Immodest Proposal
Four little heads rest on the nursery pillows upstairs, the last morning of their visit. For a week this lovely old tomb has glowed as it once did when our own children were little.
Jannecke came last week to take the Victrola away, leaving in exchange two little girls. Mathilde and Lilli jumped up and down excitedly, crowing about having a new music box that made voices. I had telegraphed Anki and Philippe in Grobbendonk, where Anki's mother Mme. Gyselink had been visiting. She kindly conveyed Johannes and Genna down to Brussels on the train. Four year old Larissa had night terrors occasionally, and Anki wanted her nearby. Baby Roland, while walking, still occasionally helped himself to Anki's bountiful breast at night, and so stayed behind as well.
Shortly before Raoul's death I had found in a bookshop a beautifully illustrated French edition of the English fantasy Peter and Wendy. I couldn't decide upon which set of grandchildren to bestow it, so I kept it and read it myself, alternately weeping or laughing. I can read it to the children, I thought. At eight, Johannes and Lilli are the perfect age. Johannes is so quiet, he looks as if he's dreaming half the time, but he takes it all in. He won't mind being the only boy with all these girls, either. Johnannes isn't a child who becomes bored easily. He quietly reads, or writes and draws in his little sketchbooks. He likes to pick out little tunes of his own invention at the piano but shows no special precocity.
The nursery has long windows that go to the floor, and the elm branches and the wide overhanging eaves keep the room cool. Through the thick elms the garden is burned brown with summer neglect. Raoul had always engaged and supervised the gardeners, sometimes digging and planting right alongside them, to their amused surprise. With no one to put nets over the Pandy sour cherry trees, most of the fruit has gone to the birds. Raoul was so full of pride for these trees, as well as his raspberry and blackberry bushes, but now the berries sprout canes everywhere and there are far fewer fruits this summer than before. Under my indifference, the fountain chokes up with algae and the bushes are overgrown.
I pulled toys out of chests and arranged them through the nursery. For Johannes, I placed Philippe's old lead soldiers on one of the small wooden desks. He won't play war with them, instead, he'll line them up and sketch them, or arrange them into geometric patterns. A strange child, that one.
For the little girls, I retrieved a bag of Martine's old rag dolls, with hats and aprons and dresses. She had liked the soft ones that I'd sewn so much more than the china-headed ones. I had stitched and embroidered little aprons for them, even decorating one with a few strips of lace. I should teach Lilli to make lace, I thought, if I have the patience. My attention is so fleeting these days. Raoul liked to watch me make lace in the evenings, and it got so much easier with the coming of the electric light. "You're so still," he would say. "So absorbed. I've never seen anyone sit and work so diligently. It makes me feel peaceful just to look at you."
Genna, there was no need to entertain Genna, but this packet of mischief had to be watched. She would follow me, or the cook, or the nurse everywhere, watching us intently. I expected her to chide me about the garden. When not supervising my household, she would follow Lilli and Johannes everywhere, and held back the tears when they tried to evade her. Mathilde in her turn followed Genna everywhere, so that sometimes they made a little train of children roaming through house or garden.
For Johannes and Lilli were inseparable all through the week, whispering secrets and stories to each other, little fables or adventures which Johannes wrote down in his black-bound book with the thick white paper.
Mme. Gyselink arrived with the children but refused my offer of tea. Her husband needed her in the studio, and she had missed him during those bucolic weeks in Grobbendonk. As she was about to go, she looked at me with concern. "Are you sure it's not too much for you? You're still in mourning, after all, still getting over the shock."
"It's been four months," I said.
"And the heat. If I were in your position, I would think of going to the seashore."
"The children are, after they've visited with me this week," I said patiently. "Both Martine's and Philippe's family are meeting in a pension by the seaside at De Haan."
"And you're not going with them? To miss bathing at De Haan, imagine that."
"I'm happy to stay here right now, and the heat doesn't bother me."
"Have you given any more thought to Philippe's request?" she asked.
I hesitated. A nameless apprehension had been growing inside me over Philippe's upcoming hospital assignment in London. "Mme. Gyselink, do you resent Anki asking me to come stay with her?"
She sniffed a little but maintained her composure. "I can assure you, whatever Anki's desires are, I will not contradict her. My knees have gotten so much worse, I can't bend down for the children easily anymore. I'm not of much use to her."
So that was it. "Of course you are of use to her. A grandmother is more than knees. Listen, this is my thinking. Until you mentioned it, I didn't know why it hung so heavily on me. It's not that I don't want to help Anki while Philippe is absent. It's that I don't want to go to Grobbendonk. I'd like to stay here, in my own home. Let's have Anki and the children come here. You're not far, less than a kilometer away. The children can be in and out of our houses. I'll engage a nurse while they're here, to do the lifting and the bending, and to take them back and forth if need be."
"It's a year now, you know," the glassmaker's wife said ominously.
"A year? But Philippe said six months. Oh, that can't be. Philippe hasn't mentioned it."
"He just received the contract. The offer is for a year, at the London Medical College. Mme. de Chagny, forgive me for frankness, but I don't feel right about this. It's not fitting for a husband and wife to be separated for so long. He says he'll visit, but that's not the same. What can we do?" She laughed. "Listen to us, old interfering mothers-in-law."
"Philippe has always been stubborn. If he thinks it's someone else's idea, he will dig in his heels and balk. Louvel once called him a 'Missouri mule,' for a particularly large and refractory variety found over in the States. There really is only one answer, isn't there?"
She nodded her grizzled head, topped with a cerulean blue hat three seasons out of fashion. A great wave of feeling swept over me for Emelia Gyselink. When Philippe and Anki rushed into marriage, she held her head up and smiled throughout. Her love for their children was fierce, wordless.
"Philippe must take his family to London," she said finally. "It kills me to say that. Anki is our only child, as you know. When she moved to Grobbendonk, I thought my heart would break. But London..."
"We'll visit them together. We can take the train to Antwerp, and then set sail for London," I said in a rush. "But you're absolutely right. They must go, and not because two grandmothers want to get out of any work."
"Philippe and Anki are so close," she sighed. "Can you see them apart?"
"No, it's impossible. But how to make Philippe understand? I'll speak to him when I take Genna and Johannes back home. He must see reason."
"I'll talk to Anki," she said with a twinkling expression. "Once she sees the wisdom, she'll know what to do. She'll convince him."
Our laundress has a daughter of sixteen, Berthe, a stout, reliable girl. She came to stay for the week the children were here. One cool morning we packed apples, a few crusts of bread under the grudging eye of the cook (who complained we were depriving ourselves of excellent bread pudding for dessert), and took the tram to the Parc Woluwe. While the little girls fled swans who chased after them after being teased with a few scraps of bread, Johannes and Lilli walked off under the arching lilacs.
"Shall I follow them?" Berthe asked anxiously.
"There's no need," I reassured her. "They won't go far. They're so lost in their imaginations, it's almost as if they forget to play."
After awhile, Lilli and Johannes came over to me, eyes solemn. "We have to ask you something, Grandmama," Johnannes said.
"Something of great importance," Lilli added. She looked at Johannes, who said, "It was your mother, it was Auntie Martine who first said it, so I think you should be the one to ask."
Lilli shuffled a little on her feet, then spilled it out. "Mama says that we could have been nobles, if Grandpapa hadn't gone and done something foolish. That he would have been a Count, and that would have made Uncle Philippe and Uncle Louvel Vicomtes. Mama says that she would have gotten invited to King Albert's balls, and had her name in the society papers. Then Papa laughed at Mama and said that Uncle Louvel couldn't be a Vicomte, because the President of America wouldn't let him."
I didn't know whether to be amused or appalled.
"What happened, Grandmama?" Johannes asked. "Not that I'm sorry. I wouldn't want my Papa to be a Vicomte. Then he wouldn't have been able to marry Mama. That's what Aunt Martine said, anyway. Now that Grandpapa is dead, Papa can't be a Vicomte, can he, Grandmama?"
"Little ones," I said, "sit by me." Berthe had joined the swan-chasing and goose-feeding adventure, for which I was glad.
"When your Grandpapa and I first married, he decided that titles were something of the past. Now in France, even though there was no king like there is here in Belgium, there were still nobles. In America, where Uncle Louvel lives, there are no nobles and no kings, only a president and citizens, like in France. However, your Grandpapa believed that what was in a man's heart was what counted, not his name, or a piece of paper in the family chest that glorified his ancestors. I suppose on paper your father is a Count, although he has decided to not live like one. He can't really give it up – it's like part of your name, just as you will always be Johannes, and you will be Lilli."
"I don't understand," Lilli said.
"I do," Johannes proclaimed. "He didn't want to be Count de Chagny. He wanted to just be Grandpapa."
"That's right, darling. He just wanted to be Grandpapa." Tears stood in my eyes.
Every night throughout the week we swam with mermaids, killed pirates, fought with wild Indians, and loved the little boy in green who kept his pearly milk teeth.
Lilli and Johannes sat rapt on the big nurse's bed with me, while the little girls hid under a tent I made for them out of a blanket and two chairs. Mathilde and Genna stopped dressing dolls and poked their heads out long enough to hear the Lost Boys kill someone, or Hook chase Pan. Sometimes the little girls rolled and giggled, and like Wendy herself, Lilli scolded, "Don't be such a child! You're all such children!" while still such a mite herself.
"Keep the nursery windows open," Johannes said seriously every night.
"They have to stay open," I remarked, " as it's summer."
"You know," he said.
His little face was so thin. Johannes was tall, like Philippe, and his lanky thinness wasn't tempered by Anki's thick solidity. He was not a handsome child. His thin tight mouth smiled rarely. A too-large forehead wrinkled in unchildlike concentration. Deep brown eyes glimmered, revealing pools of sadness. His hollow cheeks never filled no matter how much porridge or ham steaks you fed him, and his thin, silky hair gave me a shiver of cold recognition when I brushed its shiny blackness. Philippe loved him fiercely, never mocking him for his slender body or the little stories he wrote in his ever-present sketchbook, and he always listened to his odd imaginations.
He can't leave the children in Belgium while he goes to London, I thought. Genna and Larissa have each other, and Roland, well, Roland is the exact opposite of Johannes, a chubby chestnut bundle of two-year old boy energy. But Johannes, he needs Philippe. There's a deep bond between these two, something in the blood that links them. Something from Erik.
I knew that Erik had left a cold and unloving house around the age of ten. It seemed so young, but many boys in that era, and even now, were apprenticed around that age. He left not for an apprenticeship, though, but to make his way on his own, to sleep in culverts or barns, tramping with rough men who lived on the roads. I shuddered to think of a child that young on the loose on the open roads that led through France, through Prussia, and through thick forested mountains on to the Balkans.
Had he been like Johannes, I wondered, sensitive, dreamy, and so much more vulnerable because of his horrific ugliness? I had seen a few of Erik's architectural sketches, his designs for the masonry foundations of the Palais Garnier. Surely he had he drawn as a child, but had he been mocked, seen his drawings torn up, or worse, ignored? I didn't know. All that came to me was the certainty, knowledge without basis, that Erik as a child had been very much like Johannes, and had been hurt, terribly wounded right at the age Johannes was today. Something speared right in that vulnerable spot of Erik's newly-opening heart, the heart that was just awakening to hatred, to loneliness, to cruelty.
Erik had a soft, childlike voice he sometimes used when, instead of yielding under the crushing mountain of sorrow, he cowered under it like a troll king hiding under his hill. There it was again, come to life once more in Johannes's quavering tones.
Erik's parents ... why couldn't they have just loved him? I thought, watching Johannes and Lilli as they sat under an enormous oak with spread-out branches hanging green and heavy. They were making crowns of pink clover. A few boys strolled by, and seeing Johannes with a girl, made catcalls. He ignored them.
You couldn't love Erik, a voice came back, cold and clear in the midsummer heat. When you told Raoul that greatly abridged story on the rooftop, all you could talk about was how horrible his face was, how cruel he had been to you. You had Raoul ready to take up arms and descend to the cellars himself, ready to kill him. Yes, Erik was cruel, brutal beyond belief, especially at the end. But once there was a child, a tall, thin, terribly ugly child who wanted what all children want, love, someone to sit them on a knee, someone's arms around them. By Providence, or an act of nature, that child was gifted with a peculiar intelligence, a remarkable sensitivity, a terrifying intensity. He could compel the will of men, but he could not compel love, and the more alone he felt, the more repulsive he became, until loneliness and repulsion almost destroyed him.
Philippe cannot leave Johannes, especially now.
Back home, Johannes and Lilli explored all through the house together. Genna wanted to tag along, but she soon fell back, baffled by the wall the two of them erected against everything else. "They make up games I can't play," Genna complained. "They use words I don't understand. And they won't explain them to me."
"Never mind," I said. "Come out to the garden with me, and we can help Cook pick raspberries. You can squeeze in all the places among the bushes that she can't."
"That's right," Genna crowed. "She's too fat!"
"Oh, Genna," I sighed, secretly laughing inside.
Every night we travelled to Neverland. It took us all week to read through till the end. In the final chapter, Peter comes back long afterward to find Wendy grown, her little daughter Jane in the nursery bed in her mother's place. The children heard me read the right words, the ones penned by James Barrie, but my heart spoke these:
She had to tell him.
"I am old, Erik. I am ever so much more than twenty. I grew up long ago."
"You promised not to!"
"I couldn't help it. I am a married woman, Erik."
"No, you're not."
"Yes, and the little boy in the bed is my baby."
It was right out of that dream of the early spring, when Erik came to lie with me. My voice cracked, the wriggling stopped, and two frolicking little puppies turned to girls as they joined Johannes' and Lilli's intent stares. I looked at the blossoming faces gathered around me on the big nursery bed, and broke down in tears.
"Grandmama," Lilli said, "it's not that sad. So what if Mama Wendy doesn't get to go back to Neverland? Jane gets to go, so it's all right."
Gay and innocent and heartless, as Barrie says. I felt like you, Erik, stabbed through by poignant, careless, and entirely innocent lack of heart.
o o o o o o o o o o o o
I blinked stupidly when Erik told me we were going out for a carriage ride. Yes, there was a world beyond these snug rooms. What did this mean, did he trust me now?
"Where?" I asked.
"To the Bois de Boulonge, around the circuit a few times."
"That will be pleasant," I said, thinking of Sunday afternoon rides in the bright sunlight, the women with plumes or great bows on their hats and their white dresses shining in the sun, the men all stiff in grey afternoon dress, with their light-colored silk top hats. Then I remembered, when Erik took me down here, it was in the dead of winter. Was it still that season, or now spring? "But won't it be cold?"
"The carriage is enclosed," he said. "Do you think I would take you out in the cold air and risk endangering your voice? I will bring a scarf, and wraps as well."
"So it is still winter," I mused.
He brought to me a huge bundle covered in thick paper.
"My fur," I said, amazed, as I untied the bulky package and peeled off the crinkly brown enfoldment. "How did you get it?"
"I sent a man to fetch it from the apartment."
I stared at it wildly, suddenly licked with flames of guilt.
"Your worthy Mme. Valerius is fine," Erik said quickly in his most brisk and authoritative voice. "She rests assured that you are with your Angel of Music."
A sad, cynical laugh burst out of me. "Simple soul. She would never to think to ask why someone who dwelt with an angel would need a fur."
He wrapped me in the long beaver coat, his hands lingering a little too long on the soft ruffled hairs. Then, fascinated, I watched him affix the odd partial mask that he used to travel about in the world above. He applied a little spirit gum to secure to his face the gutta-percha nose with a silky black moustache underneath. "You are staring at my whiskers," he said. "I cut some of what little remains of my hair, and wove it on. If I can spare some more," and here he laughed bitterly, "my new mask will look even better. I'll have sidewhiskers as well."
"I thought we were to have no more masks," I remarked.
"This is necessary, if we do not wish to be conspicuous. I am making a far better one, Christine, soon you will see it. I can wear it about all the time, and you won't be able to tell any difference." Then he applied greasepaint to his cheeks and around his eyes, to even up his skin tone. With a scarf and a wide black hat, he looked almost like someone who you would see on the winter streets of Paris, but still shockingly ugly. In some ways this disguise was worse. When he was unmasked, he was singular, monstrous, remarkable. With his false nose and makeup, he was in some ways more an object of horror, because his face was so close to a normal one, yet different in a dozen small disturbing ways. He looked not only dreadfully unattractive but aged as well, which I had never noticed when he sat before me unmasked.
"How old are you, Erik?" I asked.
He wouldn't look at me. "Fifty-two."
I said nothing.
"You think I am old, too old to love you."
It had never occurred to me. The first-place National Conservatory student in my graduating class was a dark little Parisienne with a soprano like Vienna crystal. She had married the professor in charge of the vocal program, disappeared into a beautiful villa southeast of Paris, and never sang onstage again. He was fifty-seven, and she twenty. In the world of talented young singers, May often married December, and no one thought anything of it.
"Love isn't a matter of age," I said quietly. "It's whether two hearts beat towards the same end."
He sighed heavily, and something went through me, pity for his lonely ugliness, pity for myself for sharing it. Not desire, for I had not again felt a twinge of desire for him since that night I fancied him a handsome noble hiding under some thrilling mask of concealment. But the heart can vibrate with pity as well as desire.
So well had he accustomed me to staying in my room while he opened his front door, that I headed there automatically. To my shock, he said, "You're going in the wrong direction." Then, more amazing, he walked over to that great slab of stone, and fiddled with a small mechanism that I had thought was some kind of doorbell that never rang. He reached behind it, flicked a switch, and the massive block slid aside easily. A cold burst of air smelling faintly of algae wafted in. Through that opening glimmered the faint whitish glare of very dim gaslights bouncing off the surface of the lake.
I stared at that opening. He put on his cloak casually, relaxed, and then drew on some leather gloves, and picked up a walking stick with an ivory ball on the end. My fur was warm, and a faint sheen of sweat accumulated on my lip. I could have walked right through that opening, but did not.
He gave a little impatient shrug. "What are you waiting for, Christine?"
"Nothing," I said, confused. "I don't know."
"You test my manners," and he made an exaggerated, elegant gesture towards the door. "Ladies first."
I stood on that stagnant shore, helpless, looking for the boat, but it was nowhere to be seen.
"It's time you began exploring the depths here. Come, I'll show you a far quicker way to the upstairs than you traversed when you first came to visit me."
We walked through a long straight corridor that ended in a thick old iron gate. From his pocket he drew a massive key, sculpted and ornate, and after several tries, he got the gate to swing open for him. "It does not always want to open, even for Erik," he said. "Then sometimes it opens by itself, a most temperamentally strange door."
He showed me the key, making as if to hand it to me, and then quickly snatched it away from my grasp when I reached for it. I glimpsed a little face carved into the handle, a smirking satyr with vine leaves twirling through its hair. "The chatelaine keeps the keys to the house," he said in a sly voice, "not the guest. If I were to let you go, and you were to come back to me, this is the route you would take."
To let me go. I had almost forgotten such a thing was possible. "It seems so easy. Why do people not find it, and come looking down here?"
"Virtually everyone has forgotten that this gate even exists, and should they remember, they would have no way to penetrate it. I have the only key, and you see it before you. If I knew you would return to me, I would give it to you, and then you could come back and see Erik, and help him finish his opera." His voice shook with emotion. "But we can speak of this later."
The long and twisted passageway that followed took us directly to the Rue Scribe. I had no time to look around at the strange and entirely entrancing fairyland of Paris, glistening at night under a fat golden moon. He bundled me quickly towards the waiting carriage, as if afraid I would be seen.
It was a gentleman's brougham, with wheels conspicuously painted bright red, although the vehicle itself and the shadowy driver were all swathed in deepest black. Apprehension seized me, because I associated a carriage ride with stiff mourning clothes and a handful of earth thumping against the outside of a coffin. My last trip in a brougham was when Professor Valerius died, when one conveyed Mama and myself to the cemetery for his internment.
"To the Bois de Boulogne," Erik told the driver. "Around the outer circle, behind the ractrack." Erik didn't offer his arm to me, but instead blocked me from behind with his body. Perhaps he thought I would bolt after all. I clambered awkwardly into the finely appointed carriage on my own.
Our conveyance was fine but small, seating only two, and both facing forward toward the driver. I nestled into the luxurious cushioned seat, my skirts crowding up against Erik sitting stiffly beside me. Then he leaned across me with his long arm, and started to pull the blinds down on my side. His arm brushed my breast like a breath of wind that barely stirs the tree, and he jerked away abruptly, dropping the blind cord. He groped for it but the grommet on the end was impossible to find in the dark.
"Never mind that, I want to see," I protested. He sighed and pulled his own blind shut. I breathed deeply. The interior smelled of leather and the oil used to lubricate springs and axles, the cold night air, and a smoky, musky cologne which Erik had dabbled on his person.
I stared out at the brightly lit boulevards. No child seeing his first Yuletree all bedecked in candles and silver paper stars enjoyed the sight of that street as much as I. Out and about, I felt like a fairy captive who had been in the enchanted land for months or years, but who to the outside world had been gone only days. I sucked the frigid air into my lungs as if it were the draught of life itself.
It was still winter. The remnants of a recent snow collected in the corners between buildings and staircases. Everywhere else, the crowds churned it to a light slush. The white bobbing faces of the passersby looked like icy, glaring masks, not like people at all. I suddenly felt disoriented and afraid. "How long?" I asked, fighting rising panic. "Erik, how long?"
"Two weeks," he said in a flat voice.
Two weeks. Surely I'd woken and slept more than fourteen times. I couldn't count, couldn't remember, and stared out the window like a sleepwalker.
There were many years when I asked myself, why didn't I scream out the window for help? True, the driver was in Erik's pay and might not have assisted, but when the carriage sat unmoving, waiting to proceed through the intersections of the boulevards, I gaped at the view like a peasant coming to Paris for the first time. More than once we passed brightly uniformed policemen, and I regarded them as another part of the scenery rather than potential rescuers. The inside of the brougham door had a latch that kept it secured, but to open it would have been a simple matter of lifting the lever and kicking the door open with my foot. Any sign of a man struggling with a lady trying to exit a carriage would have caused a great stir on the street. Yet I did nothing.
We turned onto the broad avenue that led into the Bois de Boulogne. Even though it was dark, many carriages crawled slowly around the concourse. We passed by a group of four or five women trying to attract the attention of carriage-riders, and I looked away, embarrassed. I had only been to the Bois during the day, never at night. It wasn't the same cheery Sunday promenade.
We turned off the main boulevard, heading towards a dark and heavily wooded section of the park where the gaslights didn't penetrate. "You've been here before," I commented.
Erik, normally so voluble, shifted uncomfortably in silence. A few lights shone from the racetrack, but the path along which we slowly crept sheltered under a thick gloom of bare branches that arched overhead like buttresses in some lonely, forsaken cathedral. He started tapping his foot rapidly, which made the carriage floor vibrate.
"Stop that, Erik," I said.
Like a rebuked child, he became entirely still. Then he said in a low voice, "Christine, have you been happy these past weeks?"
Had I? Like a distant memory of childhood, one that forms before words and thus leaves little mark on the mind, I recalled curses, shouts, blows, and his body on mine, followed by a snarling face with huge square teeth almost pressed into my face. A thick cocoon of well-being swathed those unpleasant recollections. Tea eased my pain, his fire warmed me, conversation entertained me, and quiet restored me. Little did I know that the worm stirring within swaddling silk would soon enough emerge as a death's-head moth with wide dark wings, bent on rampant destruction.
"Is the canary in the cage happy?" I asked.
"When it sings."
"Then I cannot sing, for only the males do that."
"What would make you happy? What makes a woman happy?" he sighed, twisting his gloved hands. Then he rapped sharply on the carriage with his walking stick, signalling the driver to stop near a little copse of trees, off the path. I couldn't see out his window, as he kept the blind down, but through mine the entire section of the park looked deserted. "I insist that you tell me, because I want your happiness above anything else. That's what I've tried to show you all this time. Hasn't Erik done his best? There's nothing Erik hasn't given you, nothing."
"My freedom," I whispered faintly, not even knowing what that was anymore.
He heard me, for he echoed, "Freedom. Who among us is free? Are we free of the accident of our birth, our country, our language? Are we free of the accident of our face, of our voice," and here he laughed richly, cynically. "Are we free of our appetites? Yes, the Church would like us to think so, with little fables of saints who lived on nothing but communion wafers, or men who never hungered for a woman's touch. We rent something we call freedom, but it is always obtained at the expense of another, one who pours her blood into us and expects something in return, something better than bitter disappointment. No woman who bears a child is free, and no child born of woman is, either."
I sat back and looked out the window. A carriage approached, and as it passed us, Erik shrank back into the shadows. The moon shone right through the windows of the moving vehicle. Outlined in sharp silhouette sat a large, wide-shouldered man in a top hat. Silvery light etched the hint of his double chin above his high collar. The woman with him had on a plumed hat, and she sat very close to the man, almost draped across his broad chest. Their driver slowed a bit as they passed us, and the man turned his head slightly to get a better look inside, but his face was entirely black, surrounded by a bright circular halo of moonlight. A pause, and then they clip-clopped on.
When the sound of hooves receded into the night, Erik relaxed. "So you see," he went on, as if the others had not passed us at all, "Erik does not offer you the illusion of freedom. Were you to continue singing at the National Opera, you would tread on a mill from rehearsal to performance to reception and back again, until when? Until you ended up like that great former and now-broken war horse, La Carlotta? She is finished, she knows it. She will wind up in a furnished room somewhere, teaching watery brats how to hit C above the middle, if she's lucky.
"I know your heart, Christine. You poured it out to me in your dressing room, when your miserable Erik was only a voice in the darkness, and you opened up to me, when you trusted me then without question. I heard your complaints about the stultifying, rigid vocal education you received, how before I manifested to you, your voice was in danger of failing entirely from strain and abuse.
"You told me how tired you were, how little you earned for how hard you worked, and how much pressure you were under to find yourself a special friend, a protector. You dodged men in the hallways, you said, and hoped that the lock on your dressing-room door would hold. Could you tell how enraged I became when you said that, when I thought of you at the mercy of some unscrupulous man who wanted only to exploit you, to wrap himself in your charms for a little support? Why do you think I forbade you to even think about men and their ways? It was all for you, my concern to protect you and keep you safe. Admit it, Christine, the theater is not your life. You have said so many times yourself, when we talked after lessons. Nor is your life caring for an old woman out of guilt and obligation."
"I don't know what my life is, anymore."
He tapped the side of the carriage again, and we jolted to a walk. Erik twisted his shoulders towards me, leaning forward, imploring. "Look, take these hands, they're gloved so you will not shudder. Erik offers you not only a refuge from the stage, if that is truly what you want, but peace and protection as well. It's very simple, really, to keep Erik happy. Loyalty is all he requires, Christine, not even love. Erik does not ask for love. But I think that love could grow, if you gave it time. You aren't afraid of me, are you, anymore? Be honest, because Erik knows if you lie."
I let my hand lie like a dead thing in his. Even through his thin leather gloves I could feel the chill. "I'm not afraid of you anymore, it's true."
"And didn't I say that would happen?" Insistent, leaning forward, the false nose almost touching mine.
"You did, I admit."
He leaned back with a satisfied sigh. "Then why do you doubt me when I say that even though you do not love me now, you will?"
"Because it's not my experience," I said.
"And what vast experience of love is that?"
I thought of tender, nervous Raoul in the garden at Perros, erect in his uniform, warmly kissing my hands. The silk on his upper lip was barely perceptible, and it made me want to stroke it with my finger to see if it was really there. There was that terrible new shyness, something foreign that overshadowed the memory of our silly games, but powerful too. It flew in on soft brooding wings of longing that fanned me with regret when he jaunted away up the road. He looked back to wave, hair white in the sun, and then he was gone. "Nothing," I said. "I know nothing of love."
The moonlight glittered on Erik's eyes, making them glow like candle flames in the dark ruin of his face. What experience of love had I had? Some caresses that fueled years of fevered imaginations, fantasies that never came to fruition. Raoul went to the naval academy that summer, and it was as if he had died at sea. Papa shut me up in a room with him the two years before he died, and it's as if I wasn't in Paris at all. Not that it mattered, for when I walked to and from the Conservatory, it was if I was encased in a block of ice, or veiled like the women of Algiers. I wanted nothing to do with men or their glances in my hard, rigid little heart.
That fall so long ago, that fall of 1880, the ice of my heart melted in that sweet autumn when I found my secret. Something strange and poetic and best of all, real, real as houses and streets and the cab-horses whose flanks I loved to stroke, had come to me, and me alone. If it sounded like fantasy, it was nothing new to me to love a fantasy. For years Raoul was a memory that haunted the furrow of my nights, while in the sunlit hours I gave up dreaming that he would write, much less come back and seek me out. My soul waited expectantly for a miracle and prayed for it to descend like a dove out of the wide-split heavens. I wanted to be in love, and if anyone asked me then, I would have said I was in love, but with what I could not tell. With a faceless, bodiless voice. With a spirit. With a god.
Then I glimpsed Raoul in an opera box one evening with his broad, brooding brother, and the tinkling crystal fantasy crashed, fractured, to the marble floor beneath. Now, I sat in a silver-lit carriage in the middle of the Bois, feeling cold and very grown-up, sharing in the weight of Erik's age.
His voice jerked out of him, abrupt, petulant. "I've taught you other things than how to sing."
"Such as?"
"Tell me about these two weeks with me. Tell Erik what you learned."
I closed my eyes, suddenly weary. It couldn't have been only two weeks. Searching for a single memory, nothing appeared except the glow of lamps under rich red or green shades, the fire that never ceased or banked, the sounds of harp or piano.
"Nothing, Erik. It's as if I did nothing."
He crowed triumphantly. "How do you feel now?"
"As if I'd been on vacation in the Alps for a month. As if I'd taken a rest cure. Not that I've done either of those things, but they say they're invigorating." For it was true. "But one can't do nothing forever."
"Of course not," he said impatiently, waving his long black hand. He rapped for the driver, who stopped at the entrance to the Bois. We had come full circle. "Open the door, if you wish."
"What?" I said, staring at him.
"You're free to go, or, if you desire, I can return you to Mme. Valerius's apartment."
"Erik, why?"
"Because you're no longer afraid of me, and you learned what I wanted to show you, while you stayed with me. You have seen my face and lived, and I think you will even come back if I ask you to."
A woman came up to the carriage, hat askew, face brightly painted, but when she saw me she made a disgusted motion with her hand, and walked off.
"There's that, or marriage," he remarked in a cold and off-hand way. "There's nothing in between."
"That can't be all," I said.
"Or the nunnery. Although I hear these days that they require a terribly large dowry, unless you want to be a lay-sister laundress washing wimples the rest of your days. Shall I deliver you to a convent, Christine? I would even provide the money, if you wished, because I would hate to see those beautiful white hands ruined with scrubbing instead of folded in prayer. You want freedom, but even a wife or whore are freer than the inmates of the nunnery."
I shrank at the coarse word. To the woman who peered in our window, or to the men in black who clustered in the foyers of every theater in Paris, I was no better than one. Warmer, better fed, better dressed, but under the skirts, no different.
The black carriages slowly paraded by, more leaving the Bois than entering now. Women moved around the periphery of the drive, perhaps sensing their last evening's chances passing them by. The woman with the crooked hat climbed into a berlin with two men.
"So what do you offer, Erik, if not the convent, or serving as a nursemaid, or a life of dissipation?"
He grew pale under his flesh paint, and he made a little choking sound. Then he opened his window and leaned his head out, calling to the driver, "Back around the outer circle."
The wind had died down and I snuggled warmly into my fur. It had taken the last of my savings, and a little of Mama Valerius's as well. Practically every woman above the level of chorus girl had a fur, but I was one of the few to have earned mine with my own voice, rather than on my back.
"Thank you for fetching my coat," I said. "I don't know how I could have managed without it."
He rested his hands on the sleeve, and I didn't pull away. Then he took off his gloves. "Please," he said, and I felt a little sick. Now, is this where it starts? He rested his bare hand on the fur, and I saw how white it was in the moonlight, but not the same kind of white all over. There were spots on the back of his hand, unlike the spots older people have. These were larger, rougher-looking. The tips of the fingers on his left hand were thickly calloused, from fretting the violin. His nails were short and scrupulously clean, the knuckles wider than the fingers themselves. He didn't press on my sleeve, but held his hands aloft on the tips of the fur, running them back and forth gently, caressingly. I felt nothing. Had I not seen those spectral hands caressing the dark glossy brown silver-tipped with moonlight, I would not have even known they were there.
"It's beaver," he murmured, "but a cheap one. You deserve sable, Russian sable. Have you ever touched it? The pelt is thick and short, almost blue in its blackness. It's dear in Paris, but in St. Petersburg it's common as beaver is here."
"You're a man of means, then, Erik? For even in St. Petersburg, I imagine one needs many kopecks to obtain one."
"Ah, we're down to the negotiations. Since it doesn't sound like your Mme. Valerius is quite up to it, and since your Papa is conducting a concert for the worms six feet under, of course I must negotiate with you. Is that something that matters to you, that I have some wealth? Not as much as the old noble families, of course, but then again, seeing that I am the son of an artisan, we wouldn't expect that, would we?"
My eyes stung at the mention of my father. "I hate all this talk of money and marriage. It's all the bourgeois girls think of. There's no love in it."
"Back to love again, I see. If love is your measure, then I have more love to offer you than all the men of Paris combined. Don't wave your hand at me, for Erik is tired of that promise, it bores him and he no longer feels constrained by it. I can offer to buy you for a certain number of francs a year, as you rightly observed about the bourgeois, or I can offer everything I have to you, and you have no idea what that entails now, Christine, no idea at all. For instance, you have seen for yourself the work of my hands, and heard the work of my heart, but I have not yet shown you the work of my mind.
"So rest assured, that yes, a sable coat for a beautiful woman is not going to get Erik in trouble with his bankers, and that I would let you lack for nothing, especially love."
I sat back, reeling. This wasn't exactly a proposal, not yet. "But I don't love you. And you can't buy me with a sable coat, not that it would keep me warmer than this one, anyway."
He sighed, low and deep from the chest. "There's no love for Erik in you at all? Then why do you sit here still?"
"I don't know," I said simply. "It's warm, and I like to talk to you."
Shifting nervously, as if he found no comfortable position, he said softly, "You know I would die for you. If I had no hope that you would never, could never love me, I would have no life left at all."
"That's foolish. Don't talk like that."
"I'm weary of living. Fifty-two years, especially when so much of it was spent sleeping in tents or on the ground, is a long time. I have been all over Asia and Northern Africa, and I've seen terrible things, wonderful things, sights that would bring blood to your eyes. Sometimes I want nothing more than to take my manuscript, lie down in my bed, and fall asleep without waking. I could do it, I know elixers to make one sleep as if dead, or stay awake for days, or drift in a dream halfway between the two. I can end life entirely without pain, with just a simple slip into sleep. I'm alone, Christine, there's no one and nothing left for me, and the one man I thought was my friend ... didn't Shakespeare say that, if a man sheds blood with you then he is not only your friend but your brother? oh, that man is no longer my friend, no longer a friend of Erik's."
"I don't know Shakespeare. You know I can't read English. Perhaps you should make up with this man, if he's your only friend. Besides, Erik, it's where you live. How can you have friends, living in a cellar?"
"Perhaps I shall not have to live in a cellar anymore. Perhaps, just perhaps, there might be a reason to emerge." This he said with such convincing pathos, that a rip of pity went through me.
The full moon went behind a large over-arching stand of trees, and darkness filled the inside of the carriage. We swung around a lake with a small island in the center. Fat little putti, frozen in marble, shone white in moonlight as colorless and cold as Erik's face.
"Who do you think those men were," he said, "riding around the Bois at this time of night?"
"No different from us, I imagine, as we're out at this time ourselves."
"Little innocent. If their moustaches are thick, they're men with wives at home, wives who know nothing of their late-night expeditions until the doctor discovers in them the itch that has no cure." He stretched his hand out towards the little lake. "As all of Paris is my witness, there is more love in my heart for you than in all of the married men of this city, in all the hearts of those in this great Babylon on the Seine combined. You will find my heart entirely given over to you, as if I had ripped it out of my chest personally. I would kill myself before even thinking of another woman besides you. Very few men in Paris can make that promise, and fewer still can keep it."
"There are faithful marriages," I protested. "Not all men are like those that roam the corridors of the theater."
"Yes, and ours will be one of them, were you to accept me."
"Accept you? Are you suggesting that we be engaged?"
He spat out low laughter. "I don't believe in engagements. Did you know, Christine, that what we think of as the marriage ceremony is actually two parts, and that it is the first part that makes the true marriage? The man and woman make promises to each other, and the man gives the woman a ring. They give themselves to each other in body, and then there comes the public celebration, the elevation of the couple before society. But the ring, the promise, and the joining of bodies make the marriage. The rest is social posturing, the elaborate ritual of the Church, which feels it must intrude into everything. Think of it as a secret marriage, if you like, a marriage between us until we can go before the altar."
He must have divined my expression, for he went on, "Oh, I will marry you in the Church if you want, Christine, why not, why not the Madeleine itself? Would you prefer that? Does such a marriage seem more real to you? I have a nuptial Mass that I have already outlined, and the Madeleine's choir could no doubt do it justice. We would take out announcements in L'Epoque, and all of le touts Paris would come with their wives and marriageable daughters. It would be the society event of the season ..."
"Stop," I held up my hand. "You mock me, and I don't like that. Further, you mock marriage."
"You mock me," he retaliated, and once again I felt the full weight of his age. "I don't mock marriage. They mock marriage," he cried out, waving his arm at a few slow coaches on their way through the Bois. "I get down to fundamentals. You have heard my heart's work, and you know I strip every emotion, every action of unnecessary sentiment and boil it down to the bone. This is the living bone of marriage I offer you, because Erik offers you the living, bleeding bone of marriage to go with his weeping, breaking heart, both for you to take in trust as your own. Look," and he fumbled in his pocket, bringing up a little velvet box. "This represents everything. All of it, do you understand?"
"Don't shout, please," I begged.
He thrust it into my hand. His own ungloved ones were like blocks of ice, and I jumped. He moaned pathetically, but I could not bear to meet his glance, so instead I stared at the little box's velvet outside for a long time. The moonlight washed all color out of it, leaving only darkness. When I looked back up, tears ran down Erik's face, and he shook like someone dying of cold. I started to shake too.
"What is it?" I whispered, but I knew.
"Open it," he said. "Open it if you dare."
I pried the top open, though when my shaking fingers slipped, the top snapped shut on my finger. Blinking away tears, not wanting to cry out, I pried it open again. Inside was a thick gold ring.
"Pick it up," he said. "Feel it, test it, weigh it, see what I give you. It represents everything material I have on this earth, money, all my goods, the work of my hands and heart and mind, every last scrap of furniture, everything I have ever created. It represents my promise to you, that it is I who loves you, and will never, ever leave you."
I placed the ring in my palm. It was thick, thicker than a wedding band normally was, and not only deceptively heavy for its size, but softer than it should have been, round and honeyed. Even in the moon's rays it glowed with a gentle yellow luminosity. "What is it made of ? I've never felt anything like it."
"It's gold, unalloyed by anything. Normally the king of metals is mixed with silver or copper to make it hard. But this ring, Christine, is pure, 24 carat, and that's why it is soft and shines with a luster that you almost never see, because the addition of baser elements diminishes its opalescence. Yes, it will crack as it ages, and it can even break or bend, but so will your poor Erik become even more cracked and damaged than he is now. That won't matter, for we can have it polished, just as if you accept me, you polish away the flaws and cracks of this man who loves you."
The ring warmed itself quickly in my hand, and I caressed around the edge, shivering. It felt like a living thing in my palm, no longer cold, waiting for my finger to penetrate its buttery softness.
"How did you know the size?"
"When you were indisposed, you drank herbal tea and closed your eyes before my fire. I measured your finger with a thread while you slept."
"Can I still sing on the stage, Erik?"
"With my permission, if I think it is a suitable role worthy of your talent, and if you are in good voice. I will care for you, Christine, and with me you can become a great singer, if you wish, or you may rest satisfied as my muse. I, Erik, am a man. But the angel of music has indeed filled you with flame, and will do so again, if you let me care for you. That is the essence of my promise. That is what your father would have wanted. Can you imagine what he would have said, had he heard you sing Marguerite at the gala so long ago? Would he have given you over to me, could I have asked him for you? I think he would have, yes, I think that would have been his fondest desire, the apogee of his hopes for you."
He sat in the corner of the carriage, so tall his hat almost grazed the top of the interior. I thought I had grown a scar over that tender place Papa left behind, that place so raw with sorrow, sweetly smelling of pipe tobacco and violin rosin and the straw in my hair, of the sounds of the bow across catgut, squeezing me with beauty until the tears came. Apparently not.
Papa, I cried out in my heart, I don't know what to do. Choked with emotion, I slipped the ring's heavy density back into the jewelry box.
"I need some time," I said in a low tone. He moved his face close to mine, and I thought, this is madness, if he tries to kiss you you'll shrink away, you can't help it. Oh, God, why did You have to make Erik so ugly? Father Damien kisses the lepers of Molokai with affection, washes their sores, and even shares his pipe with them. As for me, even the thought that Erik's mouth might touch mine makes my lips curl in protest. Gloved in the most supple leather, his hands still repulse me.
He didn't kiss me. Instead, he unsnapped my beaded bag and slid the jewelry box in. "Perhaps you will tell me tomorrow," he said quietly. Then he leaned back and opened the window to speak to the coachman. "Where shall we go, Christine? To the Opera, to Mme. Valerius's apartment, or perhaps to that convent?"
As I closed my eyes, dark-stained walls slid into view behind my lids, their rough surfaces covered with brown-striped paper streaked with water. The floral pattern on a worn hand-knotted rug no longer disguised the spilled tea stains. I heard endless prattle, meaningless tears, perennial clacking of the rosary beads, babble about spirits and miracles and the smell of roses wafting off the manure-clad feet of some peasant girl. I'm so weary of it. So weary. Swallowing my guilt, I said, "What will happen to Mama Valerius? I can't leave her high and dry."
"She will be provided for," he said simply. "Erik gives his word."
"To the Opera," I whispered.
(continued)