The Language of Paradise: A Novel

by Barbara Klein Moss

  It occurs to her that the painting she is about to make, back-to-back with her portrait, will be one flesh of a sort. If this is presumption, so be it—Gideon has his experiments, and she has hers. But she can’t take time to sketch as she usually does, or her excitement will ebb; she’ll wake up tomorrow full of doubt and never do it at all. She takes up a brush and adds white to carmine, chooses a place where his head might go. This first stroke always stirs her: something where there was nothing, all possibilities open. The color she has mixed is too fiery for pale skin like his; she will have to blend in more white and some ochre to get close. Once the tone is right, she works quickly, building his face in layers of paint, thick, as if she were sculpting him. Cheekbones, chin, curve of brow, angle of nose. Empty statue eyes: she will do them last, she isn’t ready to meet his gaze.

  His mouth is very fine; her brushwork is too clumsy to shape it. Sophy follows the curve of her own lips with her little finger, dips it in paint and transfers the touch directly. On the other side of the board, her painted self burns.

  TWO SESSIONS LATER, she has a likeness that pleases her. Not that it is finished. She doesn’t want it to be, she will be improving it for some time. Her mind is the palette, memory mixing with her own longing to make a Gideon she can possess. She didn’t know how well she knew him until she painted him, yet she’s caught only the shell; it would be impossible to confine a man so deep to a single image, even if she were good enough. The eyes won’t come right. No matter how she fusses, she can’t infuse them with more than a cold light: a scholarly dispassion that falls far short of the soul mirror she wants. She’s making yet another attempt when she hears footsteps on the stairs. She barely has time to reverse the poplar board before Sam blunders in, butting into a rafter as he straightens up.

  “What do you think, Soph?” He rubs his forehead, grinning, a gesture that does double duty to soothe his bruised brow and convey astonishment. “Wonders never cease! You have a bidder!”

  CHAPTER 16

  ____

  WEDDING

  “

  WEDDING” MUST HAVE STARTED AS A VERB, GIDEON thought. In the weeks since Sophy returned home, the process had gathered momentum around them, setting them spinning faster and faster as they struggled to keep their footing, to keep their wits, to keep—for a few stray moments—still.

  There had been, first of all, the matter of the ring. On the Sunday after James left to retrieve Sophy, Mrs. Hedge asked Gideon whether he had a band from his “dear mother.” It took him a few seconds to understand what she referred to. His mother wore a ring, but it was thin as a thread, of no more weight than the invisible father who had, in theory, presented it. The ring had been part of her hand, like her prominent veins and her nails that were always breaking. It never occurred to Gideon to remove it for a keepsake when she died. Mrs. Hedge said not to mind, she had a perfectly good ring from her grandmother, far too small for her big bones but a perfect match for Sophy’s twig of a finger.

  He went back to seminary with the box in his pocket. In his room he took the ring from its nest of velvet and held it to the window’s light. It was almost as narrow as his mother’s, but crowned with a minute diamond and incised with delicate rays around the jewel’s base. Someone had taken great care with it, though it seemed to have been sized for the hand of a child.

  “I am about to possess the pearl of great price,” he whispered, conscious of how actorish the words sounded.

  He looked at the ring for a long time, at the gold circlet and the tiny disk of sky that it enclosed, before putting it back in the box.

  Sophy arrived the next day. Gideon waited with Mrs. Hedge and Micah while James helped her out of the cart. She came toward them with her head down, her face half-hidden by her bonnet. Once the usual inquiries about the journey were dispensed with, James led the horse to the barn, trailed by Micah, who was visibly eager to escape the looming momentousness of the occasion. Gideon felt like bolting himself. When he dreamed of being with Sophy, he had never imagined following this drab, predictable script. Sophy seemed as uncomfortable as he, refusing to meet his eyes and looking off to the side when he spoke to her. They might have been meeting for the first time. She had been timid then, too—moony, Mrs. Hedge had called her—but there had been freedom in it, and independence, the instinctive shying of a wild creature. Now she was merely awkward. If he could only get her alone, he thought, they could be themselves again, and the right words would come.

  He didn’t have to wait long. He was ushered to the parlor while Sophy went to greet the Reverend and deliver news of Sam. Gideon sat stiffly in a horsehair chair, thinking that he ought to have kept his hat so he could twirl it on his knee in the ritual manner.

  Sophy came in and sat opposite him. She was wearing a simple gray dress that he hadn’t seen before, and she had smoothed her hair. After an absence of weeks, Gideon was beguiled again by the modesty of her manner, her serene containment. His little nun. She would dance, but only for him.

  “I don’t imagine you found much time to paint with all those children to look after,” he said. He was startled when she blushed.

  “Not much. I began something new, but only as an exercise. It isn’t fit to show.”

  “You’re too modest about your work.”

  She didn’t answer, and he could think of nothing else to say. It seemed possible that they would sit forever in constricted silence.

  Sophy looked up suddenly, her face lively. “You don’t have to!” she said. “We can go on as we are. Or not go on at all. You mustn’t feel . . . compelled.”

  Her few words released a flood of feeling in Gideon. How little Hedge’s manipulations counted when weighed against such generosity, such a pure, selfless heart! He would be fortunate to have her, under any circumstances.

  “If I love anyone, I love you,” he blurted. “Only you. But I wish we could run away to our own little place. I hate all this managing.”

  As soon as the fatal phrase was spoken, Gideon realized that he had never said it aloud—not since he was a small child, returning his mother’s endearment at bedtime. He stood apart for a moment, like another person in the room, watching its effect. Sophy didn’t move, but emotion suffused her skin and radiated from her eyes. It was, he thought, like shyness turned inside out. Her mole-colored cloak showing its scarlet lining.

  Dropping to one knee, he swept the box from his pocket in a deliberately broad gesture, meaning to mock the convention. He realized too late that he had neglected to open it. “Will you do me the honor . . .” he began, but the rest of the words did not come.

  Sophy took the box from his hand. Instead of looking inside, she held it to her heart and knelt before him, so they faced each other like two children playing. She brought her face to his and kissed him on the lips. He closed his eyes, lost in some dimly remembered sweetness, and kissed her back.

  When at last they came apart, Sophy said, “We will run away. But not yet.”

  GIDEON HAD ASSUMED they would be married in the parlor, or even at the Reverend’s bedside—a quick exchange of vows, with family looking on. Hedge was still far from well, prey to persistent discomfort that kept him confined to his room for most of the day.

  But the parson had invested the wedding day with hopes he had once reserved for Heaven. He had seized on the ceremony as the occasion for his formal rebirth as head of his congregation, and it soon became clear that only a sanctified setting would do. Twice a week Gideon and Sophy came to him to be instructed in the duties of marriage, and on each visit he presented them with some new idea, as the solemnities evolved in his mind. Hedge would be seated at the head of the meetinghouse, having been enthroned before the congregation assembled. He would look on as Gideon processed down the aisle, flanked by church elders, visiting clergy, and dignitaries from the seminary. Wedding attendants and family members would follow, and last of all, the bride, on the arm of one of her brothers. With the young couple before him, the Reverend would raise himself
on Micah’s crutches—“as on the wings of angels,” he said—and stand before his flock upright! Once the vows were spoken, he would address the newlyweds and the congregation on the new dispensation of duties, and Gideon would be ordained to the service of the church.

  “Surely it would be better to keep the two rites separate,” Gideon said, after being informed about the latest enhancement, “to give each one its full due. I can be ordained after we’re married.”

  “I grant you, it is not the orthodox way. I suppose some of my colleagues will balk.” Hedge was seated in his rocking chair, his leg stretched out on a footstool. The chair had been moved to his bedroom to serve as a way station on his road to ascension, and he sat in it for at least an hour each day, however poorly he was feeling. “But at times the Lord calls us to transcend custom. The ancients saw patterns in the heavens and celebrated the cycles of the sun and moon. Should we be deprived of our festal days when events converge to show us that ‘all things work together for good’? In fact”—his eyes slid from Gideon to Sophy and back again—“I have been entertaining thoughts of a double wedding. James and Caroline have been pledged for too long. The boy’s gone soft. He seems to lose all force when he deals with that young woman. I’ve counseled him to show some spirit and set a firm date. And if the stars should align . . .” He looked down his nose at them and winked, as if they were fellow conspirators.

  Gideon thought he had used up all his anger, and found some to spare. Damn the man and his endless mixing! He would boil the lot of them in a brew of his own making until they lost all distinction. But Gideon was alarmed by Hedge’s volatility, his roaming eyes. It seemed that the idleness imposed by the parson’s long prostration had generated an excess of vigor that mimicked the symptoms of madness. The energy he’d once spent in constant activity was wreaking havoc with his body and his mind. Hedge talked incessantly; his hands were never still, his face was an alphabet of tics and grimaces.

  “Papa, you know that won’t do,” Sophy said. “James knows very well that he can’t command Caroline. She must agree of her own free will. And she isn’t even home. She’s staying with her cousin in the city, attending a finishing school.”

  “Her parents are indulging her. Ruining what is left of her character. Why has no one told me until now?” Hedge plucked querulously at the blanket covering his legs. “Chaos everywhere. Pacts are broken; the weak rule the strong; our money isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. If I could stand on my own two legs, I could at least put my parish house in order. Keep the Evil One from our doors.”

  The Reverend gripped the arms of his chair, but his voice, when he spoke again, was calmer. “Sophy, would you fetch those ornaments from the wall? I think—if you two will assist me—it may be time to put them to the test.”

  IN HIS ROOM at seminary, his trunk already packed, Gideon read the vows that would bind him to Sophy. He had an old copy of the Book of Common Prayer; he loved the archaic spellings, the high language gemmed with thees and thous. With the ceremony less than a month away, he expected that the words would pulse with meaning. They did not. His mind sifted them with dry detachment, pulling apart and peering under, examining the text like a theological treatise.

  Marriage was an honorable estate instituted of God in Paradise. But who would have known better than the Creator that formalities were irrelevant in a world made for a single couple? Gideon concluded, with some fellow feeling, that the first man and woman would have had no idea of how to inhabit this exclusive preserve; Adam would know only that he had been alone—all one, sufficient unto himself—and now he was joined to another.

  He was cautioned against entering in to satisfy carnal lusts and appetites, like the brute beasts that have no understanding. Gideon thought of the girl in the schoolroom: the bovine bulk of her, her moist underlip and dull eyes. He thought of his solitary efficiencies in bed, how his hand crept to his crotch like a thief in the night. He would be done with all that when he married Sophy. But he wasn’t sure what replaced the bestial urge, or how, exactly, his understanding would increase, once they were legally bound and lying side by side in the boarder’s bedroom at Hedge’s. He wasn’t sure he would know what to do. He wished he had a friend close enough to ask. Most men seemed to know such things by instinct—or to act as if they did.

  Gideon rushed through the giving and taking and having and holding without being further enlightened. These were so familiar that they offered nothing new. He stopped when he came to the one vow reserved for the groom alone. The ring was on his desk again. Sophy had returned it after she accepted him so he could give it to her on their wedding day; he had no money for a plain gold band, but, as Fanny said, who would quibble over that scrap of a jewel? Once the pledges were exchanged, Gideon would present her, as instructed, with the sliver of gold—not much, but more solid than paper money in these uncertain times—and then he would promise to worship her with his body and endow her with his worldly goods. Tantalizing, the conjunction of wealth and fleshly reverence. The hint of paganism appealed to him. It was the same quality that drew him to Catholic churches, with their naked Christs presiding over gilded altars. But worship seemed to have nothing to do with the kiss they had shared, only their lips touching, their bodies held chastely apart. He remembered his first sight of Sophy, how he had gazed at her across a field as she did her Maenad’s dance. Soon he would hold close what he had seen then at a distance. He imagined falling to his knees before her—in earnest, this time—and clasping her childish hips, burying his face in her belly, teasing her breasts with his tongue. Thinking of her this way, he felt what he had never felt before: a pure, stabbing desire for her flesh. It was so intense that it pained him; he had to satisfy himself.

  He was ashamed afterward, but wiser, for he had learned by way of his body the reason for the church’s elaborate ritual. Lift the veil of formality and the stately phrases revealed their carnal truths. The idealized emotion of love—the “thou”—brought low, reduced to a rubbing of parts, dissipated in pure sensation. Raised up again.

  In his first reading Gideon had hurried over the means of redemption. Procreation of children. The text listed it first among reasons for marriage, but the fusty old term shrouded reality in a carapace of leaden duty. Children were the culmination. They elevated the animal act, changed it into something sacred. His mother had this much in common with the Queen of Heaven: they both had sons they doted on. Yet Gideon, for all his obsessing over the wedding night, had given little thought to the outcome of the act. Unlike other men, he had never felt the need to make a miniature of himself. His great role had always been to be the child.

  He got up and walked to the window. The trees outside were a tender green, but a strong wind whipped their branches, the last breath of winter. He thought of his Sundays in the study with Sophy and Micah, of the family they made. He had pretended to father Micah because Micah was grown, and not really his, but to bring a new being into the world seemed an arrogance he wasn’t capable of. He tried to imagine his features and Sophy’s combined, and found that the mental exercise was beyond him. His eyes, her mouth, her eyes, his nose, her ears, his chin. The two of them didn’t look the least alike. The face kept mutating, and in the end resembled nothing human.

  It was easier to visualize the sequestered infants he’d written about in his thesis. They came to him at night, unbidden, and they came to him now. Although no image had ever been made of them, he could see the babies clearly. The radical innocence of their faces. Their round, clear eyes, mirroring the other in perpetual astonishment. Their alertness, registering the slightest tremor in their cloistered world. The word—one or many; Phrygian, Hebrew, or tongue unknown—forming in them over time, an embryo of thought maturing slowly until ready to be born as speech. Thinking of these children, his heart raced as it did when his studies yielded a discovery. Just so it must have been in the Garden!

  “I SUPPOSE YOU will want to know things,” Mama says. She speaks with difficulty, pins brist
ling from one corner of her mouth. To herself she mutters, “The sleeves could be fuller, but they would drown you.”

  Sophy is distracted, feasting on her image in the glass. The dress she will be married in is the first fashionable dress she has ever owned. Mama has always scorned fashion, but for this occasion she has overcome her scruples and modified a pattern from the dressmaker, who claimed it came from Paris, France. The bodice is gently scooped, front and back, the sleeves belled just enough to widen her shoulders and show off her slim waist and the delicacy of her wrists. Mama had predicted that white would fade her. The opposite is true. The layers of fine muslin make her shine, though quietly, the light seeming to emanate from within. Luster is what this dress gives her. She might not aspire to be a diamond, but she can—she will—be a pearl.

  The Sophy in the mirror is the one Gideon will see as she walks down the aisle. She will never match him for beauty, but her reflection testifies that she’s prettier than she’s ever been. In her white dress she can stand beside her husband with pride and not shame him by comparison. Later he will help her with all the tiny buttons she can’t undo herself. Will the luster fade when she stands before him in her skin? Is naked easier to be than to say aloud? These are things she would like to know, but she doubts Mama is the one to ask.

  “I want to know whatever you think I need to,” she says.

  Mama removes the pins from her mouth one by one. Her lips stay pressed—whether in exasperation or a rare moment of contemplation, Sophy cannot tell. After a pause she says, “You’ve seen the animals. You know what boys are like. You must have some idea of the parts and such. What goes where.”

  She releases these statements in rapid-fire pellets, but her eyes are clouded. Sophy has the impression that boulders are moving in her head.

  “I don’t ask what you and Mr. Birdsall got up to when the Reverend and I were otherwise occupied. Whether you stopped at a kiss or went beyond. It’s of no account now, with all about to be made right. But I do reproach myself for allowing you to nurse him when he was sick. I did it with a good heart, thinking to teach you charity, but I wonder if seeing him so helpless and childlike didn’t stir up certain thoughts. It begins with thoughts, you know. That’s what sets us apart from the beasts—though not in any way we can preen on.”