as the minister was a source of great consternation to him. I don’t think his parishioners cared then—though they would soon—but he did. It was one more thing, it seemed to me at the time, over which he felt needless and un reasonable guilt. Already he was looking for a place he could rent in Bennington.

  “Hi, stranger,” I said, and I leaned against the wall of the dressing room. I turned up the volume on my phone so I could hear him over the throbbing bass of the store’s sound system. “How are you doing?”

  “We need to talk.”

  There was an urgency to his voice that I had never heard before. I was aware of the way his mood could vacillate between brooding and playful; I had seen him despairing to the point where there was an edge of meanness to his tone. But the insistence I noted in those four words was new to me.

  “Okay,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “Where are you?”

  “In a stall that could seriously use some Febreze.” He went silent, and I realized that my lame little joke had given him the wrong idea of where I was. “I’m in a dressing room in a clothing store. A shop that has some great dresses. I think I’m too old for the one I’m wearing, but it was still fun to try it on. I—”

  “When can I call you so we can talk?”

  “Well, we’re talking now. But it sounds like this is serious.”

  “It is.”

  I thought about the things he might want to discuss that would make him sound so grim, and the obvious one was that he wanted to—as he might have put it—break up with me. That he wasn’t going to come back to New York after all. I wasn’t precisely sure how far along our relationship was, but I did know that I wanted it to continue. Initially I had presumed that I’d been dropped into his life by his angel because he needed me after the Haywards had died, but as we spent more and more time together, I had begun to wonder if, perhaps, our angels—mine and his—had been in collusion and had consciously brought us together.

  “We can’t talk now?” I asked. He was, quite obviously, stalling. Whatever he wanted to discuss, he was hoping he wouldn’t have to broach the subject while I was in a slightly rank dressing room in clothes I didn’t own.

  “I’d rather you were alone.”

  “I am alone.”

  “I’d rather you were home.”

  “Do I need to be sitting down?” I asked, teasing him.

  “Please,” he said, and his voice softened the tiniest bit. “I need to tell you something, and it’s important you understand that this isn’t a moment to be light.”

  “‘Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.’”

  “What?”

  “That’s a quote from G. K. Chesterton.”

  “Heather, I just came from a state police barracks. For the last forty-five minutes, I was interrogated by two very curt troopers.”

  I realized I had misread the signals in his voice. This was not urgency so much as it was outrage. He was indignant. “Go on,” I said.

  “Now?”

  “Now. It’s fine.”

  “They think I killed them. Maybe just him. George.”

  I slid down onto the thin wooden board that served as a seat and went completely still. I actually did need to sit down. “Why would they think that?” I asked. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “It is ridiculous. Completely ridiculous. And appalling. Obviously I didn’t kill the two of them. I offered to take a lie-detector test. But they’re serious enough about this that I’m going to have to get a lawyer.”

&
nbsp; “Where did they get this idea? They certainly didn’t think you’d had anything to do with this tragedy when it first happened.”

  “I know.”

  “Why, then?”

  “I don’t know. I just know I’m furious.”

  “It does sound a little absurd.”

  “Trust me: It is.”

  From the corner of my eye, I saw the feet of teen girls and women younger than me walking beneath the drape, but the world went eerily silent. I was no longer aware of the pulsating music the store had been playing or the conversations between customers just outside the dressing room. I stared down at the black wool of the dress, bunched up a little bit in my lap, and rested my forehead in my hand. My ears were ringing. On the floor of the dressing room was a torn sliver of bathroom tissue, and I couldn’t imagine why it was there.

  “Heather?”

  “I’m here,” I said. Then: “So you’re getting a lawyer?”

  “I am.”

  “Well, if you’ve done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to worry about. I know that’s not universally true. But have a little faith in your angel,” I said, and a memory came to me. I thought you were my angel. It was what he had said that first Saturday morning when he’d come to my loft and I’d told him that I wanted to show him an angel. He had called me his angel at least three times since then, and I expected him to say those words to me now. But he didn’t.

  “I expect I’ll depend mostly on my lawyer,” he said instead. “But thank you very much.”

  “You’re still coming to New York?” I asked.

  “Yes, of course. I just might be a day later than planned. It depends on who is representing me and when he or she can get together with me.”

  I was relieved, though not completely. From the other side of the drape, I heard teen girls giggling about the scatological drawing and the sexual double entendre on a T-shirt. They sounded too young to be so knowledgeable, and that only unnerved me further. I was engulfed in an aura of demonstrable unease.