The Lake of Dead Languages

by Carol Goodman

  “I got shit-all done,” complains Nat Loomis, the novelist. The famous novelist. I’d had to stop myself from gasping aloud when I recognized him on my first day at Bosco—and who wouldn’t recognize that profile, the jawline only slightly weaker than his jacket photos suggest, the trademark square glasses, the hazel eyes that morph from blue to green depending (he once said in an interview) on his mood, the tousled hair and sardonic grin. Along with the rest of the world (or at least the world of MFA writing programs and bookish Manhattan), I had read his first novel ten years ago and fallen in love—with it, with its young, tough-but-vulnerable protagonist, and with the author himself. And along with the rest of that little world I’d been immersed in these last ten years, I couldn’t help wondering where his second novel was. Surely, though, the fact that he’s here is a favorable sign that it’s only a matter of time before the long-awaited second novel is born out of the incubator of silence that is Bosco.

  “It’s too quiet,” Nat says, now taking a sip of the single-malt scotch that the director, Diana Tate, sets out each night in a cut-glass decanter.

  David Fox, a landscape architect who I’ve heard is writing a report on the gardens for the Garden Conservancy, holds up a Waterford tumbler of the stuff, the gold liquor catching a last ray of light as the sun impales itself on the tips of the pines at the western edge of the estate, and proposes a toast, “To Aurora Latham’s Sacro Bosco—a sacred wood indeed.”

  “Is that what the name means?” asks one of the painters who’ve just joined us on the terrace. “I thought it was a funny name for an artists’ colony—isn’t it some kind of chocolate milk housewives made in the fifties?”

  The other artists, who are just now straggling in from their outlying studios and cabins like laborers returning from the fields, laugh at their cohort’s joke and grouse that the writers, as usual, have taken all the good chairs, leaving them the cold stone balustrade. One can’t help but notice that there’s a class system here at Bosco. The writers, who stay in the mansion, play the role of landed gentry. Nat Loomis and Bethesda Graham somehow manage to make their identical outfits of black jeans and white Tshirts look like some kind of arcane English hunting wardrobe. Even unassuming Zalman Bronsky, in his rumpled linen trousers and yellowed, uncuffed-and-untucked dress shirt looks like the eccentric uncle in a Chekhov play.

  “She named it after the Sacro Bosco garden in Bomarzo—near Rome,” I say, my first spoken words of the day. I’m surprised my vocal cords still work, but, after all, my book—my first novel—is set here at Bosco, which is why I know that the estate isn’t named for a bedtime beverage. I address my remarks to David Fox, though, because the other writers, especially Bethesda Graham and Nat Loomis, still scare me.

  Just remember, the director told me on the first day, never call Nat, Nathaniel, or Bethesda, Beth. I smiled at that evidence of vanity on their parts, but then I remembered that I’d been quick enough to modify my own name to Ellis when I published my first story. After all, who would take seriously a writer called Ellie?

  “She saw it on one of the trips she and Milo Latham took to Italy,” I add, “and was inspired to create her own version of an Italian Renaissance garden here on the banks of the Hudson.”

  We all look south toward where the Hudson should be, but the towering pines obscure the view. Instead we are looking down on crumbling marble terraces and broken statuary—statues of muses, whose shoulders are mantled with the gold dust of decaying pine needles and whose faces (at least on the statues who still have their heads) are cloaked in shadow and green moss. The hedges and shrubbery—once clipped and ordered—have overgrown their neat geometry and now sprawl in an untidy thicket across the hill. The fountain allée, with its satyrs and sphinxes who once spouted water from their mouths and breasts, leads to a statue of a horse poised on the edge of the hill as if it were about to leap into the dark, overgrown boxwood maze—Aurora Latham’s giardino segreto—at the bottom of the hill. Somewhere at the center of the maze is a fountain, but the hedges have grown too high to see it now.

  “Actually, the garden’s closer in design to the Villa d’Este at Tivoli,” Bethesda Graham murmurs, sipping her mineral water. “The idea of all these fountains and the springs running down the hill into a grotto and then out to the main fountain and from there to the river and finally to the sea… Aurora wrote in her Italian journal that she wanted to create a garden that was the wellspring of a fountain like the sacred spring on Mount Parnassus.” Bethesda pronounces Aurora’s name as if she were a contemporary who’d only moments ago quit the terrace. Of course, I remember, she’s writing a biography of Aurora Latham. Bethesda’s the expert here.

  “The whole hill is a fountain,” David Fox says. “One might even say the entire estate. Pumps draw the water up from the spring at the bottom of the hill and then pipes funnel the water down the hill though a hundred channels. On a night like this we would have heard the water cascading down the terraces like a thousand voices.”

  Zalman Bronsky murmurs something. I lean forward to ask him to repeat himself, but then the words, half heard and still lingering in Bosco’s perfect silence, sound clearly in my head.

  “ ‘The eloquence of water fills this hill,’ ” I repeat. “How lovely. It’s iambic pentameter, isn’t it?”

  The poet looks startled, but then he smiles and takes out of his jacket a piece of paper that has been folded in quarters and begins to write down the line. When he sees it’s too dark to do so, he gets up to go inside. The artists have already gone inside for dinner, their manual labors having given them keener appetites.

  “What happened to the fountains?” I ask David Fox, but it’s Bethesda who answers.

  “The spring dried up,” she says, taking another careful sip from her glass.

  “Not a particularly good omen for those who’ve come to drink at the wellspring of the muses,” Nat says, downing the last of his scotch. “We might as well go inside for dinner.” He looks into his empty glass as if its dryness stood for the dried-up pipes of the fountain. Bethesda takes the glass from him as he gets up and follows him through the French doors into the dining room.

  David Fox and I are left alone on the terrace looking down on the overgrown garden.

  “So when you finish researching the garden, will it be restored?” I ask.

  “If we get funding from the Garden Conservancy,” he says, draining the last drop of scotch from his glass. I get up and he reaches a hand out to take my wineglass. As his hand brushes mine, I feel a tremor—as if the pipes of the old fountain below us had come to life and were about to send forth jets of water into the last lingering glow of the sunset. The garden wavers and quakes like a reflection in a pool of water, and I see a slim white figure swimming at its center. I force my eyes shut and, ignoring the sweet, spicy smell that has swept over the terrace, count to ten. When I open them, the garden has gone still and I can see that the slim white figure is only a statue standing below the western edge of the terrace and the scent of vanilla has faded from the air.

  “You’re right,” I say, “it is prettier as a ruin.”

  He laughs. “I agree, but I never said anything of the kind. The Garden Conservancy would have me fired if I did.”

  AT DINNER I SIT BETWEEN ZALMAN BRONSKY AND DIANA Tate. I’m glad I’m not next to David Fox, because I’m still embarrassed at what happened on the terrace. Of course he hadn’t said that the garden was prettier in ruins. It was only my imagination. Sometimes after a day of writing, after listening to the voices of my characters in my head, I begin to imagine that I can actually hear their voices.

  Sitting next to Diana Tate, though, makes me feel the way I had in college when a professor sat down next to me in the cafeteria. I’m afraid she’ll ask for a page count of my novel thus far, or a detailed outline (which I don’t have), or, most frightening of all, an explanation for why I’m writing the damn thing. I have no explanation, because it’s not the book I’m supposed to be writing. For the last few
years I’ve written short stories about twentysomethings living in Manhattan—spare, wry stories that my workshop classmates and teachers have praised and that I’d begun to publish in small, but respected, literary magazines. Then last year I went home for Christmas vacation (or, as my mother puts it, “to honor the solstice”) and the pamphlet on the Blackwell case fell into my lap. Literally. I’d been reading on the ragged old couch in the sunroom when one of the planks in the bookcase over my head succumbed to centuries of dry rot and collapsed, spilling my mother’s collection of manuals on goddess worship and treatises on herbal remedies. Among them I noticed an ancient, yellowing pamphlet entitled A True and Intimate Account of the Blackwell Affair.

  When I finished it, I stayed up the rest of the night writing at a fever pitch and by the morning I had completed a story that I called “Trance.” From the beginning the story seemed to have a life of its own. Not that everyone liked it. Half my workshop said it was too sensational, half were repelled by the character of the medium, but it engendered more passionate debate than the class had ever witnessed and Richard Scully, my teacher, said it had an interesting ironic stance and that if I cut down on some of the more “overblown” imagery, I might submit it to a short story contest called Altered States. “Trance” not only won the contest, but one of the judges brought it to the attention of an agent, who contacted me and urged me to consider turning it into a novel.

  “Didn’t that medium spend a summer at the Bosco estate?” the agent asked. “Why don’t you apply for a residency there? It would be the perfect place to write it.”

  When I told Richard Scully my news, he warned me to beware of melodrama. Hadn’t I better stick to something more realistic? he asked. But still, he agreed to write me a recommendation—without which I would never have been “invited” to the famously selective Bosco. I know that the board doesn’t require the “guests” to adhere to any prearranged course of work, but I suspect it is the book “about the medium” that they expect to see sometime at the end of my stay at Bosco. And so I am dreading the moment when Diana Tate asks me about the novel.

  Fortunately, Zalman Bronsky is only too happy to talk about his work. He tells me and Diana Tate that the series of sonnets he’s writing about Bosco was inspired by a Renaissance book. I have to ask him to repeat the name three times, until he draws out a piece of paper, folded in quarters, from his pocket and writes down the title: Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.

  “Its English title is ‘The Strife of Love in a Dream,’ ” he says, “the hero, Poliphilo, journeys to the island of Cythera with his lover, and there they wander through an elaborate garden full of groves and grottoes, mazes and fountains, until they achieve the… er… culmination of their love.”

  “You mean they make it in the garden?” the young girl sitting across from Bronsky asks.

  “Daria,” Diana Tate says, closing her eyes for a brief moment as if to call upon a reserve of inner tranquility to deal with her niece. The director had explained to me on my first day that Daria had dropped out of college and would be filling in as Bosco’s secretary until a replacement could be found. “What have we spoken about?”

  “What? He’s the one who brought up people shagging in the woods. It’s not as if it’s a new idea. When I was twelve I came across that famous painter screwing that Yugoslavian poet half his age in the grotto.”

  “You’ll have to excuse my niece,” Diana tells us. “Her idea of appropriate dinner conversation was formed growing up in my sister’s loft in SoHo.”

  At the mention of her mother, Daria blushes. She drops her fork onto her plate and pushes her chair back from the table—making enough noise to draw the attention of everyone—and exits through the long glass doors onto the terrace, where she lights a cigarette and lounges on the marble balustrade, one long jean-clad leg bent and resting on the marble ledge, her chest thrust forward, so that the moon falls full on her snug white Tshirt. I notice that most of the men in the room are now gazing in her direction, especially, it seems to me, Nat Loomis, who’s sitting at the end of the table next to Bethesda Graham.

  “Why don’t we go into the library,” I hear Bethesda ask in a cajoling voice with a Southern accent I hadn’t noticed before, “and find a place by the fire before the yahoos get there first.”

  I see Nat look around the table as if sussing out his other opportunities. The artists are organizing a trip to the Tumble Inn, a dive halfway between Bosco and town. One of them asks me if I want to go, but I notice that Nat and Bethesda are getting up and heading toward the library. Maybe this is part of the unwritten division between the artists and writers. I wouldn’t want to end up on the wrong side of the divide, so I politely decline and accept, instead, Zalman Bronsky’s chivalrous offer to accompany me into the library.

  “It’s a funny thing about that line you gave me,” he says as we cross the main hallway.

  “Gave you?” I ask. “But I was just repeating something you said.”

  Zalman pauses at the door to the library and looks up at me, blinking his kind brown eyes. “I don’t think so,” he tells me.

  “But you must have,” I say, trying to laugh it off. “I couldn’t write a line of metered verse if my life depended on it.” And then, before he can question me further, I enter the library.

  Nat and Bethesda are already there, lounging in the best Morris chairs by the fire. David Fox is standing above Bethesda, resting one arm on the broad oak mantel, another glass of scotch by his elbow. Nat, I notice, is glaring at the architect. Maybe he’s jealous, I think, or, I suddenly feel sure, he’s angry at David for drinking up all the single-malt scotch.

  “We were just talking about Aurora Latham,” David says, pointing above the mantel at the painting of Bosco’s former mistress leaning against a marble column, her bare shoulders and the marble the same shade of creamy white against the velvety black backdrop of a night garden in which pale statues glow dimly in the distance. She is standing on the terrace at the top of the fountain allée, one slim hand extended toward a spray of water erupting from beneath the hoof of Pegasus, as if she had just commanded the water to flow. The artist has depicted her as a Greco-Roman goddess guarding the sacred spring of the muses.

  “That’s the portrait by Frank Campbell, isn’t it?” I ask. “It wasn’t finished because he died of a heart attack while he was working on it.”

  “You seem to know a lot about Aurora Latham,” Bethesda says. “Are you writing about her?”

  “I’m writing a novel based on certain events in Aurora Latham’s life,” I say.

  “An historical romance?” Bethesda asks, smiling, but at Nat not me. I can feel myself blushing and for a moment can’t think of anything to say.

  “Of course there’s no lack of sensational elements in Aurora’s life,” Bethesda goes on, “I’m sure it’s hard to resist exploiting them.”

  “I’m not”

  “Perhaps you two could share material,” Nat says. “After all, Bethesda has the cooperation of the Board and the Latham heirs.”

  “Yes,” Bethesda says, glaring at Nat before turning back to me. “Do you?”

  “Well, they know I’m working on a novel that takes place here at Bosco in 1893,” I say, swallowing hard. It’s the first time I’ve discussed my work with Nat and Bethesda, and they’re already attacking me—or at least Bethesda is. I can’t tell if Nat is defending her or egging Bethesda on. “Isn’t that what she was famous for—inspiring artists? What was it Frank Campbell called her?” I falter, trying to remember the phrase. I’d read it somewhere… or had I? Then it comes to me.

  “Muse of Water. That’s what he called her.”

  Bethesda turns deathly white at the words, as if I’d stolen something from her. “I suppose it’s the Blackwell scandal you’re interested in,” she says angrily; “that’s all anyone ever cares about. Not Aurora’s artistic vision—this sanctuary she created for artistic expression…” Bethesda throws her arms open wide as if to indicate not just the libr
ary but the whole house, the crumbling gardens, the four hundred acres of pine forest surrounding them. “She’s been defined by that one malicious act against her instead of by all the positive good she did.”

  “Well, not for me,” David Fox says. “I just want to know if she planted her hedges according to Francesco Colonna or Donato Bramante.” He’s trying to divert Bethesda’s attention to save me from her tirade. “What’s all this about a black well, anyway?”

  “Corinth Blackwell,” I explain, gaining strength from David’s attention. It doesn’t quite make up for Bethesda’s disdain, but at least it’s something. “Milo Latham brought her to Bosco in the summer of 1893 at Aurora’s request to contact the spirits of their three children who had died the year before in a diphtheria epidemic. She was a medium.”

  “Ah, a spiritualist,” Bronsky says, “like Madame Blavatsky. You know Yeats attended her séances…”

  “She was a charlatan,” Bethesda says, “and a con artist. She and her partner, a man by the name of Tom Quinn who had gained access to the estate that summer by posing as the amanuensis of Violet Ramsdale, a writer of execrable nineteenth-century melodramas”—here Bethesda pauses and looks straight at me as if to make clear to what literary tradition I belong— “kidnapped Alice Latham, the only Latham child who survived the diphtheria epidemic.”

  “They never proved that Corinth Blackwell was responsible,” I point out. “Both she and Quinn disappeared. Some people think that Quinn might have been the kidnapper and set up Corinth Blackwell.”

  “Ah, so that’s your angle,” Bethesda smiles at Nat, but he doesn’t smile back. “The medium as heroine. Don’t tell me—you’re calling your novel Entranced.”

  I’m about to tell her that there’s already a novel called Entranced by Nora Roberts, but then I’d be admitting to either reading Nora Roberts or having done an Internet search for the title, because I had thought of using it. But then Nat interrupts.