The Language of Paradise: A Novel (54 page)

She had called the painting
Annunciation
, but for all its polish, it isn’t finished. The words she meant to inscribe on the serpent’s wings have never revealed themselves. It would be easy enough to copy some Hebrew characters from Gideon’s books, but this seems like cheating. What good are letters that don’t spell a message?

Sophy closes her eyes. “I suppose you fancy yourself my muse. If you have something to tell me, Mr. Solloway, say it now. Plain English will do, thank you.”

The sound of her own breathing. Noises from the street drift in, muted, as if the world had held back as long as it could so as not to spoil her hopes. The silence is eloquent. The paintings are the only message she will ever have from this most talkative of men. He has done his part. The rest he leaves to her.

HER EASEL
is by the window, the chair at an angle, beckoning her. She brings the only drawing she’d saved, a hasty sketch of her strange dream on the night Aleph was born. She had asked for her sketchbook while she was still confined to bed, fearful that the details would slip away. The mountain of a man; the woman peering out of his middle, contemplating the world outside through bars of bone. She always meant to make a painting of the Pregnant Adam, but never had time, and now she isn’t sure she has the capacity. Portraits are a great discipline, but working from life fences in the imagination. The subject is always there, before her, demanding,
Make the best of me
. She can infuse; she no longer invents. How to recover that playfulness? Shake off her hard-won skills and romp in Eden?

Sophy sets the sketch aside. One day, perhaps. The image is old, part of the past; it doesn’t stir her now. There is a moment she would rather capture, though whether it can be rendered in paint is doubtful. What does the woman see in that first instant—before she is Eve, before she is anyone—when she is delivered from her long hibernation into the world of light? Oil is too heavy and plodding, she would have to use watercolor and bring it off like a magic trick, instant translation, her hand as quick as her eye. Lacking new eyes herself, she would have to sink so deep into Eve that she saw through hers. An impossible feat. She’s a humble picture-maker, no magician. But even as she takes refuge in this thought, images are coming to her. Pastels. A mix of colors raining down, the sky like a turbulent sea. In the foreground, a small, huddled figure, a mermaid out of her element, marooned on the forest floor.

She pins a fresh sheet of paper to the easel and confronts the white.

AFTER SUPPER THEY
gather in the parlor for the evening reading. Sophy has been working her way through Sir Walter Scott; she is well into
Ivanhoe
, and Aleph and Micah are hanging on her every word. She has just opened the book when Aleph stands and clasps his hands behind his back. He has an air of fierce seriousness, as if called upon to recite in class.

“I have something to tell you,” he says. “I have a new name.”

Gideon snaps to attention. “You don’t like your name? It belongs to you. No one else has one like it.”

“It won’t do for school.”

Aleph has been told the story of his name many times. He is well acquainted with the ox and the Beginning before the Beginning. But they’re all aware that the name has been a trouble to him. People can’t get their mouths around it; they trim it to fit what is familiar. He’s been called Alva, Adolph, Alfred, even, when he was still in skirts, Olive. Worst of all is Alf. Aleph is a stoical boy, but he can’t abide Alf.

“You have a perfect right to choose your name,” Gideon says, leaning forward. “Will you . . . will you tell us what it is?”

They look at one another, Sophy and Gideon and Micah. There isn’t a sound in the room. Breath is suspended, the flame in the hearth stops dancing, the hands of the clock freeze, for who knows what power time will wield in a new world?

“Tom.”

The quiet syllable, flat on the air.

Gideon rubs the dent in his nose where his spectacles rest. He puts his knuckles to his eyes and rubs with such vigor that Sophy thinks he must be stanching tears, but when he takes his hands away, his eyes are dry. He smiles, a slow smile, and opens his arms to his son. “Tom! Now that is a very fine name.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I
AM INDEBTED TO THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS
for vital support during the making of this book and to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for a fellowship.

I’m grateful to all who read portions of the novel, but I owe abiding thanks to two faithful readers who read chapters as I wrote them and offered abundant wisdom along the way. Kate Blackwell’s acute insights and sensitive perceptions always instructed and inspired; our conversations about our work have leavened the solitude of the desk. Sandy Cohen has given me the benefit of her painter’s eye and sharp mind, and has proved to be as adept in the editorial realm as in matters of the law. When the draft was done, Lynn Auld Schwartz interrupted her busy writing life to read the whole thing and give helpful analysis. Chris Hale’s comments on early chapters helped to set the course, and Victoria Hobson’s meticulous close reading unearthed details I might have overlooked. I am thankful for members of our small writing community, Ann Jensen, Vicki Meade, Paula Novash, Laura Oliver, Lynn Schwartz, Christe Spiers, and Heather Wolf, who have given encouragement and support, and greatly enriched my life in Annapolis.

The sober volumes of advice for young ladies that Sophy contemplates reading in Chapter 4 are lined up on my desk thanks to Ann Jensen, who plundered her family archive for primary sources and her bookshelves for research material. I’ve enjoyed our talks about the challenges of writing historical fiction.

Several years ago, on a visit to the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, I saw an early-nineteenth-century landscape of the village of Blue Hill, each of its sparse buildings lovingly rendered, and in the lower right corner a man in a tall hat waving a stick at a serpent, chasing the Devil out of town. The artist was the Rev. Jonathan Fisher, a polymath parson who knew several languages and had invented his own coded alphabet. Fisher was the inspiration for the Rev. Samuel Hedge, another stern Calvinist besotted with language. Although Rev. Hedge is a fictional character, I’ve endowed him with Fisher’s love of Hebrew and borrowed Fisher’s Alphabetical Bestiary and his reversible engraving table to furnish his study.

The definition of “baboon” that provokes Gideon’s contempt in the prologue is an actual quote from a book I found on a secondhand shelf years ago,
A Dictionary of English Etymology
, by Hensleigh Wedgwood, published in 1878.

Leander Solloway’s comments on Moses’s stuttering in the chapter “Alliteration” were inspired by ideas in Joel Rosenberg’s fascinating essay, “A Treatise on the Making of Hebrew Letters,” in
The Jewish Catalog
, edited by Siegel, Strassfeld, and Strassfeld, 1973.

Information for Gideon’s thesis about the historical quest for the first language was found in
The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language
, by Christine Kenneally, 2007, and
World of Words: The Personalities of Language
, by Gary Jennings, 1984.

I am deeply grateful to my editor, Amy Cherry, for her valuable feedback, sound guidance, and skillful nurturing of the book in all its stages. If patience is a kind of faith, hers carried me through. My longtime agent, Wendy Weil, passed away suddenly two years ago. Two emails that she wrote me the week before she died remain on my desk, tokens of her presence.

There is no way to adequately thank my husband Stewart for his constant love and support. The characters in this book have inhabited his life as well, and we’ve had some lovely moments discussing them over a glass of wine. My daughter Sara is my tech guru, and I thank her for connecting her Luddite mom to the modern world and only occasionally rolling her eyes.

Finally, I would like to remember with love Ed and Jean Ryden, cousins who made art all their lives, who long ago sent me a small check and told me to keep writing.

BOOKS BY

BARBARA KLEIN MOSS

____

LITTLE EDENS: STORIES

Copyright © 2015 by Barbara Klein Moss

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Moss, Barbara Klein.

The language of paradise / Barbara Klein Moss. — First Edition.

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