Chris Bohjalian - Secrets of Eden

And there were the cars with their fins and the convertible my mother had loved when I’d been so very small and remembered now only in terms of its inviting red leather seats and how invigorating the breeze had felt in my hair in the summer. And there were my sister and me. In prams. In matching bathing suits (but never gold-sequined). On, I have to assume, Amanda’s first day of school: I am beside her, looking up at her, and my face is a combination of longing and awe. She has a lunch box and a small backpack that is shaped like a monkey. Curious George? Perhaps, though I have never had any recollection of either of us having had a special fondness for those yellow books, and when I asked Amanda about it, she was characteristically evasive, clutching her memories close to her heart. I was pleased that her hair had been brushed before school. Our mother was mercurial, and some mornings she simply couldn’t cope-all the energy she had expended the night before battling with our father would leave her a rag doll-and our hair had been rats’ nests.

Ah, but in the evenings? That was when both of our parents would experience their strange and unpredictable transformations-their all-too-frequent transmogrifications. They were vampires. Werewolves. The night changed them. But they didn’t instantly become monstrous. Often there was, first, those long hours of celebrity-like glamour. That night in Brooklyn, I held the stem of my wineglass between my fingers and gazed at a slide of my parents arm in arm on their way to a black-tie dinner, my father in a tuxedo and my mother in a strapless gown that shadowed her collarbone. They were in control-of their lives and of their emotions. They were in charge. They could have been movie stars.

In that image they were standing in front of our house on a summer evening, the convertible with red leather seats parked in the portico just to their left. One of our magnificent weeping willows is over their shoulders. When we sold the house, my aunt told me, the roots of those trees were just starting to burst through the cement floor of the cellar. She thought this was rather funny, an indication in her mind that Amanda and I were getting out of the house just in time. Although in hindsight the violation of the structure from the inside out and the bottom up can only be viewed as a metaphorical sledgehammer, it is nonetheless telling.

But there was one more detail to that aging Kodachrome slide that caused me to sit forward on my couch and then, a moment later, to put the wine on the floor and approach the sheet. To actually run my fingers over the cotton. To press it flat, to understand if what I was seeing was merely a wrinkle in the fabric or an illusion caused by something behind the sheet. A picture hook in the wall, maybe, or a dimple in the Sheetrock. What was there? What was drawing me to the makeshift screen I had hung on a wall in my tiny apartment? There in the window of my childhood bedroom, standing in profile and gazing down at the corner of the room in which I knew had once sat my small white bed-absolutely oblivious to the slide picture being taken outside the house-was an angel. I could see the tips of the wings, her shoulders (and she was a female angel), and the hair the color of corn silk. I could not see her face because of the angle.

Angels demand nothing from us but faith, and I should have known then that there was no reason to doubt the image on the wall. I had been saved by an angel five years earlier: What grounds had I to mistrust what I was seeing now? Why should I have wondered that she had been looking out for me even then, when I was a small child? But I did wonder, I did doubt. And that was my mistake. I took the slide from the carousel to see if I could see the angel on the actual slide. I turned on the lamp by the table, pulled off the shade, and held the slide near the bulb. Of course the angel was gone. Evaporated like a splash of water from the concrete lip of a swimming pool under a hot summer sun at midday. When I placed the slide back in the carousel, there was no longer a trace of her. The window was dark, and that little girl I had been long ago was, once again, all alone in that bedroom.

THERE WERE MOMENTS when I was fascinated by the way Stephen’s fertile mind worked. One morning when I awoke, he was still beside me in bed, but I could tell that he had been awake for a while. It wasn’t quite seven-thirty, and the sun was turning the seraphim in my chandeliers the color of pearl. I burrowed into his chest and asked him what he was thinking, expecting perhaps an account of a dream or an analysis of the independent film we had seen the night before at the Angelika. He pulled me against him and said simply, “There were no secrets in Eden.”

I liked the idea that we were alone in my bed and he was contemplating Eden.

“No,” I agreed, “there weren’t. What made you think of that?”

“Eden? Isn’t it enough that I have a beautiful woman curled up beside me?”

“Thank you. And I’ll accept that my presence was a part of the inspiration.”

“But only a part.”

“Yes.”

I rested my hand on his heart and watched it rise and fall on his chest.

“Genesis is a blunt instrument,” he said after a moment. “Especially the story of Adam and Eve. The symbolism is pretty heavy-handed. Obvious.”

“Is a sermon forming in your mind?” He shook his head. “No. I was just contemplating what an arduous burden a secret is. If I were the storyteller, I would have spent more time in what had to have been that nightmarishly stressful period between when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge and when God confronted them with what they had done. Just imagine how oppressive the wait must have been. There the two of them are, cowering in the garden, just waiting to be discovered.”

“Genesis isn’t known for character development.”

“No. But the beauty of Adam and Eve’s nakedness? It’s that they haven’t any secrets at all. Not a one. And maybe that’s the magic of Eden-and what we’ve lost forever.”

There was a ruefulness to his tone that was endearing. It made me want to hold him-and be held by him-forever.

I HAD THE sense that the investigators wanted to find parallels between the ways my parents and the Haywards had died. Why not? It was, in part, those rudimentary similarities that had drawn me to Haverill that first July afternoon. But as I learned more and more about the Haywards’ marriage, I was reminded that even batterers and drunks have their distinctions and quirks. The biggest difference, it seemed to me, was that although my father’s behavior was indefensible-and I am not even referring to the reality that in the end he would murder the woman he’d married-my mother was no picnic to live with. She drank too much and had a tongue that was poisonous. She could be desperately loving with Amanda and me, but she seemed to take pleasure in the ways she could verbally emasculate our father. I remember the first time I saw Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , I thought it was a home movie.

From what I learned about the Haywards, Alice had spent her life trying her best not to antagonize the beast that was her husband. My mother, on the other hand, was poking hers with a sharp stick. That doesn’t excuse the fact that my father would hit her. It isn’t a justification for homicide. But the auras of both of my parents were sad and grim in ways that were unlike the auras that must have shrouded George and Alice Hayward and kept their particular angels at bay.

I WAS IN a vintage-clothing shop on lower Broadway when Stephen called me on my cell phone. I was in the dressing room-a dark and musty little cubicle with a fraying curtain the color of subway-track muck-wondering if I was still young enough to pull off a sleeveless black sheath from the 1960s or whether it made me look like an amazon. I was in a very good mood, a little giddy even. It was late afternoon, and when I saw that it was Stephen causing my phone to chirp, I may even have allowed myself a little extra sigh of contentment. We hadn’t been apart long, but already I missed him madly, and our tentative plan was that he would return to Manhattan that weekend and stay with me. We had ruled out my coming to Vermont until he had a better sense of whether he was capable of resuming his duties in the pulpit. The idea that he was continuing to live in the parsonage though he was no longer serving as the minister was a source of great consternation to him. I don’t think his parishioners cared then-though they would soon-but he did. It was one more thing, it seemed to me at the time, over which he felt needless and un reasonable guilt. Already he was looking for a place he could rent in Bennington.