Fallen Beauty (22 page)

“Rock man,” said Grace.

His face lit with a smile.

We started off over the field together, pulling Grace behind us on her sled. Gabriel took the rope from me, which I appreciated in the deep snow. I looked up at the quarter moon and inhaled, enjoying the open feeling in my chest, and then at the path before me, where Gabriel and Grace had pulled ahead, silhouetted against the forest.

When we arrived at the fire, a hearty cheer welcomed us. Two girls about seven or eight years old ran to Grace and reached for her hands. Grace looked at me with a question in her eyes, and I could barely see her through the tears in my own. I gave her a smile and a nod, and she brightened and allowed them to lead her to the edge of the circle, where Blue lay with three puppies nursing from her.

“She had babies,” I said, as we walked up to the dogs.

Sam beamed. “Man at the lumberyard had a husky, and we let them have a night of it a while back. It proved fruitful.”

As silly as it was, I felt embarrassed for him to say such a thing while I stood so close to Gabriel.

Grace and the girls kneeled by the dogs, whispering and remarking on their sweetness. When the puppies finished eating, two of them tumbled about while one stayed snuggled against her mother, half-drunk on milk and warmth. The girls giggled and shrieked when the puppies nibbled their fingertips, and Sam showed them how to clamp the puppies’ mouths to teach them not to bite.

“This one has a red eye and a blue eye!” said one of the girls.

“It’s actually brown, but it sure looks that way in the firelight.”

Gabriel moved away from me, and when I stole a look at him, I could see him talking to Liza. She wore a smart dress in forest green with a white collar, and a matching jacket and hat. I wondered if the flush of her skin came from the fire, the alcohol, or Gabriel’s company.

Randall, the Wall Street violinist, brought a steaming cup of cider to me.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Would you like a shot?” He held up a flask with a large RGL engraved on it.

“No, thank you.”

Randall looked from me to Gabriel and Liza, and back.

“You’d better tell your friend to watch out,” he said. “Gabe, that is.”

“Why?”

“Liza has a theater house full of brokenhearted suitors.”

“Do you speak from experience?”

“Indeed I do.”

The firelight reflected off his glasses. He stood a full head taller than me, but he was so thin and tidy, he looked as if a strong wind would knock him over. He gave me a weak smile.

“I barely know Gabe,” I said. “He’ll have to figure that out on his own. As for you, I’m sorry for your hurt heart.”

“It’s all right. I knew what I was getting into,” he said. “It’s just that your friend seems sensitive. I don’t think he’d take it with a grain of salt.”

“I see what you mean,” I said, though I had a feeling Gabriel was a sharp judge of character. His comments about the townswomen had shown me that.

I turned my attention back to Randall. “If you’ll excuse me for saying it, you don’t seem like a shrewd Wall Street type. I mean that as a compliment.”

“I’ll take it that way,” he said. “I can relax here. I’m a bulldog at work.”

Sam whistled through his fingers and motioned for the musicians to pick up their instruments. Randall tipped his hat and moved to join the others. Liza winked at Gabe. I felt a small thrill of satisfaction to see that his face remained dark. He turned his gaze back to me, and I looked away.

By now, the puppies were sufficiently exhausted, but the children still ran in circles. Grace seemed to have opened like a butterfly. The realization that it was the first time she had ever really played with other children unleashed a storm of emotion in me: gratitude that they’d been so kind to her, sadness that this had never before happened, pain like a snapped thread between the two of us as she took her first steps away from me.

“You are impossible to read,” said Gabriel. He had come to stand beside me without my noticing, and I was startled to hear his voice so close to my ear.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t brood while I’m here.”

“Don’t apologize,” he said. “It’s fascinating. But it makes me see how limited I am in my artistic medium.”

“How so?”

“Well, if I were to sculpt you, for example, I’d have no way to fairly represent you. Would your brow be furrowed or relaxed? Your eyes squinted in concentration or wide with wonder? And your mouth—pursed or open, with a small smile around the edges? There is no stillness in your features. Like the stream.”

“With language like that, you could be a poet,” I said.

Gabriel smiled.

Liza turned her eyes on us across the fire. Her gaze was not kind. Gabriel stared into the dark forest, but directed his words to me. “She’s angry.”

“Who, Liza?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “She can’t understand why I’m not romantically interested in her.”

“I can’t either,” I said. “She’s beautiful, talented—”

“She’s not you.”

In spite of the noise around us, we might have been alone in the woods. I dared to look at him, and he at me. My heart pounded as if I’d been running over hills, and the short moment of warmth I’d felt at hearing his words cooled and shriveled like a blackened vine when I reminded myself that he was just another man.

“There you are again,” he said. “Unreadable.”

“How could others be expected to read what I can’t understand?”

I looked away from him and toward Grace making snow angels on the ground. For her protection, I could not allow myself to start a relationship, at least not at this time in our lives when she was beginning to understand people. It would be bad for her to get to know Gabriel as someone connected to me, only to have him wrenched away when the inevitable split occurred. But my young self would have hated me for such negativity. My young self would have taken her cup and clinked it against his, and leaned into his arm, and enjoyed herself.

Damn the man who had done this to me. Damn myself for allowing it to be done.

I placed my empty cup on a nearby stump, and then went to Grace to take her home.

“No,” she said, staring up at me from the snow.

“Don’t tell me no,” I said. “Up. Now.”

She curled herself into a ball on her side and refused to look at me, even whispering no under her breath. I crouched down to pick her up and she thrashed back and forth, wiggling out of my grasp and running to hide behind a tree. I lunged to grab her, and she darted behind another tree. My anger and embarrassment grew, and I hated that I would have to drag her away.

After several more slips and dodges, Gabriel finally came over, scooped up Grace, and swung her under his arm. “Don’t give your mother trouble, little imp,” he said. She giggled in his grasp and allowed him to hang her upside down while he carried her to the sled. He passed her a caramel from his pocket, and tucked the blanket around her legs. I gave the group a halfhearted wave as we started back to my house, mortified that Gabriel had had to help me control my own daughter.

“Thank you,” I said, as we emerged from the forest. “I’m embarrassed that she behaved so poorly.”

“What, like other toddlers when they have to leave a place of fun?”

I shoved my hands deep in my pockets, and tried to concentrate on the shafts of moonlight slipping through the trees. I hated that I couldn’t find a single word to say to him. I was sabotaging something real, and possibly good. Every time I thought of something to say, it sounded silly in my head. I didn’t want to lead him on, nor did I want to apologize for my response. Gabriel couldn’t understand what these years had been like, alone, ostracized, tainted by scandal.

To him, I was a regular woman, without stain. He knew that I had a child alone, but I could have been a widow, for all he knew. I hated to let another person in on my secret. If I allowed him to get close to me, I’d have to do that. The thought made me weary.

We reached the field, and the unspoken words seemed to sizzle in the air between us. A train issued its mournful whistle in the distance, and as I looked at the lay of the town before us, I noticed how charming it appeared in the glowing, snowy moonlight. Candles and lights dotted upstairs rooms. The pleasant scent of wood-burning fireplaces drifted on wind gusts.

“I love this town,” I finally said. “I think of my parents here. I have my sister and my shop. My daughter. It’s familiar, like an old robe. But it’s hard to live here, Gabriel. It’s hard. I don’t know how else to put it.”

“Whatever your situation,” he said, “it doesn’t matter to me. I mean, it matters, but it doesn’t bother me.”

“How can you say that when you don’t know anything about me?”

“I know all I need to know. You’re a hard worker, a deep thinker, a good mother. What else could matter, really?”

“I’m touched by what you say, but it is all very complicated.”

“Of course it is. What isn’t?”

The walk that I hadn’t wanted to begin now ended. How I wished we had miles more to go. But perhaps this was for the best. I shooed Grace indoors and propped her sled against the cellar doors. Then I turned to Gabriel.

“I’m sorry I can’t give more right now,” I said.

I turned and started up the stairs to the kitchen door when he reached for me, his hand on my arm.

“Just so you know,” he said, “there’s no charity in what I said. It’s purely selfish.”

He pulled his hand away, put it in his pocket, and left. I went into the house and bolted the door behind me. Grace had fallen asleep halfway up the stairs. I carried her to her room, pulled off her snow clothes, and put on her pajamas while she continued to sleep. I placed her in the bed and her smudged glasses on the night table.

I went to my room, thinking of Gabriel’s words. He’d understood that I hated charity, and he had appealed to my sense of self by talking in terms of his own gratification. His honesty and directness stirred me, and I knew I was attracted to him. I also knew that he was just a passerby, a rover. He’d be gone once the statue was finished. I didn’t know a thing about his past, and I knew I wasn’t as open-minded as he seemed to be.

I didn’t bother with sleep. Instead, I worked all night by the window in my room, where I could glance between the dark rectory and the unfinished statue. By early morning, I began to pity my own loneliness. I felt sorry for Grace. I hated that I was a prisoner of my past. As I worked, I felt almost feverish. My fingers manipulated the fabric in ways that extended beyond what I could have ever imagined in my sketches. My tears fell on the cape of midnight blue, and once, without showing any discoloration, the fabric absorbed a bead of blood from where I’d pricked my finger with the needle. This robe would reflect the goddess who walked at night, with the moon and the darkness her only friends. It would recall the nights she spent with her lover and wished for winter because those nights were the longest.

•   •   •

VINCENT

I
open the curtain when I see the horses draw up to the house, delivering Laura to me. She has surprised us with a telegram asking Eugen to bring her to Steepletop for the fitting. Eugen climbs down and walks through clouds of horse breath to Laura’s side. He lifts the dress box from her hands while she carries Grace bundled in a plaid blanket to the front door, where I hurry to let them in. The moonlight reflects off Grace’s glasses, winking at us. I feel a satisfaction I haven’t felt in many nights—of firm footing that makes me stand erect, relaxes my features, allows me to take deep, full breaths.

It is a perfect night. We drink wine; I play the piano well while we sing; we eat chocolates and cinnamon toast. I remove the cape from the box with great flare, and stand in front of Laura while she wraps it around my narrow shoulders and comes kissing close to me to fasten it at my neck. I feel myself bloom. I approach the mirror, and I am in awe of myself and the cloak. I run my hands over the material, lift it to my face, and close my eyes.

“You are all over this cape, Laura. Your scent—like apples and a glowing hearth. A scent of home.”

There’s more of me on you than just the scent of my home.
I can almost hear her voice, but when I look at her lips, I realize she hasn’t said anything aloud, and yet I understand her thoughts.
My blood. My tears. My past, folded and put to rest on the yards of fabric wrapped around you.

I wonder if I have hallucinated her response.

Later that night, I drive the sleigh to take her home. She holds Grace on her lap, and Eugen sits on the rear-facing bench, dangling his legs behind us and whistling. The clear sky of stars enchants us. We marvel at the icicles reflecting the moonlight, the owl sounds, and a shooting star. I think I hear fairy music on the breeze, but when I say so, Laura smiles in a secret way, and the sound vanishes.

On the approach to the road behind her street, just as we round the bend, the unfinished statue of the Blessed Virgin glows in the moonlight. I reach back and touch Eugen’s shoulder.

“Look, Uge,” I say.

He turns around in his seat and looks between us where my finger points at the Virgin. He whistles long and low.

“That is something,” he says.

“Your favorite saint,” I say.

Laura laughs. “
You
have a favorite saint?”

He gives her a playful nudge. “Yes, Miss High and Mighty, I do. Us heathens are capable of the occasional chaste prayer, you know.”

“She reminds me of
The Miracle
,” I say. “You know, the play we saw when I was on my last reading tour in Texas?”

“Ah, yes! That wonderful, awful play,” he says. “In it, a statue of the Virgin comes alive to take the place of a troublesome nun in a convent, while the nun experiments with life. But when the statue is gone, there are terrible droughts and such.”

“How interesting,” says Laura. “How does it turn out?”

“After the nun has slept her way through numerous men—” continues Eugen.

“We don’t know she sleeps with them,” I say. “It is implied.”

“Yes, but clearly, she sleeps with them. Anyway, when all is said and done, the nun returns to the place from which she came, satisfied that it is actually where she belongs, and the statue resumes her place over the town.”