Andrew Byar began his experiment in the garden, going out in the dusky evenings after the help had dispersed for the day, after the cook had served the last meal and washed the china and departed to catch the final trolley, after the gardener had arranged the tools in a gleaming, orderly progression against the shed walls, had carried the remnants of the weeding to the mulch pile at the edge of the grounds, and had tended to the orchids hung like lanterns from the trellis—that was when Andrew Byar went outside, the house behind him lit like a great ship, his wife and grown sons moving through their evening rituals beyond the panes of glass.

It was June, the air fragrant with jasmine, honeysuckle, and mimosa. Catalpa blossoms burst like stars in the trees; their delicate custard scent infused the violet air. Andrew walked to the shed, stepping quickly, almost stealthily along the path, as if he were a thief and not the owner of these three verdant acres in the heart of Pittsburgh, high on a bluff overlooking the flatlands on the opposite shore of the Monongahela River. There, his steel plants roared all day and night, bright as beating hearts, glinting in the distance like piles of burnished coins.

At the shed door he turned on the flashlight and stepped into darkness rich with the scent of raw wood and linseed oil and fresh, damp earth. He made his way to the workbench. Beneath it, shoved in a corner, was a wooden crate once used to ship fresh persimmons from the sea coasts of Japan, now buried under blankets. Dust billowed in Byar’s narrow beam of light, and the smells of mildew and oil flew up as he dragged the crate to the middle of the room. He slid the lid off and groped inside for the strongbox hidden beneath a pile of old magazines, limp and yellowed. The box, smooth steel, was wrapped carefully in layers of oily rags, which fell in a soft pile by the polished leather of his shoes. He opened the latch with a tiny, intricate key he took from the inner pocket of his coat.

A ten-ounce bottle, fashioned of brown glass, was cushioned in a cloud of cotton. Ubiquitous, it might have held iodine, or smelling salts. Andrew Byar balanced his flashlight on the bench. He took a test tube from his pocket and carefully poured a clear liquid from the bottle, filling the vial to a line marked near the top, then stoppering it with a cork. He put the brown glass bottle back into the box, nestled the box into the rags and beneath the wilting magazines, and slid the crate back to its position beneath the bench, the moldy blankets. Flashlight in one hand and the test tube in another, he went back outside, striding past the swimming pool and down the gravel path between the camellia bushes laden with rosy white flowers, until he came to the trellis where the orchids hung.

Here, he paused. From this clearing the house was visible only in pieces through the trees, magnificent elms and oaks and sycamores hundreds of years old, rare remnants of the virgin forests felled a century before to build the city. He stood watching for a moment, glimpsing the glassy light and shadowed brick amid the leaves, imagining his wife in her evening bath, plush towels on the floor of Italian marble and rose petals scattered on the water. Recently, her hair had begun to gray, and each week a stylist came to the house and left her gilded, as pale and ornately framed as a mirror. Still, in her expressions, her slowing movements, Andrew Byar faced his own age. His two sons were home from college for the summer, apprenticed to the steel factory, which he had built from nothing and through which he had made his fortune. They were indolent young men, handsome and spoiled, and he had no confidence in them. This summer they had brought friends, steady rivers of young men and women whose bright laughter flowed through the house, who studded the tennis courts with their flashing limbs and shouts, who draped themselves over benches, sofas, armchairs, who swam laps in the natural spring pool or splashed in the shallows or drank martinis at its edge. Andrew avoided them and slept poorly, waking from nightmares where his empire, built at such sacrifice and with such canny skill, constructed so painstakingly from the hours and sweat of his whole life, had been frittered into nothing as they played.

The test tube in his hand had warmed until it seemed to give off its own heat. Andrew held it up, trying to discern if a faint glow came from within, or if this was merely a trick of the scarce evening light. The single brown bottle hidden in his shed had cost more than his pool, more even than the private train carriage fitted out with velvet and gold in which he traveled to New York City once a month. Yet if this liquid was, as he believed, an elixir of life, then no expense was too much, no cost beyond consideration, even if it cost him the earth.

He took the cork from the test tube. Slowly, carefully, drop by drop, he poured the liquid evenly into the soil around the orchid.

He stood still before the trellis then, until the darkness was complete, until the crickets and frogs filled his head with a frenzied singing that seemed near madness. Then he slipped the empty tube into his pocket and went home.

In this way his evenings passed for one month, then another. By day he was, as usual, consumed by business. He drew up contracts in his office or strode along the catwalks over the burning furnaces, while below men worked, shadows shoveling and hefting and shaping long bars of steel. The heat from the red-hot metal pleased him, as did the intricate dance between machinery and men, and he looked forward, too, to the end of every week when the accountant brought the production figures to his office high above the plant, sliding them across the mahogany desk in a black leather folder edged with gold leaf. Andrew Byar, born poor in Scotland, was a self-made man, and proud of it. He believed in the power of his own personal will, and he believed in science. Pittsburgh in the 1920’s was a pulsing city, powered by great machines and fabulous inventions, and if soot sometimes fell from the air like dark snow, if the rivers grew choked and black, then Andrew Byar believed that science would find solutions. Already electricity had displaced the dangerous hiss of gas, the awkward churning of steam; in decades to come the city would gleam, a bright metropolis, sunlight scattering and refracting from the mirrored surfaces of a million well-oiled moving parts.

All made, of course, from steel.

Byar had profited from his keen understanding of new technologies, as well as from his instincts for risk and innovation. He trusted people less completely, knowing as he did about human frailty and failure—how many men had died in his plant through a single careless action, after all? How many times had a widow appeared in his office, begging for money to feed her fatherless children? He gave it, always, taking care to explain each time how the accident might have been avoided. Thus wise in matters of human failure and culpability, he had given his gardener a camera with instructions to photograph the orchid in the garden every morning at precisely eight o’clock. Memory, with its unexpected currents, its tendency to favor hope over facts, was not something he would trust. Each day the gardener came into his study and put a manila envelope on his desk, and each day Andrew Byar dated this envelope and filed it in the oak drawer of his desk without opening it up.

At the end of the second month, when his family was in Europe, he locked the door to his study and took the sixty-one sealed envelopes from the drawer. Clear morning light poured through the windows which ran floor to ceiling along the wall behind him. He hung the photos one by one, in chronological order, against the opposite wall, securing each to the plaster with a bit of tape. By the time he reached the last, his hands were trembling. Still, he was methodical, careful, precise. Not until the final photo was hung did he step back to survey the whole.

What he saw astounded him. He had begun with an orchid whose flowers were sparse, a plant well past its prime. Yet, nourished by this experimental liquid, the plant had flourished so profusely that change was clearly visible from one photo to another. After only a single week the orchid had burst its pot; twice more in these two months it had done the same, and now it was as large as a bush. Blooms cascaded from stems grown so long that they draped themselves over one another, trailed against the ground. He went immediately to the garden, where the orchid hung from the center of the trellis, its blossoms living jewels. He touched their waxy white petals, their deep purple hearts, with awe. What had been ordinary had become something from another world, a place more fertile and profuse, a place of unending plenty.

All day he was in a state of euphoric agitation, distracted in his morning meetings, pacing the factory grounds and glancing at his watch, willing the slow hours to pass. At last, evening began to gather, and he went home. He dismissed all the help and sent his car for Beatrice. Wear white, he instructed in a note, folding the dense paper once, imagining her at her dressing table, the dark words discarded amid her bottles of perfume. She would be late, he knew. Spirited and capricious, she would take her time; perhaps she would not come at all. He had seen her first one morning at dawn, an errant, early-rising guest floating like a petal on the invisible and mysterious currents of the pool, her pale skin almost iridescent.

Dusk was softening the edges of the world. Impatient, unused to idleness, he arranged the setting carefully to pass the time, carrying a white wrought-iron table and chairs to the expanse of soft lawn. It was a night garden, bordered by low clouds of white alyssum. Moonflowers opened as Andrew worked, releasing their faint scents of lemon into the darkness. He hung the spectacular orchid from a low branch of a sycamore tree, each blossom like a candle in a chandelier. In a crystal bowl filled with water he placed white lilacs and camellia blossoms, so that the table seemed a part of the garden and yet appeared to float above it, too, to be suspended, hovering as bright and fleeting as a wish.

At last he heard her footsteps, rustling the gravel. And then he glimpsed her on the path, as pale and slender as the stem of plant. Her white dress had a diaphanous layer, making her both vibrant and undefined, amorphous. She wore a fitted hat, close as a caress against her skull.

“What is it?” she asked, laughing, her lips cool against his own. “I can’t wait to know. What is your surprise?”

They sat at the table. Andrew Byar pulled an unlabeled bottle from the canvas bag on the grass, the old glass smooth and undulant in his hands.

“This wine,” he said, “is two centuries years old. A case of it was discovered on the bottom of the sea, part of a shipwreck off the coast of France in 1718. For all those decades it lay beneath the waters, and when they brought it up it was still intact. Think of it, Beatrice—the grapes which made this wine grew in the world when the garden where we sit was nothing but wilderness.”

Beatrice smiled, intrigued, he could tell, and curious. It was the same look she had given him when she climbed out of the pool at sunrise, her skin so pale against her lavender suit, water streaming from her limbs, and found him standing there, watching her and waiting.

The cork crumbled; he poured the wine and raised his glass to hers.

“To the lost past,” he toasted. “And to our future.”

The rare vintage tasted darkly of burnt oak; it was dry, not bitter, with a trace of cherry. Marvelous, Beatrice murmured. When their glasses were empty, Andrew reached into the canvas bag and pulled out another bottle, which he put on the table beside the first.

“This one has a label,” Beatrice observed.

Andrew smiled. The night air was as warm as breath. “Yes,” he said. “It’s the most recent vintage from the same vineyard in France where the first wine was made.” He turned the modern bottle, keeping his eyes on her face. “Of course, in another two hundred years, when this bottle is opened, almost everything that is living now will be dead.”

“You puzzle me,” she said, and looked away, and he remembered that despite her youth she was sensitive to death; she had lost her only brother to influenza.

“Yes,” he said, “it is most depressing, I agree. But Beatrice, what if you could live to drink this wine?” He put the bottle down and took her hands. “What if, in two hundred years, we could sit in this garden again, just as we are now, and open this bottle together?”

She laughed, and her laughter struck his silence like waves and fell away.

“I don’t understand you,” she said.

He stood then, and pulled her up. He showed her the orchid which had been so withered, now profuse with life. The year was 1922, and the Curies had transformed plain earth into something rare and unimagined. A secret of the universe had been revealed, and a restless world dreamed of transformation. In drugstores everywhere were special toothpastes, hand creams, bath salts, liniments, chocolates, all laced with radium, promising miracles. In factories across the country, women painted luminous faces onto clocks, licking the tips of their brushes to keep a fine point, tasting a bitter metal from the heart of the dark universe. The era was affluent, and most people could afford to have a little radium, but only a man as rich as Andrew Byar could have all he wanted. Radi Os. He whispered the name of his elixir, running his fingertips over the vial in his pocket. When he told Beatrice what the bottle had cost, she gasped. And when he poured the drops into her second glass of wine and his, this wine from grapes vanished for two hundred summers, she drank.

Paradise lost, he thought leaning back in his chair. Pale flowers opened in the darkness, amid the rising sounds of insects, and the wine warmed his throat, hers.

Paradise lost, now found.



Andrew had called the car, it was waiting when Beatrice finally left the house, sitting quietly as a shadow by the gate. She walked, listening to the night sounds of crickets and wind in the leaves, and the harsh crunch of the stones beneath her pale satin shoes. Her eyes would not stay down, she looked up into the night sky with its endless wheeling, scattering stars. Her father had a telescope and had tried to teach her the constellations, taking her to the roof of their own great house and pointing out, with infinite patience, the belts and flames and streaming hair, the cups of stars brimming over with night-darkened sky. She had studied it to please him, but she could never see what he was so intent on showing her. Celestial navigation, he explained, a science of the air: whole fleets had traveled with only these stars for guides. Beatrice stared until her eyes ached and stars burned phosphorescent against her closed lids, but even then the patterns eluded her. Often, just as she felt on the verge of seeing the stars coalesce into a shape, they seemed to swell, spilling over into rivers, shattering like a handful of rice strewn across blacktop. Her father sighed and put the telescope away. He could not imagine that his only living child would not share his love and aptitude for science.

The driver had the window rolled down. His cigarette ember made a bright arc as he reached to start the engine. Beatrice paused to tell him she would walk—the night air was so lovely—then passed through the gate into the street. Her footsteps were solid and lonely on the city sidewalks. The vast grounds of the estate rose wild and tangled beside her; a soft breeze stirred the diaphanous wrap she wore across her shoulders. The night was so dark that the random stars seemed nearly within her reach. Beatrice flung her head back to gaze at them, joy cascading through her flesh. She felt like a star herself, pale and radiant, as if every one of her cells were burning bright, as if she gave off her own particular light into the universe.

This feeling was something new: perhaps, though not certainly, it was the consequence of Andrew’s elixir. When he put the drops into her wine, she had stopped laughing out of respect, though privately she had remained amused. She had drunk out of curiosity and politeness, repeating the formal, nearly silent exchanges that held their passion like a vessel, but also being true to a vow she had made to herself. For Beatrice was involved in an experiment of her own, one that had only tangentially to do with Andrew Byar. The wine had tasted old, of worn oak with a trace of mold. She let it linger on her tongue, imagining those vanished grapes, but she had tasted nothing out of the ordinary, not even the tinge of salt from all those decades beneath the sea.

It was not until later, after they had finished the wine and were walking along the rock path through the white garden, that it began. Moths, luna and sphinx, skimmed through the shadows and lit on the moonflowers, lifting their slow wings. Near the house, a bed of white nasturtiums seemed to flicker and spark. Beatrice slipped off her shoes and waded into the pool, a natural spring shaped by stones. You look like a water lily, Andrew said, and she glanced down at her dress, its hem soaked now and darkening. She smiled and pressed her palm to his cheek. He caught her hand and kissed it, his lips against the shallow concave below her fingers, his breath in the palm of her hand. She felt it then for the first time, how her flesh, where it had been touched by his, seemed to pulse with light, transformed, but she blamed this sensation on the wine, the starry light, the strangeness of the moonstruck garden. They walked across the grass. She stumbled, and he caught her arm, and she felt it again: the splay of his fingers like rays of sun on her skin. Inside the house, it was no different. Light trailed from his fingertips and marked her flesh, light soared through her like a comet in his bed.

Now she turned onto the avenue of stately homes, the white wrap slipping from her shoulders, her hair falling loose down her back. It was an extraordinary night, the air soft and warm, a caress. She heard the car following her in the near distance, and as she passed through the familiar gates of her father’s estate, less grand than Byar’s but magnificent all the same, she turned and waved to the driver, who looked straight ahead at the empty road and pretended not to see her. Then, still smiling, she followed the tree-lined path to the back garden, where she sat on a bench by the pond. On the rooftop her father’s telescopes stood in a line, and beyond them, the stars.

Beatrice was twenty years old and beautiful, and she had made herself this promise: she would never be used, she would always be free. She would follow her heart wherever it might take her, and in this way she would discover her own true understanding of the world. It was an experiment as daring as Andrew’s, as full of uncertain hope, though to those who knew her she was merely wild, spoiled, a girl whose family had never recovered from the death of her older brother, that young man of great promise who had survived the war only to die of influenza eight months later in the room where he’d been born. Three years ago, this was. Beatrice had been seventeen, and when the doctor emerged from her brother’s room to break the news, she had felt her world splinter, like glass cracked and held only tenuously in its former shape. Her mother had collapsed, weeping, and her father had bent his graying head, revealing a vulnerable place at the back of his neck, reddened by his collar. Beatrice, however, had not moved. She had not dared. What had been held together, logical and orderly, was suddenly unbound. Her brother, whom she had loved, who had taught her to ride a horse and sneak to the train tracks to flatten pennies when the engines roared past, this brother with his pale hair and paler blue eyes, was suddenly, mysteriously gone from the world. Why? she demanded, turning her fierce anger on the friends and relatives and clergy who came to visit in the days and weeks that followed, but they shook their heads and could offer no answer more complete than the natural order of the world, a pattern fixed in place, preordained, divine.

Beatrice had been a dutiful girl, receiving the world and the rules of her society as true and inevitable, just as one accepted the moon rising or the servant girl bringing clean clothes into her room at dawn. However, she could not accept this. Walking the paths of the estate at all hours of the day and night, remembering her brother’s laughter and the touch of his hand and the way sunlight made his pale hair look white, she began to question everything.

She began to push the limits of her world, too, tentatively at first, then more urgently. She was steadfast against the hue and cry which resulted, utterly determined to step beyond the strictures she had known. But she was not cynical. More than ever, the world seemed full of mysteries she could hardly comprehend, and the visible fell like a veil between herself and something else, something glimpsed at unexpected moments—a white curtain rising from an open window, or leaf shadows playing on the tiled floor of her room—images that layered and gathered, inexplicable but powerful. Yet her intuitions could no longer be contained by the structures she had accepted all her life, and this discovery made her feel breathless, as if she stood on the edge of an abyss, even while the world around her went on much as it always had, knit back together by the ordinary day-to-day. Don’t you see, she wanted to shout, at her father bent over endless figures of steel sales and her mother arranging flowers and the cook cutting a hundred biscuits out for tea. Don’t you see that everything has changed?

Had they looked up, she would have explained that the rules were like a net: they could not hold the fleeting thing they sought to capture. But no one did look up, and Beatrice slowly understood that she must discover the truth of the world on her own. And so, she decided, she would. She would embrace every experience; she would discard all preconceptions; she would see every moment as an open door, and she would step through each one wide-eyed, without fear.

Thus, when she emerged from the pool, water glistening cool on her pale limbs, and saw Andrew Byar watching her, transfixed, she had smiled.

And thus on this night, when the leaves stirred behind the hydrangea bushes by her father’s house and a figure emerged, tall, dressed in black, invisible except for his hands and face shining out to her like beacons, she smiled once more.

“I thought you were never coming,” she said, tranquil.

“I waited here for hours,” the young man complained, sitting down beside her, taking her hand. Light shot through her; she thought of Andrew Byar and his garden.

“Poor Roberto,” she said.

He was a distant relative of her mother’s, come from Italy for the summer. Ostensibly to study, but she knew her father was seeking someone suitable to take over the business when he died. He had never considered asking Beatrice to do so, something which had not troubled her until she perceived that the rules of the world were light and hollow, easily knocked aside. Idly, she wondered if her father’s decision might change if he knew that she was going to live forever, and she laughed.

“It is not funny,” Roberto said, speaking in a formal, lilting English that she loved. “All day I have been dreaming of this time with you, and then you do not come. It is insulting.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and she was, though she was not regretful. “I was called away unexpectedly. There was no way to inform you.”

“Called away to where?”

“It’s not discussible,” she said lightly. “It is my own affair entirely.”

He did not answer. She felt his presence beside her, dark and churning. The old Beatrice would have hastened to soothe away his anger, but now she sat quietly, waiting with interest to see what would happen next.

“I am in love with you,” he said, angry at having been forced into this admission, or perhaps at the feeling itself. “I don’t want to lose even a moment of our time.”

She put her hand to his cheek, as she had earlier with Andrew. Offended still, Roberto turned his face away. Beatrice let her hand fall to her lap, wondering for the first time if what Andrew had claimed might be true. She had not really considered it, what it might mean to be ageless, to live outside of time. To explore every facet of the world, to follow every passion to its depths, because she would not have to choose one over another.

“What do you think?” she asked Roberto. “Would you like to live forever?”

“I have done so already,” he replied at once. “Each moment you are gone is an eternity to me.”

Beatrice laughed then, delighted by the way all doors opened to new places. Impulsively she kissed Roberto, sliding her hand behind his neck and her tongue into his mouth, where it bloomed like a flower struck by light.



Summer grew rich and dense, and then, subtly, it began to wane. A few leaves drifted to the ground, and overnight the dogwoods turned flame red. In his garden the orchid still flowered profuse and opulent, and elsewhere, in his car, Andrew Byar splayed his long, hard fingers on the custom-built walnut desk. The city was a rush of lights beyond his open windows, and from a distance came the roar from the steel plants, humming night and day. Recently, he had ordered a new furnace, determined to best his competitors, richer and more famous than he. They were old men now, men whose time of building and creating would soon end.

His, he believed, would not.

For two months and five days he and Beatrice had been drinking the Radi Os. It had become a ritual, and as with any ritual there were rules, intricate ceremonies which had taken on their own life, and which must not be broken. Each week they met in the garden, even though his family had returned and sometimes moved, visible, beyond the panes of glass. The alyssum had grown brittle, and the moonflowers had wilted, and the magnificent orchid would soon be moved into the greenhouse in anticipation of an early frost. Capricious still, as beautiful and willful as ever, Beatrice nonetheless joined him at the table each week, watching seriously and silently as he placed the drops into her glass. Any wine would do by now, any sort of dress, but they each assumed the same position at the table as they had on that first night, and they knew without speaking that they must finish their drinks in a single swallow. Dusk, it must be, though dusk came earlier now.

Sometimes they went inside afterwards and sometimes Beatrice merely rose and disappeared into the shadows. The eager talk of their early days, the chattering comparisons of change—flesh that quickened, fingertips that trembled—had given way to a pensive silence. They touched less and less often as the new sensations grew; even the most casual union was almost more than they could bear. One kiss, and his lips hummed for hours. A brush of their fingertips, and his hands carried her warmth, her imprint, like a brand.

Like a brand. It was so. Before the experiment, Beatrice had been a flicker on the edge of his mind, a pleasure, a reward, laughter falling amid the flowers in his garden at the end of the day. It had pleased him that she was the daughter of a significant rival, that she was pliant and easy, slipping so carelessly into his bed, apparently removed from any of the strictures and concerns that governed other women. A wild child, a free spirit, and he had chosen her because of this. Strangely, however, now that they had been sealed together by this secret, now that he saw her regularly and might go on doing so for decades or even centuries to come, she never left his mind.

Indeed, he had become obsessed with her, with her indifference. Here, after all, was the rarest gift, and he had given it to her alone, to Beatrice. Not to his wife with her gilded hair, not to his indolent sons, not to anyone else but Beatrice. She had been surprised and pleased and curious; it was true that she came faithfully each week to meet him. Yet not once had she expressed joy or wonder at having been so chosen, and lately this had begun to trouble Andrew Byar. He had given her this gift: why, then, should she still withhold her heart? Yet Beatrice remained as she had always been, amused and curious, but strangely distant, as if her own life were a book she was reading, one she might put down at any moment in order to gaze out the window at the sky.

Andrew’s expectations had been so fully disappointed that he found himself regretful of the future. What if, in the uncountable days that lay before them, he became completely disillusioned with her? What if his companion turned out to be a woman he despised? The orchid thrived, cascading gem-like blossoms; released from the prospect of death, however, Andrew Byar’s feelings for Beatrice were withering into dust. He saw her now in the harshest light, and became critical of the tiniest habits of her being: the way a muscle flickered her cheeks when she stifled a yawn or a smile, the irritating motion of her throat as she drank, her persistence in murmuring the foolish slang of the day whenever she was moved or delighted by the world.

In a decade, he wondered, in a century, would her quirks move him to violence? A life sentence, he mused: the phrase had taken on new meaning.

Yet at the same time he could not get enough of her. More and more often he dispatched his driver to seek her out, and more and more often she was not to be found. Her aloofness made him brood, it made him angry. He would cut her off, he thought sometimes, awash in anger, sitting alone in his great office, trembling with this unfamiliar inability to accomplish what he wished. Science had been Andrew Byar’s life, yet science had not prepared him for this. Not for the rage he felt upon learning she met others, in the garden of her father’s estate or on the rooftop or in the cars of trains. Not for the longing and misery which welled up to replace the rage, a depthless yearning which was what had driven him, finally, out in his car to confront her on this night.

He pulled into the circular drive before her father’s house. A maid, fluttering and startled when he asked for Beatrice, explained that she was in the roof garden. Andrew brushed away her attempts to have him sit and wait. He strode across the foyer, following his instincts up the wide, curved staircase to the second floor and the steeper one to the third, where he discovered the open door and the ladder that went to the roof. He climbed, emerging into the crisp night air. Urns of flowers and small trees had transformed the rooftop into a park. Benches and tables offered places to rest and view the glittering cityscape below. Beatrice stood with her head bent over a telescope, her hair cascading over her shoulders, as the silhouetted figure beside her pointed out the belt of Orion, the Big Dipper and the Little, the flowing tresses of the Coma Berenice. “Surely you can see them,” he exclaimed. He was wearing a hat, and he gestured at the stars with a folded newspaper. “Why, they are as clear as if I had drawn them there myself.”

“Let me look again,” she soothed. Dark hair slipped across her cheek, and in that instant Andrew Byar’s anger faded. He understood that he could never deny Beatrice, any more than he could deny himself. What had begun as science and desire had become something more, something as essential to him as life itself, so that seeing her in this intimacy with a stranger, involved in a world of which he knew nothing, made him catch his breath in pain.

At this the two looked up, startled, from their telescopes.

“Andrew!” Beatrice exclaimed. Her father—for it was her father, Jonathan Crane, with his shock of white hair falling over his eyes and an old man’s spotted hands—took a single step and said, “Byar, what the devil are you doing here?”

“I came to talk to Beatrice.”

“Uninvited,” Beatrice said sharply.

Jonathan Crane looked swiftly from one to another, his spare white beard cutting the air.

“Well,” he said. “Beatrice is right here, as you see. Whether she will speak to you, I cannot say. But in any case, you may be of some assistance to me, Byar. Come here, and have a look. Beatrice insists that there is no order in the sky. Tell her, if you would, that she is wrong.”

“Perhaps not wrong, exactly,” Byar demurred, crossing the roof. Beatrice was staring at him; he felt her gaze like the sting of a slap. “Perhaps she prefers the stars to remain unknown.”

“Perhaps I see my own patterns,” she replied. “Perhaps I seek new patterns altogether.”

“The world is as it is,” her father said. “Come, Byar, have a look.”

Andrew leaned over the telescope, gazing up at a familiar sky. When he finally stood, the old man was studying him with a gaze both unremitting and intent, reminding him of the many meetings at which they had faced each other just so, opposed on issues of steel production or charitable trusts.

“Orion,” Andrew said, for the order of the stars was clear to him, and he could not see the point in saying otherwise. “And the Big Dipper, hung from the North Star as if from a hook.”

“There, you see, Beatrice?” her father said. “Even your secret lover can find the constellations.”

Into the shocked silence which followed, the old man spoke again. “Yes, I know,” he said. “All except for your intentions, Byar. Beatrice visits you, in secret, or so she presumes, every week. At those meetings you give her a glass of wine. Sometimes, she goes inside with you, and sometimes she does not. I am her father, and I am asking what your intentions are.”

Andrew Byar stared at his old rival. How had he been discovered so completely? His next emotion, however, was pure fear. For he had understood, in that moment when he emerged onto the roof and saw Beatrice, that desire had its roots in the possibility of loss. He understood, too, that if Beatrice were not present to solidify his belief, to confirm his confidence like light confirms a shadow, then belief might disappear from him entirely.

“This is my own affair,” Beatrice was protesting, her voice clear, but trembling with anger. “You do not own me, either one of you, and you have no right to be discussing me like this.”

“But I want to answer,” Andrew said. Carefully, he explained the experiment to her father.

Jonathan Crane whacked the folded paper against his palm.

“Ridiculous. Your ideas are nonsense.”

They began to argue then, worrying the properties of radium as they had once exhausted the properties of steel. They argued with such ferocity and passion that they forgot Beatrice entirely. It was her father who noticed first that the quality of silence had changed; the rooftop with its intricate tile and urns of flowers was empty.

“You see how it is,” he said gruffly, interrupting Byar. “She has gone. She chooses to ignore us both.”

Beatrice was near enough, standing just beyond the doorway, to hear her father say this. She did not wait for Andrew to reply. How little they understood, she thought, descending the ladder and the flight of stairs to her rooms. How much they took for granted, and chose not to see. She had never made Andrew any promises; he had mistaken her silence for complicity, that was all. The experimentwas no more her passion than were the distant and abstract patterns of the sky. Why be limited to seeing the stars as bulls and goats and scuttling crabs, when from another vantage point—from, say, the moon or Jupiter or Saturn—they might resemble something else entirely? Or beyond even that, within another way of perceiving, within a new framework of thought, a person might discover patterns beyond what her father or Andrew Byar or anyone else imagined. They did not, after all, have the slightest insight about the mysteries of her own heart. Why, then, should she trust their vision of the world?

Well, she would not. It did not take her long to pack a suitcase.

The house was silent. Roberto had proposed to her, and in the wake of her refusal he had in turn refused her father, turning his back on the steel trade and returning to Padua to study botany. I am free of you now, he had written on one terse postcard, and she had considered this for a moment before she wrote on the bottom, Your freedom brings me joy, and sent it back.

One suitcase, but it was heavy. She lugged it down the stairs and through the marble-floored foyer, grateful for the murmuring of the fountain, which masked her footsteps. Outside, Andrew’s car was waiting. The driver started the engine the instant he saw her in the doorway. Well, why not? Beatrice thought, though she had intended to call a cab. Tonight she would accept a ride—yes, why not? The driver tossed his cigarette into the gravel and got out to put her bag in the back. Beatrice slid across the cool leather seat, folding her hands on the walnut desk, inhaling Andrew’s peculiar scent: cologne and cigars and an underlying whiff of steel. The liquid in his little bottles was odorless, but the car was filled with the aromas of money and autumn air, close counterparts, somehow. To the station, she instructed, and the driver pulled away. She glanced back at the house, wondering if Andrew and her father were still on the roof, discussing the stars or the stock market or her own stubborn nature. No matter, really. She would take the first train, wherever it might go. She picked up Andrew’s pen. Across the production figures, which he would see as soon as the car returned to fetch him, she wrote in bold black letters, My freedom brings me joy.



Beatrice traveled for nearly a year, to Boston and Chicago, New York and Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Stories of her wildness rippled in her wake, how she drank too much and danced barefoot in the snow and took lovers with careless abandon. Scandalous photos appeared in the society pages: Beatrice with her slender arms around one neck or another, the delicate rise of her breasts visible beneath her risqué dresses. Beatrice dressed up like a man, dressed up like a bear, wearing a corona like a star. She was always laughing, but people noted that her wildness had made her thin, had lent a feverish quality to her eyes. They watched Andrew Byar slyly, too, commenting on how gaunt he’d grown, waning like a moon in her absence. Or perhaps it was the strikes, which had begun just after the new furnace arrived and three hundred workers were laid off in the name of progress. In bloody protest, whole production lines had shut down for weeks, rendering meaningless the neat projections across which Beatrice had scrawled her liberation.

On the verge of summer, the stories of Beatrice’s escapades suddenly ceased. The photos stopped. Her father made discreet inquiries, only to discover that no one had seen Beatrice since a party at an estate in the far reaches of the Adirondacks a month earlier, where she had danced frantically, people said, frenetically and without ceasing. She was there, dancing, and then she was gone. Just like that, disappeared, though no one had thought too much about it at the time. Perhaps she had stepped out onto a terrace for a breath of air, perhaps she had gone for a stroll.

No one had seen her pause on the side of the swirling room and light a cigarette. Or they had seen her and had not noticed, for the party was wild and everyone was drinking, and in the kinetic mosaic of the evening Beatrice was only one more fragment of color. She drew the smoke in deeply, watching the flash of arms and ankles, the beaded dresses glinting. Then she slipped through the French doors onto the terrace, closing them behind her, so that the visual intensity of the party was separated from its noise, which came to her distantly now, muffled. She inhaled again, folding her bare arms against the night air. She had begun to smoke at some point, in Chicago, she thought it had been, where a young man had left his cigarettes on a table and she had slipped them into her purse. Chicago or Boston or New York: this was one discovery, that it really didn’t matter. Whatever truth she’d been seeking, trying on the laughter and the costumes and the men, she simply had not found. One by one she’d discarded them, and now she stood here, at a party that was real, but also unreal, a place that was not her own. Her Pittsburgh life was lost as well, no more now than a dream. She had heard rumors of the strikes, of course, and through them rumors of Andrew. She had seen his photograph twice, and noted how he’d aged. Strangely, she found that she missed the meetings in the garden, so secret and exhilarating. She missed even Andrew and her father, for without their orderly views of the world to work against, to define her, the freedom she had gained had fallen flat. The room beyond the glass doors swayed and pulsed. Beatrice threw her cigarette, still smoldering, into the wet grass, and walked alone to the lake.

It was dark. Waves lapped at the shore. She slid her shoes off and waded to her ankles in the frigid water, so recently ice. In recent weeks the sensations of light had slowly left her, replaced now and then with mysterious shooting pains which came and went and finally came and stayed. In motion, she did not feel them, which was one reason she lived as she had. She squatted down and cupped the icy water in her hands, listening to the distant call of loons. A flash of white on the opposite shore caught her attention. She looked up, then held herself as still as the water, searching the line of trees.

Maybe it was nothing, or maybe nothing stranger than nasturtiums glinting sparks in the dusk of Andrew’s garden. But it seemed to Beatrice that she glimpsed her brother, standing as naturally amid the trees as a deer, one hand in his pocket and his head tilted at an angle, the forest at his back. For a long time, until her legs ached and began to tremble with the exertion of stillness, she did not move. When she stood, he was gone. But she was convinced that he had been there, that she had glimpsed something vital through these trees. Barefoot, still, she left the lake and followed him.

It was a near-wilderness, and night. In the house, people laughed and sang and fell asleep on sofas even as the music played, ices slipping from their hands. Days passed before her disappearance was discovered. Two weeks before search parties were dispatched, and yet another ten days before Beatrice was found, not by anyone looking, but by a group of boys attempting to become Eagle Scouts. Thin as a leaf, her clothes torn and dirty, she was sitting on a rock by a stream. She did not seem at all surprised to see them. “Oh, hello,” she said, standing and brushing dirt from her hands. “I’ve been wondering when somebody would come.”

The boys clustered around her, astounded. To them she seemed like an enchanted creature, a deer that spoke, a shaft of light assuming human form. They were afraid at first, hesitant to offer her their arms. The unplanned hike back took most of a day, for the boys, inexperienced, were forced to stop often and consult their compasses. Also, Beatrice was weak. She walked slowly, and at first she walked in silence. After a few hours, though, she began to tell them stories, fantastic stories, of her weeks alone in the woods. Later they would argue over them, agreeing on the details but never the whole. She had eaten the earth, she claimed, she had broken open maple trees no bigger than her finger and drunk the rising sap. She had stood in a shockingly hard rain, water dripping from her fingertips, from her hair, and watched a herd of elk move across a clearing. She had been following her brother at first, sighting the glint of his hair one moment and the flash of a limb another, but in the end he had disappeared, and she had been left alone. This she did not tell the boys, fearing it would frighten them, as it had frightened her, to hear of the dark nights she’d spent, sleeping on moss or pine boughs, the nights so pure black that she couldn’t tell, finally, if the darkness was coming from within her or without. As it was, she frightened them, anyway. Her arm was no more than a living bone beneath their hands as they helped her across streams and over fallen logs. They imagined a dark forest of the heart, the pulse of blood and weave of branches, and they let her go as soon as possible.

Beatrice saw the fear in their eyes; she heard them saying, later, that she had lost her mind. In the wake of this derision she grew silent, aware that she could never explain how solitude, so unfamiliar and so perilous, had altered her forever.

In his great house on the bluffs, Andrew read of her rescue. No longer well himself, he spent most days in his sunny office, going through his papers, or sitting in the solarium with his wife. He studied the brief story on the back page which chronicled Beatrice’s emergence from the forest, leaves woven in her hair, dirt ground into her dress.

When she returned to Pittsburgh, he went to meet her at the station. She stepped from the train, dressed simply in a white silk skirt and a gray cashmere sweater. She was very thin. She is dying, he thought, which is what Beatrice thought, too, when she saw Andrew standing on the platform, as hunched and gray as a comma. Her heart swelled up with sadness, as well as with a sudden, inexplicable love. She knew as vividly as if she had seen it herself that the orchid was withered in the greenhouse, its flowers gone, its very leaves and stems marked with burns. She was twenty-one years old.

“I loved you,” Andrew whispered as she passed him. “You must believe me, Beatrice, I chose you out of love.”

“No,” she said. She spoke evenly, for her fear and bitterness had faded during her weeks in the forest. “It was not love between us then, never enough love from either you or me. I was your experiment. And you were part of mine.”

They did not speak again, though within months they were living in the same sanatorium. What they had observed in one another was terribly true: they were dying. Geiger counters clicked and chattered on their breath, voicing the disintegration of their cells. The slightest touch raised bruises, the color of pale lilacs against thunderclouds, on their arms. The families came, bearing flowers, wine, books, news, the small comforts of the day-to-day, and if they passed one another in the halls they averted their eyes: whatever connection had existed between Andrew and Beatrice was ignored, as if ignoring might erase it.

One afternoon, when everyone had left, Beatrice stood, filled with an insatiable restlessness. She must move. The staircase was grand, built of hickory and curving down to the main floor, where French doors opened onto the gardens. It took her half an hour to descend. Outside, the grass was warm, thick, springing up beneath her bare feet. She felt a wave of pure astonishment at its texture, as if each blade pressed separately and softly against her flesh.

No one was in sight; the sunlight was a warm hand, moving and returning. She thought of Andrew, how solemn he had been as he put the drops into their glasses, how deeply he had believed in—had depended on—the certainties of science. She had never shared his belief, but she had no regrets. It was not, as some argued, misguided love or self-sacrifice or the whimsical nature of a young girl’s heart that had brought her to this moment. She had been no vessel for another’s dreams, no casualty in Andrew’s single-minded pursuit of scientific knowledge. It had been life she wanted, life she had embraced, no moment lost or left unexplored, no light or darkness left unseen.

Beatrice paused to rest on a ledge of stone. High up in the brick building, a curtain flickered in a window, lifting for an instant like a veil. I create the universe, she murmured, knowing it was in some strange sense true, for she understood now that the world was a shimmering place, shaped anew in every instant by the mystery of perception, each atom in constant if invisible motion. Except that suddenly for Beatrice the motion was visible. The earth beneath her feet felt as volatile as ocean waves, and the transitory beauty of the garden, the subtle shifts and alterations of even the boulders, left her breathless.

The wind lifted. Branches hummed, and then the stones began to groan, resonant and strange. All around her borders dissolved, spilling trees and flowers from their shapes; the air was stained with color. Within herself, beyond herself, there was this swirl and glitter: this was the wondrous and terrifying knowledge she had gained. Beauty, too, and even a coherence in the way her thoughts themselves were splintered, coming to her in layers and rushes: her brother’s bright hair and the feel of a horse about to leap beneath her, her father’s reddened neck and the scent of baking biscuits floating through the house on a rainy day. And Andrew’s face in his luminous garden, so solemn and so full of hope. The elixir of life, he was saying, and now the stones were speaking, too, a chant reverberating through every cell of everything, living and inert, a sound so powerful that even her own body began to blur and lose its form, cascading into the unstill world like petals falling, like water shattering, like every minute particle of light.