The Lake of Dead Languages (52 page)

“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 T-shirt. 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 library 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.

“Hey—
Muse of Water
—isn’t that what you’re calling your book, Bethesda?”

Although I wouldn’t have thought she could grow any paler, Bethesda turns a face so drained of color toward Nat that for a moment she looks more like one of the stone-cold statues in the garden than a living girl. Then without another word she rises and leaves the room.

“What’s wrong with her?” David asks. “Why was she so hard on Ellis?” He’s approaching the decanter of scotch, but Nat reaches it before him and empties the last inch into his own glass.

“It’s because you nabbed her title,” Nat says, pointing his glass in my direction—almost as if he’s toasting me for the feat.
“Muse of Water.
She found the phrase here last summer in a letter Frank Campbell wrote to Aurora, and she’s kept it to herself since then. Since he wrote the letter the day he died, Bethesda thought it was probably the only appearance of the phrase. Where in the world did you come upon it?”

“I don’t know. I must have read it somewhere,” I say, although the truth is I have no idea where I first encountered the phrase.

*    *    *

L
ATER IN MY ROOM
I
LIE AWAKE CURSING MYSELF FOR PRO
voking Bethesda Graham’s anger. She’s a major reviewer, after all, famous for her scathing dissections of hopeful new novelists. I should have known that the phrase
Muse of Water
came from her. It’s not, I realized after checking the pamphlet and my research notes, anything I’d read or heard before. No, I heard it for the first time tonight, in the library, spoken as if someone had whispered it into my ear. Just as I heard the first line of Zalman’s poem and David Fox’s secret wish to leave the garden in ruins. Just as I’ve heard voices all my life that issue forth from no human lips. Sure, other writers may talk about hearing their characters
speak
to them and finding their
voice,
but I’m beginning to suspect they don’t hear the kind of voices I do.

As if in mockery of my unhappiness, a girl’s laugh suddenly rises from the garden below my window. I get up, pulling my T-shirt down over my panties as I cross the cold floor to the half-opened window. For a moment the moonlight on all that white marble is blinding. All I can see is the terrace that wraps around the first story of the house. The paths that lead into the garden and down the hill, the crumbling fountain-allée, the statues that stand on the ledges, all fade into the shadows of the cypresses, the dense ilex branches, the deep overgrown boxwood hedges, and, beyond the boxwood maze at the bottom of the hill, the deeper blackness of the pine forest. As I peer into the impenetrable gloom trying to find the source of the laughter, a light wind stirs the tops of the trees and carries with it, along with a scent of pine and copper, that same sweet odor of vanilla and cloves I’d caught on the terrace earlier. Something white sways just beyond the edge of the western edge of the terrace, and I realize it’s just the statue I saw earlier today, only someone must have draped a scarf around its neck, because I can see the girl’s drapery floating on the breeze. Thank goodness, I think, the last thing I need is to add visions to my voices. I’m about to turn from the window when I see a white
hand reach out to grasp the fluttering drapery and draw it close around her. A coppery taste pools in my mouth like blood, and I hurry back to bed before I can see anything else.

I pull the covers over my head, but I can still hear the wind as it sweeps down the hill, skirts the muses’ draperies, pushes into the open mouths of satyrs and sphinxes, swirls around the overgrown parterres of the rose garden, solves the puzzle of the boxwood-hedge maze, and finally settles into the grotto dug into the hillside where the stalactites still drip with the last drops of the last spring. There I can feel the wind go to ground, its voice muffled at last by the webs the tunnel spiders spin in the underground pipes of the old fountain.

Tomorrow, though, it will rise again, carrying voices with its coppery breath, and even Bosco’s legendary silence won’t be able to still the voices in my head.