by Kim Edwards
Beatrice was twenty years old and beautiful, and she had made herself this promise: she would never be used, she would always be free. She would follow her heart wherever it might take her, and in this way she would discover her own true understanding of the world. It was an experiment as daring as Andrew’s, as full of uncertain hope, though to those who knew her she was merely wild, spoiled, a girl whose family had never recovered from the death of her older brother, that young man of great promise who had survived the war only to die of influenza eight months later in the room where he’d been born. Three years ago, this was. Beatrice had been seventeen, and when the doctor emerged from her brother’s room to break the news, she had felt her world splinter, like glass cracked and held only tenuously in its former shape. Her mother had collapsed, weeping, and her father had bent his graying head, revealing a vulnerable place at the back of his neck, reddened by his collar. Beatrice, however, had not moved. She had not dared. What had been held together, logical and orderly, was suddenly unbound. Her brother, whom she had loved, who had taught her to ride a horse and sneak to the train tracks to flatten pennies when the engines roared past, this brother with his pale hair and paler blue eyes, was suddenly, mysteriously gone from the world. Why? she demanded, turning her fierce anger on the friends and relatives and clergy who came to visit in the days and weeks that followed, but they shook their heads and could offer no answer more complete than the natural order of the world, a pattern fixed in place, preordained, divine.
Beatrice had been a dutiful girl, receiving the world and the rules of her society as true and inevitable, just as one accepted the moon rising or the servant girl bringing clean clothes into her room at dawn. However, she could not accept this. Walking the paths of the estate at all hours of the day and night, remembering her brother’s laughter and the touch of his hand and the way sunlight made his pale hair look white, she began to question everything.
She began to push the limits of her world, too, tentatively at first, then more urgently. She was steadfast against the hue and cry that resulted, utterly determined to step beyond the strictures she had known. But she was not cynical. More than ever, the world seemed full of mysteries she could hardly comprehend, and the visible fell like a veil between herself and something else, something glimpsed at unexpected moments—a white curtain rising from an open window, or leaf shadows playing on the tiled floor of her room—images that layered and gathered, inexplicable but powerful. Yet her intuitions could no longer be contained by the structures she had accepted all her life, and this discovery made her feel breathless, as if she stood on the edge of an abyss, even while the world around her went on much as it always had, knit back together by the ordinary day-to-day. Don’t you see, she wanted to shout, at her father bent over endless figures of steel sales and her mother arranging flowers and the cook cutting a hundred biscuits out for tea. Don’t you see that everything has changed?
Had they looked up, she would have explained that the rules were like a net: they could not hold the fleeting thing they sought to capture. But no one did look up, and Beatrice slowly understood that she must discover the truth of the world on her own. And so, she decided, she would. She would embrace every experience; she would discard all preconceptions; she would see every moment as an open door, and she would step through each one wide-eyed, without fear.
Thus, when she emerged from the pool, water glistening cool on her pale limbs, and saw Andrew Byar watching her, transfixed, she had smiled.
And thus on this night, when the leaves stirred behind the hydrangea bushes by her father’s house and a figure emerged, tall, dressed in black, invisible except for his hands and face shining out to her like beacons, she smiled once more.
“I thought you were never coming,” she said, tranquil.
“I waited here for hours,” the young man complained, sitting down beside her, taking her hand. Light shot through her; she thought of Andrew Byar and his garden.
“Poor Roberto,” she said.
He was a distant relative of her mother’s, come from Italy for the summer. Ostensibly to study, but she knew her father was seeking someone suitable to take over the business when he died. He had never considered asking Beatrice to do so, something which had not troubled her until she perceived that the rules of the world were light and hollow, easily knocked aside. Idly, she wondered if her father’s decision might change if he knew that she was going to live forever, and she laughed.
“It is not funny,” Roberto said, speaking in a formal, lilting English that she loved. “All day I have been dreaming of this time with you, and then you do not come. It is insulting.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, and she was, though she was not regretful. “I was called away unexpectedly. There was no way to inform you.”
“Called away to where?”
“It’s not discussible,” she said lightly. “It is my own affair entirely.”
He did not answer. She felt his presence beside her, dark and churning. The old Beatrice would have hastened to soothe away his anger, but now she sat quietly, waiting with interest to see what would happen next.
“I am in love with you,” he said, angry at having been forced into this admission, or perhaps at the feeling itself. “I don’t want to lose even a moment of our time.”
She put her hand to his cheek, as she had earlier with Andrew. Offended still, Roberto turned his face away. Beatrice let her hand fall to her lap, wondering for the first time if what Andrew had claimed might be true. She had not really considered it, what it might mean to be ageless, to live outside of time. To explore every facet of the world, to follow every passion to its depths, because she would not have to choose one over another.
“What do you think?” she asked Roberto. “Would you like to live forever?”
“I have done so already,” he replied at once. “Each moment you are gone is an eternity to me.”
Beatrice laughed then, delighted by the way all doors opened to new places. Impulsively she kissed Roberto, sliding her hand behind his neck and her tongue into his mouth, where it bloomed like a flower struck by light.
SUMMER GREW RICH and dense, and then, subtly, it began to wane. A few leaves drifted to the ground, and overnight the dogwoods turned flame red. In his garden the orchid still flowered profuse and opulent, and elsewhere, in his car, Andrew Byar splayed his long, hard fingers on the custom-built walnut desk. The city was a rush of lights beyond his open windows, and from a distance came the roar from the steel plants, humming night and day. Recently, he had ordered a new furnace, determined to best his competitors, richer and more famous than he. They were old men now, men whose time of building and creating would soon end.
His, he believed, would not.
For two months and five days he and Beatrice had been drinking the Radi Os. It had become a ritual, and as with any ritual there were rules, intricate ceremonies that had taken on their own life, and which must not be broken. Each week they met in the garden, even though his family had returned and sometimes moved, visible, beyond the panes of glass. The alyssum had grown brittle, and the moonflowers had wilted, and the magnificent orchid would soon be moved into the greenhouse in anticipation of an early frost. Capricious still, as beautiful and willful as ever, Beatrice nonetheless joined him at the table each week, watching seriously and silently as he placed the drops into her glass. Any wine would do by now, any sort of dress, but they each assumed the same position at the table as they had on that first night, and they knew without speaking that they must finish their drinks in a single swallow. Dusk, it must be, though dusk came earlier now.
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—flesh 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 significant rival, that she was pliant and easy, slipping so carelessly into his bed, apparently 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 faithfully 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 despised? 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 stifled 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 sometimes, awash in anger, sitting alone in his great office, 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, finally, 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 floor 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 Berenices. “Surely you can see them,” he exclaimed. He was wearing a hat, and he gestured at the stars with a folded news paper. “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.”
“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 solidify his belief, to confirm his confidence like light confirms 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 flowers 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 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 peculiar scent: cologne and cigars and an underlying whiff of steel. The liquid in his little bottles was odorless, but the car was filled 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.