The New Science
The maid leaves me alone now in the mornings. She knows that it's my scribbling time. Tolerantly she smiles, for the world is awash today in women who write, and she reads their stories every week in the magazines. I have no such ambitions; I seek only to lay down a burden that I have carried for over thirty years. In the vast empty space left by death this burden pokes out its head, tentatively looks around, and says, are you ready for me now? Can you look at me? Can your children bear me?
Raoul said nothing of the awkward arithmetic which placed only six months between our marriage and Philippe's birth. He said nothing even after his brother's namesake grew up tall and thin and dark, as he stretched out into leanness instead of thickset blondness. Raoul never commented how Philippe's darkness set him so apart from those gold and blue Dresden figurines, his parents. Raoul said nothing for thirty-two years, not even on his deathbed where Philippe, father of four children himself, gripped his hand and wept like a child.
After the de Chagny family held the final council, after all the tears, the conferrals with lawyers, the dismissal of the lawsuit, the meetings in which I was never included, Raoul was welcomed back into their bosom. That we named our first child after his unfortunate brother did the most to touch their frosty and ravaged hearts.
The maid piles the calling cards up in a plate but I don't answer them. Instead, I think of Isabeau, our little white dove. She came third, sister to Philippe and Martine. With hair so blonde it looked like ice, with a bluish tinge heightened by the color of her eyes, she danced like a fairy on the greenway of our lives. Martine at age two burned with jealousy when Isabeau was born. Philippe doted on her, however. When Isabeau grew big enough to dart about, nose in everything, he took her on as his little charge and the two became inseparable.
Philippe loved Isabeau, but being with her emphasized his difference. Once I gave Philippe a coin to buy two sugar buns, one for him and one for Isabeau. He came home red-faced and furious. "She teased me, Mother," he said angrily. Isabeau started to whimper, and I asked incredulously, "Your sister?" Isabeau teased no one.
"No," he fiercely replied, "that fat stupid baker woman." Isabeau glanced at me to see what I would do when her brother referred to an adult that way.
"You shall not speak that way, Philippe," I said, stern. "Tell me what the woman at the bakery said."
"She asked if Isabeau was my sister, and I said yes. Then she kept making remarks that one of us must have been a changeling, because she was like a swan and I was like a crow." Isabeau began to cry. I held my arms out to her, but she ran over to Philippe instead, and he wrapped his arms around her.
"The crow is one of the most intelligent birds there is, other than the parrot," I said, and that mollified him a little.
"What about the swan, Mama?" Isabeau clamored. "Tell me something about the swan."
"The swan is loyal and true. He mates for life."
"Like you and Papa," she chirped.
I took both children in my arms, raven and swan alike. "Yes, darlings. Like Mama and Papa."
Then one dreadful morning in her sixth year she grew sick, begging for water, begging for anything cold. First her face caught fire, followed in a few hours by a vermilion stain that covered her back, her chest, her tender little limbs. By evening she couldn't speak for the pain. By midnight she could no longer hear us call her name. She neither blinked nor responded even when we thrust a candle right before her eyes.
Everyone said it was a mercy when she died the next day. The scarlet fever would have left her blind and deaf, and perhaps feeble-minded as well. No child could escape such a fire within and remain unscathed. After her funeral, I lay on the sofa, not moving or speaking, staining the damask with tears. Raoul asked me, "Do you want to move to the country? We can build a chateau, we have enough money to build five if we wish. Or would you rather return to Paris?" I looked carefully at his face, but it was an open and honest question. He would have returned even to that tomb, had he thought it would help. "No," I said. "This is our home now," and he sighed with relief.
Philippe was my comfort then. He pushed the thick dark hair back out of his eyes and pulled himself up to his full height, which was considerable even before he'd begun to grow in earnest. "Mother," he said, "you must get up. I insist, Mother. If Father won't make you, I will," and it seemed so curious from a boy of ten, that powerful mastery, that self-confidence. He had a beautiful clear soprano that had not yet deepened into the rich bronze baritone of manhood. I got up, because underneath his tones I heard the command that pulled at me so long ago, that awoke a sleeping heart even while freezing it with terror. He led me over to the piano. "I'll play for you, Mother," he said, "and you'll sing." He was a better cellist than pianist, but he competently worked through a few little volkslieder, and for the first time since Isabeau's illness and death I smiled and sang along.
She's with both my husbands now, forever six, forever beautiful with gossamer hair. In the eye of my heart she tenderly takes first a hand long and white and slender, calloused from fretting the violin. Then she takes the another, thick-fingered and blond-furred. Under the shade of cedars, sustained by the fragrance of apples, across the wide grassy plain they walk, each with a hand in a little girl's, with a little girl in between them.
Isabeau. I don't move to wipe the wet spots from this paper. Let them stay, jewels in the crowns of the happy dead.
Each morning I wrestle with pen and paper as Jacob struggled with the angel, and like Jacob I do not expect to escape a wounding. As I climb the ladder, beneath me yawns an abyss. Each rung is like a mountain, or the steps to the rooftop of the Opera. Each passage up another rung leaves me braver now to look into the darkness below. Each day finds me less afraid of the golden eyes that draw me onward, glowing in the depths.
His eyes weren't gold, not really. They were so brown as to be almost black. Nor did they actually glow in the dark. Through some strange quirk of birth (something genetic, as Philippe would say,) when in almost total darkness a little light did shine on them, they reflected that light with the colors of the back of the eye itself, like a cat's. But while the cat's eye shone red, his shone like gold coins, like the coins in the eyes of the dead.
Those dark-gold eyes that so easily filled with tears, that so easily followed me, they will never let me rest.
At twenty-four, Philippe was one of the youngest of the new doctors who had just finished medical training at the University of Louvain. Soon he would assume a position at the Cliniques St. Luc, but for a short while he relaxed at home for the first time in several long years. Raoul, Philippe, and I sat languidly in the dining room. The roast had been perfect, Philippe had returned, and a soft ease rested over us like a blanket. The maid had just cleared dessert while we lingered over cognac. Martine presided over her own table, having just married Jannecke a few months before. Our youngest, Louvel, had been excused to run off a bit more of his adolescent energy before bedtime.
Philippe and Raoul amused themselves by catching the lamplight's reflection off the polished silver of the butter knives. They made little darting "angels" of light dance across the room whenever the maid walked out. "Louvel should have stayed," I remarked. "Then you three boys could have played together."
Philippe put his knife down. "Oh, please don't stop on my account," I said, slightly embarrassed that I'd killed the game. Then the play of reflections brought something to my mind. "This light and how it moves around reminds me of something, Philippe. You should know this. How do cats' eyes shine in the dark they way they do?"
Philippe proceeded to enthusiastically explain in his thorough, detailed fashion the structures of the eye, how light entered through the lens to be collected on the retina, and how the tapetum lucidum in the back of the cat's eye reflected light like a colored mirror. Then I said, "Can it ever happen with people?" thinking I was being subtle, but when I saw the look on his face, I knew that I'd let out too much.
"Why would you ask, Mother?" he said quietly.
"Have you heard of it?" I persisted.
"I have," he said with a sharp edge, "but it is rare. Very rare. In fact, it's one of the examples given to support the notion of inherited characteristics, which if you can believe are still in dispute, in some circles."
Raoul looked up, puzzled, because the air between Philippe and I suddenly filled with ice. "What's this about, you two?" he quipped. "Did I miss something?"
"You missed nothing, Father, or perhaps everything," Philippe said, rising to his full height. He slammed the door only a little as he went out. Raoul looked at me with a baffled expression and just shook his head. A flare of anger went through me, however. Raoul might take this mildly, but I could not. I followed Philippe into the parlor and stood staring up at him as he opened his cello case. He loomed over me, face red with suppressed anger.
"You don't speak to your father like that, even as a man," I snapped. "Especially as a man. To him you accord respect."
"What respect is shown towards me, Mother?" he asked caustically.
"You receive every consideration. Whatever your quarrel, it is with me, not him."
Abashed, he turned away, shoulders hunched as if to make himself smaller, less angry, less threatening. His fingers trembled out of control on the clips of the cello case, and he stopped trying to undo them. We sat in the parlor for awhile as purple-slanted twilight darkened the room. The maid stood in the parlor door, wanting to come in and light the lamps, but the cold fog of our mood kept her out. Philippe sat waiting until dusk turned to dark, just looking at me. The moon sent a sliver of light through a long window. When it fell across Philippe's face, one of his brown eyes glittered like a gold coin.
I sprang to my feet, almost crying,
and stumbled out of the room. The maid slipped in after me, and
behind me the soft pale glow of light chased away some of the anxious
fog. Then I heard a long, deep note like a knife drawn across the
throat of some dying animal, followed by cascading staccatos. Without
looking back, I climbed the stairs and went to bed. Beneath me I
could hear Philippe playing his cello wildly, fiercely, into the deep
of the night. He must have stayed in the parlor all that long night,
for his bed was undisturbed.
The next morning I walked past and
saw him replacing two strings. He glared at me and refused to speak.
When Philippe was little, he liked to hold a candle up to his eyes in a darkened room, in front of the mirror. It had never occurred to me back then to ask why.
It was in the next week after our quarrel that Philippe set up his new laboratory at the Cliniques St. Luc. A laboratory required glassware in assorted odd shapes and sizes, so to obtain his flasks and beakers and tubes, he spent afternoons at the glassmaker's. After a few weeks, Raoul jokingly asked him if it was the glassware he was interested in, or the glassmaker's daughter. Anki Gyselink kept her father's accounts, greeted customers, tidied the studio, and brought beer and sandwiches to the apprentices at midday. A fluffy Flemish partridge of a girl with glossy black hair and twinkling hazel eyes, she came up to the middle of Philippe's chest. It was easy to imagine her head resting there.
"He could have sent an assistant," I commented dryly to Raoul one day.
"That would defeat the purpose," Raoul chuckled.
That spring Philippe was gone for long hours at the hospital, or somewhere else. One evening he came in very late, smelling of blossoms, face flushed and eyes bright. With him was Anki, her soft round face warm as flame, her lips full and red, as if swollen from repeated kisses.
"Won't her father want her home?" Raoul asked.
"Eventually," Philippe replied, "but we thought we should tell you now. We want to announce the banns. It is our express wish to be married as soon as possible."
Raoul and I looked at each other piercingly. "You don't want to wait for a wedding?" My tongue dragged behind my thoughts for several seconds.
"You and Father didn't exactly have a society wedding, did you?" he retorted. Anki looked back and forth at the both of us intently, absorbing every word.
"Son," Raoul said in a kind, heavy voice, "You're not yet twenty-five. You can't post banns on your own."
"I know, Father," Philippe answered. "I'm of age to marry in six months. Anki is twenty, but her father will give permission. We're sure of that."
"You've asked him?" I said, angry that Philippe would have gone to Anki's father before us.
Anki spoke up in her strongly Dutch-accented French. "Just this evening, Mme. de Chagny. We meant no disrespect."
Philippe directed an expression at Raoul that said, Mothers, what do you expect? "I think it makes more sense to ask the father for the daughter's hand before making an announcement, wouldn't you say, Mother? After all, he could have refused me."
Defeated, dejected, I nodded. A sadness washed over me I couldn't explain. I looked at Raoul, what would he do? He had the power to restrain Philippe from marrying, for half a year if nothing else. Raoul rested his hands on his large thighs, and said nothing for a long moment. Finally he spoke, "I take it there's a substantial reason not to wait six months."
Philippe put his long slender arm protectively around Anki's yielding shoulders. She looked so like a little partridge, her black hair fluffy under the simple wool hat, her bosom swelling large in her tight cream-colored flannel dress. As she leaned her body submissively into his, I knew at once that they had been lovers, and that he didn't want her shamed. Brussels was no two-cow town, but it wasn't Paris either. Even in Paris an artisan's family like Anki's would have no tolerance for laxity.
Raoul waited patiently, and finally Philippe answered, "There is," saying no more.
"Do you love her?" I blurted out. "You must love her."
Anki's eyes went wide. "Of course I do," Philippe said. As he turned his head to plant on her face a brief kiss where cheek meets ear, I remembered an afternoon long ago in that registry office, and a promise I made to Philippe before his birth.
Then all eyes fell on Raoul. "You will have my permission," he said gravely. Then he rose, turned to Anki, all strong responsibility. Taking her hand, in Flemish he said, "Welcome, daughter."
Now Philippe, Anki, and all their children are my dark irises among a field of daffodils. A few months ago Anki and I bathed their daughters' slippery little olive bodies and tucked their dusky little heads into bed. The four- and six-year old girls squealed and squirmed about like seals. We corralled two wiggling children with towels and nightdresses. Poor Erik, I thought, he wouldn't have believed this. He wouldn't have thought it ever possible, that so much life could have come out of his sadness. You could have filled another lake under the Garnier Opera, you could have filled the Seine itself with his tears.
As a physician, Philippe must know. He too can count, and he not only has learned the recently discovered laws of heredity, he has made their disorders his principal field of research. Never has he become angry with me since that night he broke his cello strings, but his eyes follow me, and his questions wait hungrily for any scrap to drop from our conversations.
Before I returned to this palace of echoes, I sat at Philippe and Anki's kitchen table drinking some warm milk at bedtime. Philippe came in with a stack of scientific papers in his hand and casually began to read them at the table, stopping only to make a mark or two in the margins.
"Genetics, that's the new science, Mother," he said presently. "I've written Dr. Bateson in London, seeking a fellowship. Anki is hoping you'll stay here with her. It will be for half a year, but I'll be back every month or two to visit. After all, it's only London, and not so far away." When I didn't say anything, he added, "She would love you to stay with the children. We can engage nurses and nannies, but nothing can replace a grandmother."
He showed me a chart, all lines and squiggles, squares and circles. "What is this?" I asked, confused.
"It's no more complicated than musical notation," he said. "Here's the father, and this one's the mother. This capital letter here represents a dominant gene, in this case brown eyes. The small letter represents the recessive, in this case the blue."
He went on to explain how generally difficult it was for two blue-eyed parents to have brown-eyed children, and then his dark eyes rested calmly and expectantly on me, as if to say, Will you tell me a story? He used to look like that when very small, when every night he waited patiently to hear of the little boy who went exploring in the Hall of the Mountain King.
I got up abruptly, claiming fatigue. He sighed and put his papers aside, brushing back the unruly black locks that he refused to cut short. "Very well, Mother," he said coolly. "Would you think about my request, so I can tell Anki something?"
"I will, but there are some things at home I have to do first," and with that I fled to my room, tears stinging my eyes.
The tender blue night wafted in through my bedroom window. Below me I could hear him playing the cello, softly, sadly.
Philippe, if you find this, I'll be long since dust. Forgive me. Ask your brother and sister to forgive me as well, because I committed the cardinal sin of parenting, even worse than bringing strange fruit into the basket.
While the sin that engendered you was long since confessed and not even deemed worthy of forgiveness, here is the one unconfessed and unforgiven: I loved you more than the others. You were the child of my heart, because despite the horrors of that underground wedding, as dreadful as were the stripes and burdens laid upon Raoul and I as a consequence, as terrible as your father's death was, there is so much of your father, so much of the good of your father in you.
Still you, always you, and I always expected God to take you from me, to strike you down like Absalom. I would have even named you Absalom, daring God to take you, but Raoul wanted to name you Philippe. I agreed, and trembled at my boldness to shake my fist in the face of God. Oh, God got his own back, when He took your sweet sister instead. You never knew why, child of my first heart, child of my first marriage, you never knew why I cried on the sofa that week. I cried out of guilt, because I was so happy that He had spared you, so tormented that I could even think it.
Anki, now Anki, in her calm sensible way, she would say that there's nothing to forgive. It wouldn't be the first time it happened in the world, now, would it? A lonely older man, a young and naive woman, a seduction, and look what's come of it. Then she would sweep her pillowy arm around those four dark olive plants arranged around Philippe's table, all a little over a year apart, basking in their father's smiles, their mother's soft round features. Anki would thank me. That helps, a little.
Philippe needs to know, not all of it, perhaps. Some things are too terrible to know, even for those compelled to bear them. I held my tongue for Raoul's sake for so many years. But now Raoul is dead. Before Philippe can meet his sire across the abyss of death, I must re-establish my own aquaintance with him. Once more I descend into that black chasm of the past, where the monster in my own breast hides with Erik, with all the other lost and ragged souls that crept in the darkness, preferring it to light.
Long ago I begged the "angel" to form himself into something my human senses could apprehend. A girl raised on stories of tall ships whose long-haired men pillaged the coasts, of naked fairy fiddlers, of enchanted horses in mysterious pools, of gods so human they died, should have known the most basic rule of fairyland. When the mortal attempts to command the spirit, she should not be surprised when the spirit obeys. The spirit comes when he wills, and upon she who calls are bestowed both horrors and delights.
It's time to go back, to once again call not an angel, not a spirit, not a demon, but a man. Erik, come forth.
( con't…)