The Winter Vault

by Anne Michaels

  – Step outside, said Jean, holding the door open for Avery to enter.

  Inside, the foyer ceiling glowed with stars.

  – This is where my mother and father lived when they were first married, said Jean. The painter J. E. H. MacDonald designed everything – the symbols of the zodiac, the patterns on the beams – and his apprentice, a young man named Carl Schaefer, climbed the ladder and painted them. Schaefer worked at night, with the door to the courtyard open. How moving it must have been to paint the night sky in gold leaf while the real night was all around him … Later my parents moved to Montreal, and my mother used to say that she started her garden there because she no longer had the stars. Almost immediately after they moved, her brother died in the air, flying at night. He was in the RCAF. My father said my mother always connected the two events, though she felt too foolish to confess it. The moment she stopped keeping watch over the night sky, he was lost. There were only the two children – my mother and her brother – and they died within three years of each other.

  Avery and Jean walked under the stars. The floor of the lobby was marble and ceramic tile; ornately braided stone archways led to the lift.

  – This is the first ceiling in Canada made of poured concrete, said Jean proudly. The paint is acid-proof with Spar varnish; the heavens will never crack or fade!

  – No one would ever guess the whole of heaven was here, said Avery, inside this stone building.

  – Yes, said Jean, it's like a secret.

  They had driven for hours together, but the night fields had been all around them and, between them, through the open car windows, the cool summer wind. Now in the tiny lift they stood cramped and awkward.

  Upstairs, Jean opened the door to moonlight and street-lamp light; she'd left the curtains open and the living room floor, covered entirely with plants, glowed, the light glinting off the edges of hundreds of jars filled with seedlings and flowers.

  – Here are some good examples of indigenous species, said Jean. And she thought, Here I am.

  They left Avery's car at the edge of the forest. The track was overgrown, not much wider than one's shoulders; how quickly the forest forgets us. There was little to carry, a paper bag of groceries, Jean's satchel. The low canopy of leaves pounded with the sound of the rapids. Mist was caught between the trees, as if the earth were breathing. The cabin was still some way from the Long Sault, yet even here the roar exploded. A handful of cabins had once stood where now only one remained. Inside, a wooden table, three chairs, a bed too old to be worth the trouble of moving. A wood-stove. The forest-shadow and the river-depth had penetrated the cabin for so many years there would always be dampness and the memory of dampness. The same day Avery had found the cabin, while assessing the site of the rapids, he had moved his gear from the hotel in Morrisburg, purchased bedding, a lantern, a supply of mantles.

  Stepping inside, Jean could hardly believe how loud the Long Sault boomed – it seemed an acoustical mirage – as if amplified by the small bare space. Immediately the coldness of the cabin and the smell of cedar and woodsmoke became inseparable from the crashing of the river. She felt she would either have to talk with her mouth against Avery's ear, or shout, or simply mouth her words. When Jean leaned toward Avery to speak, her hair touching his face felt to him unbearably alive.

  – After a time, said Avery, the sound becomes part of you, like the rushing of your own blood when you cover your ears.

  Avery lit the lamps. He built the fire. Jean unpacked their groceries; there was nothing fresh from Frank Jarvis's own garden, and the fact that there would never again be a garden and the reality of the almost empty General Store had unnerved her. They'd bought canned tomatoes instead, carried by ship all the way from Italy, and a long carton of pasta, a small jar of basil, and a shiny white cardboard box from Markell's, containing the same kind of sweet buns her father used to bring home to Jean when she was a girl. These she laid out on the wooden table.

  Because of the noise of the river, neither spoke much; instead they felt intensely their every movement in the small room. Avery watched Jean push her hair from her eyes with her forearm as she washed her hands at the sink. She saw his discomfort as he scanned the cabin for embarrassing traces – the grimy rind of soap by the kitchen sink, his mud-stiff trousers hanging from the back of the door.

  There was little room to move; the table was at the foot of the bed, only a patch of rug on the plank floor separated the kitchen from the bedroom. All was orderly, the axe in its leather sheath by the door, the Coleman water containers waiting to be refilled. A narrow shelf for a wash basin, the folded square of frayed towel. On the floor next to the bed, Edible Plants, The Pleasure of Ruins, The Kon-Tiki Expedition, Bird Hazards to Aircraft, Excavations at the Njoro River Cave. On the windowsills, the usual collection of stones and driftwood, but here organized by shape or colour, kept for their resemblance to another form – the stone shaped like an animal or a bird. It has always been this way, Jean thought, the desire for a likeness, for the animate in the inanimate. The whole cabin was organized as a chef might organize a kitchen, everything in its place for ease of use. Avery was acutely aware of how deeply the room betrayed his habits.

  Jean added oil and basil to the tomatoes and threw salt into the boiling water. They ate in the sound of the rapids. From the window there was only forest and this, too, cast its spell: the very invisibility of the overpowering river. As the room grew darker, the noise of the Long Sault seemed to increase. For the first time, Jean thought about the intimacy within that sound, the continuous force of water on rock, sculpting every crevice and contour of the riverbed.

  After the meal, through which they had barely spoken, with nowhere else to go, Avery took Jean's hand and they lay down.

  – If we're getting into bed, then we'd better get dressed, said Avery, and he passed her a wool jumper and a ball of thick socks. It's very cold at night and sometimes I wear everything I have, even with the fire.

  The sight of Jean in his clothes almost broke Avery's resolve. But he remained quiet beside her.

  He could smell the woodsmoke in her hair. And she, in the wool of his sweater, could smell his body, lamp oil, earth.

  The lantern light, the fire, the river, the cold bed, Jean's small, strong, still hand under his sweater.

  To claim the sight of her. To learn and name and hold all that he sees in her face, as he, too, becomes part of her expression, a way of listening that will soon include her knowledge of him. To learn each nuance as it reveals a new past, and all that might be possible. To know in her skin the inconsistencies of age: her child hands and wrists and ears, her young woman's upper arms and legs smooth and firm; each anatomical part of us seems to attain a different maturity and, for a long time, remains so. How is it the body ages with such inconsistency? Looking at her across the table, or looking at her now, his face next to hers, his limbs along hers, the yielding of her face as she listens, of one face into another and another, always another openness, a latent openness, so love opens into love, like the slightest change of light or air on the surface of water. Lying next to her, he imagined even his thoughts could alter her face.

  After a very long time, Jean began to speak.

  – My father brought me to Aultsville for the first time after my mother died. He said he was taking me to hear the ‘talking trees,’ to lift my spirits a little … I still have no word for that depth of sadness. It is almost a different kind of sight; everything beautiful, a branding. During the whole train journey he wouldn't tell me what the talking trees were … After his day of teaching we walked out to the apple grove near the station …

  It was warm, pink, dusk. Shadows fell between the rows and soon it was not so easy to see the way. The path was woven with shadow. I remember holding on to his arm very tightly. He always rolled up his sleeves in the summer, above his elbows. I can feel his bare arm now. The wind shook the small silver leaves – that indescribable sound – and farther into the grove I heard the murmuri
ng. I looked up and saw nothing, but of course in the dusk, the brown arms of the apple-pickers were hidden by the branches, were themselves like moving branches. They were women's voices, and the words were so ordinary. Sometimes a single word suddenly clearer than the rest – Saturday, dress, waiting – and it was the ordinariness of the words that was so moving, even as a girl I felt this, that such ordinariness should always sound that way, as if the wind had found its language. ‘Voices sweet as fruit,’ my father said, a phrase I'm sure he'd saved for me in his mouth the entire day. Another time, he took me with him in the middle of winter, it was after a storm and again we walked, this time in snow-white darkness. From the mill roof hung immense icicles, almost to the ground, a frozen waterfall, twelve or fifteen feet long; it made me think of a painting I'd seen, of mammoth baleen in the moonlit ocean … Always he would show me these things as if they were secrets, not just there out in the open for anyone to see. And it's true, hardly anyone ever noticed the miracles my father noticed. We took the train back to Montreal together in the dark, and I fell asleep leaning against his wool coat, or his cool short-sleeved summer arm, full of the day's beautiful secrets and the irreducible knowledge that my mother was not with us. That she would never see these things. And that is when I realized we were looking for her.

  Children make vows. From the moment I saw my father sitting in the kitchen, her sweater draped across his chest, about a month after she'd died, I knew I would never leave him, I knew I would always look after him.

  When I think of it now, only now, I realize we lived in a hush, as if my mother had been all the happy noise we'd ever known. After she was gone, our range of expression shrank – to the small, to the significant. I ached and longed for her. I've missed her every minute of my life. Each morning I woke up, I walked to school, I cooked our dinner, and I never stopped missing her. I remember the first day at school after she died, all the children knew and they avoided me – they were too young for pity, they were afraid. She left a small garden that I kept tending – for her – as if one day she would come back and we could sit there together and I would show her how well her lilies had grown, show her all the new plants I'd added. In the beginning, I was afraid to change anything and it was momentous when I dug the first hole. Then planting became a vocation. Suddenly I felt I could keep on loving her, that I could keep telling her things this way …

  It was hard trying to learn simple things like what kind of clothes to wear or what was expected of me by watching my schoolmates, seeing what they wore and how they behaved, listening to them talk. My father had one sister, much older than him, who lived in England and she visited us once. My aunt seemed so vibrant, so exorbitant in her habits – so free and at ease. She wore silk dresses and velvet hats and when she arrived she gave me a pair of bright red woollen mittens trimmed with tartan ribbon. I remember how frightened I was to wear those mittens in the schoolyard. What if someone said something to make me not love them as much? I thought everyone would laugh at me – something so jolly and pretty could not belong to me, could not be for my hands! It was wrong, gauche, a display of happiness above my standing. But of course no one noticed them at all. And those mittens had a kind of magic in them: they had not been ruined by words. Long after my aunt returned home, her gift continued to make me bolder and, very slowly, I began to wear what I liked, and be what I liked. And again, no one seemed to notice or care. I wore my mother's old-fashioned cardigans and her lace-up Clapp shoes, which she'd always called her ‘house shoes.’ There were our two birthday parties each year, just my father and me, always with an elaborate store-bought cake with heavy ropes of icing along the edges. The thought of those cakes makes me weep because he did not know what to do to please me, how to please me enough. All his love went into the choosing of a cake, the colour of the icing, the sugar decorations – almost as if it were for her. Jean was crying. Everything to do with our life together was painfully beautiful. Everything between us was remembering my mother. What she might have liked, what she might have thought. My life formed around an absence. Every bit of pleasure, each window of lamplight against the night snow, the drowsy smell of the summer roses, attached itself to the fact of her absence. Everything in this world is what has been left behind.

  In my final year of school, my father suggested we move to Toronto so I could go to university there. There was never any mention of my going alone. It was unthinkable for both of us. Sometimes things change simply because the time has come, an inner moment is reached for reasons one cannot explain – whether grief takes six months or six decades or, as in our case, eight years. Something latent in the body awakens. Sorghum seeds can lie dormant for six thousand years and then stir themselves! It happens all the time in nature; we should not be surprised when it happens in human nature. When we began to talk about moving, there was a light heartedness in my father, and I began to feel that there could be a new life for both of us. But I think now, for him, it was the opposite, a way to recapture something.

  He wished to return to Clarendon Avenue. We made one trip to Toronto to see the flat together and later that evening we went to a concert at Massey Hall. Elgar's Cello Concerto, one of my father's favourites. After the concert, as we were about to leave, he hesitated, then led me by the hand back to our seats. ‘Listen with me,’ he said. Sitting again in the empty hall I found I could still hear the music, it was a kind of haunting. ‘Your mother and I,’ said my father, ‘used to do this whenever we went to the symphony; we'd wait for everyone to leave and then keep listening.’ We sat together while the music again unfolded, until the usher came and said it was time to leave …

  My father died before we'd moved. This happens so often – death at a time of change – that I think there should be a word for it. Perhaps there is: betrayal, or violation; not stroke or aneurism … Our house in Montreal was already sold. There was nothing else to do but continue to pack up and to move alone. I took cuttings and seeds from every plant in my mother's garden, but there's no place for them. Now her whole garden is in pots and jars on my living room floor. That was two years ago … I think of the last gardens on the river, I mourn them …

  The light of dawn was beginning to filter down through the heavy trees. Jean could see the outline of their limbs under the blankets, a faint seam of light around the window.

  – My botany, my love and interest in everything that grows – at first it was for love of my mother, a way of living with my yearning, and then perhaps an homage, but gradually it became something more, a passion, and I wanted to know everything: who had made the first gardens, how plants had been depicted in history, growing up in the cracks of cultures, in paintings and symbols, how seeds had travelled – crossing oceans in the cuffs of trousers …

  I think we each have only one or two philosophical or political ideas in our life, one or two organizing principles during our whole life, and all the rest falls from there …

  I remember a day in the Hampton Street garden with my mother; we were having a sun-bath together – her warm skin and the sun lotion – I used to push my face into her and smell her like a flower – the fullness of my mother's black hair was held back by a wide white band and she gave me a huge blossom, an Asian lily, and I am reaching up my hands. I'm barely the height of her legs, perhaps I'm four years old …

  Every morning, before my father left for work, he stood with my mother, their foreheads touching. Sometimes I joined in, and sometimes I just watched, finishing my egg or oatmeal with my slippered feet wrapped around the rungs of the chair. Every morning my father – as if he were going down to the docks to begin a long sea voyage and not just walking down the road to a stolid brick boys' private school, with a smile holding all the intimacies between husband and wife – spoke the same sweet words: ‘Wish me well.’

  The forest around them was the forest of a dream. The sound of the river embraced them, safeguarded Jean's words, a pact between them. She felt there was no other place for her than beside him, a man who could
transform the world this way, transform the dark into this darkness, the forest into this forest.

  – My mother was connected to a ventilator. My father wrote a note and strung it across the bed, across those futile, thin hospital blankets, from one bedrail to the other. In case she woke and we weren't there. He wrote it again – I love you – and pinned the note to his shirt, in case he fell asleep in his chair …

  For days I sat next to my mother and listened to the ventilator breathe for her. Until finally I realized that this was what I had to do – breathe for her. What does it mean to breathe for another person? To take them in and give them rest. To enter them and give them rest … as good a definition of forgiveness as any …

  Her name was Elisabeth, said Jean.

  Then slowly, not to wake Avery, Jean reached down and took off her shoes.

  Sometime after dawn, Jean woke. For several moments she thought she'd gone deaf.

  Repeatedly the seaway engineers had tried to still the Long Sault. Thirty-five tonnes of rock had been unloaded into the river, but the current had simply flung these gargantuan boulders aside, like gravel. Finally they built the hexapedian, a huge insect of welded steel, and now this, at last, had pinioned the rocks into place.

  The detonation of silence.

  Jean lay next to Avery, unmoving. Even the leaves on the trees were mute; so absolute the stillness, all sound seemed to have been drawn from the world.

  Avery did not know what Jean was thinking, only that there was intense thought behind those eyes filled with tears. It was not only her weeping that moved him, but this intensity of thought he perceived in her. Already he knew that he did not want to tamper, to force open, to take what was not his; and that he was willing to wait a long time for her to speak herself to him.