“A complicated relationship with landscape,” Jerome repeated. “How could that be?”
Sylvia looked up now and studied the young man she was talking to, his smooth forehead and long perfect hands, his thoughtful, serious expression. It seemed she had never really seen anyone this young, and she doubted she had ever looked this young herself. “He wanted, or at least Andrew said he wanted, to drain everything: the lakes, the rivers, the streamlets, and every acre of bog. Andrew always said that old Joseph Woodman wanted to squeeze all moisture out of the County of Kerry, as if it were a dishrag. He was convinced, you see, that with proper drainage, fields of wheat could be made to replace the bogs. When he presented his report to the British Crown, his ideas were utterly dismissed. One month later he immigrated to Canada in a full-blown fit of pique, a man still young enough – and ambitious enough, Andrew claimed – to cause serious damage. Thousands of acres of forests would be floated to his docks on Timber Island, so that the logs could be assembled into rafts. Then the rafts would be poled downriver to the quays at Quebec, where the timber was loaded onto ships bound for Britain. This went on for years and years, until all of the forests were gone.”
“But he couldn’t have been the only timber merchant.”
“No, no, of course not. But Andrew never forgot that his own family was involved. He could never let go of the picture of a raped landscape. He didn’t forget this, at least he didn’t forget for a very long time.” Sylvia twisted the ring on her left hand. “Forgetting would come later.”
Sitting in silence, she wondered if Jerome would ask her a question, would in some way begin to interview her. She would not have liked it if he had.
“Sometimes,” he began, “it’s best just to let them go, family things. Otherwise… well, what’s the point? There’s nothing you can do anyway.” He was looking at the wall behind and slightly above Sylvia’s head. “But this would be a sort of ecological forgetting, another kind of letting go, I suppose…”
Jerome’s angle of vision remained unchanged, and Sylvia felt an urge to turn in her chair and follow his gaze. She suppressed this, however, and spoke again. “All those years ago when we first began to meet – began to know each other – that inherited memory of destruction was still in Andrew’s mind,” she said. “He spoke to me about it.” She paused again, catching just a glimpse of Andrew’s face in her memory, the expressive mouth, the sad eyes. “That we should have been alive at the same time,” she said to Jerome, “that we should have somehow walked from such distance toward each other, and that he would speak to me about the things that troubled him… all this seemed miraculous to me. I took everything he told me and kept it deep inside me – so deep that I could hear him speaking when he was not there. And the truth is, he was most often not with me, not there. We were not able to meet with any kind of frequency, and sometimes there were months when he was traveling, months when we were not able to meet at all.”
He had become, in spite of his absences, or perhaps, she thought now, because of his absences, the vital center of her inner world. Her daily life had strutted around her like theatre, like a performance needing neither her participation nor her attention. Even during painful, disorienting times – her father’s sudden heart attack and death and, years later, her mother’s stroke – she could bring the curtain down and permit Andrew’s distant light to dominate. Because he had spoken about the wind from the lake, there was no longer anything neutral about the wind from the lake; because they had talked together on the dunes, a child’s sandbox glimpsed in a neighbor’s yard brought with it the idea of Andrew as palpably as if it were a letter written by his hand. But there were no letters written by his hand; often he didn’t communicate with her for weeks, or would make the briefest, the most perfunctory, of calls during the empty hours of the day.
“During these periods of absence, of withdrawal,” she told Jerome, “I would believe that he was communicating with me through dreams, or thoughts, or omens, a belief I maintained during this last, this final absence.”
“Yes,” said Jerome, leaning forward to pick up the cat near his feet. “It’s odd how people who die come into your dreams. My father’s been gone for more than ten years, and still I have these dreams. About him.” He watched as the cat leapt back to the floor. “I never dream about my mother. Never about her, and never about them together.”
Sylvia tried to envisage Jerome’s parents, the people who had given birth to the earnest young man who sat opposite her. They would have a familiar domestic life, she imagined, not unlike, in some ways, her and Malcolm’s, a shared daily space, but with room for a child, of course. There would be that difference and other differences as well. But all of it, the rooms, the partnership, would be there on a daily basis.
She began to think about the first time she entered the place where for twenty years she and Andrew would meet and part, and meet and part. An old cottage, almost deserted, situated on a wooded hill thirty miles or so down the lakeshore from where she lived on property left to Andrew by his father because no one else wanted it. In the summer the cottage smelled of racoons and damp. In the winter the wood stove’s fire barely penetrated the cold. It had been winter that first time, and during her walk from the car, deep snow had fallen over the tops of her boots, burning her legs when it melted against the skin. There had been no talk, at least not at first. It had been far too cold to undress, and as they had fumbled through layers of clothing in order to touch, fear had set off its sirens in her brain. But she overcame this, barely knowing what was taking place, only that she could not stop it. She had learned next to nothing that first winter about Andrew’s long, angular body, the bones and ligaments and pale, faintly bluish skin that would become so familiar to her. So familiar that, as the years passed, she would sometimes confuse it with her own. Unlike the awkward disruption of Malcolm’s sad, brief attempts to establish a physical relationship with her, there would come to be nothing foreign or invasive about Andrew’s lovemaking, just the comfort, the consolation of full embrace.
It wasn’t until months after their first meeting – when the summer heat began – that they had seen each other whole. They had been relatively young then and Sylvia had been amazed by the fact of their flesh – hers as much as his, as she had never paid any attention before to her own nakedness, though she said nothing at all about this. He had pulled back and had looked at her for what seemed to be a long, long, time, one hand moving over her breasts and stomach. Then he had lifted her legs and groaned as he entered her.
Always, afterwards, they would remain silent for some time, as if making a focused journey over a dangerous and beautiful terrain, a journey requiring rapt attention and great care. And then when they began to talk, they spoke about the land: her County, the objects in her house, and the stories of his ancestors on the island where the lake became the river. They did not then, and would never, speak of love. Only about geography, the townscapes she had just hours before left behind, the house she would return to, and the tapestry of fields and fences that tumbled away from the place where they lay.
“Even when we were far, far apart,” she told Jerome, “Andrew rolled through my mind like active weather.” She smiled, pleased with her description, then, suddenly embarrassed, straightened her hair with her hand and tugged her skirt farther down over her knees. “And when I wasn’t with him, I was waiting.”
“My mother was like that,” said Jerome, a shadow sliding over his face and a faint trace of anger in his voice. “She was always, always waiting.”
This abrupt confession startled Sylvia somewhat. “What was she waiting for?”
“Change. For my father: for him to change. He didn’t, of course.” Jerome coughed. “No, that’s not quite true,” he added. “He got even worse, became even more impossible.”
Sylvia would not ask about his father’s condition, what it might be. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter. Or, at least it doesn’t matter to me.”
Jerome got up and walked back to the counter, where a bowl filled with Mira’s oranges sat near the toaster. He picked up one perfect orange and offered it to Sylvia, but she shook her head, so he returned to the couch and began to peel the fruit for himself, slowly, and with what appeared to be great concentration. Sylvia found herself drawn to the vibrancy of the color as if she had never seen orange before.
“You know,” she said, “Andrew always maintained that all married couples seemed to him to be placed for the purposes of determining scale in a painted landscape. Tiny anonymous figures that Victorians referred to as the ‘argument’ of the picture.” She paused. “He liked the pun, the word argument. Marriage, for him you see, would have been an argument. He told me he couldn’t imagine using the word we all the time in reference to thoughts, or even actions.” They had been curled together on the bed and his mouth had been against the back of her neck when he had spoken about this – she had been able to feel the slight motion of his lips. “But here we are,” he had said later. “Here we are lying on the shoreline of the ancient lake. This whole ridge is like negative space, like a physical memory.” He had explained that braided in the limestone around the Great Lake were the fossils of life forms whose narrow sessions of animation had been silenced forever. Such brief, simple narratives, such unobserved histories, he had said, permanently halted by a wall of ice. Sometimes, he’d said, you could see the direction the animal intended to take. With others – those who were born to a spiral shape for instance – they seemed to have already accepted their fate.
In what season had he spoken those words? What year? She didn’t, she couldn’t remember. Only that she had been lying on her side and that he was curled around her like a shell, his hand circling the wrist of her left arm, their clothing tangled together on a chair near the bed. Flannel and corduroy, silk and linen caught on a lathed armrest or falling over the torn rush webbing of a chair seat woven a hundred years ago in innocence. Corduroy, she had whispered once, removing his old brown jacket. From the French, he had joked. The threads of the king. Then he had run his hands through her hair, had looked at her and said, “Sylvaculture, the encouragement of trees.”
She had told him, once, that in the first half of the nineteenth century there was scarcely a pioneer family in her County that hadn’t lost one or two of their young men to the whims of the Great Lake as boy after boy joined the crews of schooners that carried goods from settlement to settlement along the Canadian shores. Often these tragedies took place within sight of home, as the peninsula itself was the most dangerous feature of the lake. Storms gestated there, lake currents became confused, and then there were the limestone outcroppings set like teeth across the eastern and southern edge of the land. The scattered fragments of the wreck, the light brown sails draped like huge shrouds on the surface of the water, or tangled by rigging and filled with sand; yards and yards of fabric lolling in the froth.
“It’s always difficult,” Jerome said, “two people and all the things between them. That’s one thing even I know is true.”
Sylvia folded her hands on her lap, looked toward the window, then said quietly, “In time, everything that should have been joy between Andrew and me became too painful. And when for a period of time we stopped, stopped meeting, stopped talking, I spent endless afternoons driving through the landscapes he had described to me. I wept, and when I was finished with weeping I believed something had gone dead inside me. But, as I was to discover later, there is a difference, a difference between death and dormancy. We had stopped, but we would start again, seven years later, impossible though that may seem.” Her voice began to falter. “When you are reacquainted with love in middle age,” she murmured as if speaking to herself, “it is more critical, almost an emergency. You can see the end of it. The conclusion is always with you in the room.” The empty, unheated cottage appeared in Sylvia’s mind, the smell of the cold, the scent of absence. She closed her eyes, willing the image to disappear.
Slowly, slowly her attention returned to Jerome, who was sitting stiffly on the edge of the couch, with the partly peeled orange in his hands and his elbows on his knees as if he were poised for flight. The late-afternoon sun had come in through the window and a pale ribbon of light cut through the air between them. It occurred to Sylvia that perhaps she had gone too far, had revealed too much of her grief, which had been with her so constantly it now no longer seemed to her like unusual pain, seemed more like breathing or sleep or walking. Of course Jerome could never understand this and would instinctively resist entering that dark world. If she continued in this vein she would lose this young man, he would want to remove himself. In fact, even now, she sensed his wanting to be elsewhere. “Should we talk about something else for a while?” she asked and, when he didn’t answer, “What were your favorite things when you were a child?”
“Forts,” he answered with surprising suddenness, leaning forward to drop an orange peel onto the table. “Tree forts, mostly.” He paused, thought a moment, looking around the room. “For a while, until quite recently, really, I made structures in my studio that were like tree houses.” Then he looked chagrined, as if he knew she wouldn’t or couldn’t comprehend, or as if he wanted to change the subject in order to avoid having to explain. “Those old buildings on the island, they had been houses I think, but they were falling down and covered with ivy and moss. I thought I might be able to recreate them in another way.”
Sylvia had not yet been able to grasp the ideas behind Jerome’s art, but she was struck once again by the awareness that she wished the conversation to continue. “But those forts, or the houses on the island, how could you build them in a room?” she heard herself ask. Whenever she was reading, it had seemed absolutely right to her that the mark at the end of a question was shaped like a hook designed to snare someone intent on just passing by. Here, however, such a sentence seemed almost natural, and she could tell that the young man had relaxed now that the subject of their talk had shifted.
Jerome leaned back against the couch and folded his arms. “I don’t know,” he said, “I had done a lot of work based on man-made structures in the past – huts and the like. I was fascinated, on the island, by the idea of built things going back to nature, you know, at least the beginnings of nature… germination. But I couldn’t figure out a way to get that to work in a gallery space. Nothing would grow fast enough for me to get the point across.” He laughed. “Maybe fertilizer would have been helpful.”
“Those would have been the workers’ cottages, I suppose.” Sylvia remembered Andrew saying that there had been a row of laborers’ dwellings on the island’s one street, and then, of course, there was the big house at the top. She was silent for a moment or two, lost in the act of removing small woollen balls from the sleeve of her cardigan. “They would be houses for the men who worked in the shipyards. Those who manned the rafts came and went… and only in the months when the river was open and there was no ice.”
“Vikings were pushed out into the icy sea on rafts when they died,” offered Jerome. He paused and his face reddened with embarrassment. “Oh sorry,” he said, “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“It’s all right,” said Sylvia, not looking up from her sleeve, “it’s with me all the time, his death, the knowledge of it is always with me. It is impossible for anyone, anything to remind me of it.” She was quiet for a moment. “It is a comfort to be able to say that aloud.” Suddenly her gaze shifted to the left and rested on a very old chair, minus one leg, tilting in a corner near Jerome and the couch. “Did you know,” she said, “that in this light you can see the imprint of the stenciling on the back of that chair? Under all that paint! Andrew would have loved that, would have called it evidence of the chair’s history. My friend Julia too. She likes to be able to trace what has happened to things. She told me once that she could feel the difference between new and old knife cuts on a breadboard.”
Jerome looked at the chair. “I’ve never noticed that before,” he said. “A hi
story written in paint, pentimento on a chair back.”
“It seems to me now,” Sylvia said slowly, “that during my own childhood, everything around me was connected to history: a knowable and therefore a safe history. Surely there must have been new toys, new clothes but, if there were, they meant so little to me that I can’t remember these gifts. What I recall instead were the Christmas and birthday gifts given to children long dead; gifts given to my father and his sister, to his father and his father’s father, for everything had been so carefully organized and preserved in the house – stored away in the spare room or in the attic – that it was all quite easily retrievable.”
She had been fairly ambivalent about the dolls, which had been grouped together like a fragile wide-eyed congregation at one end of the large attic. They were still there, but she had covered them some time ago, with sheeting. The cars and tractors and toy trains that had belonged to boy children had interested her more, the fact that they were in no way attempting to be human, were content instead to pretend to be the large machines they were drawn from. Sometimes she had found a faded Christmas tag stuck to one or another of these objects. To Charlie, Xmas 1888, it might read, still existing after the small Charlie had passed through adulthood on his journey toward death. To Charlie from his loving Mama. When she was older, she came to realize that the tag wouldn’t have remained attached to the toy were it not for the way that other children – children not like her – were so easily diverted from the things that surrounded them by the episodic nature of their small, vibrant lives. The world had probably handed them an invitation, and, unlike her, they had been able – joyfully – to accept the offer to participate.
“When I was small,” she said, “I distrusted the human face and all the changes of expression that the human face invariably brought with it. Animals were somehow less threatening, though I suppose it is possible to read a change of mood or disposition in the face of an animal, particularly if one looks directly into its eyes.”
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