The Lost History of Dreams

by Kris Waldherr

  Isabelle couldn’t think what to say. The prostitute rose to leave. Hugh fumbled with his trousers. Isabelle averted her gaze so she couldn’t see him, her father, exposed. But she couldn’t avoid smelling him. He stank of drink. Of decay. Hugh always wore beautiful clothing, which he had sewn special after he’d gained success. Isabelle recalled his dark green frock coat from that day in Sévres—it was this coat he now wore. She could smell he’d pissed it like a baby. He was nothing at all as Isabelle recalled, or the man Ada loved. The skin around his eyes had sagged, ageing him a decade. His beard had grown in long over his handsome face, making him look more wolf than man. He must have just eaten, for there were sauces drizzling down his beard. Crumbs along his collar. His beautiful green frock coat all wrinkled and ruined, like he’d been sleeping in it for days.

  Once he’d settled himself, Isabelle handed him Dr. Engelsohn’s letter. “What did you do with my sister?”

  He thrust the letter back at Isabelle. “Burn it. Better no one should know.”

  “But now I know.”

  He turned from Isabelle’s stare. “I don’t care.”

  “But I do. You must tell me where Mathilde is. Ada would want me to know.”

  He laughed. “I can tell you where Ada is. I fed her remains to birds so she might fly. She’d like that, don’t you think?”

  Isabelle was without words.

  “You know, I knew you’d be coming here,” he said, turning eerily calm. He set his hands on her shoulders. “I knew it was only a matter of time once you read that book.”

  Isabelle understood too well what he meant. The Lost History of Dreams. Still, her face must have shown skepticism, for he said:

  “Ah, but you don’t believe me. How do you think I got all this?” His arm swept around the room of that fancy hotel suite, so gilded and garish and vulgar. “All paid for by Parnassus because of that wretched book of poems my wife inspired. Who knew grief could be so profitable?”

  Isabelle felt her heart crack. “How can you jest about this?”

  “I’m not, Isabeauty. Did you know those poems are meant to mimic the architecture of a chapel? They rise from the earth toward the heavens. And the chapel is meant to be like a poem—well, a cycle of poems anyway. Cantos, if you will. It’ll take less than a year to build. Just as well to work on it since I haven’t been able to pen a damn word save for shit verses since I finished that book. I’m as dry as a whore’s notch.”

  “Chapel?” Did he mean writing or building one? Between his chatter of cantos and whores, how dull Isabelle felt! She recalled that sketch after he’d taken Ada to Sèvres, the chapel for his missing family.

  “Yes. Like this, Isabelle.”

  Hugh pulled out a long roll of paper from beneath his chair. His hands shook from drink as he unfurled it.

  “See? A chapel like a poem. And with stained glass too. A locus amoenus. Even better than a poem! I’ve arranged for the glass and hired workers. They’re already building it. It will be the most beautiful place that ever was.” His voice caressed her ears in his old way. “Did you know I first gained the idea for it when I visited Canterbury with Ada well before you entered our lives? I knew I’d marry her even then. I wanted the chapel to be as transcendent as she was. A home for her soul. A permanent record of our love, since I thought we’d never have children . . .”

  At this, Isabelle’s distress began to rise. Never have children. What about herself? Didn’t she count?

  Isabelle grabbed Hugh by his shoulders. “Where is Mathilde? Tell me!”

  Hugh shrugged her off. He stumbled from his throne to uncork another bottle of wine. Isabelle felt invisible, as though she were a ghost herself. Was she dreaming? Did she breathe? She touched her face, stared at her hands, to convince herself she was awake.

  “You’ve been crying,” Hugh said, as if starting from a trance.

  “Of course I’m crying! I loved Ada like a mother. And now she’s gone. And you . . . I never expected to find you in this state.”

  “Neither did I.” He gestured with a wide, wild sweep of his arm at the drawings of the chapel, the fancy hotel room, the marble floor, the prostitute slinking toward the gilded door. “Well, at least my wife has proven herself useful for something beyond sorrow. What about you with your music? After all, if she’d never gotten with child, you’d never have gone to conservatory. Did you ever think to be grateful for that?”

  With those words Isabelle lost herself. She hit Hugh’s jaw. She hit him so hard that her palms stung like they’d been burned. She’d come all that way, searching for him, hoping to find Mathilde, seeking absolution for her jealousy, for agreeing to piano lessons over remaining with Ada. Over a year of traveling across Europe alone to find Hugh—she, a young girl with no prospects, no money. She’d sewn linens, worked in kitchens, scrubbed floors, begged. And then she’d discovered her father with a whore’s mouth around his genitals. A whore like her mother had been.

  “Merde! Why the hell did you do that?” Hugh shouted; she’d struck him so hard that blood trickled from his mouth. He dabbed it with a lacy handkerchief, cloying with perfume from some woman. This further enraged her.

  Isabelle kicked his plans for the chapel across the room. “Because it was always about your poetry. Your inspiration,” she cried. “And now you’re using her for your art with that glass chapel! Mathilde too—that’s why you gave her up, so you’d have another loss to weep over.”

  “You little bastard!” He grabbed Isabelle by her shoulders. Her neck. His hands tightened. “Don’t you understand? You had to leave, Isabelle—Ada said as much. Don’t believe me? It’s true! You lived through her. You never drew a breath you did not think of her, worshipping her like she was the fucking Madonna descended to earth. Like I, your own flesh and blood, didn’t matter. You don’t even call me Father—”

  “You’d told me not to. Please, you’re hurting me!”

  “Not that it matters—Ada is gone. She’s really gone. Not even our baby resembled her—she had red hair, like me. Like you used to. Nothing like Ada. God help me . . .”

  Now Hugh was weeping so hard he had no choice but to release Isabelle. She collapsed to the floor, gasping and clutching her throat.

  “God forgive me,” he said, reaching to help her up. “Forgive me, Isabeauty. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have done that . . . I’m sorry. So sorry! I know you didn’t mean to say what you did. I loved her so. I know you did too—”

  She slapped his hand away. “Fie on you! You never loved Ada! Not like I did!”

  “That’s not true! I loved her more than life. More than death—I couldn’t live without her.” His tone turned odd, unlike anything Isabelle had ever heard of him. “We had a plan.”

  Isabelle grew cold. “What sort of plan?”

  “Laudanum. Drowning. Hanging. Does it matter? I promised her we’d never be parted.” He forced a laugh, but it came out like a sob turned sour. “You don’t believe me, Isabelle? Remember when I came to her that day in Fiesole? When she tried to turn me away, and oh! how I begged her to let me stay? After she’d sent you away, I told her that she was my soul and I hers. That it went against natural order for us to live apart, for we were each other’s locus amoenus. And she took me in her arms, and oh! how she took me! Isabelle, it was like that spring morning when I first met her beneath the yew tree—the wood pigeons, her poor sparrow, the beauty . . .

  “Before we’d taken our fill of each other, I remember lying there in her arms, listening to the rise and fall of her chest, the mortality rasping inside her lungs. I thought, ‘If we have nothing more than this, I shall know I have lived more than most men. I shall ask God for no more.’ And then I whispered to her, ‘If I remain with you, your life will end, but I cannot bear for us to be apart. Therefore, I shall die with you.’ ”

  “You said this?” Isabelle shuddered. She’d had no idea.

  “I did, Isabeauty. I told her she should not be afraid of death, for we’d be together always. I promise
d when the time came I’d hold her in my arms, kiss her, lie with her even as she breathed her last. And then I’d join her afterward. That they’d find our bodies entwined, so we’d be buried as one. For to know a love such as ours was enough for a life.” He broke off. “You’re shocked, aren’t you?”

  Isabelle forced herself to speak. “That’s why you sent me to music school and gave Mathilde away. Because you planned to commit suicide when Ada died.” It had never been about her jealousy.

  He forced a nod. “Laudanum seemed easiest. She thought so too, and swore if I didn’t join her, she’d haunt me. That she’d never leave . . .”

  Isabelle recalled her vision of Ada in the mirror. “Did she come back to you?”

  “. . . But the poems, they kept coming. I couldn’t stop them. And they were unlike anything I’d ever written. They possessed me. You must believe I couldn’t turn away from them. I just couldn’t. And it was her doing! Her death—”

  Isabelle interrupted, “You must tell me! Did she come back to you?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do, Father.”

  Father. How strange the title felt on her tongue.

  Hugh leaned in close. The stench of wine, of sex, on him made Isabelle gag.

  “No,” he said at last.

  And then through sobs and shouts he related the strangest tale Isabelle had ever heard: of how he’d traveled everywhere in search of Ada; from sea to mountain; from country to city, oftentimes disguising himself to avoid interaction with humanity. He attended séances held by charlatans who stole his money and his hope. He ingested opium with strangers under bridges. He even went to church to take communion but was turned away by a priest who thought he’d come to steal silver.

  “Not once did I glimpse her,” Hugh concluded, his cheeks wet. “Not once. Here’s the sorry truth, Isabelle. There is nothing after death. Nothing! Only rot and regret.” Then he wiped his eyes and offered Isabelle his hand anew, as though he’d forgotten he’d tried to strangle her. “Did I hurt you, child? Forgive me. Pray forgive me . . .”

  Isabelle couldn’t forgive. She wouldn’t forgive. Her recollection of leaving the Black Forest, of Hugh sending her to go to music school so he could let Ada and their baby die without her awareness, returned fresh as the morning it occurred. She felt her sorrow twist to anger, her anger to fury, and her fury grow until it expanded beyond that hotel room. Beyond Paris, to the sky.

  “You forced me to leave her!” she shouted, balling her hands into fists. “I never would have otherwise! And she died because I left her—if I’d been there, I’d have protected her, I’d have given my sister a home, I would have talked her out of your stupid pact! And now Ada is gone, Mathilde is gone. She’s gone! Really gone! All is gone!”

  Isabelle punched him again. And again. She hadn’t known she possessed such strength. Hugh’s nose was bleeding, his cheek swelling.

  “Where did you take Mathilde? Tell me!”

  Hugh arched a brow, laughing. “I appear to have misplaced her.”

  In that moment, if Isabelle had had a knife, she probably would have stabbed him. Then she realized how wrong she’d been—begging would work better than accusations.

  She fell to her knees before him. Wrapped her arms around his ankles.

  “Please, Father. Tell me where Mathilde is. For Ada’s sake. For mine. I’ll raise her as my own. It’s the least I can do. You need never see her, if that’s what you want. Please.”

  Hugh slumped back down in that throne chair, his wine and bloody nose forgotten. “I won’t ever tell you, Isabelle. I can’t! It’s too late. Too late for Ada, for me, for everything. Better Mathilde grow up without knowing her wretched history. To not bear responsibility for her mother’s death and her father’s ruination. It’s the least I can give her, my poor daughter, a life unburdened of her past.”

  “But if you don’t tell me, I’ll never forgive you,” Isabelle whimpered. “I won’t forgive you for keeping Mathilde from me. Nor shall I forgive you for Ada’s death. How can you live with that?”

  “Such youth. Such certainty . . .” He caressed Isabelle’s hair, his hands unexpectedly gentle. “I know it’s hard for you to imagine, but you will forgive me, Isabeauty. Not immediately, but in time. Once you go inside the glass chapel, you’ll have no choice. You’ll understand how much I loved Ada, and that we weren’t meant to be parted. That I was right to let Mathilde go . . . The chapel will make amends for everything. All will be set right. You’ll see.”

  With this, Isabelle couldn’t bear her father’s touch. His stench.

  She released his ankles and stood.

  “I promise you this, Hugh,” she said, her voice ragged. “I will never step foot inside that chapel. Ever. Not even if my life was dependent upon it. Not even if I was without shelter in this world, and was starving. This I swear upon all I hold dear.”

  “Then I suppose we’re done, Isabelle.”

  He rose at last from that ridiculous gold throne. Reached anew for his bottle of wine, and took a deep gulp.

  He spat the contents of his mouth onto the floor in front of Isabelle.

  “Go,” he said.

  VIII.

  “I never saw my father again,” Isabelle concluded. “When I returned to the hotel the following morning to try to change his mind, he’d already left for God knows where. At first I wondered if he’d killed himself. Then I decided he’d gone to Weald House to build the glass chapel. I was right, but I was so destitute that by the time I had the funds to leave France, he’d already disappeared. And now he’s dead.

  “And that, Robert, is the whole of my story, and the whole of my suffering. Once I learned of Hugh’s death, I knew I needed Ada’s story preserved to honor her memory, which you’ve now written, or some version of it . . . but then it no longer seemed to matter. While I spoke, I understood I yearned for something more.”

  Revenge.

  The word hung between them, bitter as rue.

  Robert said nothing. What words could he offer to undo the acts of so many years earlier, which had led to so much sorrow, so much remorse? All he could do was sit on Ada’s marble bench in her chapel—a chapel he now knew had been built by Hugh out of guilt instead of love—and set his head between his hands. It was hard to recall any life beyond what he’d experienced that morning: him seated there, Isabelle kneeling before him, Hugh’s last letter on the bench. How heavy his skull felt, so thick, so dense! The lack of sleep, the emotion, even the scent of sex lingering about the folds of his clothes made the air feel still. Frozen. In all his years as a historian and a daguerreotypist of the dead, he’d never heard such a saga. Repulsion rose in him tainted by compassion, a conundrum of sour and sweet. No wonder Hugh sought to destroy himself. No wonder he’d given up Mathilde. No wonder Isabelle refused to allow Hugh to be buried beside Ada. No wonder Hugh had needed to leave Mathilde’s address and lock it inside a chapel of glass.

  “I had no idea,” Robert said at last. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Sorry . . .” Isabelle gave a strangled laugh. “Not as sorry as I am. To think what I wanted was here all along. I feel such a fool! So stupid!”

  “You couldn’t have known.”

  “But I should have suspected, Robert.” Her voice dropped. “You see, every year on the anniversary of Mathilde’s birth, Hugh sent me a key. Year after year. Package after package. Key after key. Each exactly the same. To Miss Isabelle Lowell, Weald House, he’d write, so damn confident I hadn’t yet gone inside the chapel. That I was still here waiting for him to show, to tell me where he’d taken my sister. And I was. I was! Every year, I’d open them, praying he’d at last sent Mathilde’s address. Afterward I’d burn, bury, or toss the packages down the well to spite him. It mattered not. The packages still came.”

  This Robert had not expected.

  “Sometimes they’d be postmarked from the Alps. Others from France. Another from Germany. Each year a new location. If that wasn’t enough, he had
to get your family involved by sending you here.” She looked up at last from her clasped hands, her eyes dark pools of exhaustion. “I even thought to destroy the chapel. I tried to throw a rock through the glass, but I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t.”

  “But that’s in the past,” Robert said. “At last you know where Mathilde is—she’s now old enough to bear her history. I’ll help you go to her. I want to.”

  With this, he found himself drawing closer to her. Yearning for her.

  “Because of what just happened between us?” She shook her head, laughing oddly. “I don’t need your pity. I can go to my sister alone, thank you.”

  “No. Because I want to be with you.”

  The words took Robert by surprise, but there they were. His willingness to admit this truth went beyond the intimacies they’d shared in the chapel, or the story she’d told him all those nights.

  “You don’t want me, Robert. You want Ada. Her story.”

  “No,” he said. “I want you.”

  Isabelle’s eyes widened; he thought he spied a warmth in their depths. “What about your wife? Your ever-lasting mourning?”

  “I’m alive. She’s dead.” His throat tightened as he said this.

  She brushed a tendril of hair from his scarred temple. “You’d be a fool. I’m like Hugh. I don’t know how to love. Only to destroy.”

  “That’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

  Her eyes grew wet. “But you don’t even know my true name. Nor do I.”

  “Be who you want to be. If you say you’re Isabelle Lowell, that’s enough.”

  To prove his suit, Robert found his fingers searching for Ada’s miniature in his pocket. He’d give it to her. Prove that it was she he loved, not Ada. Instead of the miniature, he felt something cold and hard atop it. Something the size of a chestnut.

  The rock Tamsin tried to throw at Grace—he’d forgotten it was there.

  Before Robert could pull either miniature or rock from his pocket, Isabelle rose from the bench. A dove nesting in the eaves flew past her shoulder to settle on the bench. Though she offered her hand to help Robert stand, any tenderness he’d sensed seemed firmly locked away.