by Sarah Bryant
“Your grandfather’s secrecy about your mother. His reluctance to talk about this place. Of course, it raises lots of questions, too . . . but this painting is like a missing puzzle piece. I feel I ought to be shocked—to try to erase a child is a shocking thing—and yet I somehow feel as though—”
“You’ve always known,” I finished for her.
She looked at me, and gave me a gentle smile. “Come, Eleanor. There’s nothing else to be gained here.”
“There must be records,” I persisted. “Birth certificates, other pictures. He can’t have destroyed everything about her. Whatever happened, he must have loved her once . . .” I heard the entreaty in my own tone. I knew that it was childish, but I could not bring myself to believe that the man who raised me as his daughter could have denied his own.
“But not here,” Mary reiterated firmly. “If there is anything like that, it’ll be in the big house. We haven’t gone through the library, and I don’t know that we’ve ever looked up in the attic, either. Come, let’s go home.” Uneasily, I let Mary lead me back to the big house.
We started with the library’s massive desk. If Mary’s motive in suggesting the search had been to distract me from the more troubling aspects of the discovery, it worked. We knelt amidst the piles of paper, giggling like schoolgirls over the bits and pieces of my family’s history we unearthed.
“Can you imagine,” said Mary, “that William was a local swimming champion?”
“And that he graduated from Harvard? He told me he never went to college. He claimed to ‘believe wholeheartedly in the concept of self-education.’ ”
Mary laughed. “What an old hypocrite!”
After two hours, though, when all of the drawers had been overturned and put back together again, we’d found no mention of either of the twins.
“Where would we find birth certificates?” I asked, sitting back on my heels.
“Probably in a town hall, but I don’t actually know where the girls were born. Then again . . .” Mary tapped her lips speculatively. “William told me that your grandmother was religious.”
“She was Catholic, I think.”
“So she would have had a Bible.”
“There’s one up there.” The large, leather-bound volume rested horizontally on one of the highest shelves on the far wall. “Why?”
“Well,” said Mary, positioning the step stool under the shelf, “she took her daughters’ names from the scriptures.” She pulled the book down and came back to kneel on the rug beside me. “I’d be willing to bet she followed the old tradition of recording children’s births.” She flipped through the empty leaves at the beginning and end of the book. “And here it is. A birth list dating back five generations. Look, they’re right here, Eve Brigitte and Elizabeth Marie Fairfax, born March thirty-first, 1882. It doesn’t say anything about your mother’s death, though, so I suppose that doesn’t help us with Eve’s story.” She looked at the faded writing a moment longer, then turned to me. “Should we explore the attic?”
Shaking off the unease Mary’s find had brought with it, I answered, “Why not?”
We lit candles, since the electrical wiring had not made it as far as the attic. Taking the ring of keys that had come with the house, we climbed up the steep stairs. The attic was divided into four long sections, each one leading into the next. The first was jumbled with broken furniture, and I heard the scrabbling of mice in the corners. There were no documents or books anywhere to be found. The next room held a few cartons of old medical textbooks, more decrepit furniture, and a large trunk. We set our candles down, and I went about testing keys until I found one that opened the trunk.
Inside were four evening gowns at least two decades out of fashion, all in relatively good condition. Underneath them was a wedding gown of yellowed white silk, with an intricately embroidered bodice. Mary lifted it up, studied it closely for a moment.
“Turn-of-the-century, handmade,” she said and laid it back in the trunk. I didn’t answer. I didn’t need to.
We shut the trunk up again, and moved on. The third room was again crammed with furniture but had no visible containers for papers or books. The fourth was nearly empty but for two good-sized cedar boxes pushed back into the eaves. None of the keys would open them.
“We’ll have to break the locks,” I said.
“Let’s bring them downstairs first.”
We enlisted the help of Jean-Pierre, Colette’s husband, and in a half hour we had the trunks in the library, both locks forced open. As I had suspected, they had belonged to the twins. They appeared to be hope chests.
“How positively precious!” Mary exclaimed as we bent to examine their contents. Toward the top these were similar. There were handmade bed and table linens, along with crocheted bedspreads and doilies and table runners. The contents of one trunk were neatly made, while those of the other had obviously been rushed through.
Both held a number of recital programs, the older ones identical but for the pieces each twin played, the later ones mapping the divergence of their talents. It was Eve who had gone on to gain local recognition, in both Boston and New Orleans, while my mother apparently had stopped performing altogether by her late teenage years.
“I didn’t know she ever performed,” I told Mary. “I suppose it makes sense, since she taught music, but I don’t ever remember her playing herself. I suppose I thought my music came from my father. And my grandmother, of course.”
The rest of my mother’s trunk was filled with letters, binders of watercolor sketches, and several thick volumes that appeared to be journals. Eve’s trunk contained similar mementos, though there was only one journal. There was also an album of photographs.
We flipped through the letters and the journals, but both of them left off long before the period in which we were interested. I put them aside, planning to read them thoroughly later on. The watercolors were faded but not badly drawn. The photographs, I realized quickly, must have been a hobby of my aunt’s. All of them were poorly developed, and most showed scenes of Eden’s Meadow.
“Here’s my grandmother.” A small, fragile woman dressed in white sat in a lawn chair by the lake. The picture was overexposed; the hair around her face was full of light, like a halo. Her eyes were pale and troubled; I might even have said vexed, if the quality of the picture had been better.
“She’s very beautiful,” Mary said. “You must have inherited your blond hair from her.”
“And the dark eyes from my grandfather. People always said I was a mix of the two of them.”
Mary studied the picture reflectively. “She looks unhappy.”
“Maybe she was already ill then. Or perhaps . . . well, I’ve heard it said that her illness wasn’t all physical.”
Mary looked at me carefully for a moment, then answered, “William did mention something like that to me once.” Quickly she laid the picture down and picked up the next. “Here he is.”
I accepted Mary’s evasion. “Holding a dead fish up to the camera, true to form.”
“And here are the two girls together. I wonder who could have taken the picture, to make them smile and blush so!” Eve was looking straight into the lens with a coquettish smile. My mother was blushing deeply, her frowning face averted.
“Some spotty boy, most likely.”
Mary laughed at my scornful tone. “They’re not all bad, Eleanor Rose,” she said, studying the picture of the girls.
“But most of them are spotty,” I answered, beginning to blush myself. “Here, look at these.” I flipped through the pictures, drawing her attention away from my least favorite subject.
We went through all of the trunks’ contents but did not uncover so much as a hair to suggest what had happened to disrupt the lives of Eve and Elizabeth Fairfax. I went to bed well after one o’clock and lay awake for a long time, deliberately thinking of Eve. Despite my efforts, my only dreams were of a man in a house in the woods.
FIVE
OVER the followin
g days I practiced the études as diligently as I was able, and in between I read the journals from cover to cover. They accounted for the year of 1898—the same, I noted, in which the portrait had been painted. Much of their contents was prattle, but they did contain several points of interest.
First, I learned how my parents met, a subject which my grandfather had been particularly unwilling to discuss with me. It turned out that they had been introduced at a Christmas ball in Boston thrown by the twins’ music teacher, an elderly lady held in high esteem by society families as instructor to their daughters. My father was a protégé of hers, a struggling young pianist from New York. In the journal, my mother referred to him simply as “R”; I could only assume it was for Rose, as I had never known his Christian name.
They appeared to have formed an immediate attachment to each other, but my mother, knowing that her parents would never approve of a penniless suitor, had kept this a secret from everyone but her sister. She didn’t mention him often in her journal, but Eve made several allusions to clandestine meetings and a steady correspondence kept up between my mother and the young musician since the meeting.
Both journals detailed a spring filled with concerts and operas, recitals at which both twins performed, and a general array of upper-class amusements. Eve described these haphazardly, referring in giddy terms to her many suitors, none of whom, apparently, made an impression on anything deeper than her vanity. My mother’s entries were more precise and long-winded in their descriptions of social and cultural events, but irritatingly bereft of any personal commentary.
When the girls’ school term ended, the family moved to Eden’s Meadow for the summer. Here, finally, I uncovered the focus of my aunt’s flirtation and my mother’s discomfort in the photograph Mary and I had found. His name was Louis Ducoeur, and he was a relation to the couple who owned Joyous Garde, the former indigo plantation near Eden’s Meadow. He was several years older than the twins and had grown up with his widowed mother in France. The Ducoeurs of Joyous Garde were elderly and childless; upon their deaths, the estate would pass to Louis.
That summer, he had come to stay with his Louisiana relatives to become acquainted with the estate that would one day be his and had subsequently befriended the Fairfax girls. He was at that time an art student in Paris, though Eve described him as a precocious Renaissance man, having already gained credentials in music and the sciences at illustrious European universities, though he was not yet twenty-one. I was skeptical of my aunt’s account of his abilities until I read that it was he who had painted the portrait of the twins I had uncovered in the cottage.
Near the description of the portrait, Eve included an account of a series of murals that Louis planned for Eden, once more using herself and my mother as models. He meant the pictures to represent the biblical story of the Fall. Eve’s descriptions of the project were so enthused that I was almost sorry Louis had abandoned the idea, until I realized why.
Apparently, an adolescent love triangle had developed over the weeks the twins spent with Louis. Eve had fallen in love with Louis, Louis with my mother. My mother, for some reason she could or would not clearly define, disliked Louis from the first, “as intensely as I have ever loved my sister.” Thereafter she alluded to Louis’s attentions self-consciously, and never with any hint that she returned them.
Yet Eve, having begun her descriptions of the affair in the same offhand tone she had used when referring to her own Boston admirers, rapidly abandoned this in favor of a more vigilant examination of her own growing love. Consequently I began to take her observations more seriously. I came, ultimately, to feel sorry for this unknown aunt, trapped as she was between love and jealousy.
Early in the summer she wrote of Louis:We speak easily of anything, of everything. We cover more topics in more depth during one conversation than I have in all the others of my life combined, and I am continually amazed at the way he seems to understand and articulate feelings and ideas that have always both possessed and confounded me, and which I would have thought, previously, to be unique to myself. Every word he says convinces me further how alike we are. Never before have I thought—rather, felt—that someone understood me so perfectly.
And yet it is Elizabeth he looks at first when he enters a room, Elizabeth whose words he hangs on, Elizabeth whom his eyes follow when she moves. We have never spoken of his feelings for her, but I know what he would tell me if I asked. A face as expressive as his couldn’t hide even a lesser emotion; when he looks at her, love is in every part of his countenance.
And my own feelings? I only wonder how he can be so blind to them. I feel them written on my face when I look at him, as clearly as his are when he looks at her. I could not claim to love him and wish him anything but happiness; yet, feeling as I do, I cannot honestly wish that Elizabeth will change her mind and return his love. I know for certain that she does not love him; at least I don’t have that on my conscience. Yet would she feel differently if I spoke to her on his behalf? Do I resist doing so because of my own feelings?
God help me! I can’t bear to love both of them so much!
Several weeks later Eve wrote:
I have been looking back at the beginning of this book—could I be the same person who wrote those pages? I used to look in the mirror and think of myself. Now when I look, I think only of Louis. Not more than half a year has passed, yet I can say that I was a child when I began this volume and, with as much certainty, that I am a child no longer.
I remember saying to Lizzie once that I didn’t believe in love. I truly used to think that it existed only in novels and operas, because my own fancies shifted so quickly and continually. Now I am so full of love that I cannot eat or sleep; even music fails to distract me. It seems impossible now that I could not always have loved him, and I see no way to stop it. Yet I know that this love is wrong, formed as it is for someone who is my sister’s, whether she values him or not.
She told me today that he has asked for her hand, and that Papa has made her promise to accept. Could she see that my heart nearly burst inside me when she spoke those words, that it was all I could do not to fly at her when she told me of her distrust and dislike of him in the same breath? She says that he is reckless, overly passionate—as if these, the very things I love most in him, could be reasons for dissatisfaction!
I know that she loves another, and this is what makes her speak so. But how can she distrust him when he so clearly feels for her what I feel for him? It seems impossible that one could reject such devotion, though he himself proves the possibility countless times every day, when he breaks off his conversation with me the moment she enters a room, when he smiles at her, or when he retrieves a blossom she has crushed, believing himself unnoticed. And to think that she has made him promise to wait for her until she comes of age—that’s five years away! Though I imagine Maman had something to do with that, too. She would never say so, but I know that she is as wary of Louis as Elizabeth is, and of course Elizabeth is her favorite.
How can they be so blind?
I had not thought of it seriously before, but it seems now that I must go away to a conservatory when I am finished with school next year, and pursue a performing career, no matter what Maman and Papa say. I don’t know how I can bear another minute with all of this so close to me, let alone the rest of my life.
The pages following this rather poignant piece of self-analysis were disappointingly bereft of the same feeling and eloquence. My aunt seemed to have sunk into a depression, and what little she wrote about her unrequited love was rancorous; she even stooped to admitting jealousy of her sister. Yet one passage in these pages stood out among their petty counterparts, sending my imagination off on a new tangent:Maman has fallen ill. First she burns with fever and complains of a terrible dryness in her mouth and throat, then she appears well again; for some days now, this strange pattern has repeated itself. The doctor first diagnosed malaria, but the quinine does not seem to be working. Papa plans to call in a speci
alist if she isn’t better soon. At any rate, we won’t be leaving Eden until Maman is well enough to travel, and I am ashamed to admit that to me, this is the most dreadful part of her illness. I long to be away from this place and all its unhappiness.
I flipped through my mother’s journal again to see if I had overlooked similar mention of my grandmother’s illness there, but the entries stopped several days before Eve’s. Returning to Eve’s journal, I found only one more short mention of this illness, written a week or so after the first. It simply said:Maman is better. We will leave within the fortnight.
The last entry in Eve’s journal was in many ways the most affecting. It so clearly reflected the views that until recently had been my own, and the subsequent, similar reevaluation I was facing in light of meeting Alexander—though even then I would have rejected the idea that my feelings for him were anything lasting.
At last Louis is gone. At last, though it gives me pain greater than I have ever imagined. I think of his face smiling at Elizabeth and imagine that the smile is for me—oh, but why torture myself this way? Why look for logic where there is none? Love cannot be logical, but I will never understand why it must be painful. It seems so ridiculous, the three of us madly pursuing what cannot be ours. For it is clear that Elizabeth is unchanging in her feelings for him: she may yet be his wife, but he will never have her love. And I, with the same face and form, so ready to give him mine, am merely tolerated. Poor Lizzie. Poor Louis. It seems there is no choice but to live these separate miseries we’ve made for ourselves.
On the page opposite she had pasted in a fragment of paper, filled with close writing in a different hand, the edges of which appeared to be scorched. A postscript in Eve’s hand explained that it was a piece of a letter from Louis to Elizabeth, which my aunt had rescued from the kitchen stove, where her sister had deposited it. It read:So much has awakened in me, so many new expectations, so much certainty and still more uncertainty. I feel that I am spinning, rushing toward a future that is at the same time clear and clouded, so close at hand yet still in the balance. There is so much to experience, and so little time. There are snow and rain, sun and stars, sea and sky and laughter and music, and everything in between; a chaos of faces, of feeling, of thoughts, worlds, loves, hates, all circling together.