Once Gideon is ordained, he will take Papa’s place in the pulpit and draw his yearly stipend. This is the expectation, the only obstacle being Deacon Mendham and two of the elders, curmudgeons who bewail Gideon’s youth and inexperience and extol the virtues of the two venerable preachers who spelled for Papa while he was laid up. No one in the family thinks to ask whether Gideon wants to assume the mantle. Mama takes comfort in the thought that her son-in-law will carry on her husband’s work. “It was always what he intended,” she assured Gideon one night, having swept Mendham and his obsequies out the door, “though who could know you’d be called so soon?” She lifted her chin. “The gall of that Judas, asking after my health with thievery in his heart. If he tries to rob me of my widow’s mite to line the pocket of that milk-face Phelps, he’ll have the Reverend’s anointed to contend with.”
Sophy alone sees what a pall the prospect casts over Gideon. He avoids speaking of it, even to her. “I must get back to the study,” he tells her. “Make some order while I can. What would the Reverend think of me if I abandoned the Lexicon?”
She knows too well what will happen. The work will draw him in, and soon he’ll be lost to her, a citizen of that country he longs to return to. In the early days, when she was fresh to him, he’d invited her to come along. Now she has what she could only covet then: the two of them joined in the sight of God and man. But if the marriage doesn’t take, how can she be sure the link between them will hold? A rope not tightly twined can easily be pulled apart.
ON SUNDAY, GIDEON STAYS late after meeting, at the elders’ request. At table with the others, Sophy can’t eat the dinner she has overcooked. The beef is tough and gristly and won’t go down; the morsel she swallows sticks in her throat. She puts a napkin to her mouth and runs to the kitchen. The gray day, the dry sermon, the dregs of grief mixed with disappointment, the bleak life ahead—the mass of it coiled in a lump in the center of her chest. She heaves over a bucket, her insides clenching, and for all this effort brings up nothing but a few tears. Sick at heart, ladies say, fluttering their fingers over their bosoms. A flowery malaise, it sounds like, until it afflicts you.
Mama rushes in. “I knew that beef wasn’t fit to eat.” She grasps Sophy’s shoulder with one hand and thumps her back vigorously with the other. “Out with it, you’ll feel like a new person when it’s gone.”
“I just need to lie down,” Sophy says, pulling away. The nausea is ebbing, but her legs are shaky under her.
“Look at you—pale as a ghost and twice as wobbly.” Mama claps a hand to Sophy’s forehead. “No fever as yet, though one may be rising. Get to bed now, and I’ll bring you a nice cup of chamomile to settle your stomach.”
The tea is sweet, the hay-and-meadow taste brightened with a little honey. Sophy takes small sips, leaning back on pillows Mama plumped, tucked to her chin in the quilt Mama made. The best comfort is Mama herself, planted on the edge of the bed, blowing gusts into her cup to cool it. Sophy can’t remember the last time they sat together, sharing a quiet moment. Even in the old days, Mama was never one to linger—when did she have time, forever called away to another task, another crisis?—yet, somehow, she was always there when needed. Sophy feels a twinge of guilt for favoring her own flighty mother over this solid, dependable presence. When Mama sets her cup down, she says, “Stay with me awhile. Please.”
“Lonely, are you? I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what ails you. I’ve been neglectful, moping in the garden all day and leaving you to cope with the house, and never a kind word when I come in.” She picks at a loose thread in the quilt. “I believe I was jealous, Sophy, for you had your new husband to keep you company, and I’d lost mine. The Reverend used to say that some women make a banquet of their grief and choose to dine alone. I ask your pardon, daughter. I should be thinking more of others’ sorrow and less of my own.”
“There’s nothing to forgive.” Sophy’s eyes fill again, the tears spilling over. Mama never calls her “daughter” to her face; the ownership goes to her heart. “It’s nothing to do with you, or with missing Papa.”
“Not due for your monthly, are you?” A new thought pricks. “Can you be . . . ? There’s no shame in the condition, however soon it comes. I can testify, nature is no respecter of brides. With Sam, it was a matter of weeks. I’d scarcely put the last stitch in my wedding dress when I was cutting squares for nappies—”
Sophy swings her head from side to side like a child learning no, reduced to pantomime because she can’t find words that Mama will understand. Mama with her faith in nature, her belief that all men are alike in their throes.
“The opposite,” is all she can muster.
There is a silence as Mama holds this fragment to the light, squinting. She nods dolorously. “And what else can be expected? Rushed into marriage. Starting life in a house of mourning. Oh, Samuel, I have much to answer for, I don’t deny it. But how was I to occupy my right mind when you left so sudden?”
Sophy follows Mama’s gaze across the room, where, for all she knows, Papa’s shade may be casting his woeful pulpit gaze over them both.
With a corner of her apron, Mama dabs at Sophy’s streaked cheeks. “Enough of this. What’s done can’t be undone, and we’ll have to make the best of it. Now, throw off those covers and wash your face and run a comb through that bird’s nest before your husband comes home. It’s early days, still. A little time alone might be all that’s needed.”
AN EXCURSION IS PLANNED—the first since Papa died. Mama and the boys are going to the village to do a few errands and call on old friends who have been kind. Gideon is quick to claim those hours for the study. He doubts he’ll have time to do more than blow the dust off the pages and sweep the floor, but it’s a beginning.
“I don’t know why you won’t go with them, Sophy,” he says. “You need to look at something beside these four walls. Put some roses in your cheeks.” He touches her face tenderly, his eyes already distant.
Sophy wakes early on Wednesday and plunges into her chores. By the time she waves her family off in midmorning, she has made them breakfast, packed food for their lunch, cleaned and swept, weeded the herb garden, punched the bread dough down once and covered it for its final rising. At the door she whispers to Mama, “Say a prayer for us.”
The glint of mischief in Mama’s eye is unsettling. “Now, Sophy,” she says, “don’t trouble the Lord when you can do the job yourself.”
As soon as they’re out of sight, Sophy rinses her face and hands at the pump, and walks quickly toward the study. The sun is hot today, summer setting in early. She cherishes these few precious weeks when outdoors is more sheltering than the house, the biting New England air turned mild, cradling the skin. Today she can’t linger to bask in it. Gideon promised Mama he’d do some weeding in the vegetable garden. If he leaves early and gets to the study before she does, the opportunity will be lost.
A moment of painful suspense as she opens the door: the wood has swollen and she has to lean into it while working the knob. The room is vacant, but not empty, steeped in stillness. She has always found churches most holy when unoccupied, eternity thick in the air, and she has that feeling in this temple of thought. If Papa is anywhere, he ought to be here, but she doesn’t sense his presence—not even in the widened way that people call the spirit. One of his tomes is lying open on the desk at the place Gideon left it on the night of the accident, a magnifying glass resting atop a word he was exploring. Papa was in the world when that glass was laid down. Where is he now?
It occurs to her for the first time that Papa and her mother may be reunited in Heaven, brother and sister looking down upon her as she does what she is about to do. She thinks it unlikely they’d be of one mind about it. Her mother would surely approve, even goad her on, but she has been quiet lately. A glance ceilingward reveals no cautionary words from the Reverend inscribed on the whitewash. Still, Sophy’s fingers fumble with her bonnet strings, and she moves nearer to the bulk of the woodstove.
&nb
sp; She is dressed for a day of work, so, with no stays to unlace, it goes quickly. Shoes and stockings first. Her everyday cotton dress has few buttons; the stains on the bodice need not trouble her under the circumstances. She unties a single petticoat, limp from long use. Pulls the shift over her head, peels off her stockings. Her hair is the conundrum. Should she take it down, or leave it knotted and wait for him to command her again? She has imagined this scene over and over, trying one style, then the other, working herself into a state of shameful excitement, for, either way, Gideon’s response is dependably fervent. Now that she is acting out her plan, she isn’t so sure of her attractions, or of him.
She reaches up to remove the pins in her hair. The cape it makes over her shoulders and breasts is a shelter of sorts.
She feels shy at first—naked—but after a minute or two, natural to the point of pugnacity. She believes she could happily walk through the meadow and across the road wearing nothing but her ring, if only it wouldn’t cause a scandal. God sees us? Let Him. He made us! Clothes are the scandal—the care they take, the fuss some folks make about them. If Gideon’s Garden dispenses with cumbersome wrappings, she will go there without a second thought.
But when she hears him on the path, she shrinks into the murk behind the stove. He contends with the door, just as she did. The flood of light is briefly shocking—her arms cross over her breasts with a will of their own—but he doesn’t look in her direction. His eyes go straight to the desk, and before the door creaks shut he’s shuffling papers, muttering to himself, one hand harrowing his hair in a gesture she knows well. Too much to do.
She pads to the center of the room, her bare feet stirring dust. He glances over his shoulder, not sure what he heard.
“Sophy! What is this?” A pause. He seems to absorb her in stages.
She thinks he might be angry, but she doesn’t look down and he doesn’t look away. His eyes narrow, and it’s as though someone else is studying her, a stranger she’s glimpsed before, bent on taking by force what she freely offers. She walks to him slowly, keeping him at bay with steady, patient confrontation. She touches his shoulder to remind him who he is. Runs her fingers lightly down his body, tugs his shirt free of his trousers and lifts the hem to pull it over his head. The whiteness of his chest startles her. He is always pale compared to other men, but she sees now how brown his face and arms have turned, how hard the world has used him while this middle part, the heart of him, remains untouched. He raises his arms, docile as a child.
Naked, they are equals. It doesn’t matter that he is more beautiful than she. In every picture she’s seen of the Temptation, Adam is the handsome one, Eve mannish and muscled with rigid tresses flowing over stony breasts. Yet, there they stand on either side of the Tree, knowledge to be acquired between them. Sophy takes Gideon’s hand and leads him to the rug.
CHAPTER 21
____
EXILE
THE SERMON FOR THE FIRST SUNDAY IN THE NEW YEAR WAS traditionally devoted to Job. The late parson never confided his reasons, but Gideon suspected that Hedge had meant to divert his parishioners from whatever small measure of frivolity they’d managed to wring from the festive season to the long, punishing winter ahead. In surrender to this convention, Gideon sat shivering in the study on a bitter evening in late December, hunched over the Reverend’s desk with a shawl over his shoulders, pondering the roots of endurance at an hour when he should have been in bed. A fallen word, if there ever was one, and it was fitting—all too bleakly suitable—that hardening was at the core of it. Hardening of the heart, the will, the back and brain. He shaped the syllables with his lips, feeling their effortful pull, the harnessed horse dragging its load over cobblestones.
An hour ago he and Sophy had made love in front of the stove. She often joined him here at the end of a long day, when he gathered what was left of his energy to work on his sermon. It was the time they stole for themselves. Tonight, tired as she was, she had played the coquette, dancing around the room, tossing her hair and swishing her skirts, collapsing breathless in his lap. “Did you see how full the moon is?” she said, nuzzling his ear. “I think it’s bewitched me, I can’t be still.” If a less onerous subject than Job awaited him, he might have been irritated at the distraction, but he was all too willing to be seduced. He scooped her up and carried her to the rug.
“Last year we only talked of Paradise,” Sophy whispered as they began, “and now we visit whenever we please. Isn’t it a wonder?”
“If this were Paradise,” he said sharply, “it wouldn’t end.”
Ashamed of himself—for being brusque with her, for succumbing in the first place—he fought too hard for his moment of rapture and proved his own words by finishing too soon. Then, compounding his sin, he’d turned his back as if the failure were hers. He knew her body well now. Too well, perhaps: he had explored its hidden niches with as much skill as he could muster, and still, the essence of Sophy eluded him. The girl who had danced in the field looked over her shoulder and darted, time after time, just out of his reach. When they made love, it was this wild, skittish creature he chased.
Even on the rare occasions when he caught her, it was never enough for him. She made her whinnying sound, and arched against him, and they locked together as one. For a single moment he wanted nothing else, knew nothing else, and then the fullness ebbed, and they came apart again. This seemed, each time, such a betrayal that he had to discipline himself to tolerate her head resting on his chest, her arm flung across him in that claiming way, the beatific look on her face as she gazed into his eyes—as though lovemaking had transported them to a higher plane, miles above the drudgery that filled their days. He didn’t doubt that Sophy felt an ecstasy he only feigned. For him, the act was a tease. Why, once the peak was reached, was there only subsidence and the longing for more? Perhaps, in the Beginning, it had been different: the unity more absolute, man and woman, once joined, never falling back into their separate selves.
Now, Gideon thought, the only hope for completion was making a child. But, for all their efforts, Sophy showed no signs of pregnancy. To his eye she appeared thinner than ever, spare and boyish from her added workload. Fanny had begun to set special broths before her at dinner-time, leaves and twigs floating ominously on the surface. To build the girl up, she said.
Sophy would have stayed with him tonight, however badly he’d behaved. She often kept him company when he worked late, curling up in a chair like a drowsy cat when her eyes got too heavy for reading or mending, offering her presence and asking nothing in return. Most nights he liked her company—needed it. Quiet as she was, the sense of her, the barely audible sound of her breathing, buffered him from his own despair. He never felt more married than on these evenings, when they were together in the room they still thought of as home and she was simply there, reminding him that he was no longer alone.
On this night, even such primal comfort was an impediment. As gently as he could, he sent her back to the house, pleading the rigors of his day: he had visited Mrs. Jennings, who lost her boy to whooping cough; he needed to be alone.
“I’ll call on the poor lady tomorrow and bring her some soup,” Sophy promised, already practiced in the role of pastor’s wife.
He stood on the stoop and watched as she picked her way along the path they’d stamped earlier in the snow, the lantern bobbing before her. The night was as clear and bright as it was cold, the stars like crystals of ice. Even without the lantern, he could have kept her in sight all the way to the door.
THE ROOM CLOSED AROUND HIM, enfolding him in its soothing dusk. It seemed to him that the inside of his mind must look like this—a haven he had once occupied readily, a space so fundamental to him that he had assumed it was a state of nature and taken its riches for granted. He rarely took refuge there now. The demands of a clergyman’s life left little leisure for musing, less for meditation. A mere six months after his ordination, it was clear that he lacked Hedge’s vigor and his affinity for the work. He lab
ored over his sermons for hours, earnestly circling around the Reverend’s favorite themes, and still they struck not a spark from his congregants, who occupied the pews impassively and filed past him with a cursory nod and a murmur as he bade them good-bye at the door. “If you could only simplify,” Sophy begged him. “These are laborers who want a little bread of Heaven to get them through the week. When you explain too much, they think you’re being superior.”
“I suppose I ought to lament my education,” he’d snapped at her. Sophy was too kind to point out that the Reverend had also been a learned man, but able to distill his knowledge into plain truths for ordinary folk.
With a sigh Gideon looked down at his notes. To be patient was to endure with calmness. Delve down to the Latin and the vein of suffering was struck: thus, the medical patient, bearing with fortitude the intimate agonies of the flesh. Gideon thought of Job, patron saint of loss, scraping at his oozing boils with a potsherd, and then of Mrs. Jennings, the bereaved mother he had visited that morning. “I could bear it if only he hadn’t had to suffer so,” she had said again and again. Her frayed gentility, the fineness of her worn face, reminded him of his mother. He suspected, from the humbleness of the house, that she had married beneath her. The boy had been her confidant, her consolation. “It’s one thing to lose an infant,” she said, “but to have had him for nine years, and him so promising . . . What was it all for, I keep wondering?” Gideon could not bring himself to offer the usual words of solace. Unable to meet her eyes, he bowed his head and watched her hands as they kneaded a damp, grayish handkerchief with purposeful efficiency, as if she were doing the weekly wash.
There were too many like her. The harsh cold of the last months had taken a toll on the village’s children; whooping cough and an outbreak of scarlet fever had robbed several families of their young. Gideon was constantly being pulled out of himself and made to address the raw needs of others, and—lacking Hedge’s conviction—he had nothing to offer them but the stock phrases and tired justifications of his trade. How could he preach about Job to those who had already suffered so much? Yet this, precisely, was what the elders expected of him. He was aware of their growing displeasure, their disappointment—had even overheard mild-mannered Mr. Brown defending him to Deacon Mendham after a church meeting. Once their loyalty to Hedge’s memory had run its course, he had no doubt that they would find a reason to replace him.
The Language of Paradise: A Novel Page 18