Fallen Beauty (4 page)

I wish I had begged him not to go. I wish I had apologized for ever sneaking out and placing that rift between us.

That afternoon an unstable rock at the top of the falls sat waiting for him. It crumbled under his weight and sent him plunging sixty feet.

•   •   •

VINCENT

T
he buck’s hot blood seeps into the snow. One moment there exists life; the next, by my gun, there is none. When I look up, the doe in the brush stares me through, and seems unafraid and even a bit triumphant, before she turns her tail to me and bounds off through the woods.

The cold wind of early April and a winter that has overstayed its welcome sting my cheeks. Against the gray-and-white landscape, the only color comes from the dead thing bleeding at my feet, and from my skin and my red hair. I understand, though, the changing of the seasons. I hear it dripping all around me in the thaw. I feel the raw energy of the world stirring beneath the nearly naked trees, and it seems to me that once this deer blood melts the snow beneath it and makes contact with the yellow grass below, it will give new life to the earth.

Try as I might, however, I cannot resurrect the joy of my youth. My last thread of hope in man was executed with those Italian immigrants, peaceful anarchists framed for murder and murdered for it. I wore down my shoes walking the lines, protesting the injustice of our judicial system. I lost sleep, went to jail, and begged politicians for mercy for them, but I was only met with the stony silence of men hardened by power and so-called principles.

Everything reminds me of the execution of those men and the futility of my marching, but instead of encouraging my inner softness, I’ve become savage. Dark, murderous thoughts blacken my vision and incite incessant headaches, and only the swift violence of hunting, writing, drinking, and copulation gives me escape.

I hear the crunch of Eugen’s boots through the shallow snow behind me. “Vincie, you are a natural killer,” he says with joviality.

I pass my gun to Eugen in silence. Words are finding one another in my head, and I don’t want to scare them off. I know he’ll understand. He’ll see the fever in my cheeks, the flush of the poetic energy coursing through my nerves, and leave me alone where I can feed off this meat.

•   •   •

M
y writing shanty seems frozen in the landscape like a jagged shard of ice. Without a stove to heat it, without a morsel of food, it is truly barren and empty, like a hollowed womb, but I will fill it with my words.

I pull a fag out of my pocket and light it with a match. With each inhalation I feel a growing contentment such as I haven’t felt in weeks slide over me like hot spring water. This absence of electricity and plumbing, decoration and paint is pure. Fresh paper, simple writing instruments, and holy silence give me freedom to create. Nestled on a small hill, accessed by a crude stone path, framed in trees and grasses, this shanty is my church. It is where I fulfill my vocation. Today’s hunt was my sacrifice at the altar, and some goddess was pleased because the words come faster than I can write—insistent, frantic, building in intensity, making my heart pound.

Though I tremble from the cold, I work without ceasing, filling the ashtray to overflowing, losing the light as the hours pass, shaping and working poetry of hunting, of execution, of death without hope, of mortal anguish. I feed on the words and stop only when I run out of cigarettes.

When I close the notebook, I feel the assertion of my physical hungers and rise to go, knocking the table and spilling ashes. I don’t stop to clean them. Instead, I pick up my notebook and swing open the door, allowing in a gust of cleansing wind, and start back to the house to find Eugen so he can fill me with another kind of fire.

When I find him in his study that night, I attack him with a new fierceness, and he responds. Fingers in flesh, kisses so deep they nearly smother, raw appetites fed over and over again. When I climb on him for a third time, he closes his eyes and shakes his head back and forth. “Edna, you will kill me. I . . . I can’t anymore.”

I cover his mouth with my hand and make his body do what he didn’t think it could until I am satiated. He is exhausted, so I help him off the rug by the fire and into his bed, where I cover him. He falls asleep before I close his door, and I take a moment to stare at him. The moonlight gives an unearthly glow to the room and Eugen’s face, and a chill rises on my arms when I realize he looks like a dead man.

A sudden terror closes like a fist around my heart. What if I do kill him? What if I give him a heart attack? He is so much older than me, and here I am, pushing him beyond what he wishes. Who will take care of me if he dies? How will I live?

I place my own hand over my heart and stagger back to my room. My skin still holds the heat of our lovemaking and of my creation, and I throw open the window to bring in the cold. I stare out into the night with wide eyes, fearful of the darkness and of what ghosts travel at this hour. The moonlight is surely playing tricks on me, but I swear I see the dead walking, slipping in and out among the trees, circling the house.

A movement at the forest’s edge catches my eye, and I see a deer emerge, a doe. She walks straight toward the house and stops in the yard beneath my window. I feel the moonlight on my face, and clutch the windowsill, the cold of it chilling my hands, and wonder if she is the doe I saw earlier, whose mate I killed. She looks up and sees me, her large black eye expressionless, haunting, piercing my heart like an arrow.

LAURA

Marie and I sat at the hospital, flanking our father like reluctant apostles, gutted that he lay so broken between us, with no real hope of recovering. The fall had shattered his spine and nearly every other bone in his body, rendering him paralyzed from the chest down.

When my father hadn’t shown up to meet the Hagertys, John had taken the trail to the falls and found my father where he lay in the shallows. He’d carried my father to the car, where his wife sat helplessly watching, and rushed him to the hospital. My father had lost consciousness and, when he did wake, rambled and cried until he exhausted himself to sleep.

John Hagerty told Marie and me about the accident. His usual calm had been shaken, compassion dripped from his words, and he made incoherent references to the curse of the falls as we sobbed and held each other. My horror had quickly turned to guilt. If I hadn’t gone out, I wouldn’t have disappointed my father. We would have hiked together. I could have been there to talk him out of the climb to the top, the ascent he’d always wanted to make but never had for the safety of us girls. Without us there, Father had been reckless and now he had paid the price.

Marie fingered the oval diamond ring on her finger, its facets catching the light and sprinkling over the walls. Everette had met with my father to ask his permission weeks before, and had been on his knee proposing as my father fell. Now Marie’s engagement would be forever tinged by what had happened that day.

I squeezed my father’s cold, limp hand, rubbing warmth into it, willing feeling back into him. His palm still had calluses from chopping wood, and I wondered if he’d ever raise his ax again. I moved to the foot of his bed and massaged his calves and feet through the blanket, imagining the slow atrophy of these fit, muscular legs, wondering if they’d ever lead him one foot in front of the other to walk again, let alone hike, his greatest passion.

“Why do you bother?” said Marie, her voice low and empty. Since receiving the news, Marie had seemed to collapse into herself. She felt we’d suffered enough with the loss of our mother, and it wasn’t fair for this to happen. I agreed, but I could only feel anger at myself. My guilt was never far, and I wondered if Marie blamed me the way I did myself. I didn’t have the courage to voice my fears.

“I have to do something. I can’t just sit here.”

“He’s broken, Laura. He can’t be fixed.”

“He’s not a bird I can watch die outside the window.” I felt my voice catch but I did not want to cry here, where unfamiliar nurses and doctors and strangers came and went all day. I didn’t want my father to feel my anguish, so I steadied myself and continued rubbing his legs.

“You’re driving me mad with all your motion,” she said, standing and crossing the room to look out the window. “I hate this place. After this, I never want to step into a hospital again.”

For us, the hospital marked the terrible times in our lives: my mother’s early death, the car accident Marie and I had suffered, and now our father’s fall. I shivered at the thought, and almost spoke of it when Nurse Lily Miller, Agnes Dwyer’s sister, stepped into the room. Nurse Miller was in her early fifties and childless and, like her sister, widowed at a young age. Lily had tended to my mother before her death, and had always been kind to my sister and me. I could see that my father’s condition affected her by the sympathy in her eyes.

Marie returned to the bedside, where Nurse Miller took measurements, administered needles, and checked pulses, and I took my place at the window. Birds twittered and cheeped from the bush outside until one of them flew toward the tree above, followed by the others in her wake. The tree shivered as the bird slipped through its curtain of new leaves.

Marie spoke. “Will he ever get better?”

I felt the heavy pause, as if Nurse Miller didn’t want to answer the question. When she spoke, I almost couldn’t hear her.

“It is unlikely. Spinal cord injuries are very difficult to rehabilitate.”

She spoke what we knew in our hearts. I turned to my father, and was grateful he wasn’t conscious to hear his sentence.

“Of course, your father will have the very best care we can offer. He has been such an asset to the town. All of you are.”

Her words moved me. We owned a simple dress shop, where my sister and I had taken over the work of my mother. My father kept the books, fixed broken things, hauled wood, shoveled snow. I turned to thank Lily, but she had gone.

“I need to go home,” said Marie. She picked up her coat and hat from the chair by the door and put them on. “Are you coming?”

I shook my head.

“Aren’t you hungry?”

“No,” I said. “I can’t eat. I don’t feel well.”

“I hope you’re not getting sick,” she said. “You need to rest. You’ve been at his bedside for weeks. You look terrible.”

I knew I looked awful. I hadn’t been outside or to the stream, and my skin had paled from lack of sun and wind. As my father had lain in the bed, springtime had arrived, my favorite time of year. I’d nearly forgotten the shop, and I’d need to tend to it, especially since Father could no longer earn money for us.

As for my lover, I’d avoided him as much as possible. I wondered if he’d left me any letters in our secret place, if he ached to hold me as much as I wanted him to. His skill at acting unattached to me while in the presence of others was so convincing, it was unsettling, though I knew it had to be. Any warm thoughts of our night together were swept away by the rush of guilt I felt about every aspect of our relationship, now forever connected with my damaged father.

“I’ll leave food for you and finish our orders,” said Marie. She kissed me on the cheek and left.

The church bell tolled the half hour. I knew Father Ash would be hearing confessions soon, and I felt I must unburden myself. Perhaps if I sought atonement, I could start over. I knew it was childish to think so, but maybe if I did, my father would get better. As I moved to get my coat, I glanced at my father and was startled to see his eyes open and clear.

•   •   •

VINCENT

I
will myself not to cry. I must save my tears to fuel my turbulent anger, not reduce me in sadness, but I have difficulty controlling my emotions at Arthur Ficke’s bedside, at the farm he has purchased just miles from Steepletop. He is no longer my Arthur, as he is married to another, but he once was and always will be mine, at least a little bit. Even though we are both married to others, the rope that binds us will hold fast forever, especially now that he is so close.

I think of Arthur often as the young, handsome soldier to whom Floyd Dell introduced me in Greenwich Village all those years ago; who sat on the floor making up silly poems with me and my sister; who made such perfect love to me; whom I almost married but allowed a zephyr to part us and make it so it could not be, though we remained close. So close, in fact, that I now sit here at his bedside while his wife makes soup in the kitchen of his half-fixed house, and we try to distract him from his tuberculosis flare-up, to fight the inflamed infection threatening to destroy his lungs and take his life.

This man before me is reduced, but not reduced. While his body betrays him, his mind and his passion are still as sharp as ever, and he is bitter, so bitter that his health confines him. It is the bitterness to which I will appeal. It will give him the anger to fight.

“Vincie,” he says, between gasps, “did you write that poem for me? Did you? Please tell me; I must know if I’m to die.”

I don’t want to tell him that I did write for him, many times. I don’t want to give him this power by admitting that I love him and he hurt me, but if he dies and he has made this one small request of me, perhaps I will regret not telling him. And what does it matter? He knows how he can destroy me with his judgment or stern looks. He knows that I will do anything to turn up the corners of his beautiful mouth.

Then there is another thought, a whisper in my ear in a voice like that of Sappho. If I don’t use my words for truth, I will never get new words. I will not be able to write. Perhaps this holding back is what is keeping me from finishing my collection. Maybe if I confess everything to everyone the phrases will breathe, and will give new life to my work. I hesitate no longer.

“Yes, Arthur. You know I wrote for you, my love. You know it without me having to say it.”

He begins to weep. No, this is not what I want. The weeping makes him cough harder. Why is he destroyed? I thought admitting it would build and strengthen him, and also me, but naming our mutual regret has given it life and weight instead of freeing it.

I clutch his shoulders and kiss his neck with passion, burying my face in him. He kisses me on the head and runs his hands through my hair, which I’ve allowed to fall in copper rivers over his bare chest. Such intimacy. I wish we could be fully intimate right now. But I must stop these thoughts. He could be dying. And here, his wife enters, bringing the soup.

She pauses a moment in the doorway, her face a mask of dour frustration. She quickly rearranges it. She
wants
to be progressive, to allow this open love to go on before her where she thinks she may control it, but it kills her. She is not evolved enough to live as we do. Eugen would get aroused if he saw me splayed over this man in this way. Mrs. Ficke wilts. I choose to ignore her. I have no use for weakness in the face of my old love’s pain.

“Why do you cry?” I ask, in hushed mother tones, wiping away his tears. I feel him stiffen. He does not want to hurt his wife, and all at once, I realize that if he knew that I wrote love poems for him many years ago, it might have changed something for him. He might never have married her. He might have taken my body, soul, and mind in some kind of spiritual or true matrimony, and he regrets the loss of what could have been our sacred years. I will not tell him that I wouldn’t trade my time with Eugen for all the summers left in time. I will pretend I don’t know Arthur’s true heart.

A sharp wind blows in through the drafty window, and the candle at his bedside flickers, throwing shadows over his face, her face, the walls. I hear the drip of a leaky faucet in the bathroom, and here, inside the brown walls, in this dark and stagnant place of illness, I feel as if I’m in a cave under the earth, and the only thing shining in it is this golden mineral of a man in bed before me. I feel a sudden pressure in my chest as the room closes in on me, making me feel claustrophobic enough that my breathing becomes as labored as his.

“Don’t answer,” I say, trying to make this feeling go away. “Eat the soup your wife has made. Gain your strength. When I see you next, I want drunken revelries, nudity, photographs.”

He smiles weakly at me, but she does not. I peer at her through this flickering atmosphere and command her with my eyes to care of him. Aside from the candle, he is the only light in this place, and I’m not convinced he has much fight in him. She casts down her eyes.

I stand to leave, and they do not speak. Arthur’s cough follows me down the stairs, where my dear husband waits for me to escort me home, where I will take him inside of me while imagining Ficke, and will good health to Arthur through our intercourse, strengthening him through the gloom of this dark night.