After brunch, which we ate in the room, I pulled Beryl’s manuscript out of the knapsack while Mark looked on in disbelief.
“Is that what I think it is?” he asked.
“Yes. It’s exactly what you think it is,” I said.
“Where in God’s name did you find it, Kay?” He got up from the table.
“She left it with a friend,” I answered, and next we were propping pillows behind us, the manuscript between us on the bed as I told Mark all about my conversations with PJ.
Morning turned into afternoon, and we did not step outside the room except to place dirty dishes in the hall and replace them with sandwiches and snacks we ordered sent up as the spirit moved. For hours we said very little to each other as we turned through the pages of Beryl’s Madison’s life. The book was incredible, and more than once it brought tears to my eyes.
Beryl was a songbird born in a storm, a ragged bit of beautiful color clinging to the branches of a terrible life. Her mother had died, and her father had replaced her with a woman who treated Beryl with scorn. Unable to endure the world she lived in, she learned the art of creating one of her own. Writing was her way of coping, and it was a talent enhanced like artistry by the deaf and music by the blind. She could fashion from words a world I could taste, smell, and feel.
Her relationship with the Harpers was as intense as it was deranged. They were three volatile elements forming a thunderhead of unbelievable destruction when they finally lived together in that storybook mansion on its river of timeless dreams. Gary Harper bought and restored the great house for Beryl, and it was in the upstairs bedroom where I had slept that he robbed her one night of her virginity when she was only sixteen.
When she did not come down to breakfast the following morning, Sterling Harper went upstairs to check and found Beryl in a fetal position, crying. Unable to face that her famous brother had raped their surrogate daughter, Miss Harper battled the demons of her house with troops of denial. She never said a word to Beryl or attempted to intervene, but softly shut her door at night and slept her fitful sleep.
The molestation of Beryl continued, week after week, less frequently as she got older and finally ending with the Pulitzer Prize-winner’s impotence, brought on by long evenings of hard drinking and other excesses, including drugs. When the interest from his accumulated book earnings and family inheritance could no longer support his vices, he turned to his friend, Joseph McTigue, who focused his kindly attentions and skills on Harper’s precarious finances, eventually making the author “not only solvent again, but wealthy enough to afford the finest whiskey by the case and cocaine binges whenever he pleased.”
According to Beryl, after she moved out Miss Harper painted the portrait over the library mantel, a portrait of a child robbed of innocence, intended unconsciously or not to torment Harper forever. He drank more, wrote less, and began suffering from insomnia. He began frequenting Culpeper’s Tavern, a ritual encouraged by his sister, who used those hours to conspire against him with Beryl on the phone. The final blow came in a dramatic act of defiance when Beryl, encouraged by Sparacino, violated her contract.
It was her way of reclaiming her life and, in her words, “preserving the beauty of my friend, Sterling, by pressing the memory of her between these pages like wildflowers.”
Beryl began her book very shortly after Miss Harper was diagnosed as having cancer. Their bond was inviolable, their love for each other immense.
Naturally, there were lengthy digressions about the books Beryl had written and the sources of her ideas. Excerpts from earlier works were included, and I suspected this might have explained the partial manuscript we found on her bedroom dresser after she was dead. It was hard to say. It was hard to know what had gone on in Beryl’s mind. But I could see that her work was extraordinary, and sufficiently scandalous to have frightened Gary Harper and caused Sparacino to lust after it.