The Other Eden

by Sarah Bryant

  “I don’t know what to do,” I heard her say. Her voice echoed in my ears with the protracted dissonance of nightmare. “I can’t possibly give her more medication yet. I don’t know what started it. She won’t tell me; she doesn’t even seem to hear me.”

  “Eleanor,” I heard Alexander say, from somewhere quite nearby.

  I screamed when he touched my hands, but he dragged them away from my face anyway. I kept them clenched as stubbornly shut as my eyes, but it was too late to hide my discovery. Alexander pried my fingers apart and exhumed the crumpled picture from its temporary tomb. My eyes opened too, as though some deeper part of me needed to see what his reaction would be. His face whitened, and the horror on it mirrored my own.

  “What is it?” Mary asked, moving toward him. “I can’t see.”

  Alexander closed his own fingers over the picture, turned to her, and said with tremulous authority, “Mary, please leave us alone.”

  “But—” she began.

  “Please,” he repeated. “It will be all right, but I need to speak with Eleanor alone.”

  I don’t think she believed him any more than I did, but something in his face or tone apparently convinced her to obey him. Reluctantly she turned and left, closing the door behind her with what sounded to me too much like finality.

  EIGHT

  “ELEANOR, it isn’t what you think,”Alexander said as soon as she was gone. He passed a hand over his eyes, and if possible, his face was whiter when he looked at me again than it had been before. “I assure you that I am not your father.”

  Though these were the words I had hoped to hear, their realization was oddly hollow, and bereft of comfort. I didn’t know what I would say, or even whether I could say anything, until I heard my own voice grating in my ears:

  “Am I enough like her? Or do you still think of her when you sleep with me?”

  I had intended to hurt him, believing all my feeling for him to be dead. Yet I found that some remaining shred of sentiment made me flinch as the words hit their target. I turned away from his ravaged face, pressing my own against the gallery’s wooden balusters. My tears were spent, and now I could only ache for us both.

  “Eleanor,” Alexander finally said, his voice still gentle, but now also indisputably authoritative. “Elenka, turn around.”

  Hating myself for still being compelled by him, I turned. He stood in the arched doorway, silhouetted against the tarnished lamplight of the room, clutching either side of it as if for support. As he stood there a finger of breeze lifted the curtains behind him, turning them to wings. The rising moon shed enough light to show me his face. I had expected it to wear guilt, embarrassment, and anger—and all of them were there—but not the love that was there too, entangled with the rest.

  “Where did you find it?” he asked.

  “It . . . it was in my mother’s journal.”

  In one stride he was kneeling in front of me, taking my limp hands in his. The photograph fluttered for a moment in his slip-stream, then settled to the floor.

  “Eleanor, forgive me,” he said, his own voice full of tears.

  “Let me go!” I insisted, trying to pull away from him, but he held my hands fast.

  “Just hear what I have to say,” he pleaded. Though I didn’t want to hear anything more, I also knew that Dorian had been right—right again—when he said that the truth would find me. So, face averted, I listened as Alexander began to speak.

  “Do you remember the conversation we had the night of Dorian’s party, after you heard the two of us talking?” he asked. “Do you remember how I told you to forget what you had heard and believe only what you saw? Well, I was wrong.” The words surprised me into meeting his eyes. Like touchstones, they betrayed the volatility his face had so long hidden.

  “It is true that once I loved Elizabeth Fairfax, and that a lifetime ago the woman you knew as your mother was my wife.” He paused again, then said, “But if you believe nothing else that I have said, please believe this: I love you as I have never loved anyone else. It is for that reason and no other that I kept this secret from you. I thought, or perhaps convinced myself, that the past made no difference. By the time I realized how much my knowledge would mean to you, I loved you too much to deliberately destroy your feeling for me. I couldn’t bear for you to think of me as your mother’s lover or, worse, the man who abandoned you.”

  The sting of the spoken words was sharp, but as it subsided I found that I could think more clearly. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to look at Alexander; instead I looked slightly to the side of him, at the blurred forms of the bedroom beyond. Unspoken questions crowded my mind, so plentiful that I could barely think through one before another surfaced and obliterated it. I wanted to demand answers to all of them at once, but at the same time I knew that he was desperate for an overture even as tenuous as that, and I still wanted to hurt him.

  Finally, though, curiosity won over stubborn spite.

  “If you aren’t my father,” I demanded, “then who is?”

  Alexander looked at me with a raw mixture of pity, pain, and dread. “Are you certain you want to know?”

  “How can you ask me that?” I spat back.

  He drew a breath and let it out with quiet finality. “To begin with, then, you must understand that you are no more Elizabeth’s daughter than you are mine.”

  I flushed and then chilled. Alexander reached toward me, but I jerked away from him, pressing myself back against the railing until it bruised my back. I saw that this hurt him more than anything I had yet said or done, but I couldn’t bring myself to pity him, couldn’t bear for him to touch me.

  “All right,” he said wearily. “Eleanor . . . your real mother was Eve. She gave you to her sister to raise as her own, under circumstances that left her little choice.”

  His face receded as shock darkened my vision once again. I swallowed hard, fighting the returning urge to be sick. “You knew this all along, and you didn’t tell me?”

  “How could I?”

  “How couldn’t you?” I wailed.

  “Wait, Eleanor. Before you judge any of us, try to imagine what it was like.”

  Only Alexander’s eyes remained steady; everything else around me swam with the outrageous surreality of his words. I wanted to scream again, to kick and flail and refuse him even the cold comfort of justifying himself to me, but my newfound capacity for hysteria seemed to have been as temporary a catharsis as tears. Meanwhile, he pressed on relentlessly with his confession, which only half made sense to me.

  “Eve and Elizabeth had imprisoned themselves in their own deception. Eve didn’t see it until later, but Elizabeth . . . she tortured herself from the day she ran away, no doubt until the day she died. The deception was bad enough: in her mind, it negated everything she was and believed in. But the worst of it was that by virtue of it, she’d exiled herself from her family at the time when she knew her sister would need her the most, because Elizabeth saw the cruel side of Louis Ducoeur as Eve could not. When Eve finally realized the mistake she had made, it was too late to save herself, but she could not bear to see you suffer the consequences of her transgressions. So she gave you to us.”

  With every word he spoke, with their very credibility, I felt his past deception widen the schism between us. “That explains a lot,” I said coldly, folding my arms over my chest. “Now get out.”

  “Eleanor, you must—”

  “Must what? Everyone has lied to me, and you worst of all. That’s all I need to know.”

  He sighed, closed his eyes for a moment, and then opened them again. “I’m afraid there’s a good deal more that you need to know.”

  “To soothe your guilty conscience?”

  “To save your life.”

  I looked at him for a moment, then said, “You can’t be serious.”

  “I am all too serious.”

  I moved past him, back into the bedroom. I heard him follow me. “I’m listening,” I said, when it was clear that he woul
dn’t continue without such an assurance.

  Still he paused, apparently trying to gather and sort his thoughts. Finally he said, “Louis Ducoeur was a jealous man. Like all jealous men, he couldn’t be happy with what he had—or, to be fair, what he seemed to have. Of course, I can’t imagine how I would react if a woman who had shown me only coldness for years suddenly overflowed with passionate devotion. But he took it to an extreme. Eve wrote that he suspected she had a secret lover, even that the child she was carrying wasn’t his own. And the twins’ own deception justified him in suspecting her, because he knew that there had been a rival for Elizabeth’s affections.”

  He paused again, then said, “Elizabeth believed that Eve’s life was in danger, and perhaps yours, too. I didn’t believe that a man would kill his wife out of purely speculative jealousy. But I hadn’t yet met Louis Ducoeur. Or rather, I didn’t know that I had met him.”

  “This is madness,” I said, though a part of me knew that it wasn’t. “We know that Eve died in Paris, under Elizabeth’s name, a few months after I was born.”

  I don’t know why I said this. I certainly remembered the letter I’d had from Paris negating everything that certificate had said. I suppose a part of me already knew what was coming, and wanted to deflect it however I could.

  Alexander’s eyes were deep with sympathy. I turned away, hating him for maintaining his composure as my world disintegrated. Yet this time when he reached for my arms I let him catch them.

  “You asked for the truth, Eleanor, and this is the truth as I have been able to discern it: Eve Fairfax, your mother, known in 1905 as Elizabeth Ducoeur, was never in Paris. That death certificate we found was Louis’s flimsy attempt to cover up the fact that he murdered her out of blind jealousy.”

  He was looking at me as though he expected me to register some sort of epiphany. “If you want me to believe my life is in danger,” I said, “you’re going to have to provide better evidence than a speculative theory that a phantom father killed a mother I never knew, when I was too young to realize what was happening.”

  He looked at me askance, as though still wondering whether my incomprehension was merely affected. “It’s only speculative insofar as no one ever found her body . . . and I would have thought you’d have realized by now that your father is a very tangible danger to both of us.”

  “You speak as if you know him,” I said, balking at the foreboding in my own voice.

  Alexander sighed patiently. “I do know him, Eleanor. So do you. I don’t honestly believe I need to tell you how, but if you will demand proof, here it is.”

  He reached into his pocket and took out Eve’s journal, opened it to the page where she had pasted the fragment of Louis’s letter to Elizabeth, and handed it to me. He had marked the page with a bit of heavy, pale blue paper. It was Dorian’s invitation to the costume ball. The handwriting on the invitation was the same as that on the burned fragment.

  I blinked at the two pieces of paper for a moment, and then I dropped them. Alexander caught me as my legs buckled, and led me gently to the bed.

  “How . . . how long have you known?” I asked.

  He sighed. “I suspected it all along. I was almost certain when I matched up the handwriting, so I went to the village today and looked up the newspaper clippings of their wedding photographs.”

  “And those things Dorian told me about you—were they true?”

  “They are as true as anything he’s told you, which is to say that they are as much his interpretation of facts as they are facts in and of themselves.”

  “One could say the same of that answer.”

  Alexander shook his head. “I lied to you, Eleanor, but I did it as much to protect you as myself.”

  I scrutinized his haggard face. “Why did you leave my mother?”

  Alexander sighed once more. “There’s no easy answer, Eleanor . . . unless you believe that we were never meant to be together. And perhaps we weren’t, any more than Louis and Eve. The twins belonged to each other before anyone else; in the end, no love was greater than their love for each other.”

  He paused, his eyes on the dark sky beyond the open balcony door. Then he said, “I told you that Elizabeth never forgave herself for her part in the deception, but it was no simple guilt. It was fundamental, and it changed her. I resented the change, and she resented me for not understanding it. And then you came, and she had nothing left for me.” He paused, then let out a long breath. “There is nothing so ugly or so painful as a marriage in which the love has become bitterness. So we separated, by mutual agreement. I went back to Russia, and you know the rest.”

  Among all of the weighty ones, a trivial thought had repeatedly occurred to me over the last few minutes. “What about your name?”

  “My family name was Rostov. The first time I came to America, the immigration officer couldn’t spell it, and changed it to Rose. The second time, I changed it myself. I didn’t want anyone to trace me.”

  We were both silent for some minutes, contemplating our separate miseries. Finally Alexander began speaking again:

  “What you don’t know, and can never know, is how you haunted me. It was as if you had become my conscience. I dreamed of you, and in those dreams you grew into a beautiful woman, like Elizabeth but stronger, all your own. My life became more and more hollow. I replayed the past, always wondering whether I ought to have chosen differently. And then that night at the concert in Boston you stepped back into my life, and I could not help but see it as fate offering me a second chance.”

  The reticence of his tone and the way he stumbled over words his fluency had previously mastered told me that these were thoughts that had lived in his secret heart for a long time. Though half of me was still appalled at his duplicity, something deeper was moved by his sudden vulnerability. Insidious or beatific—even now I can’t decide which—that inner voice was telling me that I had no right to judge him. His love might be a thicket of duplicity and remorse, but it was still the basis of all he had done, not calculation or cruelty. And so, despite everything, in my own heart I began to forgive him.

  “I knew that it was you from that first moment,” he was saying when I was again aware of his words. “After that night you seemed to disappear, but I devoted myself to finding you. When Martha Kelly came to me with your offer of a house, I was even further convinced that we had been reunited for some purpose. When we finally met, of course, I knew what it was. And when Louis arrived, I saw that there was a second reason for my finding you. To save you from him,” he said, before I could speak the question. “As I failed to do the first time. Do you see?”

  What in fact I saw was the image of my grandmother’s fearful, accusatory eyes as they had looked in Eve’s overexposed photograph.

  The penny finally dropped. Claudine Fairfax would never have looked at her daughter the way she was looking at that photographer. All along I had assumed that she had simply accepted my grandfather’s decision that Elizabeth would marry Louis, but perhaps she hadn’t. If she hadn’t, and if she had exerted any kind of control over her husband’s decisions, then she would have had to have been silenced before that marriage could have taken place. Cover her face, my mind whispered, mine eyes dazzle . . .

  “There is a connection between Tasha’s illness and my grandmother’s,” I cried, “and now mine as well.”

  “Eleanor—”

  “No, listen. All of us have shared similar symptoms: fevers, and nightmares. Louis—Dorian—killed her. He drove her mad and then poisoned her!” I thought about this, then added, “But it still doesn’t explain why he thinks I’m a threat.”

  There was speculation in Alexander’s look now, and also a shade of relief. “Unless he never found out about the switch,” he said slowly. “In that case, he would have attributed all he knew of Elizabeth’s history to his wife, Eve. He must have assumed he had a rival. Given that, and Elizabeth’s sudden willingness to marry him, the arrival of a child so soon afterward might have made a bette
r man suspicious.”

  “So he thinks that I’m yours. That’s the secret he’s been holding over me all this time.” I had thought that I had nothing left to fear; now I saw that I was wrong. “He wants revenge on us for what he thinks you and my mother did to him. And yet, that doesn’t explain his fear . . .”

  “Unless he believes we know what he did to Eve.”

  “What am I going to do?” I murmured.

  I didn’t listen to his answer. Instead my spent mind turned a single memory over and over again, snapping it against my battered heart like the loose end of a film in an abandoned projector. The first time I had awakened with Alexander beside me, I had looked past the curve of his shoulder at the sunlight filtering through a small flowering tree in the garden below. I had never noticed the tree before, but suddenly it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, an intricate lantern hissing with light.

  I hadn’t watched the light fade. I don’t know whether I would have taken heed if I had. Either way, the metaphor was apt: I had guarded my love so carefully, but as Dorian had said, nothing could guard it from time.

  Yet I realized something else as I sat looking into the dark garden. The light might have faded, the blossoms withered, but the roots of my love for Alexander ran as deep as those of any tree. As long as I dug and as much as I made him hurt me, I would never entirely stop loving him.

  I curled up on the bed then, my back to Alexander, too exhausted even to think of an answer when he asked me whether I wanted him to stay with me or not. After a moment of hesitation he turned off the bedside lamp and lay down beside me; after another I felt him begin to stroke my hair, gingerly, as though he were afraid I might break. And though I knew that it should not, this comforted me.

  NINE