by Sarah Bryant
“You were beautiful,” I finished softly. My eyes did not move from his, but it was an incredible effort. His expression was unchanged. I drew a deep breath. “You looked like . . . like something not real. At first I didn’t think that you were real, but then you smiled and held out your hand, and we walked out of the ballroom and into a garden. There was a fountain in the garden, and roses, and a wall with ivy. We walked to a door in the wall, and you took a key from around my neck and opened it.
“Inside was another garden. There was a statue, and a tree with pink flowers. I remember looking at the stars. They were so bright, and the statue looked so real, I thought that in a moment he would move . . . but that’s ridiculous, I know.” I laughed hol lowly. “Then you made me look into a pool of water at the statue’s feet, and there were two faces there, Eve’s and a man’s. He looked a bit like you, but he was fair.” I shook my head, willing the spinning images to settle. “They were terrible. Terrible and . . . familiar.” I paused for a moment, uncertain of the implications of the word I had unwittingly spoken. “Then Eve handed me her necklace, which was like this, only a ruby”—I touched the diamond—“and you said, ‘Remember.’ ”
“Remember?” he repeated.
“Yes.”
Alexander was watching me incredulously again, with the ambiguous half-smile I was coming to recognize as a characteristic.
“Is that all?” he asked.
“Isn’t that enough?”
He looked down again, dropping a white stone from the path into the dark water of the pool. Concentric circles spread out from the place where it had fallen.
“You forgot a few things,” he said. My eyes snapped upward. “In the first part of the dream, you were wearing a long red dress with a lighter pattern on it. Your feet were bare. The piece you played is a real one, though it’s no wonder you didn’t know it—it’s mine, and it’s unpublished. The key you had was silver, on a silver chain. And the faces in the pool were terrible because they were broken, and they were so much like our own.”
I stared at him for a few moments, my thoughts and feelings an inextricable tangle. Most powerful, though, was the return of the chilling fear he alone seemed capable of inducing in me. Finally I managed to ask, “Are you psychic, then?”
He shrugged. “Not that I know of. But I must tell you that I have had the same dream.” He spoke the words unemotionally; there was no hint of humor in his face. I waited for him to laugh, to somehow retract the impossible words he had just spoken.
When I finally accepted that he wouldn’t, I could only think to ask, “What does it mean?”
“I wish I knew.” He looked at me, and in that moment something shifted. His eyes, unguarded for the first time since I had met him, told me that he was as bewildered as I was, and this went farther than any words in bridging the oddly turgid gap between us. What I had taken for the mild contempt of an older man for a young girl was apparently his way of guarding some far deeper feeling that had nothing to do with me.
He sighed. “I suppose it’s my turn to be honest,” he said hesitantly, as though finding the right words to speak his mind in a foreign tongue was a greater struggle than he had anticipated; yet I also wondered if it was the subject matter rather than the language that frustrated him.
“The first time I had that dream,” he continued, “I didn’t know that you existed, but it was as if I’d known you all my life. In my dream, there was light all around you. I had different dreams of you, none so clear as that one, but the one element that carried through was the light: there was always a glow around you, sometimes faint, sometimes too bright to look at. I didn’t know why until I learned your name. In its Greek origins, ‘Eleanor’ means ‘light.’ ”
He paused for a moment, then continued in a less ruminative tone. “You can imagine how I felt when I saw you that night at the symphony. Yes, I did see you. It was only for a moment, as you were leaving, but I cannot express to you what it was like to see you standing there looking at me, to know that you were real. Then, when I came here and found you as well as that house, it was like coming back to something I’d once known well. In a way, I did already know you, as I knew the house, from the dreams. But you must understand that I was also afraid.”
“Of what?” I asked.
“Not of you, Eleanor; only of the fact that you are real. Because if you are real, then that means the other one is, too.”
“What ‘other one’?”
The muscles around his mouth had tightened, making it look almost cruel. “Have you dreamed other dreams of that man? The one with Eve in the pool?”
“Why?” I asked softly.
I was surprised by the supplication in Alexander’s eyes when he looked at me. “Is he someone you know?”
“No.”
He paused, his jaw tightening again, then asked, “Did your aunt have a lover?”
The question took me aback, more because of its abruptness than because of its nature. “Not that I know of,” I answered after a pause. “Unless you count a boy she admired when she was sixteen—a relative of the family at another plantation. Anyhow, I’d more easily believe she hated the man in the dream, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“What makes you think that the face in the dream was Eve’s? Couldn’t it as easily have been your mother’s?”
I shrugged. “I suppose I assumed it was Eve’s, because I’ve always dreamed of Eve and never of my mother.”
“I also have seen the painting, Eleanor.” He paused, again appearing to choose his words with difficulty. “It strikes me that Elizabeth would have been the more sensible of the two. But love and hatred are sometimes inseparable. They can certainly cause equal misery.”
The reserve was gone from his face. In its place was a brooding kind of anxiety. I looked down with him at the surface of the pool, and our shimmering reflections looked back.
“Do you believe that she’s alive?” I asked.
“I suppose it’s easier to believe that she’s alive than that she’s a ghost. Anyway, it will be easy enough to find out.” He turned away, his mouth grim. Yet when he looked back at me, he was smiling. “The first time I had that dream,” he said, “I was depressed for days afterward. I thought you were a figment of my imagination.”
“You wanted me to be real, then?”
“There was something in your face, in your eyes ... a depth and an honesty that seemed so unusual. And then there was the light. But I think that most of all it was the fear: something like what you were describing earlier. I had to help you find something so that you could stop some other, terrible thing from happening.”
“But what? And how?”
“Frankly, I’m more interested in why this is happening. Or is there a reason at all?”
“So you’re a philosopher.”
He smiled. “I’ve been accused of it.” Alexander shook his head. “Anyhow, I don’t know any more than you do, but I think that the answers to at least some of your questions are to be found up in that house on the hill.”
I shivered in a sudden brush of wind. The sun had set, and twilight was deepening around us. Finally Alexander stood up and offered me his hand.
“Come, now,” he said. “It won’t do to worry over it. If you want to find out who is in that house, you can do so easily enough. But the choice is still yours. Some secrets, Eleanor Rose, are better left as such.”
It’s true: the choice lay before me then, still uncomplicated. To this day I wonder what my life might have been had I chosen differently.
I looked at him. His face was full of resignation, but I had never believed in fate. I shivered again, and stood up quickly to receive the hand he offered, which closed tightly about mine for a moment, as warm and alive as I had dreamed it. It made me realize how cold I had grown, despite the heat. Then convention intervened, and Alexander let my hand go, offering me his arm instead, and together we walked back toward Eden.
EIGHT
MARY and Tasha we
re upstairs playing with the dollhouse when we returned.
“There you are!” Mary said.
“We thought you’d never come back,” Tasha added.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“A bit past eight,” said Alexander, looking at his watch. “I’m sorry . . . we lost track of time.”
Mary waved away our apologies. “Come downstairs and eat before it all gets cold.” We moved into the dining room and sat down at the great mahogany table, which had not hosted so many people in years.
Over dinner, Alexander related some of his story to us. His family had been well-to-do before the revolution. Like most White Russians at that time, they were hounded continually by the Bolshevik government, and when one night their house was torched, burning the family in their beds, no one was surprised.
Alexander and Natalya had been out that night at the ballet. They remained in the country only long enough for Alexander to clean out one of the family’s bank accounts and buy black-market visas for France and transportation to Poland, where their long journey to the west began. They had arrived in America a little over a year ago, after nearly two years of a transitory existence in western Europe.
“It must have been awful,” Mary said softly, “especially for the little girl. To see her home and family destroyed that way; to leave everything familiar behind.”
We all looked at Tasha. She sat happily oblivious to the topic of conversation, stirring a melting pool of ice cream around the bottom of her dish.
“I suppose,” Alexander said, “it wasn’t so bad as it could have been. She was barely four when we left. She won’t remember much.”
“But the poor child, her mother—”
“It wasn’t as you imagine,” he interrupted sharply. Seeing Mary’s surprise, he quickly said, “Forgive me. It is only . . . it is not a simple story.” He paused, composing himself, then said, “Natalya’s father was my older brother. In middle age he married a beautiful young woman, who I’m afraid had little else to offer in the way of redeeming qualities.” His face had hardened as he spoke. “Anya was a silly, social girl, only a few years out of school. Natalya was her only child, and she died in childbirth, leaving my brother to despair and Tasha to the care of nursemaids.”
He paused again, looking at the child. She stared into the dish of melted ice cream, her lips slightly parted. “Why don’t you go play with the dollhouse again, Tasha?” he told her gently.
“All right,” she agreed. She slid down from her chair.
“Do you remember which room it is?” I asked.
“At the top of the stairs, to the right.”
Mary smiled at her, and Tasha disappeared.
“She shouldn’t hear these things,” Alexander said, not looking at us. Then he continued, “No one ever imagined she would live to see her first birthday. The poor child was skinny and sickly, and she went unloved and unwanted through that first year of her life. Her father wouldn’t look at her, thinking that she’d killed her mother. Our only other family were my politically crazed younger brother and a blind great-aunt who was acrimonious enough in her own right.
“I was playing in public a great deal at that point and was rarely at home. I had cares far more important to me than a sickly little niece. Then one day I overheard Tasha’s doctors speaking together. One of them said to the other that he was going to advise my brother to put her into an asylum, since she would probably not live long, and if she did, she was certain to grow up slow or deformed. The doctor’s words seemed particularly cruel to me. I went directly to the nursery to see if they were true.” He smiled. “I found a perfectly normal child, if a little undersized. She was sufficiently well looked after, but her face was sour and pinched. She wailed when I picked her up, and kicked her legs as if she would have been happier to have me drop her. By then I pitied her. I carried her out of the nursery, ignoring the doctors and nursemaids who said it would only make her ill again. I took her to the only place I knew of that might help her, because it had so often helped me.”
“The music room!” I said.
Alexander nodded. “I recall that she was still shrieking when I set her down on the carpet and began to play. Beethoven.” He laughed. “I thought the music of that troubled soul must catch her attention, and it did. She stopped crying and her face smoothed out maybe for the first time in her life, and I saw that in fact she was a very pretty child. After that day I never let her out of my sight. I had her nursery moved to a room next to mine, and I took her with me whenever I went out, no matter where I was going. I suppose it was a strange life for a child, maybe not the most suitable. But, you see, she had come to think of me as her father even before she lost her own. Sometimes I wonder whether she even remembers that she once had one.”
“Neither you nor Tasha has anything in the world to call your own but each other,” Mary mused.
Alexander looked up at her, shaking his head. “It may have been like that once, but we’re well on our way to having a life in this country—a life as rooted as our last. You must not feel sorry for us.” He smiled. “We’re far from being lost souls.”
“Oh, no, that’s very clear.” Mary smiled back. We sat in silence, sipping the last of our coffee. Then she said, “Alexander, won’t you play for us?”
“Oh, please do!” I agreed.
He looked at me. “I’ll play if you will. After all, you have heard me, but I have only heard about you.”
I shrugged. “That sounds fair.”
We called Tasha downstairs again and moved to the music room, where one of the maids had already lit the lamps. Alexander conceded to play first: Schubert, on Mary’s request. He played the first of the second set of impromptus, and the fourth of the “Moments Musicaux,” so beautifully that for the first time in my life I was afraid to take the bench.
“I don’t know what to play,” I said, realizing even as I said it how silly I sounded.
“You said you were working on Chopin’s études,” Alexander suggested.
“Oh, no!”
“Well, then, play your favorite piece.”
I thought for a moment, then smiled. I began to play, and everybody else smiled with me.
“ ‘Children’s Corner’!” cried Tasha when I’d finished the first, clapping her hands in excitement. “Oh, play the rest!”
When I was finished, everybody clapped, and then Alexander said, “Come, won’t you play one of the études for us?”
I sighed, fingering the keys. “Which one?”
“The fourth of opus ten?”
“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to play that one very well!”
“Well then, I’ve always liked the last of opus twenty-five.”
I played it, though I was painfully aware of its flaws.
“Lovely,” said Mary.
“Not as lovely as it ought to be, I’m afraid.”
Alexander only looked at me thoughtfully.
“You’ve said you compose,” I said quickly, before he could request anything else.
“A little, on the side,” he said, but his quick glance told me he knew exactly what I was getting at.
“Oh, do play one of your pieces for us!” Mary said, before I had to.
He stood up with a sigh and took the bench, and before I had time to wonder, he was playing the piece from my dream. I found it no easier to classify than I had previously. It had the rippling quality of an étude, the repetition and variation of a nocturne, the fluidity and nostalgia of a serenade. Mary’s eyes went dreamy; Tasha watched Alexander with quiet composure. Several of the maids crowded in the doorway to listen. My own thoughts wandered a spectrum from études to abandoned houses, and I was hardly aware that Alexander had finished playing until Mary’s entreaty for another piece cut through the silence.
“Why not play the ballade? The Opus 23?”
Alexander and I looked up at her simultaneously. He smiled, but not quickly enough to hide the sadness. I watched Tasha absorb that look in her s
ilent, incisive way, and I knew why Mary had said that she was not a child.
“Forgive me if I postpone your request,” Alexander said, smiling at Mary as he rose from the bench. “The ballade requires more concentration than I am capable of tonight.”
“No, forgive me,” Mary answered. “I’d forgotten how far you both have traveled today! You must be exhausted, and we’ve kept you too long.”
“No, no, it’s been a pleasure. But you, Natashenka”—his look arrested Tasha in the middle of a yawn—“should be in bed. Say good night to Mrs. Bishop and Miss Rose.”
The little girl thanked us obediently, then stretched out her arms. As Alexander lifted her up, she asked, “Will we come back?”
“You’re welcome any time,” I said. “Both of you.”
“Thank you again for dinner. You’ve been so very kind.”
“It’s you who’ve done us the kindness,” Mary insisted.
“It’s far too late to begin a battle of civilities,” I interrupted. “Come, I’ll see you to the door.”
“Better see them to the path home,” said Mary. “It wouldn’t do to lose them in the woods on their first night!”
I led them through the kitchen and grape arbor to the top of the topiary garden. By the time we reached the steps where we had first spoken, Tasha was asleep on Alexander’s shoulder.
“Will you be all right from here?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said. “It’s just a short walk, and the moon is bright. The ghosts won’t be walking yet.” He smiled. “Thank Mary for her kindness to Tasha.”
“I think she might be just what Mary needs.”
“And likewise. People always need the company of others.”
I nodded, and wished for once that I had the subtlety to avert my eyes, or at least to blush. Instead I looked at him steadily. He reached out and took my hand.
