Fallen Beauty (6 page)

Maybe she is the one, my new experience, the one who is meant for me.

LAURA

The weeks after my father’s funeral passed slowly and with a strange amplification of my already heightened senses. His death reminded me of the impermanence of life, and made me wish to breathe life, smell it, experience it with deliberation. I sought comfort on the banks of the Stony Kill, often removing my shoes to place my feet deep in the mud as if trying to grow roots or find solid footing. I walked early in the morning and late at night, trying to accustom myself to solitude, willing myself to prefer it to interaction on the street with people who would look on me with disgust once they knew my secret.

I ached for my lover.

He had taken the letter from our secret place in the stones behind the cemetery, but left nothing in return. I avoided the town to avoid him most of all, because I did not trust that I could hold myself back if I saw him. I’d never wanted to fling myself into his arms as badly as I did while his child formed inside me.

Instead I put everything I had in me into helping Marie with her upcoming wedding, crying with her because our father would not be there to give her away, leaving my feelings of separation from her and from the town unacknowledged and festering inside me, stitching her dress with more care than I’d ever before used in hopes that it would inspire good feelings in me about her nuptials.

I still hadn’t told her about the baby.

On the first day I had awoken without getting sick, I sat with Marie in the shop, sewing costume pearls into her veil, when the door bell tinkled and Everette walked in. Marie leapt to her feet and threw herself into his open arms.

“My darling!” she exclaimed. He looked over her shoulder at me with a somber expression. She kissed him, but he pulled back, seemingly embarrassed to be so fussed over in front of me. Marie never would have behaved this way if my father were alive.

I slipped the veil under the counter. Marie noticed and covered his eyes with her hands. “Bad luck!” she said. “You can’t see the wedding clothes.”

“I think that just means with you in them,” he replied. “But I’m just popping in. I have a present for you both.”

I narrowed my eyes. What could Everette possibly have for me?

He reached into his suit jacket and pulled out an envelope. Marie tore it open, and read aloud, “‘
Romeo and Juliet
in the park.’ It’s a play!”

It was the first time I had smiled since my father’s death. It seemed Everette did have something that could make me happy. I stood and walked over to see the tickets, while Marie squeezed him again.

“Just for the two of you,” he said, giving me a knowing glance.

His acknowledgment of my fear of being left alone was a gift—the reassurance that even though he’d marry my sister, I would still have her. I looked away so he would not see my tears.

When the night of the production arrived, mere weeks later, Marie and I walked arm in arm to the field behind the hospital, where a traveling theater company had taken over the town’s summer stage. All afternoon I’d planned that I would tell Marie about the baby later that night, after the show. She’d been asking with increasing persistence for me to reveal my lover’s identity, and grew more frustrated every time I put her off, but I could not tell her. As a result, the fissure between us that had begun the night of the Follies had widened in small but meaningful ways. When Marie had realized that I no longer shared everything with her, something inside her must have rebelled against me.

We were a pair that night, however, reveling in the evening of warm breezes, summer energy, and lights that began in the grass as fireflies, then rose to the electric lights strung on strands in the trees, and evaporated into stars in the blue-black sky. I’d sewn a new dress for myself to accommodate my swelling abdomen. It was a floral cotton shift, distracting to the eye but comfortable on my skin. My hair had grown a bit since I’d bobbed it, and had a wave from the humidity. Marie had told me how beautiful I looked.

I felt strangely serene as we searched for our seats in the outdoor amphitheater, and I resolved to concentrate on this perfect moment and put off future worry for the duration of the play. Almost as soon as we arrived, however, I saw my lover on the other side of the crowd. When he caught my eye, and I saw on his face how he still loved me, all peace and calm dissolved. The knowledge that I carried his baby but we could not be together made me unsteady on my feet. I leaned on Marie.

“Are you all right?” she asked, helping me into my seat. Her skin felt warm and familiar. “You’ve seemed so ill, lately.”

I nodded and turned my attention to the stage, where the lights flickered the warning that the play was about to begin. I forced myself to concentrate on the production and the costumes, trying not to think of the Follies night.

The actor playing Romeo was fully himself but fully another. Here were men and women in their own bodies living stories someone else had written. The sets were important to creating the scene and igniting the imagination, but the costumes were my fascination—purple wool, black satin, green velvet, red silk that poured from Juliet’s knife like blood across the stage. These sumptuous fabrics were what turned the actors into other characters, what removed the men and women from themselves and allowed them to try on other lives and other times. The costumes held power, and I felt that familiar longing to take part in such an act of creation and transformation.

In the final moments of the play, I felt my lover’s gaze on me, and dared to look across the audience. Again his face wore open longing. It was murder to be so close to the one I wanted without being able to possess him. I told him that with my gaze, and suddenly, I felt the first quickening in my womb. On the stage, Juliet had done her deed and Romeo had discovered it. I clutched my belly and was unable to stop my tears.

“What is it?” Marie asked, as she put her arm around me.

I should not have looked at my lover, but I couldn’t help it. His eyes were still on me, but this time they had dropped to where my hands cradled my abdomen. I could see his realization as his mouth opened and his eyes widened. I felt one of the knots inside me untie itself at the tiny release his knowing gave to me. I willed him to look into my eyes, hoping to see his love and final surrender, but when he met my gaze, there was only horror in his face. As the applause announced the ending of the show, he slunk away from the audience, and disappeared into the night.

I sat like a statue. Marie said my name, and when I finally looked at her, she wore the same look of horror. She couldn’t take her eyes from my stomach.

“Oh, no, Laura.”

I did not reply. My tears had dried, and I felt their salt stiff on the hollows of my cheeks.

“You’re not . . .”

The motion of the crowd around us called Marie to action. She pulled me away, and I made myself start the walk back to the shop at her side. Her arm was laced through mine, and trembled against my hip. As we traveled away from the crowd on the dark path at the stream’s edge, she babbled next to me, but I couldn’t speak. All I could see was his face before me, a face that had meant warmth and love and adoration for so long, but now was like a stranger’s. He’d behaved so cowardly.

“Who is he?” she demanded.

I did not answer. I still could not say it. She would judge me, as I deserved, and I needed her on my side. As long as I could keep him a spectral figure, I could keep my sister.

“He needs to marry you!” she said. “Don’t let him get away with it.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Then help me to understand,” she said. “You’ve never kept anything from me. Why this?”

“It’s too wrong to speak of. And it’s over. I can never have him.”

Pity crossed her face, then a flash of determination.

“We’ll find someone to marry you,” she said. “The Winslow boys love you.”

I stopped walking. The Winslow boys were terrible bores with bad complexions—lettermen in high school track whose entire lives were guaranteed to go downhill from the summit they’d reached in school varsity athletics. They seemed content to bag groceries at their father’s market.

“Listen to yourself,” I said.

“You can’t have this child alone. You’ll be an outcast,” she said. Marie suddenly looked as if another idea had occurred to her. She dropped her voice and leaned into me. “I’ve heard there are ways to fix this.”

“Fix it?” I said. “It isn’t a torn fabric; it is a child. My child, with the man I love.”

“Don’t be foolish, Laura,” she said. “You just said you cannot have him.”

I wrenched my arm away from her, dizzy with frustration and confusion. She reached for me but I shook her off and folded my arms over my chest, heading for the solace of the forest, leaving her behind as she called my name.

I walked for what felt like hours, though it couldn’t have been long, and my wanderings brought me to the bridge. Watching the car taillights, I wondered if I should run away to make a new life for myself and my child. We’d have no life here. I thought about how I’d heard of young women going away to convents and having their children put up for adoption. Perhaps that would be best for all of us. But then I thought of my lover, and my foolish hope that once we talked, we would find a way to be together. I went over and over it in my head and thought that I’d rather live alone in the world with his child than give up our baby. It was the one piece I had of our love, and I couldn’t imagine losing that.

Several cars passed, and without knowing what came over me, I raised my arm to flag one down. Before long, a Lincoln Tourer pulled up alongside me and a middle-aged man looked at me over his glasses. I recognized him as one of the men who worked at the train yard.

“If you were my daughter, I’d lock you in your room for hitchhiking,” he said.

I looked at the ground, trying to push away thoughts of my father, when it suddenly occurred to me where I wanted to go.

“Can you take me to Bash Bish Falls?”

He stared at me for a moment, then looked at his wristwatch. “Park’s probably closed this time of night. . . .”

“I need to go,” I said. “Please.”

He looked at the empty passenger seat, and then back at me. I could see that he was wondering why a young woman like me would want to visit a place like that at night, and he would probably turn me down.

“My father died there,” I blurted. “I . . . I need to pay my respects. No one else will take me. Please.”

His forehead creased. “I suppose I could run you there. I don’t live too far. But you can’t take too long, because I’ll have to motor you back home, and my wife will be worrying.”

I crossed in front of his car and joined him in the front seat. He started forward, but looked sideways at me. I concentrated on the road ahead and the film of memories of my father, my lover, Marie, the Follies. The man tried to make conversation, but I could not speak.

“Do you want me to go with you?” he asked as we pulled up to the path leading to the falls.

I shook my head and opened the door.

“Hurry back, now,” he said. “And be careful.”

I left the car and started on the path that had taken me to this place just months ago. Before long, I could hear the rush of the water as I struggled to see the ground under the canopy of leaves. As if in a trance, I chose the trail that climbed to the top of the falls. I thought of my father, who had walked this path, and also of the Indian women, hundreds of years before him, as bereft as I was now.

On the climb, I had to sit several times to catch my breath. When I reached the top, I made my way along the large boulders with trembling hands until I reached the edge of the falls. The wind and rushing of the water reminded me of the danger I was in, and I felt paralyzed with dread. I stared over the edge and thought how many had died by falling or jumping. It seemed I heard a whispering in my ear. I could join them and leave this earthly pain, it seemed to say.

I began to cry deep, aching sobs, and felt that a hundred pairs of eyes were watching me, though I was alone. I glanced around, catching movements of small animals, seeing the shiver of the understory in the great shadow of the trees overhead. I again thought of the woman who had thrown herself over the edge for sins like mine, and I believed in the curse.

Once I’d cried myself into exhaustion, the forest went strangely still. I noticed only the rushing of the water. I felt as empty as a reed, and seemed to sense the hum of the forest life in vibrations deep within me. To fall here, to become one with this place forever, tempted me, and I felt myself step forward.

Then I felt the quickening again, a fluttering in my belly like moth wings on a window or a breeze rippling over the surface of a stream.

My child.

I stepped back, trembling, horrified at what I’d almost done. I clung to the boulders and dropped to my knees to crawl to safety. When I finally reached the path—wet, dirty, and exhausted—I sat for a moment to collect myself. I didn’t take in the walk back to the car or the man’s reaction to seeing me in such a state, but I was delivered safely home just before midnight.

On the ride home, I had convinced myself that the episode at the falls was a nightmare. I stole into the house and thought of my father at the fireside the night I’d snuck in from the Follies. The wedding picture on the mantel glowed in the moonlight. Those formal, unsmiling people did not seem like my parents. They were like icons hanging in a church, saints who had no remembrance of what it was to live the seasons and trials on earth. I wished I could pray to them for advice and guidance, but my shame prevented me.

I climbed the stairs as quietly as I could so as not to wake Marie, but there was no need. I peered in and saw that she lay with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling.

“Do you remember the girl Jane who was in the upper school when we were in the eighth grade?” she asked. “Do you remember how Jane became pregnant and wouldn’t tell who the father was, and was sent away?”

I walked to my bed, took off my shoes and wet clothing, and crawled under the covers wearing only a slip.

“Jane never came back,” said Marie. “And her parents—they owned the feed shop. They went out of business and left. You remember. I know you do.”