The hall led into the dining room (the domain of horses) if one walked straight ahead, or into her father’s office (now Malcolm’s study) if one turned to the right, or off to the realm of the vast double parlour if one turned to the left. What huge, multidimensional worlds those parlours had seemed to her when she was a child, and sometimes later as well; Africa and Asia couldn’t have been larger, more filled with changing light and shades of colour, with the sudden rumble of a furnace hidden beneath the boards of oaken floors polished to such a degree the furniture was reflected in them like architecture placed at the edge of vast golden lakes. There were the carpets and the confusing, mesmerizing patterns of the carpets, the different paws and hooves of chair legs lurking near the fringed edges of the carpets. The two round mirrors with the child, and then the girl, and now the mature woman in them, always with the same carved eagle on the frame hovering over her head, benignly some days, and on others hunting, about to unfurl its talons, wanting to carry off her brain.
Sylvia, lying now on the bed in a modern, urban hotel room, ran all these things through her memory. She knew the contents of the drawers: twelve knives, eleven soup spoons, twelve forks, one serving fork, or fourteen folded linen napkins, and the small, silver tongs with tiny hands fashioned like maple leaves. The napkin rings with the names of previous children of the family etched into them in flowing script; Ronnie, Teddy, Addie, the names old-fashioned, tender in the use of the diminutive. Platters depicting the wildflowers of England or France dwelt inside a cumbersome mahogany sideboard beside a set of plates depicting the rivers and mountains and pavilions and bridges of the Orient in shades of blue, and one large dish that must have been much loved by Addie and Ronnie, a plate with a fully decorated Victorian Christmas tree painted on its surface, toys like those now occupying the attic placed under its boughs. And everywhere, in all the rooms of the house, stood the china figurines, the horses and the Creation piece, of course, but shepherdesses as well, and horsemen and dancers and soldiers whose relationships had kept Sylvia busy with gossip when she was little and at certain times—before Andrew—as an adult.
Sometimes, however, she had been prone to exhaustion. When she had been unable to give weight or order to the variety of sounds and sights and smells that were near her, she had been convinced that each impression she received was insisting on its own importance. Like a series of ego-driven guests, the fold of a sheet, the sound of a dripping tap, the click of a closing door, her shoes huddled together in the closet all demanded equal attention. It was at these times that she would begin to shut down, to disappear. She was surprised to realize now that it had been Jerome, not her, who had seemed occasionally to be absent while they had been talking, and she wondered whether it had been her, or something else, perhaps some fear she was unaware of, that had caused him to drift and then come back again. Did he have a collection of objects from his childhood he could go to at such times? She thought not, knowing by now that such peculiarities of character were certain to be hers alone.
She got up and went over to the closet and took the salt shaker out of her coat pocket. Then she crossed the room and placed it on the desk beside the journals. How intimate she had been all her life with things like this. As she again allowed the objects in her house to appear, one after another, in her imagination, here in this room in the city, she did not question whether she had left them behind. There was their world and her world and the times of day when both worlds intersected. Sometimes, as now, as dusk entered the city that was not her home, the intersection took place simply in a state of recall. But there were other times when she could lift the ceramic figures from the furniture that sheltered or displayed them, lift them up to the light, and then hold them for a few comforting moments in her hands.
The following day when Sylvia knocked on the steel door and Jerome opened it and beckoned her inside, she was ushered into a space filled with sound and movement. The young man with the orange hair that she had seen when she first approached the alley was seated on the couch playing a guitar while someone else—someone oddly dressed—was executing a series of awkward gestures in the centre of the room. The floor beneath the performer’s feet was covered with a coating of sand into which several circular patterns had been incised by a pointed toe. Sylvia, unnerved by this pantomime, felt as if she was intruding on an act of great secrecy, one that by rights should be enacted in utter privacy, and she was suddenly unsure of the permission she had been granted to be in this place.
Jerome placed his finger on his lips, then opened his palm in a gesture that Sylvia knew was meant both to silence her and to placate her. Then he raised a small movie camera to his face and turned it in the direction of the performer, who bent at the waist and lifted both arms behind his or her back, then crouched near the floor, hands sweeping through sand. After a few uncomfortable moments during which Sylvia was acutely aware of the buzzing noise of the camera, the music stopped, Jerome placed the camera on the counter beside the sink, and Mira removed the veil from her head.
“Sorry,” the girl said to Sylvia, “we were just finishing up.”
The sound of clicking buckles. The orange-haired boy was noisily packing up his guitar. He stood, zipped up an old leather jacket, and lifted the tattered black case from the floor. “I’m off then,” he said.
“Please,” said Sylvia, “not because I —”
“Nope,” he said. “Don’t worry … got to go to work.” He glanced at her as he walked out the door, but Sylvia could see that there was no recognition in the look. He would not, this time, call her “Mom” in that condescending tone that was an acknowledgement of her age and demeanour. Not here. Not now that she was known by these young people, now that she was inside.
“That was Geoff,” said Mira after the door had closed. “He works at the music shop down the street, repairing instruments—guitars mostly, some violins.”
Jerome had moved to the edge of the sand and was now filming the patterns left there by Mira’s dance steps—if that is what they were. Mira was massaging her head, lifting the short, dark hair that had been pasted to her skull by the headgear.
“A performance piece,” the girl explained, “though, at the moment I’m still working on it. I have no idea where it’s going.”
“Where might it be going?” asked Sylvia.
Mira smiled. “I mean, where it will end up. How it will turn out. We had to repeat it a couple of times because of Swimmer. He kept rubbing up against my legs.” She walked toward the door of the place she called the bedroom, opened it, and released the cat. “We had to lock him up in the end.”
Today Sylvia would talk about how she met Andrew. She had imagined revealing this episode to Jerome the night before, had envisaged herself in the chair, him on the couch, the story a thread between them. Mira had not been in the picture she had seen in her mind and she began to worry about how she would be able to talk with the girl in the room, with the two of them together and the bond that existed between them so visible, so obvious to her.
Mira, as if sensing this, pulled her scarf and coat from a hook on the wall, then paused and stood still for a moment. “I wish I could stay,” she said, “but I guess I’ll leave you two alone now.”
“Poor Mira,” said Jerome. “Off to the salt mines.”
Mira wound the scarf around her neck. “Yes, the salt mines,” she said. “Though in some ways I suspect the real salt mines might be more interesting.”
“Smithson would have agreed with that,” said Jerome. “He loved mines, loved excavation of any kind, in fact. Even … no, maybe especially, industrial excavation. He wanted to know about everything.”
Mira opened the door. “I want to know about everything too,” she said, turning to look at Jerome. “I always have.”
When Mira had gone, Sylvia told Jerome about the tactile maps she made for her friend Julia. “She’s blind,” Sylvia explained, “but touching a map is one of the ways she is able to see. I didn’t think I could do it at
first, didn’t think I could translate landscape into texture on a board. But then I know the County so well; I suppose that made it easier.” She shifted in her chair. “I came to love making the maps,” she confessed. “In fact, I am working on one, right now, in the hotel.”
“You’re making art yourself when you do that,” he said, “taking what you see in your own County and reproducing it on a flat space.”
Sylvia rejected the suggestion but found that she was somewhat flattered nonetheless.
“Andrew and I first encountered one another on the only busy street in the County,” she began when she could no longer remain separate from the idea of him. “The only thoroughfare that sustained anything that resembled what a city person might think of as traffic.” She described the town of Picton, its sidewalks, walls, and old windows, and as she did so, each square inch of that town’s surfaces presented itself in her mind, as if she were walking, right then, on one of the familiar streets. As always, she took quite a lot of pleasure from doing this, this long walk back to the subject of Andrew.
“I was carrying on a conversation with myself, or revisiting a scene from my childhood, or perhaps I was bringing something I’d seen—a pebble on a path, the grain of a fenceboard—back into being in my mind. I was walking down this busy street in the centre of a town two or three times larger than the town in which I live, but in my mind I was, as I so often was, somewhere else, following the thread of a story that had nothing to do with the street, the errand I was performing. This ability to be absent was really the only unique skill I had managed to master, though I could clean a house, cook a passable meal, drive a car, participate in a prescribed set of ordinary social activities.”
“Sounds like what we all do,” said Jerome. “I spend half my life daydreaming.”
She couldn’t recall the season because seasons were only important to her when they brought about discomfort and distraction in the form of extreme heat or cold. She’d been aware of neither of these states so it must have been autumn or spring, an unobtrusive climate that would not have caused her to apply or remove a layer of clothing, to unfurl an umbrella, to turn her face from the wind, or to watch her step on a slippery surface. “I would have seemed, to anyone watching, a thin, unremarkable, young woman,” she said, “dressed conservatively, going about my daily tasks, likely about to enter a drugstore or a stationery shop, preoccupied perhaps.
“I had, I suppose, stepped from the curb without looking, without thinking. I almost believed at the time that everything that surrounded me appeared because I was walking through it, and when I had moved on, it withdrew until I had need of it again. I counted on this neutrality; it was the key to my freedom, my singularity, and, as I would later come to understand, it was my charm against sorrow.”
Though she was not looking at him, Sylvia could sense Jerome’s clear, focused gaze.
“He came toward me from somewhere just behind my peripheral vision so that my first impression was that I was being assaulted, my arms pinned to my side, my feet lifted off the ground, that and the blue blur and slight wind of the car that swept by inches in front of my knees. Then I looked down, saw the wool sleeves—tweed, I think—one atop the other across my sweater, the slightly freckled wrists, and felt the elbows—his or mine—digging into my ribs. I didn’t make a sound. Neither did he, at first. Then he spoke some sentences that included the words might have been killed.” Back on the curb they had faced each other and he had laughed. She had thanked him, said that he had saved her life. She was shaken, not by the proximity of death, but by the accident of this sudden, purposeful embrace.
“ A conditioned response,’ he told me when I thanked him for rescuing me. Then he looked at me more closely. ‘I’ve seen you before. You’re the doctor’s wife,’ he said, ‘from Blennerville.’ When the light turned green, he nodded toward the other side of the street. ‘All clear now,’ he said. I began dutifully to cross, my face burning as if I had been slapped out of a shock or out of hysteria though, in the course of my entire life, I had been visited by no emotion powerful enough to cause such a response. I stopped on the opposite side, turned back, and watched him walk away. He was a tall, awkward man, with a slight stoop and light brown hair, greying slightly at the sides, though I had been able to tell by his face that he was still fairly young.”
A conditioned response, a conditioned response. She remembered that the phrase had kept repeating itself at the centre of her mind as she watched him climb the four steps of the County Archives. She saw the shadowed carving of the stone mullions around the arched windows of that building, the reflections in the glass, petunias in the flowerbeds beside the steps, and, even from that distance, the curve of his shoulders, the worn heels of his shoes.
“Well, the truth was he had broken into my calm like a burglar then and, like a burglar, had gone casually on his way. But what had he stolen, apart from my detachment. My heart? No, that would come later. The poor man. He had no idea what he had done.”
“Well, what had he done?” said Jerome. “Other than save you from a speeding car? That seems like a good thing to me.”
“No,” said Sylvia. “You don’t understand. I have an odd mind. There are times when I can’t move it around, can’t take it to a new subject of concentration. It sticks … it sticks to things, things that I’ve come to understand other people have little, sometimes no interest in at all.”
“You’re not alone in that,” said Jerome. “Once, I thought about old, decaying fences for an entire year. And then, there are other times when I think about absolutely nothing … nothing at all. I hate it when someone asks what’s going on in my mind. Often, quite often in fact, it’s a blank slate.”
“A blank slate,” Sylvia repeated and looked around the room. “But my own strangeness, I think, is that perhaps I have lived too long in the same place, too long in the same house, thinking about sofas no one sits on, cupboards no one opens filled with silver and china and linen no one ever uses. Any more. There are also Bibles no one reads and ancient photo albums no one ever looks at, old letters no one ever glances at. Except for me, of course, except for me. It is as if I were an extinct species mysteriously catapulted into the beginning of the twenty-first century out of a childhood where boys stood on the burning deck when all but they had fled and captains lashed their daughters to the masts of sinking ships.”
“ ‘The boy stood on the burning deck when all but he had fled,’ ” Jerome said quietly. He turned to Sylvia. “I haven’t a clue how I came to know that.”
“Could you have learned it at school?”
“Doubtful.”
“They don’t memorize poems in school any more, then.” Sylvia had been particularly good at memory work. When called upon, however, she had been unable to rise to her feet, unable to recite the required lines.
“Not in the school I went to,” said Jerome.
“In the beginning, at least, we seemed so alike, Andrew and I, so much a part of the same vanishing species with our pioneer ancestors and a shared focus that drifted to the past. He often stood on burning decks of one kind or another when all but he had fled. And I … I seemed to be constantly lashed to the mast by those who had, for my own safety—or was it for theirs?—tied me there.”
Jerome, Sylvia noted now, had leaned back against the arm of the couch and had lit a cigarette. “Don’t tell Mira,” he said. “She thinks I’ve quit.” Smoke rose from his hand, then twisted in the air above him. “ Well, at least you know something about your past. Not much of that in my life. In fact I know next to nothing about my family’s past.”
“Oh yes,” said Sylvia. “I know about the past, all about the past. I can list from memory the entire genealogy of my father’s family and have been able to do so since I was six, seven years old: also, the townships of my County, backwards and forwards, in rapid succession.” She smiled, remembering. “I can tell you the names of all the constellations and I can relate their exact distance from Earth. I can tell yo
u where each Georgian house in the County is situated and I can describe what it looked like when it was in its prime—what was cultivated in its flower beds and vegetable gardens, whether the clapboard was painted, where the original log house was placed, when the magnificent barns were built, the full name of the earliest settler and that of his wife, and how many of his children died during the first winter, and where they are buried.
“I can describe each line on Andrew’s face, the one brown eye that is fractionally larger than the other, the dip of his temples and the smooth, moist creases of his eyelids. The way his hair changed from light brownish grey to white before my own eyes, how when it is brushed back the growth pattern of this hair reveals an uneven widow’s peak. I can describe this the way a child describes a set of facts given to him in school, but now there are times when I can’t visualize anything at all about Andrew’s face.”
His hands had been soft, not the hands of a labourer. There had been a place on his leg where the thigh muscle eased like a beach onto the hard bone of the knee. There was a particular vein that stood out on his forehead, and a small oval-shaped birthmark on the back of his neck. Sylvia knew all this and yet, when she closed her eyes, she could not see him.
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