“Like the Stormbird,” I said.
His face, so recently filled with pain, was now filled with hope. “Yes, Rose. Like Der Sturmvogel.”
Several days later, when I returned for dinner after a morning spent with Meister Wilhelm, Hannah handed me a letter from Emma.
“Did the post come early?” I asked.
“No, child. Judge Beaufort came back from Raleigh and brought it himself. He was smoking in the parlor with your Papa, and I’m gonna have to shake out them parlor curtains. So you get along, and don’t bother me, hear?”
I walked up the stairs to my room and lay on top of the counterpane to read Emma’s letter. “Dear Rose,” it began. “Aunt Otway, who’s been showing me an embroidery stitch, asks what I’m going to write.” That meant her letter would be read. “Father is returning suddenly to Ashton, but I will remain here until school begins in September.” She had told me she was returning at the end of August. And Emma never called Judge Beaufort “Father.” Was she trying to show off for Aunt Otway? Under the F in “Father” was a spot of ink, and I noticed that Emma’s handwriting was unusually spotty. Under the b and second e in “embroidery,” for instance. “Be” what? The letters over the remaining spots spelled “careful.” What did Emma mean? The rest of her letter described a visit to the Museum of Art.
Just then, my mother entered the room. “Rose,” she said. Her voice was gentler than I had ever heard it. She sat down on the edge of my bed. “I’m afraid you can’t continue your lessons with Meister Wilhelm.”
I started at her in disbelief. “You don’t want me to have anything I care about, do you? Because you hate me. You’ve hated me since I was born. I’ll tell Papa, and he’ll let me have my violin lessons, you’ll see!”
She rose, and her voice was no longer gentle. “Very well, Elizabeth. Tell your father, exactly as you wish. Until he comes home from the Beauforts’, however, you are to remain in this room.” She walked out, closing the door with an implacable click behind her.
Was this what Emma had been trying to warn me about? Had she known that my mother would forbid me from continuing my lessons? But how could she have known, in Raleigh?
As the hours crept by, I stared at the ceiling and thought about what I had read in Lord Rutherford’s book. I imagined the slave ship that had been wrecked in a storm, and the cries of the drowning slaves. How they must have wondered, to see Orillion descending from the sky, to walk through its city of stucco houses surrounded by rose gardens. How the captain must have cursed when he was imprisoned by the citizens of Orillion, and later imprisoned by the English as a madman. He had raved until the end of his life about an island in the clouds.
Hannah brought my dinner, saying to me as she set it down, “Ham sandwiches, Miss Rose. You always liked them, didn’t you?” I didn’t answer. I imagined myself walking between the belltowers of the city, to the Academy of Art. I would sit on the steps, beneath a frieze of the great poets from Sappho to Shakespeare, and listen to Meister Wilhelm playing his violin by the Monument of the Muse, the strains of his Sturmvogel drifting over the surface of the lake.
After it had grown dark, I heard the bang of the front door and the sound of voices. They came up the stairs, and as they passed my door I heard one word—”violin.” Then the voices receded down the hall.
I opened my door, cautiously looking down the hall and then toward the staircase. I saw a light under the door of my father’s study and no signs of my mother or Hannah.
Closing my bedroom door carefully behind me, I crept down the hall, stepping close to the wall where the floorboards were less likely to creak. I stopped by the door of the study and listened. The voices inside were raised, and I could hear them easily.
“To think that I let a damned Jew put his dirty fingers on my daughter.” That was my father’s voice. My knees suddenly felt strange, and I had to steady them with my hands. The hallway seemed to sway around me.
“We took care of him pretty good in Raleigh.” That was a voice I did not recognize. “After Reverend Yancey made sure he was sacked from the orchestra, Mr. Empie and I visited him to get the money for all that bamboo he’d ordered on credit. He told us he hadn’t got the money. So we reminded him of what was due to decent Christian folk, didn’t we, Mr. Empie?”
“All right, Mr. Biggs,” said another voice I had not heard before. “There was no need to break the man’s spectacles.”
“So I shook him a little,” said Mr. Biggs. “Serves him right, I say.”
“What’s done is done,” said a voice I knew to be Judge Beaufort’s. “The issue before us is, what are we to do now? He has been living on my property, in close proximity to my family, for more than a month. He has been educating Mr. Caldwell’s daughter, filling her head with who knows what dangerous ideas. Clearly he must be taken care of. Gentlemen, I’m open for suggestions.”
“Burn his house down,” said Mr. Biggs. “That’s what we do when niggers get uppity in Raleigh.”
“You forget, Mr. Biggs,” said Judge Beaufort, “that his house is my house. And as the elected judge of this town, I will allow no violence that is not condoned by law.”
“Than act like a damned judge, Edward,” said my father, with anger in his voice. “He’s defaulted on a debt. Let him practice his mumbo jumbo in the courthouse jail for a few days. Then you can send him on to Raleigh with Mr. Biggs and Mr. Empie. Just get him away from my daughter!”
There was silence, then the sound of footsteps, as though someone were pacing back and forth over the floor, and then a clink and gurgle, as though a decanter had been opened and liquid were tumbling into a glass.
“All right, gentlemen,” said Judge Beaufort. I leaned closer to the door even though I could hear his voice perfectly well. “First thing tomorrow morning, we get this Wilhelm and take him to the courthouse. Mr. Empie, Mr. Biggs, I depend on you to assist us.”
“Oh, I’ll be there all right,” said Mr. Biggs. “Me and Bessie.” I head a metallic click.
My father spoke again. “Put that away, sir. I’ll have no loaded firearms in my home.”
“He’ll put it away,” said Mr. Empie. “Come on, Biggs, be sensible, man. Judge Beaufort, if I could have a touch more of that whiskey?”
I crept back down the hall with a sick feeling in my stomach, as though I had eaten a dozen green apples. So this was what Emma had warned me about. I wanted to lie down on my bed and sob, with the counterpane pulled over my head to muffle the sounds. I wanted to punch the pillows until feathers floated around the room. But as I reached my door, I realized there was something else I must do. I must warn Meister Wilhelm.
I crept down the stairs. As I entered the kitchen, lit only by the embers in the stove, I saw a figure sitting at the kitchen table. It was my mother, writing a note, with a leather wallet on the table beside her.
She looked up as I entered, and I could see, even in the dim light from the stove, that her face was puffed with crying. We stared at each other for a moment. Then she rose. “What are you doing down here?” she asked.
I was so startled that all I could say was, “I heard them in the study.”
My mother stuffed the note she had been writing into the wallet, and held it toward me.
“I was waiting until they were drunk, and would not miss me,” she said. “But they think you’re already asleep, Rose. Run and give this to Meister Wilhelm.”
I took the wallet from her. She reached out, hesitantly, to smooth down my mop of hair, but I turned and opened the kitchen door. I walked through the back garden, picking my way through the tomato plants, and ran down the streets of Ashton, trying not to twist my ankles on invisible stones.
When I reached the cottage, I knocked quietly but persistently on the door. After a few minutes I heard a muffled grumbling, and then a bang and a word that sounded like an oath. The door opened, and there stood Meister Wilhelm, in a white nightshirt and nightcap, like a ghost floating in the darkness. I slipped past him into the cabin, tos
sed the wallet on the table, where it landed with a clink of coins, and said, “You have to get out of here, as soon as you can. And there’s a note from my mother.”
He lit a candle, and by its light I saw his face, half-asleep and half-incredulous, as though he believed I were part of some strange dream. But he read the note. Then he turned to me and said, “Rose, I hesitate to ask of you, but will you help me one final time?”
I nodded eagerly. “You go south to Brickleford, and I’ll tell them you’ve gone north to Raleigh.”
He smiled at me. “Very heroic of you, but I cannot leave my glider, can I? Mr. Empie would find it and take it apart for its fine bamboo, and then I would be left with what? An oddly shaped parachute. No, Rose, I am asking you to help me carry the glider to Slocumb’s Bluff.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Are you going to fly it again?”
“My final flight, in which I either succeed, or— But have no fear, liebling. This time I will succeed.”
“But what about the wing?” I asked.
“I finished the repairs this afternoon, and would have told you about it tomorrow, or rather today, since my pocket watch on the table here, she tells me it is after midnight. Well, Rose, will you help
me?”
I nodded. “We’d better go now though, in case that Mr. Biggs decides to burn down the cottage after all.”
“Burn down—? There are human beings in this world, Rose, who do not deserve the name. Come, then. Let us go.”
The wind tugged at the glider as we carried it up past the plateau where it had begun its last flight, toward the top of Slocumb’s Bluff. In the darkness it seemed an animated thing, as though it wanted to fly over the edge of the bluff, away into the night. A little below the top of the bluff, we set it down beneath a grove of pine trees, where no wind came. We sat down on a carpet of needles to wait for dawn.
Through the long, dark hours, Meister Wilhelm told me about his childhood in Pomerania and his days at the university. Although it was August, the top of the bluff was chilly, and I often wished for a coat to pull over my dress. At last, however, the edges of the sky looked brighter, and we stood, shaking out our cold, cramped legs.
“This morning I am an old man, liebling,” said Meister Wilhelm, buckling the strap of the violin case around his chest. “I do not remember feeling this stiff, even after a night in the Black Forest. Perhaps I am too old, now, to fly as Otto would have me.”
I looked at the town. In the brightening stillness, four small shapes were moving toward Judge Beaufort’s house. “Well then, you’d better go down to the courthouse and give yourself up, because they’re about to find out that you’re not at the cottage.”
Meister Wilhelm put his hand on my shoulder. “It is good that you have clear eyes, Rose. Help me to put on the glider.”
I helped him lift the glider to his back and strap it around his chest, as I had done the week before. The four shapes below us were now moving from Judge Beaufort’s house toward Slater’s barn.
Meister Wilhelm looked at me sadly. “We have already said our goodbye, have we not? Perhaps we do not need to say it again.” He smiled. “Or perhaps we will meet, someday, in Orillion.”
I said, suddenly feeling lonelier than I had ever felt before, “I don’t have a glider.”
But he had already turned away, as though he were no longer thinking of me. He walked out from under the shelter of the trees and to the top of the bluff, where the wind lifted his gray hair into a nimbus around his head.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” I asked, raising my voice so he could hear it over the wind. Four shapes were making their way toward us, up the slope above Slater’s barn.
“The sun, Rose,” he answered. “She is not yet risen.” He paused, as though listening, then added, “Do you know what day this is? It is the ninth of August, the day that my friend Otto died, exactly one year ago.”
And then the edge of the sun rose over the horizon. As I had seen him do once before, Meister Wilhelm crouched into the stance of a runner. Then he sprang forward and sprinted toward the edge of the bluff. With a leap over the edge, he was riding on the wind, up, up, the wings of the glider outspread like the wings of a moth. But this time those wings did not rise stiffly. They turned and soared, as thought the wind were their natural element. Beneath them, Meister Wilhelm was twisting in intricate contortions, as though playing an invisible violin. Then the first rays of the sun were upon him, and he seemed a man of gold, flying on golden wings.
And then, I heard them. First one, then ten, then a hundred—the bells of Orillion, sounding in wild cacophony, in celestial harmony. I stood at the top of Slocumb’s Bluff, the wind blowing cold through my dress, my chin lifted to the sky, where the bells of Orillion were ringing and ringing, and a golden man flying on golden wings was a speck rapidly disappearing into the blue.
“Rose! What in heaven’s name are you doing here?” I turned to see my father climbing over the top of the bluff, with Judge Beaufort and two men, no doubt Mr. Biggs and Mr. Empie, puffing behind. I looked into his handsome face, which in its contours so closely resembled mine, so that looking at him was like looking into a mirror. And I answered, “Watching the dawn.”
I managed to remove The Island of Orillion and the wallet containing my mother’s note from the cottage before Mr. Empie returned to claim Meister Wilhelm’s possessions in payment for his bamboo. They lie beside me now on my desk, as I write.
After my father died from what the Episcopal minister called “the demon Drink,” I was sent to school in Boston because, as Aunt Winslow told my mother, “Rose may never marry, so she might as well do something useful.” When I returned for Emma’s wedding to James Balfour, who had joined his uncle’s law practice in Raleigh, I read in the Herald that the Wrights had flown an airplane among the dunes near Kitty Hawk, on the winds rising from the Atlantic. As I arranged her veil, which had been handed down through generations of Ashton women and made her look even more like a china doll, except for the caramel in her right cheek, I wondered if they had been searching for Orillion.
And then, I did not leave Ashton again for a long time. One day, as I set the beef tea and toast that were all my mother could eat, with the cancer eating her from the inside like a serpent, on her bedside table, she opened her eyes and said, “I’ve left you all the money.” I took her hand, which had grown so thin that blue veins seemed to cover it like a net, and said, “I’m going to buy an airplane. There’s a man in Brickleford who can teach me how to fly.” She looked at me as though I had just come home from the river by the Beauforts’, my mouth stained with blackberries and my stockings covered with mud. She said, “You always were a troublesome child.” Then she closed her eyes for the last time.
I have stored the airplane in Slocumb’s barn, which still stands behind the remains of the boarding house. Sometimes I think, perhaps Orillion has changed its course since Lord Rutherford heard its bells echoing from the mountains. Perhaps now that airplanes are becoming common, it has found a way of disguising itself completely and can no longer be found. I do not know. I read Emma’s letters from Washington, in which she complains about the tedium of being a congressman’s wife and warns about a war in Europe. Even without a code, they transmit the words “be careful” to the world. Then I pick up the wallet, still filled a crumbling note and a handful of coins. And I consult Lord Rutherford’s charts.
CONRAD
When had he realized that Aunt Susan was trying to kill him? He shook his head to clear away the clouds that Falways seemed to gather around him, like the clouds outside his window, gray and filled with rain, obscuring the garden. From his bed, he could see the tops of the yew trees. His father had hated them, had said they made the garden look like a graveyard. But they had been planted by the first Randolph Slovak, who had lost his name at Ellis Island. Someone had written Slovak where his last name should have been on the form, and he had been Slovak for the rest of his life. They had mistaken his fi
rst name as well. It should have been something else, something that sounded to Conrad, when his father said it, like coughing. Randolph Senior had come to Ellis Island with nothing but the clothes on his back and a pocket filled with soil from the forest around his village, and died one of the richest men in Manhattan. Slovak Inc. had bought the house on the upper East Side, with the garden in which the yew trees stretched their branches over the graves of Randolphs Senior and Junior. As Conrad’s mother had pointed out, the garden was indeed a graveyard.
And now there was another grave, although he had not seen it. When he had caught that cold and Aunt Susan had come, bringing Dr. Stanton, and the clouds— He drifted again, over the streets of Manhattan, and then the playing fields and dormitories of St. Andrew’s, where Simon McGreevy and Barnabas Ringe were arguing about the Peloponnesian War. And then out to sea, where his father, who had refused to name him Randolph, was also drifting in the waves beside his mother, who had seaweed in her hair. And the waves were saying—
“Conrad! I don’t think he’s paying attention to us at all. Dr. Stanton said it sometimes happens. You must have read about the accident, on the front page of the Times. Mary, that was my sister, and Randolph Slovak. Obituary pages aren’t good enough for the Slovaks! I’d never fly in one of those small planes myself. Far too dangerous, whatever they tell you. And Randolph, I wouldn’t call him a drunkard. I won’t speak ill of the dead. But I warned Mary. Drunk at the wedding, with that friend of his from college, both of them singing something that would make a decent woman blush. But would she listen to me? An old maid, she called me, though I was only ten years older than she was. That’s ten years worth of advice I could have given her. Conrad!” Aunt Susan’s beads clinked as she leaned over him. He tried to count the strands. First there were five, and then seven. “Conrad, are you awake?”
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