The Language of Paradise: A Novel (20 page)

The Sophy in the picture reminds her of a doll she had when she was little: the same slick cap of painted hair parted in the middle, the same wide eyes over an enameled valentine of a mouth, prim in spite of being puckered for a kiss. She hasn’t touched a brush to it since she arrived at Sam’s. The flatness of the image proves she has no gift for likeness; yet she can’t quite regard the girl as just another exercise. The eyes seem to demand that this thin slice of a self be plumped out, filled fuller with life. Sophy would provide satisfaction, if she were able.

On a rainy Wednesday afternoon, the implacable stare is too much for her. She has had a harried day, having awakened to cramps from her monthly and two of the children sick with colds. Instead of comforting them, she’s behaved like an irritable child herself, speaking sharply and ordering Alice, the eldest, to stand in a corner. The worst of it is that Lucy approved of her excesses. “See how wicked you are?” she chided her snuffling daughters. “No wonder Auntie hides herself away!” Even the hard-won solitude of the attic doesn’t cheer Sophy after such a display. Her facsimile on the easel is no help; she has as little character as the nieces, and like them, she wants, wants, wants. Sophy has been saying no, no, no all day, and she says it now. She turns the board over to its blank side.

The smooth wood is blessedly mute. As she relaxes, the fist in her stomach unclenches and the sluggish blood flows free. Each month, for a day or two, she goes soft like this, liquid inside. Her body weeps with a sweet need, private and cloistered, not to be dissipated in dancing. Most months the longing is general, but lately she’s been dwelling on Gideon. She hasn’t seen him since the first weeks after Papa’s accident. She wonders what he is doing at this moment, separated from her by nothing more substantial than miles. Is he perhaps thinking of her, too? Of the home they made in the study? The kiss he ventured, barely?

Papa summoned her to his bedside before she left for Sam’s. “You and I have always been close,” he’d said, reaching for her hand. “If something is weighing on your heart, I would like to know.” She would have confided in the man who took her for conversational walks, but it had been too long since he had sought her feelings. She shook her head, not wishing to cast a lie in words, and he had sighed and read her flushed cheeks instead.

Sophy puts a finger to the board and traces Gideon’s head, the curve of his jaw, his neck and shoulders. She has rehearsed his body so often that the line comes easily. Caroline said she should paint him, and—putting aside Caroline’s meaning—she has been working up to it all these months. During their time in the study she’d thought of asking him to pose, but whenever she gathered courage to broach the subject a reserve came over her—a hesitation, as if a cautioning hand had been laid on her shoulder. To replicate Gideon is a liberty she can’t risk. It is one thing to show him her hazy rural views of no place in particular, quite another to subject his features to her lack of skill. He would be kind, and that would be terrible.

But the unmarked surface entices her. She imagines dipping her fingers in paint, feeling the grain of the wood as she works. Why would he ever have to know? She can paint him for herself—or for her other self, that deprived creature who faces the easel like a naughty child. And when she is done for the day, she can turn painted Sophy to the light again, and no one will be the wiser. Gideon—her Gideon—will be hidden in plain sight. The idea pleases her.

She supposes what Mama said is true: that some who have gone over to the dark side make images of the object of their desire, and chant spells that draw the beloved helpless to their arms. Sophy can’t see that it’s all that different from the things respectable girls like Caroline do. Wiles are wiles, and whatever the method, the end is the same: the merging of two into one.

It occurs to her that the painting she is about to make, back-to-back with her portrait, will be one flesh of a sort. If this is presumption, so be it—Gideon has his experiments, and she has hers. But she can’t take time to sketch as she usually does, or her excitement will ebb; she’ll wake up tomorrow full of doubt and never do it at all. She takes up a brush and adds white to carmine, chooses a place where his head might go. This first stroke always stirs her: something where there was nothing, all possibilities open. The color she has mixed is too fiery for pale skin like his; she will have to blend in more white and some ochre to get close. Once the tone is right, she works quickly, building his face in layers of paint, thick, as if she were sculpting him. Cheekbones, chin, curve of brow, angle of nose. Empty statue eyes: she will do them last, she isn’t ready to meet his gaze.

His mouth is very fine; her brushwork is too clumsy to shape it. Sophy follows the curve of her own lips with her little finger, dips it in paint and transfers the touch directly. On the other side of the board, her painted self burns.

TWO SESSIONS LATER
, she has a likeness that pleases her. Not that it is finished. She doesn’t want it to be, she will be improving it for some time. Her mind is the palette, memory mixing with her own longing to make a Gideon she can possess. She didn’t know how well she knew him until she painted him, yet she’s caught only the shell; it would be impossible to confine a man so deep to a single image, even if she were good enough. The eyes won’t come right. No matter how she fusses, she can’t infuse them with more than a cold light: a scholarly dispassion that falls far short of the soul mirror she wants. She’s making yet another attempt when she hears footsteps on the stairs. She barely has time to reverse the poplar board before Sam blunders in, butting into a rafter as he straightens up.

“What do you think, Soph?” He rubs his forehead, grinning, a gesture that does double duty to soothe his bruised brow and convey astonishment. “Wonders never cease! You have a bidder!”

CHAPTER 16

____

WEDDING

“
W
EDDING” MUST HAVE STARTED AS A VERB, GIDEON
thought. In the weeks since Sophy returned home, the process had gathered momentum around them, setting them spinning faster and faster as they struggled to keep their footing, to keep their wits, to keep—for a few stray moments—still.

There had been, first of all, the matter of the ring. On the Sunday after James left to retrieve Sophy, Mrs. Hedge asked Gideon whether he had a band from his “dear mother.” It took him a few seconds to understand what she referred to. His mother wore a ring, but it was thin as a thread, of no more weight than the invisible father who had, in theory, presented it. The ring had been part of her hand, like her prominent veins and her nails that were always breaking. It never occurred to Gideon to remove it for a keepsake when she died. Mrs. Hedge said not to mind, she had a perfectly good ring from her grandmother, far too small for her big bones but a perfect match for Sophy’s twig of a finger.

He went back to seminary with the box in his pocket. In his room he took the ring from its nest of velvet and held it to the window’s light. It was almost as narrow as his mother’s, but crowned with a minute diamond and incised with delicate rays around the jewel’s base. Someone had taken great care with it, though it seemed to have been sized for the hand of a child.

“I am about to possess the pearl of great price,” he whispered, conscious of how actorish the words sounded.

He looked at the ring for a long time, at the gold circlet and the tiny disk of sky that it enclosed, before putting it back in the box.

Sophy arrived the next day. Gideon waited with Mrs. Hedge and Micah while James helped her out of the cart. She came toward them with her head down, her face half-hidden by her bonnet. Once the usual inquiries about the journey were dispensed with, James led the horse to the barn, trailed by Micah, who was visibly eager to escape the looming momentousness of the occasion. Gideon felt like bolting himself. When he dreamed of being with Sophy, he had never imagined following this drab, predictable script. Sophy seemed as uncomfortable as he, refusing to meet his eyes and looking off to the side when he spoke to her. They might have been meeting for the first time. She had been timid then, too—moony, Mrs. Hedge had called her—but there had been freedom in it, and independence, the instinctive shying of a wild creature. Now she was merely awkward. If he could only get her alone, he thought, they could be themselves again, and the right words would come.

He didn’t have to wait long. He was ushered to the parlor while Sophy went to greet the Reverend and deliver news of Sam. Gideon sat stiffly in a horsehair chair, thinking that he ought to have kept his hat so he could twirl it on his knee in the ritual manner.

Sophy came in and sat opposite him. She was wearing a simple gray dress that he hadn’t seen before, and she had smoothed her hair. After an absence of weeks, Gideon was beguiled again by the modesty of her manner, her serene containment. His little nun. She would dance, but only for him.

“I don’t imagine you found much time to paint with all those children to look after,” he said. He was startled when she blushed.

“Not much. I began something new, but only as an exercise. It isn’t fit to show.”

“You’re too modest about your work.”

She didn’t answer, and he could think of nothing else to say. It seemed possible that they would sit forever in constricted silence.

Sophy looked up suddenly, her face lively. “You don’t have to!” she said. “We can go on as we are. Or not go on at all. You mustn’t feel . . . compelled.”

Her few words released a flood of feeling in Gideon. How little Hedge’s manipulations counted when weighed against such generosity, such a pure, selfless heart! He would be fortunate to have her, under any circumstances.

“If I love anyone, I love you,” he blurted. “Only you. But I wish we could run away to our own little place. I hate all this managing.”

As soon as the fatal phrase was spoken, Gideon realized that he had never said it aloud—not since he was a small child, returning his mother’s endearment at bedtime. He stood apart for a moment, like another person in the room, watching its effect. Sophy didn’t move, but emotion suffused her skin and radiated from her eyes. It was, he thought, like shyness turned inside out. Her mole-colored cloak showing its scarlet lining.

Dropping to one knee, he swept the box from his pocket in a deliberately broad gesture, meaning to mock the convention. He realized too late that he had neglected to open it. “Will you do me the honor . . .” he began, but the rest of the words did not come.

Sophy took the box from his hand. Instead of looking inside, she held it to her heart and knelt before him, so they faced each other like two children playing. She brought her face to his and kissed him on the lips. He closed his eyes, lost in some dimly remembered sweetness, and kissed her back.

When at last they came apart, Sophy said, “We will run away. But not yet.”

GIDEON HAD ASSUMED
they would be married in the parlor, or even at the Reverend’s bedside—a quick exchange of vows, with family looking on. Hedge was still far from well, prey to persistent discomfort that kept him confined to his room for most of the day.

But the parson had invested the wedding day with hopes he had once reserved for Heaven. He had seized on the ceremony as the occasion for his formal rebirth as head of his congregation, and it soon became clear that only a sanctified setting would do. Twice a week Gideon and Sophy came to him to be instructed in the duties of marriage, and on each visit he presented them with some new idea, as the solemnities evolved in his mind. Hedge would be seated at the head of the meetinghouse, having been enthroned before the congregation assembled. He would look on as Gideon processed down the aisle, flanked by church elders, visiting clergy, and dignitaries from the seminary. Wedding attendants and family members would follow, and last of all, the bride, on the arm of one of her brothers. With the young couple before him, the Reverend would raise himself on Micah’s crutches—“as on the wings of angels,” he said—and stand before his flock upright! Once the vows were spoken, he would address the newlyweds and the congregation on the new dispensation of duties, and Gideon would be ordained to the service of the church.

“Surely it would be better to keep the two rites separate,” Gideon said, after being informed about the latest enhancement, “to give each one its full due. I can be ordained after we’re married.”

“I grant you, it is not the orthodox way. I suppose some of my colleagues will balk.” Hedge was seated in his rocking chair, his leg stretched out on a footstool. The chair had been moved to his bedroom to serve as a way station on his road to ascension, and he sat in it for at least an hour each day, however poorly he was feeling. “But at times the Lord calls us to transcend custom. The ancients saw patterns in the heavens and celebrated the cycles of the sun and moon. Should we be deprived of our festal days when events converge to show us that ‘all things work together for good’? In fact”—his eyes slid from Gideon to Sophy and back again—“I have been entertaining thoughts of a
double
wedding. James and Caroline have been pledged for too long. The boy’s gone soft. He seems to lose all force when he deals with that young woman. I’ve counseled him to show some spirit and set a firm date. And if the stars should align . . .” He looked down his nose at them and winked, as if they were fellow conspirators.