The Language of Paradise: A Novel (37 page)

“How long?” She cuts him off.

“Until the words come. A year and a half, three at most. Leander and I are of two minds on the subject. He thinks language will evolve slowly, given the lack of a model. I’m persuaded that, in a mind so clear, speech will bubble up like a natural stream. There’s much we don’t know. The ancients conducted similar experiments, but their methods were more primitive.”

He’s speaking quickly now, caught up in his ideas. “What we envision has never been attempted before. To return to a pre-Babel condition. To create our own paradise, and let a child come to consciousness there in perfect freedom, nurtured by affectionate caretakers—but with a light hand! We must never impose, only observe. I called us gatekeepers, but our function is higher than that. We will stand in the place of the Lord in Eden, watching over our precious creation.”

“And if—after a year or two or three—the words never come?” Sophy has heard of children raised in the wild, bestial creatures who walk on all fours and howl like the wolves that nurtured them.

“That won’t happen. The Bible tells us God brought the beasts to Adam to see what he would call them. We can infer that the names were already in him, dormant, waiting for the proper objects to present themselves. If Adam is the model for humanity, why should our little man be different? With the three of us to entertain him, he won’t lack for stimulation, and the garden room will feed his senses year-round.” Gideon looks about him with a mildly puzzled air, as if the lush flora had taken it upon itself to vanish out of spite. “Leander wants to acquire a pair of peafowl to strut outside. To amuse Prince Adam, he says: every kingdom needs its court jesters. The fellow is besotted with poultry . . .”

Our little man
. The baby has been an
it
until now, neither of them willing to confine it to one sex or another. Sophy tries out this new identity on her intimate companion, and sees it—him—in her arms, then teetering on squat legs as she beckons him. A presence become a person.

“You’re too late,” she says, not bothering to contain the note of triumph. Her emotion makes her careless. Let them try to use her boy! “He’s been listening to us all these months. Do you think he doesn’t know our voices? We have conversations every day, he and I. We’re already quite familiar.”

“Why must you always oppose me?” Gideon gets up and paces from one end of the conservatory to another. “No one is more aware than I am that we can’t
achieve
perfection, we can only try to approach it. Look at this place! The greenery was supposed to be installed two months ago.”

“Gideon.” She is sweet reason, calling him home. “This is our baby that we waited for all these months. We don’t have to put him in a glass case and study him. Only to love him. What else does a little child need? Our love will be paradise enough.”

“If you had seen more of the world,” he says, “you would know it is never enough.”

The words are harsh, but she sees a wavering in his eyes, and she speaks to it.

“Do you remember, the day you asked me to marry you, you said you wanted to run away, just the two of us? And I said, not yet?”

“I meant from your father and his eternal managing. Our circumstances have changed.”

“Have they? It seems to me we’ve gone from one manager to another. You open your mouth and Leander’s words come out. We’re a family now. It’s time for us to rule our own lives.”

“All very fine, but how would we live? We have no resources.”

“You’re a man of gifts. You will find another position—if not in a parish, then a college, or a school in the city. I don’t care where we go or how humbly we live. I would be happy in a single room, if only we can start new.”

“Why else are we here?” Gideon passes a hand over his forehead. “You don’t see what Leander has done for us. Your dislike blinds you—and your lack of vision. He’s sacrificed so much. The rent is only half of it. Do you know that he paid for this conservatory out of his inheritance?” He stops in front of her. “I suppose you have no idea of the cost of glass. He could easily have built a home of his own.”

“Let him have this one, then. I won’t sell my child for a roof over my head.”

He is the only man she knows who turns white, not red, in the grip of anger. His whole body clenches like a fist, flesh stretched taut over bone. She steps back, her arms crossing over her belly.

After a minute he says, “You have a short memory. We were miserable a few months ago, and if we run away, we’ll be miserable again. Single rooms may suffice for the lovers in romances, but try to imagine raising an infant in one. I would be away all day, trying to scrape a living, and you would be alone with the baby, doing all those chores you scorn. If you felt the urge to paint, you’d have to stifle it. Compare that to the life we have now. A fine house with more space than we need. Time to pursue our true vocations, and a generous friend to care for us. Above all, the
task
. The work we do will reverberate far beyond our family. We might begin by cultivating paradise in a—a bell jar, but what we plant here will spread into the world. Leander is convinced of it, and so am I.”

We don’t know anything about this man, she wants to say. Where he is from, how he came by his so-called inheritance. If we had never met Leander, we’d be an ordinary couple, coping as best we could, and what is so terrible about that? She doesn’t speak because the answer has been clear since that day she first saw him across the meadow, the sun burnishing his hair.

Gideon takes her hands in his and looks into her eyes. “Trust me, Sophy. A long time ago I asked you to come with me. Now I’m asking you again. Say you will.”

He waits until she nods before letting go of her hands. At the door he says: “Say a word to Leander, won’t you? Your heart would melt if you knew how fond he is of you. He doesn’t expect an apology, but a little warmth would be welcome.”

Their generous friend, who, a scant minute ago, was lurking outside the door, listening. She doesn’t know how she knows. A sudden absence; a receding of attention that thins the air. She’s had the sense before.

Sophy sinks down in her chair, exhausted. Her back aches, her legs ache. She won’t work today. Her winter scene gives her a headache—dead earth, dead trees. The sky is empty. How could it be otherwise when she painted it from life? She turns the picture to the easel.

THE PAINTING COMES
to her like a dream, and in the manner of dreams, she sees it first in motion. The couple in the bell jar, walking arm in arm through a forest of potted plants, red and yellow flowers climbing the glass walls like ivy. The two make their decorous way to a bench beneath an orange tree. The young man helps his lady to sit before settling at her side. They don’t touch or look at each other; then one of his hands wanders to her ample skirt to rest on her stomach. His fingers spread, her hands cover his, and they are still. The view widens to the larger landscape, where November reigns in bleak contrast to the luxuriant greenery inside the jar. Skeleton trees, the breath of winter agitating the branches. Across the matte sky, a pair of wings growing larger: a swan’s neck; no, a serpent’s, topped by a human head. The creature hovers over the jar, shedding letters like feathers with each stately sweep of its wings. When the wings stop beating, she has her painting.

If the scene were less vivid in her mind, transferring it to canvas might be easier. She works for hours, ignoring the pain in her arms and shoulders. She puts her shock into it, her righteous anger tinged with fear. While she paints, she feels some mastery over her situation. If her hand is steady enough to wield the brush, she is not helpless, she still has her wits.

At dinner—a talking meal—Leander says, “Have I grown a second nose, Sophia? Or a third eye in the middle of my forehead?”

She doesn’t take his meaning at first. She has been studying him, discreetly, she thought, trying to memorize his features so she can render them accurately. But Leander sees what other men don’t. She wouldn’t be surprised if that black hair slanting across his brow hides a third eye.

“You have an interesting face,” she says. “Unusual.”

“Ah, the artist’s pitiless eye. Are you threatening to immortalize me?”

“If I tried, you wouldn’t know yourself. Don’t fret, I’ll spare you—for the sake of family harmony.”

He laughs and turns back to Gideon, but she has been warned.

She clears the table quietly. The men are still deep in conversation, and Leander has taken out his pipe, a sure sign they’ll be occupied for a while. Neither seems to notice that the room has darkened. She lights a candle and places it between them; then she lights one for herself.

“Off to bed, are you? Dream well, little lady.” Leander puts a match to the candle and ignites his pipe.

“I’m not tired yet. I thought I might sit in the glasshouse and watch the stars.”

“Oh, Sophy, don’t sit in the dark,” Gideon says. “You’ll catch cold. You could be reading in your own chair by the fire.”

“I like it there at night,” she tells him. “It’s very peaceful.”

“Perfectly understandable,” Leander says, with a look at Gideon. “Of course you will want to be by yourself at such a time. Yourselves, I should say.”

She bristles when he alludes to her pregnancy, as he often does. He has the soul of a Norseman. He invades her casually. She could say something, but she lets it pass.

DARKNESS HAS A DIFFERENT
texture in the glasshouse than in a room with solid walls. It is luminous, even on nights like this one, when the murky weather hides the stars. Mysterious, not eerie: Sophy has hated dark rooms since she was a child, but she is never afraid here. When she sets the candle by the easel, her painting glows like a stained-glass window—that hushed light that Papa said signifies the Holy Spirit.

She begins to paint immediately, while the image is fresh in her mind. She did the wings yesterday—layers of feathers shading from white to gray, tipped with black—and the long sinuous neck, which seemed to unfurl of its own accord, with very little prompting from her brush. Faces are always a challenge. If only he still had his beard, there would be less territory to cover. She has done a few pencil sketches of him for practice: a profile which came closest to capturing his aquiline features, a three-quarter view that was less sure, and a full-face that failed entirely, suggesting an old woman who bore a rogue resemblance to Mama.

The three-quarter view will work best for her purposes; she wants to convey arrested motion, a pause in mid-flight above the couple in the glass dome.

The area is so small that it’s hard for her to see. She squints into the circle of candlelight, aware that Gideon may come in at any moment and order her to bed. Even with a fine brush, it is impossible to achieve the precision of pencil, but at her level of skill, accuracy matters less than the overall impression. Painting him, she can almost love him for the angles of his face, his swooping nose and square chin. She takes some care with the eyes. How to suggest their mutability? It comes to her to make tiny gems where the irises would go: emeralds, their facets catching the light. She solves the problem of motion by lifting his hair off the brow and to one side, a black banner in a stiff wind.

Sophy leans back in her chair and considers that she’s done a good night’s work. The face confronts her like a genie out of a bottle, audacious:
Who are
you
to have made
me? This creature would dominate even if it didn’t occupy the lion’s share of sky. She isn’t sure what to name the beast—flying serpent or dark angel—but, remembering the letters falling from its wings, she thinks she’ll call the painting
Annunciation
. The message it brings to the pair below will have to wait until tomorrow.

She hears Gideon’s footsteps in the bedroom, and calls out, “I’m just cleaning my brushes.” She sets the picture near some older canvases stacked in a corner and covers it with a cloth, mindful that the paint is not quite dry.

Gideon is cross with her for having stayed up so late. Lying by his side, her head still buzzing with the night’s work, Sophy thinks of Leander’s odd words when bidding her good night. She’d scarcely noted the phrase at the time, dismissing it as one of the quaint foreign expressions he affected. Dream well, he said—as if he’d peered into her with his third eye and seen what she would do.

CHAPTER 31

____

VISITATION

M
ICAH IS DUE ON THE FIRST SATURDAY IN DECEMBER
, bringing clothes and blankets for the baby, along with the cradle that rocked all the Hedge infants to sleep. When Sophy hears the wagon lumbering up the hill, she is alone in the house, a rare occurrence. A fine snow is falling, the first of the season. The men have gone to a neighboring farm to see about purchasing a horse. It is a sensible step, now that an infant is on the way, but neither is delighted at the prospect. Gideon has always relied on his feet to get around the parish, and Leander seems to find the idea of keeping a large animal intimidating; he is a city man, in Sophy’s opinion, for all his tales of living rough. She hopes they’ll take their time debating the merits of the beast so she can have some private moments with her brother.