The Other Eden

by Sarah Bryant

  I found that I could not face the thought of either. “I must have been mistaken,” I told the nurse as she gently laid my intubated arm back on the white sheet. Then I slipped back into a merciful semi-sleep.

  When I opened my eyes again, it wasn’t quite such an effort to breathe. Outside the window the sky was dusky, but I had no idea whether it was evening or morning, or how far I had come from the blue afternoon with the gentle nurse. I turned my head. Mary sat beside me, her face more creased than I remembered it, squinting down at her knitting as though trying to determine what it was. When she heard me shift position, she dropped her needles and looked up. The relief I saw when she met my eyes almost made me forgive her.

  “Eleanor,” she said, as if she was about to tell me a hundred things. Then she stopped, apparently at a loss. Finally she said, “I’m so glad to have you back.”

  There were tears in her eyes, and none of the fear that had haunted them before. I held a shaking hand toward her, and she took it, squeezing it gently.

  “How is Tasha?” I asked.

  “She’s had a bad cold, but nothing more serious came of it. She’ll be glad to see you.”

  “How long have I been here?”

  “A week. You were in Baton Rouge before that, but . . . well, you needed to be here.”

  I looked at her for another moment, bracing myself, then asked, “Alexander?”

  The tears that had filled her eyes spilled over onto her crepe-paper cheeks. She squeezed my hand again, but this time the movement was convulsive. “He . . . they didn’t find any trace of him or . . . the other. But the house burned to the ground. He’s presumed dead.”

  I repeated the words in my head, waiting for the ensuing pain, but it never came. In fact, it would be many weeks before the numbness of shock would wear thin enough for me to feel anything at all. Even then, the worst of it would only come out in nightmares from which I would wake screaming and crying, and which I seldom remembered afterward.

  I looked at Mary, who was still crying silently, and asked, “When can I leave?”

  “They want to keep you here for another week.”

  “I want to go as soon as possible.”

  “I’ve already bought the tickets.”

  “And Tasha?”

  She shook her head. “No relatives could be located.”

  “She’ll stay with us, then.”

  Mary nodded silently. “What about the house?”

  I cringed. “Sell it. Give it away if you like. I never want to see it again.”

  She ran her fingers over the knitting in her lap, as if she couldn’t find a place for them to settle. “I’ll go tomorrow to gather our things.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t want anything from there. Take what you want, and give the rest to the staff.”

  Mary nodded. Eyes still on her knitting, she asked, “What about Alexander’s things?”

  I thought for a long time, trying to force myself to picture him and the things that had been close to him, but the images were as slippery as river rocks. I couldn’t even conjure a steady picture of his face.

  “Give them away as well,” I told her in the end, “except for what Tasha might want someday.”

  “Don’t you want anything for yourself?”

  She asked this gently, but as I looked at her teary face, I was suddenly filled with anger. She was already grieving for him, while my attempts to think of him hit a grey deadness which I knew would only prolong the pain when it came.

  Finally, I said, “If he kept portfolios of his own music, I’d like to have them.”

  The thought of looking at that heartbroken music again, let alone trying to play any of it, left me sick. But I suspected that the time would come when I would be glad that I had preserved them: my only link to a past so strange that I sometimes doubted that it had happened at all.

  We were silent again for a long while. Then something else occurred to me. “Is it only pneumonia?” I asked. “Is there anything else wrong with me?”

  Mary reddened, then paled again. “It’s not what you think . . . what I thought.” She paused, clearly having difficulty controlling her emotions. “The doctors couldn’t awaken you at first. They asked me if you’d taken anything unusual, so I brought them your medicine from Boston and—and the other one. They had them tested, and found that both had been mixed with belladonna. The tablets were nearly pure extract, with a little chloral mixed in.” She looked ready to break down again, but managed to finish. “They told me that it can cause fevers, delusions, hallucinations, nightmares, and in high doses . . .” She broke down again and covered her face with her hands.

  “Never mind,” I said. “I understand.”

  And finally I did understand: the bizarre, story-like nightmares, the scrambled senses, the shaking and fevers and shortness of breath, even that terrible night with Dorian when I had seemed to lose a chunk of time. No doubt my grandmother’s and Tasha’s illnesses had been caused by something similar.

  When Mary had regained her composure, she continued, “Both you and Tasha had taken it that night. Tasha also had a good deal of chloral hydrate in her system. She’s lucky to be alive. So no, Eleanor. There was never anything wrong with you, mentally or physically, other than the effects of the drug.”

  The words of Eve’s glowing journal entry came back to me: a precocious student, a Renaissance man with degrees in art and science by the time he was twenty. To Dorian, using substances to control me—and, perhaps, others before me—must have been as simple as his parlor tricks.

  I sighed. “Don’t cry, Mary.”

  “I can’t help it. Tasha told me what happened that night, as well as she could; you yourself told us the rest, in your delirium. These last days and nights it’s been all I could think of. I should never have doubted you, or trusted him.”

  “None of us acted any more wisely.”

  “Thank you for saying so, Eleanor,” she said, but I knew the words had been little comfort.

  WE boarded the train to Boston under a sky the faded blue of autumn. Tasha sat quietly on Mary’s lap, her eyes fixed on the passing landscape. She had spoken little during the few days we had been reunited, and not at all of Alexander. At the time I thought that it was the shock of losing him, and that she would regain her buoyancy as his memory faded. However, the inward look on her face that day would never quite leave it again. It was a premonition for us all.

  With the hindsight of more than half a century, I would venture to guess that Tasha knew that day that in leaving Louisiana, she was leaving behind what remained of her childhood. If she regretted it, she never showed it then or later; she was a docile, dutiful child who grew into an intelligent, quiet woman. Through her girlhood she applied herself diligently to her studies; she graduated from Harvard Medical School the year Hitler shot himself in his bunker under Berlin. She seldom spoke of Alexander, and when she did, it was as someone might speak of a relative she has heard of but never met.

  Like Tasha, Mary lived silently with her regret, but I know that she never stopped feeling it, nor the guilt she had shouldered when she learned how near I had come to dying, if inadvertently, by her hand. She lost her taste for society, preferring instead to help Tasha with her studies. Her eyesight continued to deteriorate over the next few years, but it was only when she was almost fully blind that she allowed me to take her to a specialist. He told us what Mary must have feared for a long time: that her sight loss and headaches were caused by a malignant tumor. She died quietly at home a few months before her sixtieth birthday.

  The year after Alexander died was a trial I would never wish on anybody. I ran from grief, never sparing a thought for the ways loving and losing him had changed me. I should have, for they were often both obvious and destructive. I gave up music and took up writing. I married twice, but never had a child of my own. I was, for a time, both quite famous and intensely lonely. It was an empty fame, built on stories I neither liked nor believed in, and an oddly resonant l
oneliness: the result of having become more than myself through love, and then losing the piece that would make me whole.

  Alexander changed me in smaller ways, too, but I only really see them now, when I can look back on my life as a whole, at its patterns and ripples shifting around the jetty of all he was and wasn’t. About ten years ago I chanced to overhear an elderly Russian couple speaking in English on a train. They were discussing the death of a friend or family member, I never learned which. The woman was endlessly berating the apparently illicit ways of the deceased, when finally her husband interrupted:

  “Yes, but at least he died with music.”

  With eerie serendipity, a Russian emigrant friend of Tasha’s said the same words a few days later. She explained to me that it’s a traditional Russian saying, meaning more or less that something has ended in style.

  For a time I found this comforting. I began to forgive Alexander for abandoning me a second time, and to appreciate that he died more generously than I have ever lived. Soon afterward I began the slow and difficult process of recording this story.

  And yet, finding myself at the end of it, I also find my opinion of what happened in flux once more. One moment I believe that Alexander died consciously, to end a destructive cycle. In the next I wonder if he died involuntarily, for nothing. It is tempting to judge him, and my love for him, and even what I have allowed his memory to make of my life.

  In the end, though, it’s pointless. Like every struggle, ours culminates in silence.

  EPILOGUE

  DECEMBER 1985

  BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

  I thought that I had made my peace with silence when, for the first time in more years than I can count, Eve spoke to me out of it. She appeared in my dreams as she did when I was a girl, and told me that I must finish what I had left incomplete.

  This time her meaning was plain to me. In the course of that wretched summer at Eden, Alexander and Dorian paid for their transgressions and, I suppose, finally escaped the past. Eve and Elizabeth, however, remained unabsolved.

  Thinking about this, I recalled something Alexander had once said to me: that a haunting is nothing more than an unsettled spirit looking for peace. Yet nor is it anything less. Eve could never find peace as long as I kept the past locked and guarded inside me. How to exhume it, though, was a different matter entirely.

  Once again I rifled my memories, opening scars long hardened, unearthing emotional artifacts perhaps better left intact. It only proved Alexander right again. The immaterial cannot satisfy the human heart in its quest for truth.

  But where to look for the tangible? I am the last vestige of Eve, her only corporeal legacy. Even her body had disappeared into thin air. It seemed I had nothing left to offer her. I thought about this for a long time; then, all at once, I began to see. Perhaps the tangible was precisely the problem. For there was one undeniably concrete piece of the past’s linked tragedies that I’d clung to all this time, the one I’d most feared and most longed to jettison all along.

  Despite Mary’s initial gentle urgings, and the not-so-gentle hounding of various property developers later on, I never had sold Eden’s Meadow. Whatever I told myself, the reason was simple.

  Despite all it had taken from me, knowing that Eden was still there, untouched by time, allowed me to cling to the past and to what I had lost.

  Now I realized that this had been selfish as well as self-defeating. The first agent I called bought the whole plantation for more than I could ever have imagined it would be worth. I sent the keys to Louisiana the next day, expecting to feel relief. But though Eve departed from my dreams, my feeling of uneasiness only increased. I could not shake the sensation that selling Eden had not been the whole answer; that something else was still impending.

  In the meantime, to distract myself and to ameliorate another stifled part of my conscience, I unearthed Alexander’s old folios of music. I copied them and then, for lack of a better idea, sent them to my literary agent in New York. She sold them within a week.

  The advance was modest, but it was enough to convince Symphony Hall to put on a benefit performance for Russian orphans. They asked me to introduce it. It would be the first time I had set foot in that hall since my twenty-first birthday, but I could hardly decline to attend. Tasha, for reasons of her own, opted out of the concert, so I went alone.

  I was shocked by the change. It was not the physical changes that bothered me—I had expected those—nor that feeling of di minishment upon visiting a once-familiar place after a long absence. Rather, I realized that Symphony Hall, like my memories, had become a hollow shell of a past I had always considered inviolate. The hall was only half full, and most of its patrons were my peers. The carnival air I remembered had evaporated. No one dresses up for the symphony anymore.

  The performance was lackluster as well. The pianist was a young Asian woman, and though she was technically very good, she didn’t understand the music she was playing. I nearly left before she had finished, but in the end I was glad I hadn’t. As an encore she played a curious piece by a modern Estonian composer whose name now escapes me. In it I heard aspects of the peculiarly compelling, melancholic passion of Alexander’s music, which had been absent from her playing of his own. Near the end of this piece, I looked across the hall, and for a moment Alexander was looking back at me, eyes wide and expectant, cheeks flushed, lips twitching upward into the smile that first caught my heart. I blinked, and the seat was empty.

  When I left the hall, the rain that had begun with my recording of this history had finally stopped, and the sky was clearing. I sent my driver home, telling him that I would rather walk. I could see that he wanted to forbid it, but couldn’t quite decide how. I left him still trying.

  Breathing the air of the autumn night as though it were the first I’d encountered in weeks, I quickened my pace down New-bury Street, glad that rheumatism and obesity had bypassed my old age. I looked into the brightly lit windows of the cafes and restaurants, even stopped for a moment before an odd shop with stained-glass windows and a stone griffin by the open door. A young man with sad, dark eyes not unlike Alexander’s looked back at me from the doorway for a moment, then flipped the sign to Closed.

  I had begun to feel that I was looking for something, though I didn’t know what. When I reached Beacon Street, I glanced up at the lights in my front windows, then turned into the park instead. I knew that this was foolish, that an old woman was an easy target. However, I had had a sudden urge to see my angel, the statue I had watched as a child from my nursery window, and I knew that I would never sleep if I didn’t indulge it.

  I made my way over the wet grass and slick leaves to the corner where he stood, half hidden now by trees that had been saplings in my childhood. His wings and outstretched fingers dripped with the recent rain; his downcast eyes were dark. I tried to summon the awe that he had once inspired, but it eluded me. Finally I turned and made my way home.

  In the end, as we often realize yet never quite anticipate, what I was looking for found me. Tasha was waiting up, as she often did if I went out without her. She had moved away from the Beacon Street house when she married, and raised her children in the suburbs. When her husband died, though, she had come back to live with me. Now she met me at the door. Her eyes were still bright blue, though her auburn hair had long ago faded to grey, and there was a suspicious glint to them, as if she had been crying.

  “Something came for you while you were gone,” she said, and held out a plain cardboard mailing carton.

  “It’s far too late for the mail,” I said.

  “A man brought it. He said to make sure to give it to you, and no one else.”

  I looked at the box. All that was written on the front was my name, in mute block letters. I opened it and emptied the contents onto the hall table. Both Natalya and I stood staring at them, at a loss for words.

  At the bottom of the pile was a sheaf of staff paper, notated by hand. Resting on this was a small pouch of crimson vel
vet, a dried, pale-pink tea rose, a lock of blond hair tied with a blue ribbon, and a small framed photograph of a curly-haired baby. On top of all of it was an envelope inscribed with my name, containing a letter from the real-estate agent in Louisiana. It read:Ms. Rose,

  I can think of no way to prepare you for this information, so I’ll come right to the point. While digging a foundation in what was formerly a garden behind the ruins of Louis Ducoeur’s house, my workers discovered the body of a young woman.

  At first, the forensic team could only determine that she had died around the turn of the century, from a severe head injury. Her identity was a mystery. However, further excavation turned up something else, ironically only feet away from the grave: a metal box containing the items you find with this letter. Among them was a note from one Elizabeth Rose, whom I understand was your mother, addressed to “Eve.” It said simply that she knew Eve had been murdered, though she couldn’t prove it, and that she was burying these items as a memorial in a place she knew Eve had loved.

  The authorities have since connected the body and the names on the note with the disappearance of a woman named Elizabeth Ducoeur in 1905, and to her sister Eve Fairfax. Unfortunately, the events surrounding this tragedy will take some time to piece together. The investigators have kept the body and the note from your mother as evidence, but ultimately you will need to decide where to have the body reinterred.

  I have complied with your wish to auction any valuable pieces left in the house and dispose of all the rest. However, I felt that the contents of the box buried by your mother would have a personal value to you. Aside from the note, I return them to you intact, with the addition of a necklace which was the only jewelry on the woman’s body. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you require further details.

  Yours sincerely,