The Language of Paradise: A Novel (21 page)

Gideon thought he had used up all his anger, and found some to spare. Damn the man and his endless mixing! He would boil the lot of them in a brew of his own making until they lost all distinction. But Gideon was alarmed by Hedge’s volatility, his roaming eyes. It seemed that the idleness imposed by the parson’s long prostration had generated an excess of vigor that mimicked the symptoms of madness. The energy he’d once spent in constant activity was wreaking havoc with his body and his mind. Hedge talked incessantly; his hands were never still, his face was an alphabet of tics and grimaces.

“Papa, you know that won’t do,” Sophy said. “James knows very well that he can’t command Caroline. She must agree of her own free will. And she isn’t even home. She’s staying with her cousin in the city, attending a finishing school.”

“Her parents are indulging her. Ruining what is left of her character. Why has no one told me until now?” Hedge plucked querulously at the blanket covering his legs. “Chaos everywhere. Pacts are broken; the weak rule the strong; our money isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. If I could stand on my own two legs, I could at least put my parish house in order. Keep the Evil One from our doors.”

The Reverend gripped the arms of his chair, but his voice, when he spoke again, was calmer. “Sophy, would you fetch those ornaments from the wall? I think—if you two will assist me—it may be time to put them to the test.”

IN HIS ROOM
at seminary, his trunk already packed, Gideon read the vows that would bind him to Sophy. He had an old copy of the Book of Common Prayer; he loved the archaic spellings, the high language gemmed with thees and thous. With the ceremony less than a month away, he expected that the words would pulse with meaning. They did not. His mind sifted them with dry detachment, pulling apart and peering under, examining the text like a theological treatise.

Marriage was
an honorable estate instituted of God in Paradise
. But who would have known better than the Creator that formalities were irrelevant in a world made for a single couple? Gideon concluded, with some fellow feeling, that the first man and woman would have had no idea of how to inhabit this exclusive preserve; Adam would know only that he had been alone—all one, sufficient unto himself—and now he was joined to another.

He was cautioned against entering in
to satisfy carnal lusts and appetites, like the brute beasts that have no understanding
. Gideon thought of the girl in the schoolroom: the bovine bulk of her, her moist underlip and dull eyes. He thought of his solitary efficiencies in bed, how his hand crept to his crotch like a thief in the night. He would be done with all that when he married Sophy. But he wasn’t sure what replaced the bestial urge, or how, exactly, his understanding would increase, once they were legally bound and lying side by side in the boarder’s bedroom at Hedge’s. He wasn’t sure he would know what to do. He wished he had a friend close enough to ask. Most men seemed to know such things by instinct—or to act as if they did.

Gideon rushed through the giving and taking and having and holding without being further enlightened. These were so familiar that they offered nothing new. He stopped when he came to the one vow reserved for the groom alone. The ring was on his desk again. Sophy had returned it after she accepted him so he could give it to her on their wedding day; he had no money for a plain gold band, but, as Fanny said, who would quibble over that scrap of a jewel? Once the pledges were exchanged, Gideon would present her, as instructed, with the sliver of gold—not much, but more solid than paper money in these uncertain times—and then he would promise to worship her with his body and endow her with his worldly goods. Tantalizing, the conjunction of wealth and fleshly reverence. The hint of paganism appealed to him. It was the same quality that drew him to Catholic churches, with their naked Christs presiding over gilded altars. But worship seemed to have nothing to do with the kiss they had shared, only their lips touching, their bodies held chastely apart. He remembered his first sight of Sophy, how he had gazed at her across a field as she did her Maenad’s dance. Soon he would hold close what he had seen then at a distance. He imagined falling to his knees before her—in earnest, this time—and clasping her childish hips, burying his face in her belly, teasing her breasts with his tongue. Thinking of her this way, he felt what he had never felt before: a pure, stabbing desire for her flesh. It was so intense that it pained him; he had to satisfy himself.

He was ashamed afterward, but wiser, for he had learned by way of his body the reason for the church’s elaborate ritual. Lift the veil of formality and the stately phrases revealed their carnal truths. The idealized emotion of love—the “thou”—brought low, reduced to a rubbing of parts, dissipated in pure sensation. Raised up again.

In his first reading Gideon had hurried over the means of redemption.
Procreation of children
. The text listed it first among reasons for marriage, but the fusty old term shrouded reality in a carapace of leaden duty. Children were the culmination. They elevated the animal act, changed it into something sacred. His mother had this much in common with the Queen of Heaven: they both had sons they doted on. Yet Gideon, for all his obsessing over the wedding night, had given little thought to the outcome of the act. Unlike other men, he had never felt the need to make a miniature of himself. His great role had always been to
be
the child.

He got up and walked to the window. The trees outside were a tender green, but a strong wind whipped their branches, the last breath of winter. He thought of his Sundays in the study with Sophy and Micah, of the family they made. He had pretended to father Micah because Micah was grown, and not really his, but to bring a new being into the world seemed an arrogance he wasn’t capable of. He tried to imagine his features and Sophy’s combined, and found that the mental exercise was beyond him. His eyes, her mouth, her eyes, his nose, her ears, his chin. The two of them didn’t look the least alike. The face kept mutating, and in the end resembled nothing human.

It was easier to visualize the sequestered infants he’d written about in his thesis. They came to him at night, unbidden, and they came to him now. Although no image had ever been made of them, he could see the babies clearly. The radical innocence of their faces. Their round, clear eyes, mirroring the other in perpetual astonishment. Their alertness, registering the slightest tremor in their cloistered world. The word—one or many; Phrygian, Hebrew, or tongue unknown—forming in them over time, an embryo of thought maturing slowly until ready to be born as speech. Thinking of these children, his heart raced as it did when his studies yielded a discovery. Just so it must have been in the Garden!

“
I SUPPOSE YOU
will want to know things,” Mama says. She speaks with difficulty, pins bristling from one corner of her mouth. To herself she mutters, “The sleeves could be fuller, but they would drown you.”

Sophy is distracted, feasting on her image in the glass. The dress she will be married in is the first fashionable dress she has ever owned. Mama has always scorned fashion, but for this occasion she has overcome her scruples and modified a pattern from the dressmaker, who claimed it came from Paris, France. The bodice is gently scooped, front and back, the sleeves belled just enough to widen her shoulders and show off her slim waist and the delicacy of her wrists. Mama had predicted that white would fade her. The opposite is true. The layers of fine muslin make her shine, though quietly, the light seeming to emanate from within.
Luster
is what this dress gives her. She might not aspire to be a diamond, but she can—she will—be a pearl.

The Sophy in the mirror is the one Gideon will see as she walks down the aisle. She will never match him for beauty, but her reflection testifies that she’s prettier than she’s ever been. In her white dress she can stand beside her husband with pride and not shame him by comparison. Later he will help her with all the tiny buttons she can’t undo herself. Will the luster fade when she stands before him in her skin? Is naked easier to be than to say aloud? These are things she would like to know, but she doubts Mama is the one to ask.

“I want to know whatever you think I need to,” she says.

Mama removes the pins from her mouth one by one. Her lips stay pressed—whether in exasperation or a rare moment of contemplation, Sophy cannot tell. After a pause she says, “You’ve seen the animals. You know what boys are like. You must have some idea of the parts and such. What goes where.”

She releases these statements in rapid-fire pellets, but her eyes are clouded. Sophy has the impression that boulders are moving in her head.

“I don’t ask what you and Mr. Birdsall got up to when the Reverend and I were otherwise occupied. Whether you stopped at a kiss or went beyond. It’s of no account now, with all about to be made right. But I do reproach myself for allowing you to nurse him when he was sick. I did it with a good heart, thinking to teach you charity, but I wonder if seeing him so helpless and childlike didn’t stir up certain thoughts. It begins with thoughts, you know. That’s what sets us apart from the beasts—though not in any way we can preen on.”

“The only thoughts I had were for Mr. Birdsall to get well,” Sophy says, truthfully enough. “He is a perfect gentleman.”

“So he appears. But men are men.” Mama sighs, philosophical. “I won’t tell you it’s pleasant at first, lying back and being breached, and you might as well learn now that even gentle men forget their manners in their throes. Don’t be alarmed if there’s bleeding, perfectly natural when you consider a path is being forged where no foot ever trod. What you must remember is that things will soon improve. And the discomfort is nothing—the merest drop in an ocean—when set against all the rest of it.”

Sophy has been stealing glances at her reflection, thinking that she and Gideon will sort out this confusion of body parts and forest-clearing for themselves. But Mama’s last words get her whole attention. Could this addendum be the Portal to Bliss that Caroline’s cousin spoke of? It would seem that the cave of crystal is accessible even to clergymen and their wives—a revelation, to be explored later. She waits expectantly, but Mama’s face is grave. She is gazing at Sophy with a brooding sympathy that solemnizes her features.

Without warning she pulls Sophy to her. Even in times of sickness, Mama has never been a woman given to physical affection. Sophy is introduced abruptly to the limp apron and the long, flattish bosoms behind it, the sharp hipbones and hammock of loose flesh slung between. Her layers of white gauze are crushed against Mama’s faded calico. She is breathless, her ears ringing, so can’t be sure if Mama actually says “My lamb,” or if that tenderness comes back to her with the words that followed on the night of Papa’s accident:
I am here to bear it with you
. At this merciless proximity, Sophy absorbs directly what Mama means by “all the rest of it.” The bloody labor of childbirth, Eve’s curse leveled again and again. The babies stillborn or dead in the cradle. The endless toil of serving others, with little thanks and never a thought for yourself. The special burden of the clerical wife, held to a higher standard, forever falling short. Mama wants her to know that this is what is in store once the door of delight is opened.

Mama lets her go. She straightens Sophy’s dress with curt tugs to the shoulders and waist, and fluffs out the skirt. She licks her hand and slicks Sophy’s hair back in place.

“Some find that a pillow under the hips eases the way,” she says.

CHAPTER 17

____

POSSESSED

J
AMES LEFT FOR BOSTON ON APRIL 30, A DAY OF SOFT BEAUTY
, the sky a new blue and a green haze frothing the trees. His intention was to spend the night with Reuben and visit Caroline at her cousin’s house the next day. He had written ahead to both, but only Caroline had replied, in a style more elegant than the one she had departed with. He managed to divine, amid expressions of artful inconsequence about the weather, the state of the Boston pavements, and her health, that Caroline would be happy to receive him, that she regretted it had been so long since they had talked. This was more communication than he’d had for weeks. James was taciturn about his expectations, but he had elected to travel with the wagon—to bring Reuben back for Sophy’s wedding, he said, owning to no further hopes about his own. Still, it was obvious to the Hedges and Gideon, gathered in the front yard to see him off, how much the prospect of seeing Caroline again lifted his spirits.

On a day as lovely as this, optimism was less an attitude than an instinct. The Reverend had managed the journey from his bedroom to the front stoop on crutches, with Gideon and Sophy supporting him on either side. It was the longest distance he had walked since his accident, and the first time he’d been outdoors. The sights and smells of spring seemed to awaken the sensualist he’d buried long ago. He raised his face to the sun, shut his eyes, and inhaled the sweet air.