The Secrets of a Fire King (32 page)

Sometimes they went inside afterward, and sometimes Beatrice merely rose and disappeared into the shadows. The eager talk of their early days, the chattering comparisons of change—

fl esh that quickened, fingertips that trembled—had given way to a pensive silence. They touched less and less often as the new sensations grew; even the most casual union was almost more than they could bear. One kiss, and his lips hummed for hours. A brush of their fingertips, and his hands carried her warmth, her imprint, like a brand.

Like a brand. It was so. Before the experiment, Beatrice had been a flicker on the edge of his mind, a pleasure, a reward, laughter falling amid the flowers in his garden at the end of the day. It had pleased him that she was the daughter of a signifi cant rival, that she was pliant and easy, slipping so carelessly into his bed, ap-212

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parently removed from any of the strictures and concerns that governed other women. A wild child, a free spirit, and he had chosen her because of this. Strangely, however, now that they had been sealed together by this secret, now that he saw her regularly and might go on doing so for decades or even centuries to come, she never left his mind.

Indeed, he had become obsessed with her, with her indifference. Here, after all, was the rarest gift, and he had given it to her alone, to Beatrice. Not to his wife with her gilded hair, not to his indolent sons, not to anyone else but Beatrice. She had been surprised and pleased and curious; it was true that she came faith-fully each week to meet him. Yet not once had she expressed joy or wonder at having been so chosen, and lately this had begun to trouble Andrew Byar. He had given her this gift: why, then, should she still withhold her heart? Yet Beatrice remained as she had always been, amused and curious, but strangely distant, as if her own life were a book she was reading, one she might put down at any moment in order to gaze out the window at the sky.

Andrew’s expectations had been so fully disappointed that he found himself regretful of the future. What if, in the uncountable days that lay before them, he became completely disillusioned with her? What if his companion turned out to be a woman he de-spised? The orchid thrived, cascading gemlike blossoms; released from the prospect of death, however, Andrew Byar’s feelings for Beatrice were withering into dust. He saw her now in the harshest light, and became critical of the tiniest habits of her being: the way a muscle flickered her cheeks when she stifl ed a yawn or a smile, the irritating motion of her throat as she drank, her persistence in murmuring the foolish slang of the day whenever she was moved or delighted by the world.

In a decade, he wondered, in a century, would her quirks move him to violence? A life sentence, he mused: the phrase had taken on new meaning.

Yet at the same time he could not get enough of her. More and more often he dispatched his driver to seek her out, and more and more often she was not to be found. Her aloofness made him brood, it made him angry. He would cut her off, he thought some-In the Garden

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times, awash in anger, sitting alone in his great offi ce, trembling with this unfamiliar inability to accomplish what he wished. Science had been Andrew Byar’s life, yet science had not prepared him for this. Not for the rage he felt upon learning she met others, in the garden of her father’s estate or on the rooftop or in the cars of trains. Not for the longing and misery that welled up to replace the rage, a depthless yearning that was what had driven him, fi -

nally, out in his car to confront her on this night.

He pulled into the circular drive before her father’s house. A maid, fluttering and startled when he asked for Beatrice, explained that she was in the roof garden. Andrew brushed away her attempts to have him sit and wait. He strode across the foyer, following his instincts up the wide, curved staircase to the second fl oor and the steeper one to the third, where he discovered the open door and the ladder that went to the roof. He climbed, emerging into the crisp night air. Urns of flowers and small trees had transformed the rooftop into a park. Benches and tables offered places to rest and view the glittering cityscape below. Beatrice stood with her head bent over a telescope, her hair cascading over her shoulders, as the silhouetted figure beside her pointed out the belt of Orion, the Big Dipper and the Little, the flowing tresses of the Coma Bereni-ces. “Surely you can see them,” he exclaimed. He was wearing a hat, and he gestured at the stars with a folded newspaper. “Why, they are as clear as if I had drawn them there myself.”

“Let me look again,” she soothed. Dark hair slipped across her cheek, and in that instant Andrew Byar’s anger faded. He understood that he could never deny Beatrice, any more than he could deny himself. What had begun as science and desire had become something more, something as essential to him as life itself, so that seeing her in this intimacy with a stranger, involved in a world of which he knew nothing, made him catch his breath in pain.

At this the two looked up, startled, from their telescopes.

“Andrew!” Beatrice exclaimed. Her father—for it was her father, Jonathan Crane, with his shock of white hair falling over his eyes and an old man’s spotted hands—took a single step and said,

“Byar, what the devil are you doing here?”

“I came to talk to Beatrice.”

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“Uninvited,” Beatrice said sharply.

Jonathan Crane looked swiftly from one to another, his spare white beard cutting the air.

“Well,” he said. “Beatrice is right here, as you see. Whether she will speak to you, I cannot say. But in any case, you may be of some assistance to me, Byar. Come here, and have a look. Beatrice insists that there is no order in the sky. Tell her, if you would, that she is wrong.”

“Perhaps not wrong, exactly,” Byar demurred, crossing the roof. Beatrice was staring at him; he felt her gaze like the sting of a slap. “Perhaps she prefers the stars to remain unknown.”

“Perhaps I see my own patterns,” she replied. “Perhaps I seek new patterns altogether.”

“The world is as it is,” her father said. “Come, Byar, have a look.”

Andrew leaned over the telescope, gazing up at a familiar sky.

When he finally stood, the old man was studying him with a gaze both unremitting and intent, reminding him of the many meetings at which they had faced each other just so, opposed on issues of steel production or charitable trusts.

“Orion,” Andrew said, for the order of the stars was clear to him, and he could not see the point in saying otherwise. “And the Big Dipper, hung from the North Star as if from a hook.”

“There you see, Beatrice?” her father said. “Even your secret lover can find the constellations.”

Into the shocked silence that followed, the old man spoke again. “Yes, I know,” he said. “All except for your intentions, Byar.

Beatrice visits you, in secret, or so she presumes, every week. At those meetings you give her a glass of wine. Sometimes she goes inside with you, and sometimes she does not. I am her father, and I am asking what your intentions are.”

Andrew Byar stared at his old rival. How had he been discovered so completely? His next emotion, however, was pure fear. For he had understood, in that moment when he emerged onto the roof and saw Beatrice, that desire had its roots in the possibility of loss. He understood, too, that if Beatrice were not present to solid-In the Garden

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ify his belief, to confirm his confidence like light confi rms a shadow, then belief might disappear from him entirely.

“This is my own affair,” Beatrice was protesting, her voice clear, but trembling with anger. “You do not own me, either one of you, and you have no right to be discussing me like this.”

“But I want to answer,” Andrew said. Carefully, he explained the experiment to her father.

Jonathan Crane whacked the folded paper against his palm.

“Ridiculous. Your ideas are nonsense.”

They began to argue then, worrying the properties of radium as they had once exhausted the properties of steel. They argued with such ferocity and passion that they forgot Beatrice entirely. It was her father who noticed first that the quality of silence had changed; the rooftop with its intricate tile and urns of fl owers was empty.

“You see how it is,” he said gruffly, interrupting Byar. “She has gone. She chooses to ignore us both.”

Beatrice was near enough, standing just beyond the doorway, to hear her father say this. She did not wait for Andrew to reply.

How little they understood, she thought, descending the ladder and the flight of stairs to her rooms. How much they took for granted, and chose not to see. She had never made Andrew any promises; he had mistaken her silence for complicity, that was all.

The experiment was no more her passion than were the distant and abstract patterns of the sky. Why be limited to seeing the stars as bulls and goats and scuttling crabs, when from another vantage point—from, say, the moon or Jupiter or Saturn—they might resemble something else entirely? Or beyond even that, within another way of perceiving, within a new framework of thought, a person might discover patterns beyond what her father or Andrew Byar or anyone else imagined. They did not, after all, have the slightest insight about the mysteries of her own heart. Why, then, should she trust their vision of the world?

Well, she would not. It did not take her long to pack a suitcase.

The house was silent. Roberto had proposed to her, and in the
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wake of her refusal he had in turn refused her father, turning his back on the steel trade and returning to Padua to study botany.
I
am free of you now,
he had written on one terse postcard, and she had considered this for a moment before she wrote on the bottom,
Your freedom brings me joy,
and sent it back.

One suitcase, but it was heavy. She lugged it down the stairs and through the marble-floored foyer, grateful for the murmuring of the fountain, which masked her footsteps. Outside, Andrew’s car was waiting. The driver started the engine the instant he saw her in the doorway. Well, why not? Beatrice thought, though she had intended to call a cab. Tonight she would accept a ride—yes, why not? The driver tossed his cigarette into the gravel and got out to put her bag in the back. Beatrice slid across the cool leather seat, folding her hands on the walnut desk, inhaling Andrew’s pe-culiar scent: cologne and cigars and an underlying whiff of steel.

The liquid in his little bottles was odorless, but the car was fi lled with the aromas of money and autumn air, close counterparts, somehow.
To the station,
she instructed, and the driver pulled away.

She glanced back at the house, wondering if Andrew and her father were still on the roof, discussing the stars or the stock market or her own stubborn nature. No matter, really. She would take the first train, wherever it might go. She picked up Andrew’s pen.

Across the production figures, which he would see as soon as the car returned to fetch him, she wrote in bold black letters,
My freedom brings me joy.

Beatrice traveled for nearly a year, to Boston and Chicago, New York and Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Stories of her wildness rippled in her wake, how she drank too much and danced barefoot in the snow and took lovers with careless abandon. Scandalous photos appeared in the society pages: Beatrice with her slender arms around one neck or another, the delicate rise of her breasts visible beneath her risqué dresses. Beatrice dressed up like a man, dressed up like a bear, wearing a corona like a star. She was always laughing, but people noted that her wildness had made her thin, had lent a feverish quality to her eyes. They watched Andrew Byar slyly, too, commenting on how
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gaunt he’d grown, waning like a moon in her absence. Or perhaps it was the strikes, which had begun just after the new furnace arrived and three hundred workers were laid off in the name of progress. In bloody protest, whole production lines had shut down for weeks, rendering meaningless the neat projections across which Beatrice had scrawled her liberation.

On the verge of summer, the stories of Beatrice’s escapades suddenly ceased. The photos stopped. Her father made discreet inquiries, only to discover that no one had seen Beatrice since a party at an estate in the far reaches of the Adirondacks a month earlier, where she had danced frantically, people said, frenetically and without ceasing. She was there, dancing, and then she was gone. Just like that, disappeared, though no one had thought too much about it at the time. Perhaps she had stepped out onto a terrace for a breath of air, perhaps she had gone for a stroll.

No one had seen her pause on the side of the swirling room and light a cigarette. Or they had seen her and had not noticed, for the party was wild and everyone was drinking, and in the ki-netic mosaic of the evening Beatrice was only one more fragment of color. She drew the smoke in deeply, watching the fl ash of arms and ankles, the beaded dresses glinting. Then she slipped through the French doors onto the terrace, closing them behind her, so that the visual intensity of the party was separated from its noise, which came to her distantly now, muffled. She inhaled again, folding her bare arms against the night air. She had begun to smoke at some point, in Chicago, she thought it had been, where a young man had left his cigarettes on a table and she had slipped them into her purse. Chicago or Boston or New York: this was one discovery, that it really didn’t matter. Whatever truth she’d been seeking, trying on the laughter and the costumes and the men, she simply had not found. One by one she’d discarded them, and now she stood here, at a party that was real, but also unreal, a place that was not her own. Her Pittsburgh life was lost as well, no more now than a dream. She had heard rumors of the strikes, of course, and through them rumors of Andrew. She had seen his photograph twice, and noted how he’d aged.

Strangely, she found that she missed the meetings in the garden,
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