The Language of Paradise: A Novel (42 page)

ALEPH
ALEPH BIRDSALL
BIRDSALL

At first light the next day, they had a little ceremony. Nothing formal like a christening, Leander said. Just a simple celebration of the name.

The baby had roused them before dawn, as usual. Sophy attended to his feeding while Leander and Gideon built a fire in the conservatory stove. The door had been shut since the baby was born. During Sophy’s recuperation and the child’s first weeks of life they had clung to the comfort of the sheltering inner rooms. Entering the glasshouse, his arms full of logs and his cheeks burning from the wind, Gideon was struck by the stillness of the cold. The panes were all frosted, like the blocks of ice in an Eskimo hut. He shuddered. The place had always been open to light, and now it had a blind, subterranean feel. One would have to live in the Arctic to find cheer in a cave of snow.

“Aleph will think the world is white,” he said to Leander.

“Not for long. He was born at just the right time. The whole pageant will unfurl before his eyes.”

Gideon noticed the bottle of wine, set atop a stone pedestal. “Surely not at this hour,” he said. They had shunned spirits since the Christmas feast. For Gideon it had not been a sacrifice. Even the thought of alcohol brought back the agonies of that interminable labor.

“It’s a passable substitute for holy water. Besides, a little sweet wine never hurt anyone. Do you know, when a Jewish child is circumcised, a drop of wine is placed on his tongue to dull the pain of the cut?” Leander smiled placidly. “I have been thinking of suggesting the remedy to Sophia to help the little one sleep through the night.”

“I wouldn’t mention it now,” Gideon said, “especially the part about the circumcision. You’ll only stir up her fears.” He kept a sober face; it was sometimes hard to know when Leander was joking.

When the room was tolerably warm, beads of moisture spreading on the glass, Gideon went to fetch Sophy and the baby. Sophy wouldn’t meet his eyes. She had let it be known that a pagan rite was no substitute for a proper baptism, but he saw that she was wearing her best shawl. The baby had been swaddled in so many blankets that only his round face showed. He was getting plump; he rested his serene gaze on his mother, smacking his lips as if still savoring the morning’s milk.

Leander held out his arms to welcome them. After a few weeks they had gotten used to this language of gesture. It was not quite habit—they were always checking themselves, stumbling raggedly from conversation in the parlor to mime in the nursery—but the impulse to speak had been blunted. And the new mode eased certain awkward transactions. Sophy was clamping the child to her bosom with that primitive two-armed grip she’d adopted, which reminded Gideon of monkeys, and yet Leander was able to take him from her without resistance. Sophy’s face was set. Short of clutching at a fragile limb like the competitive mother in Solomon’s tale, there was little she could do.

How naturally he assumes the priestly role, Gideon thought. Leander had motioned for them to stand on either side of him. He was gazing above their heads as though consulting the sages, the baby nestled casually in his arm. Perhaps he had been a rabbi in his long-ago other life, the one that contained a wife.

He had poured wine into a glass. Gideon, anticipating a ritual anointing, hoped he would take care not to sting the baby’s eyes; he saw that Sophy had the same misgiving. But Leander dipped a forefinger in the wine and traced three strokes on the brow. Gideon recognized the letter’s slanting spine, the vestigial arms sprouting unevenly from its sides.

Leander lifted Aleph on the palms of his hands and mouthed his name. Ignoring Sophy’s gasp, he held him up for a few seconds before placing him in Gideon’s arms. The baby was calm, though Gideon sensed he was puzzled at this sudden expansion of his close, milky world. The letter had dried to an indecipherable smear. Gideon felt a pang to see the clear forehead marred, even so slightly; he had an urge to wet his thumb and wipe the stain away. Was it his imagination that the face was more defined, the expression livelier? He would have liked to reflect on the mystical properties of naming and its effect on the molding of character, but a patch of damp was spreading under his hand. In haste he gave the baby to Sophy, who took him to the bedroom to do the necessary.

Leander drank from the wine in the glass, then offered it to Gideon: “One sip, to celebrate the occasion.” After the two of them had finished what was left, he reached into the folds of his coat and brought out a small scroll, tied with ribbon. “A souvenir of our first great work,” he said. He watched as Gideon unrolled the single sheet and read aloud,

ALEPH BEN GIDEON

Aleph, son of Gideon

“And whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”

Beneath was a line of Hebrew, the characters inscribed in an ornate style that was difficult to read. Faltering, he translated,

Such shall be the covenant between me and you

He looked up, confused. The fragment seemed an odd fit for the occasion.

“There is more, much more, of course,” Leander said, “but your friend is no scribe, he lacks the stamina and the skill, in this case also the space. I thought, since a boy acquires his name at the circumcision, this passage would be appropriate . . . the third covenant, you know . . . first the Sabbath, then the rainbow, then”—he scissored his fingers—“then the snip! But it is too obscure, I chose badly and ruined the whole . . . ” He broke off. “I’m a bit addled these days. This ceremony has raised phantoms from the past.”

“No, not at all. It’s a perfect memento. Splendid. I’ll keep it in my study to remind me how blessed I am to be a father.”

Gideon was already feeling the effect of the wine; he was very tired and the day had hardly begun. He felt pity for Leander’s rambling discomfort—a rare show in such a confident man, and more than a little unnerving—but he had no energy to cope with him now. He wanted to be alone with his son: a private communion where he could pursue the thoughts that had come to him during the ceremony.

The opportunity came in the afternoon. Leander had gone off on an errand and Sophy was busy in the kitchen. The baby had been fed recently, but was still wide awake, kicking his legs in his cocoon of blankets. Gideon took courage and lifted him out of the cradle, careful to support his head. Sophy looked up from the potatoes she was peeling and nodded. She liked to see him with Aleph.

Gideon carried the baby into the dining room and pulled a chair up to the hearth, where a fire was still clinging to life after the midday meal. He loosened Aleph’s wrappings to give him more freedom, and thought he saw some slight alteration in the child’s expression that might signify gratitude. How tempting it would be to have a father-son chat, to laugh with a conspirator over the fussiness of women! For a second he believed he would actually speak. He sometimes had these spasms of nostalgia in Leander’s absence, when it was just the three of them, a little family like any other.
Aleph my Son
. Gideon shaped the words, searching the soft features for the change he had glimpsed that morning. The eyes were different, but he couldn’t say how. It was like staring at the letter
Beth
in Hedge’s study. Now you see it, now you don’t.

Aleph stared back at him. He was already extraordinary, Gideon decided: few infants had such a power of concentration. Likely, the silence had done that. He moved his finger back and forth, and Aleph’s eyes followed. They looked darker. It was no trick of light: the blue was less liquid, deepening to brown around the pupils, retreating from the color of his own. He had never noticed how widely spaced they were. Perhaps it was the setting that gave them their contemplative look, both dreamy and penetrating, the observed object only a conduit to wonders just beyond. There was no mistaking the imprint. Sophy’s eyes.

CHAPTER 34

____

ALLITERATION

T
REE
. SOPHY IS NOT PERMITTED TO SAY THE WORD, SO SHE
thinks it, hard, as she introduces Aleph to a silver maple. It is finally warm enough to take him outside, spring having muscled through early this year, and she imagines his fledgling senses exulting, just as hers are, to feel the air on his cheek and smell the earth, to see the new greenery without the barrier of glass. Gideon was hesitant, but she persisted, and in the end curiosity got the better of him. He is right behind them with his journal, starting at every rustle and twig snap and bird cry, ever on guard against fugitive word-spouters who might turn up in their woods and pollute the baby’s virgin ears with a clumsy greeting or a request for directions. They have recently been spied upon.

On Sunday, a warm bright day, she had carried Aleph into the conservatory for his morning feed, thinking how pleasant it would be for him to dine in the sun. She was about to unbutton her dress when the baby turned his head. At the far end of the room, two urchins were staring in at them, their noses and hands pressed against the glass. She had grown so used to seclusion that she froze like a deer. Aleph was delighted. His small body quivered with excitement; he pushed against her with his fists as he used to in the womb, and let out a shrill squeal—a sound he had never made before. Any noise from him was a reassurance; he was a quiet child. She lifted his hand and waved it, and the boys grinned and waved back. When Gideon came in a moment later and hurried them back to the bedroom, the baby wailed in protest. He seldom cries these days, except for the occasional bleat to let them know he is wet or hungry. Leander says it is because he has everything he needs.

Leander went out to investigate. “A couple of my pupils,” he reported. “Harmless fellows, missing their old master. I had a word with them and they won’t trouble us again.”

Gideon was not convinced. “Now that they know where the Pied Piper lives, they’ll be flocking here in droves. The warm weather will bring them out.”

Sophy bends a low-hanging branch, tickles Aleph’s chin with the tender new leaves. A smile is her reward. Are trees like people to him, creatures with faces? She sometimes wonders how Aleph sees the three of them. The milk one. The fair one that hovers. The tall dark one. Today she has shown him an oak, a maple, a birch. Is each a separate phenomenon, springing up like a jack-in-the-box to astonish his eyes, or does he join them in his mind? If so, with what glue? His mother can’t tell him,
leaf
,
branch
,
trunk
.

Gideon perches his spectacles midway down his nose and records the leaves and the smile. All part of the process, he has assured her: a smile is the embryo of a syllable; they have only to let it ripen and be born as speech. Having captured the observation, he expands on it without looking up, the crease in his forehead deepening, his mouth pursed like an old man’s. Sophy hates those spectacles, and not only because they make him look pinched and ungenerous. They narrow his sight even as they sharpen it. The small, round lenses magnify his own notions, and the wide world—the wife, the blooming child, the lush foliage—fades to a blur at the fringes.

She is showing the baby a cardinal preening on a nearby oak, imagining that
red
and
loud
will be fused for him, when an insistent tapping disturbs the tranquility. The
BIRD
flies off—Sophy can track its reeling path
AWAY
in Aleph’s eyes—and Gideon drops his book and claps his hands over the baby’s ears.

It’s only Micah, knocking on the glasshouse walls to get their attention. Leander must have let him in. He’s as light-footed as an Indian; they never heard his step on the path. He promised weeks ago to help with the garden, but James must have kept him at home.

The sight of him blowing out his cheeks at the baby makes it easier to return to the glass box.

MICAH CAN
’
T GET ENOUGH
of Aleph. He is fearless with him. He swings him aloft and takes him on wild flights across the room, welcomes him back with smacking kisses and belly-nuzzles. The baby adores it all; he gurgles and laughs for his uncle as for no one else.