The Other Eden

by Sarah Bryant

  “That’s an awful way to see the world.”

  “You still think that I am denying, rather than accepting.”

  Alexander leaned back on the railing, tipped his face to the sun. He hovered for a moment against the blank air beyond, and in that moment he reminded me of nothing so much as the angel in the Public Garden. Then he looked down again, with kind, troubled eyes.

  “Just then, a moment ago, nothing was so real or so true as the sun on my face. And now, in this moment, it is the way that it turns your eyes to gold. But that truth too will pass. The only absolute truth is the moment in which we are living, the only certainty that it will be eclipsed by the next. Time is the one god, and we are sand grains in his flood. Why struggle to understand, to exercise will or judgment? Why not just let go, and tumble?” His eyes flickered to the drop behind him.

  “Do you really believe this?” I asked softly. “Or are these only speculations?”

  He looked at me again, and I felt his eyes reaching out, enveloping me in their particular emotion as they had that night in the shadows of his study. As on that night, I was aware that those eyes opened not onto the glorious light I sometimes sensed in him, but onto the shattered columns of a broken heart.

  When he answered, his tone was barren. “I believe that we live in a world where terrible things happen without explanation or justification. What use are reason or free will when they neither afford explanation nor rescind mortality?”

  “How can you say that?” I cried. “You, with all your gifts? Most people live and die longing for a tiny part of what you’ve been given! You have no right to play music to the world, to make people love you for it, believing what you do. Don’t flatter yourself that they don’t know it, either. I heard that betrayal the very first time I heard you play.”

  He watched me in stunned silence for a moment; then he blinked, a prolonged motion, almost ludicrous. When he looked at me again, his eyes were full of tears. They were like tears leaking from a statue’s eyes: his face, though miserable, was inert. It was my turn to watch him in surprise, at a loss, until he took me in his arms. The urgency in that embrace was very like fear. For the first time it occurred to me that Alexander might be as frightened by all that was happening as I was.

  “I’m sorry,” he said finally.

  “Why?” I asked, pulling free to look at him.

  “Because there was no reason to say those things to you, and I don’t mean them as you think I mean them . . .” He looked away, bemused. “Eleanor,” he said suddenly, urgently, “is there no way that I can convince you to leave Eden? This place cannot be healthy for any of us, especially you. It’s too unlike what you know, too secluded. Let’s go back to Boston—or New York, or Europe, wherever you like. We can go together if you want to, I’ll take a permanent post—”

  He must have seen the futility of his pleas at once, because he allowed me to interrupt him.

  “I left all of that for a reason,” I said, “like you did. Maybe later things will be different, but I have to stay here now. I need to know all of it: everything that happened to my mother and her sister. If I don’t, I’ll always wonder. But go if you want to, or need to. Don’t let me be the cause of more unhappiness in your life.”

  He was already shaking his head. “I promised not to leave you.”

  With his words, the fear returned; I could only nod in reply and will it to relent. Then, for the second time, an image darted into my head along with the fear, as clearly as a memory would have. One of the twins was writing by the furtive light of a single candle. Intermittently she paused to look behind her, as if she feared being detected, or to dab the page in front of her with a torn strip of blotting paper. I had long enough to see the fear in her face, and then the image was gone.

  “Alexander,” I said, and then paused, wondering how to explain it. “I . . . I just thought of something.”

  “What?”

  I shook my head. “It was almost as if I remembered something. A dream, maybe. It was one of the twins. She was writing, and she was afraid.” I shuddered, hating the ominous sound of the words.

  His look had turned incredulous. “What made you think of this?”

  “I don’t know. It was just there suddenly, as if I’d seen it before.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Maybe you have. You could have dreamed it and remembered it only now.”

  “There’s something else,” I continued. “Sometimes, when I dream of Eve, I hear crying. A woman crying.”

  He looked out toward the hazy horizon. The sun was midway down the afternoon sky; our shadows on the flagstones were slowly lengthening. “How many times have you dreamed this?”

  “Only a couple. Have you dreamed it, too?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing like it.”

  We stood in silence for a few moments. Finally, Alexander asked, “What now?”

  “Let’s look at the maze,” I answered. He nodded, and followed me back down the ladder.

  We went back outside to the walled garden behind the ballroom, through the circular garden with the statue of the boy flautist, then out through the break in the hedge at the far side. This led us to a narrow corridor with tall evergreens on either side.

  “Maybe this isn’t the best idea when nobody knows that we’re here,” I said, looking up at the strip of robin’s-egg sky beyond the tops of the overgrown hedges.

  “Don’t worry,” Alexander said, taking my hand. “I’m fairly sure I saw the way to the centre from the roof.”

  Hesitantly I followed him along the corridor to the left and into the first two turns.

  “It’s like a storybook,” he said after a time.

  “Or a horror novel,” I replied. “Jane Eyre.” He smiled in the manner he did sometimes—the manner that told me as clearly as words how many years it had been since he had read Jane Eyre. I felt myself blushing, but he squeezed my hand and my anger dissipated.

  After one more turn we emerged into a clearing about the size of the garden with the statue of the boy. At its centre was what must once have been a fishpond: a glorified stone bowl set into the ground, with a few inches of stagnant water and rotting leaves at the bottom, and a carving of an Aeolian harp in the middle. There was a stone bench next to the pool, an abundance of overgrown grass and some wildflowers, but not much else. At the far end the path continued.

  “Let’s go on,” I said before Alexander could suggest anything else.

  Again we entered a narrow path bordered by tall hedges, their tops taking on a golden cast in the lowering sunlight. Alexander remained as certain of the turns to take as I was muddled.

  Finally I said, “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you’d been through this maze before.”

  He shook his head. “These types of puzzles have always been easy for me. Think of it this way: however confusing, the configuration cannot be random, because it is man-made. There’s always a pattern to things like this . . . a bit like music, I suppose. Here there is a definite sequence. We take two right turns and one left, twice, then reverse the pattern. But if, when it comes time to reverse the sequence, the corridor we are in leads east, then we take one left and one right instead. And if we come to a clearing, then we go back to the beginning of the sequence. I believe that the clearings mark the way to the centre. Do you see?”

  Theoretically I did, but trying to hold all of the information in my mind was taxing enough that I gladly left navigation up to him.

  Soon we rounded a corner and came into another garden with a statue. This one was a willowy girl holding a violin by her side and looking down into the basin of another dry fountain.

  “These people certainly loved the neoclassical,” Alexander observed.

  I tilted my head, studying the serious face of the stone girl. “I think she’s pretty.”

  Alexander smiled. “She looks rather like you.”

  I could not help smiling to myself at this.

  The next garden held a statue of Diana sporting her
bow and arrow and a hunter’s horn. The horn was hollow in the middle, and in its day had spilled not music but water into a pool at her feet. Looking at her, I began to see an order to the gardens. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense.

  When we finally reached the centre of the maze, however, my theory collapsed. The clearing wasn’t really a garden at all, just a rectangular patch of overgrown grass with a tree trunk in the middle. The blackened streak on its rotting bark suggested it had been struck by lightning.

  “Damn,” I said under my breath.

  “What?” Alexander asked.

  “I thought I saw a pattern, until this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Every clearing in the maze has a musical statue. The Fontaines have always been musical. It seemed that the small gardens would lead to some kind of bigger one, with statuary depicting their union with the Ducoeurs, and then the rest would keep to some Ducoeur theme. But there’s only this.” I indicated the burned stump.

  “Remember, when the house was built, that would have been a living tree. An apple tree, by the look of it.”

  “It doesn’t tell us much about our haunted dreams.”

  Alexander considered this, then answered, “Perhaps it does. What is any haunting but an unhappy spirit looking for peace? Maybe it is as simple as your aunt wanting us to know what happened to her, and this place has something to do with it.”

  We stood in the silence of the clearing, considering this. Sunlight streamed through chinks in the top of the hedge, dropping bright spots like pennies into its shadow.

  “Come,” Alexander said, taking my hand, “it’s getting late.”

  “There’s something I want to show you before we go.”

  I followed him back through the maze to the rose garden outside the ballroom. I had my key ready in case the door was locked again, but this time it opened easily. I thought that I was prepared to find anything at the top of that spiral stair, but when we reached the tower room, what I saw struck me so violently I had to grab the door frame for support.

  It was empty. Except for the little table with the cracked mirror, the furniture was gone. The floorboards were filmed by the same snowfall of dust that covered the rest of the house. Its dull grey surface was inviolate, but for the faint, skittering lines drawn by the dry leaves that had blown in through a broken pane in the French doors. Alexander looked at me incredulously.

  “But—it’s all gone!” I cried. “The couch, the desk—” I turned to him. “Alexander, I wasn’t lying to you! It was all here. Please believe me!”

  He looked from my face to the panes of sunlight lying across the carpet of dust. “I know that you didn’t lie. But could you have been mistaken? Could we have come to the wrong room?”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I snapped. “There’s only one tower, and only one room at the top of it.”

  He sighed. “All right, then. I suppose the likeliest explanation is that whoever you heard playing the piano that day knew that you had been here and covered her tracks.”

  “But the dust? And the broken window? It’s as if no one has come here in years. Besides, why would someone go to the trouble of moving the furniture out if they knew I’d already seen it?”

  Alexander bent down to study the dust on the floor, touched it, and rubbed his fingers together absently. Then he stood up again, his eyes on the cracked mirror, and made as if to enter the room.

  “Don’t!” I cried, catching his arm.

  “Why not?”

  “I just—don’t think that it’s meant to be touched.”

  “Eleanor, don’t be silly.”

  “Please . . . Alexander, this is frightening me. I’ve had enough.”

  “All right,” he said.

  I let him lead me back down the stairs and out of the house; I didn’t even look back. But I knew very well that we had not seen the last of the place.

  FIFTEEN

  THE next two weeks passed like as many days. My attachment to Alexander grew until it seemed impossible that we had not always known and loved each other, as it always seems when one falls in love for the first time.

  We did not talk about the house on the hill. Privately, I wrote to the hospital in Paris that had been named on the death certificate, requesting verification, and then tried to put the matter out of my mind.

  What I couldn’t put out of my mind, however, was Dorian Ducoeur. I dreaded seeing him again, but his party was rapidly approaching. I had thought that Alexander would not accept the invitation, but he hesitated only a moment when I asked him to go with us. We arranged for Tasha to remain at Eden with Colette.

  The evening of the party I stood before my closet dejectedly, realizing that what fashions had sufficed for Boston society would be inadequate for Louisiana. The fabrics were too heavy for the climate, the styles too spare for the decrepit decadence around me. There wasn’t time to go shopping, even if there had been any decent stores in the village.

  “Stop worrying,” Mary said as she came into the room with a box in her hands. “I knew that it would never occur to you that you might need something new to wear tonight. I told Colette to find you something in New Orleans when she went to visit her mother. I had to trust her judgment.” She opened the box and lifted a dress out.

  “Oh, Mary, it’s beautiful!” I hugged her and then took the dress from her. It was the latest style, rose-colored, the bodice glittering with beads and sequins, the skirt made of layers of gauzy fabric.

  “Here, try it on,” she said, and helped me into it.

  What I saw when I turned around surprised me. I couldn’t remember the last time I had really studied myself in a mirror. I saw now that I had regained some of the weight I had lost after my grandfather died, yet I was still thinner than I had ever been before. I seemed to myself unnaturally angular, but it made me look older, and I was glad of this. The color of the dress lent color to my face, which was apt to be pale. As for the dark eyes, the shape of my nose and mouth, suddenly I saw the twins in them, or rather, I could no longer not see the twins in them. Not only the features but their expressions were there, the two melded like a stereoscopic image.

  Mary touched my shoulder softly and said, “You don’t have to wear it if you don’t like it.”

  “I love it, Mary. I’m just not used to seeing myself like this.”

  “No,” she agreed. “You used to look at yourself often, but I don’t know that you ever saw. Look now, though, Eleanor, and see yourself, because you are beautiful now, and someday you’ll be like me.”

  I studied our images. They were not dissimilar: Mary was the same height and build as I, she wore her hair long, like mine. Her eyes were brilliant as Venice beads in a face so serene that it seemed timeless, despite its fine tracery of lines. One day, I thought, I will awaken from another period of inattention and find that I have aged. I hoped that I could wear the years as Mary did, and smile in the glass at whatever I became.

  I shook my head. “I think you’re more beautiful than any girl could be.”

  Mary smiled and kissed my cheek. “It’s a gift to be able to lie artlessly,” she said, then retreated in a trail of pastel gauze and sandalwood perfume.

  Not for the first time, I wondered what she thought of the change in my relationship with Alexander. Though I knew she saw it, we had never spoken of it; by now I suspected we would not. The moment for it, after that strange, rain-soaked night at Alexander’s house, had been eclipsed by Tasha’s illness. By the time Tasha recovered, there was no easy way to open the subject.

  Or so I told myself; in retrospect, I wonder if it was actually fear. Up until recently, mine had been a façade of impermeability, no doubt founded on the loss of my mother, to avoid being hurt again. But my grandfather’s death had weakened it, and in those first weeks of declared love, the last of the girl I had been dissipated, leaving a stranger in her place. Moreover I had not been in the society of anyone except Mary, Tasha, and Colette since I had fallen in love wi
th Alexander, and I didn’t know how I would fare by it, without my slippery wall of wit and easy banter.

  Sighing, I turned back to the mirror and debated putting on jewelry and makeup that would match the grandeur of the dress, and which in the old days I wouldn’t have dreamed of forgoing. In the end I wore only my mother’s diamond and a sprinkling of powder. I put my hair up with a plain gold clip that my grandfather had given to me as a twelfth birthday present, then went downstairs to wait for Alexander.

  Mary was standing by a window at the back of the entrance hall in the fading light. “Eleanor—you startled me!” she said when I came up beside her.

  “Why don’t you turn on the lights?” I asked, moving toward one of the wall fixtures, but she put out a hand to stop me.

  “Look up there,” she said. “Do you see that light, or am I imagining it?”

  I walked back toward the window with mounting trepidation. In the direction of her extended finger, far up on the hill to the left of the water, a light shone through the trees.

  “I see it,” I finally said.

  “What could it be?”

  “Maybe Dorian’s been up there,” I suggested, more to soothe myself than answer her. “Maybe he has people doing repairs.”

  “Still, don’t you think it’s odd at this time of night?”

  The lights in the room came on suddenly, and we both turned. “I almost missed you in the dark,” Alexander said. His eyes didn’t falter when they reached mine, though he must have heard our conversation.

  “Why, Alexander,” Mary cried, “you look wonderful!” And he did. He wore the black tails of that long-ago night at the symphony. His hair was combed back; his eyes were velvety in the soft light. He wore a rosebud in his lapel, one of the barely pink roses particular to Eden. He held a bunch more in his hand; these he offered to Mary and me.

  “How pretty,” Mary said. “They look so lovely near your dress, Eleanor. You ought to wear one.”