The Language of Paradise: A Novel (53 page)

Portland, Camden, Belfast. Wherever they stay, Micah makes his way to the shipyard. Levelheaded as he is, the sea air intoxicates him. He talks of working for a shipwright, furnishing boats instead of houses, making wooden parts rather than chairs.

“I thought you didn’t want to be an apprentice,” she says.

This is different, he tells her. He has watched the men work, seen how easy they are with one another. He searches for the word, stumbles over it when he finds it.
Camaraderie
. Maybe this is what he needs, Sophy thinks: to do a man’s work among men, plying his skills without his tongue getting in the way.

In Blue Hill, a village that reminds her of Ormsby, the innkeeper says, “I hear they’re looking for joiners over to Castine.”

THEY HAVE LIVED HERE
for five years. The elder Hedges would have called it an extended visit. The four of them call it home. Castine is a town of useful beauty, seasoned by the salt sea. Ships are built and fitted and sailed here, fish are caught and preserved and sold. It is a shire town, housing both a courthouse and its logical outcome, a jail. A prosperous town without being pompous. The occupants of the pristine white mansions lining Court and Main streets are as likely to be shipowners and shipbuilders as lawyers: hardworking men not born to wealth. Sophy has painted them in stately solitude, in their parlors or alongside their boats, and in the company of their wives and children and dogs. For an extra fee she will embed miniature vistas in the background of her portraits: a busy wharf glimpsed through a window, and in the distance a toy boat bobbing on symmetrical waves; the village Common with courthouse in view (this for a judge). She has achieved some small reputation, here and in the surrounding towns. Folks who have never dreamed of being painted put on their best clothes and sit still for the lady artist. Not only her sex but her smallness works in her favor. The roughest men are always the most impressed: she cherishes the memory of a burly stonemason who kept stroking his beard and muttering, “Well, I’ll be!” as his likeness emerged on the canvas. She travels from town to town in the cart she bartered for painting the local doctor and his wife, often alone now, though in the old days, when he was too young to study, Aleph would come with her.

He is six-going-on-seven, tall and serious, a boy of few words though he knows many. He says what he has to say, stops to consider, speaks again if called for. Around town he has a reputation for being thoughtful beyond his years. Sophy can’t be sure what he remembers but is certain that the silence of his first year is as much a part of him as his blood and bones. The hesitations don’t concern her, for his mind is agile: Gideon began to teach him Latin at five and has just started him on Hebrew. Aleph is quick to learn, but his strongest natural bent is mathematical. He is good at sums—does them in his head for fun. They all marvel at it, though no one can imagine where such a rogue talent came from. Sophy suspects he caught more than a cold at Reuben’s, that some spirit of mercantilism infected him during their weeks in Boston. They are already making use of his gift. Between the two of them, Sophy and Micah make a decent living, yet neither has a head for business. Each month Sophy gives Aleph the book she keeps of her commissions, and earnestly, bending close over the pages with a death grip on his pencil, he adds up the proceeds.

He is a regular boy in other ways, impatient with Gideon’s gentle tutoring and longing to be off on his own adventures. They rent a small house on High Street, equidistant from the two poles of his existence, the wharves and the lighthouse. He loves to go to the shipyard to watch Micah work, but the dock is an even greater attraction, with ships disembarking from Cádiz and Liverpool and Le Havre. One summer afternoon he came home in a state of ecstasy, wearing a red cap that one of the French sailors had given him.

“You have no business talking to those rough men!” Gideon scolded. “You’re not to go there again.”

“They speak
French
! You told me I must learn French,” Aleph said, sniffling. Sophy was amused that he knew his father so well.

The lighthouse is farther up the road they live on, but might as well be on an island, moored as it is on a tongue of land jutting out from a pasture. Once High Street ends, it’s a long, solitary walk to get there, with only a couple of bleak farmhouses along the way. The place has a particular romance for Aleph; he says the beacon lights up his dreams. Micah took him there earlier in the summer and Aleph talked about the excursion for days: how the keeper lived all by himself in a round room at the top of a winding staircase, and manned his great lamp day and night. He had all sorts of questions. When did the man sleep? Did the gulls bring him food?

“I’d like to do that,” he said, adding, like a little philosopher, “It would be a good life.”

“Oh, I think you’d be lonely,” Sophy said quickly. “All by yourself up there, staring at the ocean day after day and no one to talk to.”

“I’d get a wife! She could read to me and cook for me. Micah says keepers can have wives.” He walked away then, as if the matter was settled.

A few days later, she arrived home from Blue Hill to find Gideon pacing back and forth, agitated. He had tutored Aleph in the morning, as usual, and after making them something to eat had dozed for a while. When he woke, the boy had disappeared. “I went to town, to the wharves, the yard. Micah hasn’t seen him. Nobody has seen him. For all I know, he could be stowed away in the hold of some ship. I warned him about those sailors . . .” He broke off, coughing. Sophy made tea to calm him, chiding him for walking so far. She knew where Aleph had gone.

Although the day was warm, she walked rapidly, quickened by a gnawing worry that had little to do with a small boy turning off a lonely road and following cart tracks through tall grass. Her son had started life with disadvantages that turned his childish fancy into a prophet’s warning. He mustn’t end up in an isolated room, staring at the horizon and communing with his thoughts. He mustn’t fall back into silence. She had not rescued him for that.

Shading her eyes, she saw Aleph coming toward her, his gait lopsided, favoring his left leg. Sophy lifted her skirt and ran, calling his name. He picked up his pace and hobbled straight into her arms. His face was streaked with dirt and tears, and the knee of one trouser leg was torn, but he was full of the wonderful thing that had happened. The lighthouse keeper had waved at him from a window! Smiled at him like the man in the moon!

That night, after Aleph was in bed, she said to Gideon, “He is ready to go to the village school.”

“Ready? He’d be so far advanced, the teacher wouldn’t know what to make of him. A boy who speaks Hebrew and Latin, who is gifted at numbers—you’d trust his mind to a country schoolmistress? I’ve heard tales about the lady. One of those narrow souls who’d break a boy’s spirit for his own good. She wields a mean switch, they say.”

“If she touches my boy, she’ll have me to contend with. You’ll always be his teacher, Gideon, I promise you that. But there are things we can’t give him. He needs to be with other children now. It’s time.”

He seemed to be considering, but the light was already fading from his eyes. “If you think it best,” he said quietly.

One more thing she had taken from him. His only remaining purpose, all that was left of his vision: the education of his son. The shame Sophy had held back earlier washed over her. Gideon was her husband, however altered. Shouldn’t her first loyalty be to him? As she’d watched Aleph walking toward her, a thought had entered her mind, stifled as soon as it formed: He mustn’t become his father. Above all, not that.

AUTUMN COMES EARLY
to Maine. It is Sophy’s favorite season in Castine, its beauties so abundant that she calls it her season of justification. Gideon was uncommonly cheerful this morning; the crisp air has restored some of his energy. He left early with Aleph to visit the school and cultivate the good graces of the fearsome Miss Dilworth, who’ll rule over the boy from next week on. Afterward they’ll walk down to the yard to see Micah and stop at the baker’s for a treat—“to celebrate your last days as a free man,” Gideon said, sounding like a boy himself.

As he was getting ready to leave, she dared to ask him the question that was always in her mind, but never voiced. “Gideon, are you happy?”

His brow clouded. “I suppose I’m as content as a useless person can be. Why do you ask?”

“You are stronger now. You could do a little tutoring. Judge Ward has a son, and I know others who’d be interested.” She hesitated. “You could write a book.”

He looked at her. “What on earth would I write about?”

Aleph burst in then, with his jacket crookedly buttoned and his neck-tie flapping around his collar, and she was saved from answering.

A day as lovely as this one makes Sophy defiant. She pleads her case point by point. The air bright and clear, with a salty tang that thrills the blood.
Was it more invigorating to breathe in your Paradise?
The pure blue of the sky reflected in the waters of the Bay; the patches of coppery seaweed, the islands set like jewels in a silver sea.
The colors you saw, that green you made so much of
—
were they more vivid than these?
Against this sky, the whitewashed houses, the Indian paint of the foliage, the brass weather vane atop the church spire gleaming in the sun.
The new world you walked through
—
were its edges sharper there? Were its contrasts more surprising to the eye, its harmonies more subtly blended?

She wants to wave the evidence in Gideon’s face, prove to him that this life they’ve made is rich and full, tolerable in its imperfections, lovable for its quiet joys. But Paradise is a worm that eats at the brain. At moments of earthly happiness there is always a nagging tug of doubt. If she’d had the courage to take his hand that day in the sickroom, where might they be residing now? What kind of man might Gideon have become if left to pursue his vision? She will never know if she has chosen the best of all worlds, or only Portsmouth, not good enough.

WHILE HER FAMILY
is gone, Sophy plans to spend a few hours in the room she set aside for a studio. Until now she’s used it mostly for finishing work and storage; she is an artist-for-hire, and the real labor of painting is done in her patron’s houses. But Micah is weary of the shipyard and has been talking of expanding the space, adding a shed where he can make furniture again. They’ll have an atelier; she will paint and he will carve, and folks will come to them.

The room is south-facing, the sunniest in the house, home to chests and broken chairs that Aleph can hide behind, or erect as battlements in the epic war he’s conducting between his tin soldiers and the chessmen Micah made for him. Sophy steps carefully to avoid upsetting the armies; a week ago she knocked over a whole line of troops, and the General made a great fuss. A truce this morning, the floor is clear.

She isn’t sure if she’ll paint today, but it is pleasant to contemplate a clean workspace of her own. She could have a couch for patrons, make a painted backdrop for posing, even hire a model. She could stack her prepared canvases against this wall—and here she finds the armies, lined up neatly on either side of a bulky package bound in twine. Aleph has balanced a soldier and a chessman on top, staring at each other across a plaid divide. Spies? she wonders nonsensically. One-to-one combat?

Five years, and she hasn’t opened it. Long enough to render it invisible, another dusty relic that she’ll attend to one of these days. If the contents are harmless, what is she afraid of? The vapors of the past rising up to envelop her as soon as she cuts the twine, spreading through the house, polluting the family’s hard-won tranquility? More likely, she’ll find a few faded images, cracked and flaking from neglect.

She returns the soldiers to their allies, and goes to find her scissors.

Folding back the blanket, she lifts the paintings out one by one and arranges them in a semicircle on the floor. They’re in better shape than she expected, but so few, really; a pittance, compared to what she’s done these last few years. A couple of early landscapes—why had she bothered to keep them? The only one worth saving is
The Naming of the Animals
; her Adam is a flesh-colored blotch, though the baboon has an innocent charm. The double-sided portraits of herself and Gideon make her blush, not for the original reason. Can she ever have painted so crudely? The paint looks as if it were slapped on like clay, obscuring Gideon’s fine features. Her angelic philosopher is as florid and full-cheeked as a butcher’s boy! As for the callow young woman—she’s no better than she ought to be, as Mama used to say. She passes quickly over her childish picture of the study—one of Gideon’s favorites, but tainted by the memory of what they did that day. Some things don’t bear revisiting.

The stark winter scene, her state of mind reflected in the begging branches. But on the back is the couple in the bell jar, a painting she can be proud of. The flying serpent is beautifully done. Leander to the life. Sophy has never doubted that he is somewhere in this world, inhabiting another name, another set of clothes, a different profession. His wings still shadow her. His eyes graze each picture she paints. His voice, with its haughty flick of German, its amused precision, is still in her head.

Among themselves, they never speak of him. It is as if, in regard to the man they knew as Leander Solloway, the compact of silence prevails. Sophy wonders if he haunts the others as he haunts her. When Gideon withdraws into himself, brooding, his eyes far away, she imagines that he is pining for his old friend, mourning for what might have been. Micah is younger and more apt to put away the past. Perhaps, in his view, he has gone farther than Moses ever did—entered the Promised Land after all.

Though, in the course of her busy days she has no time for Leander, he invades her dreams at night, ever a man of insinuation, coming at her sidewise, burrowing into her need. He enjoys her, simply and silently, exploring her with his hands and mouth, waking her sleeping parts, and for a moment she is alive in her body as she used to be when she danced, and when it is over . . . it is over. Leander is gone, and she has no regrets.