Fairy Tales
"Every evening after supper the Beast came to see her, and always before saying good-night asked her in his terrible voice: 'Beauty, will you marry me?' And it seemed to Beauty, now she understood him better, that when she said, 'No, Beast,' he went away quite sad."
"Christine!"
They both look up at me at once, Christine and Marguerite, with the same air of startled birds. The fading sunlight gleams alike on their golden hair.
"I need to speak with you for a moment."
Christine blinks, then marks her place in the book and lays it aside, standing. Marguerite sits back on her heels, visibly disappointed. "Oh, Mamma--"
"We'll finish the story later, darling."
Marguerite is a dutiful child. "Yes, Mamma."
It's dark in the windowless hall, except for a dim glow that leaks through the door from the front room. I shut the other door behind us. "Doesn't she have any other books?"
Christine looks at me blankly, beautiful and luminous in the gloom. "You know she does."
"Well, I wish you'd read something else to her."
"Why?"
Her confused tone, the eerie blue shadows in the narrow hall, send me straight back to the passageways of the Opera and a blind, stubborn panic. "She's eight years old. She's impressionable. I don't want her head filled with fairy tales."
"Don't be silly, Raoul, I loved those stories when I was her age--"
"And look where it led you!"
Silence falls, quivering like glass in the instant before it shatters. Her eyes have gone wide and dark.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to shout at you."
"I think," Christine says very carefully, "you're being unreasonable."
"I'm not unreasonable. I'm being very reasonable, I don't want to end up as one of those stodgy tyrant fathers, Christine! I just--" Watching her face, pale and grave, calm as a marble madonna, I find myself shaking. "I worry -- about her."
Her expression never changes. Defeated, I look away.
And her hand falls lightly on my shoulder. "Oh, love, so do I."
I turn back to face her, and she leans into my arms. A woman, my wife, warm and real, not the maddening ghost-girl she was ten years ago, and the knot in my heart loosens.
"I'm sorry," I say again.
Christine shakes her head. "Do you think -- after everything that happened -- do you think I don't want to protect her from that? I won't make the same mistake that Papa did, meaning to comfort me... I won't... It is only a story, Raoul," and in her voice is the peal of truth. Of confidence.
I kiss her cheek. "I know."
She kisses me back, light as a snowflake, and smiles. "I'm glad."
We stand there for a moment, quiet in the shadows, holding each other. My heart is lighter than it has been in years. When I let her go at last, she is still smiling, and so, I find, am I.