Jane Urquhart

by A Map of Glass (v5)

  He was not entirely at ease with this. Not being much of a talker, he was never quite sure of what would be expected of him by way of conversation and was grateful for Mira’s poise, her curiosity and genuine interest in people: in what they were thinking, doing, how the small dramas of their lives were unfolding. He generally left the talking to her, but listened, nevertheless, intrigued by the way Mira hid or revealed her cleverness, deferred or brought her thoughts forward into the path of the talk. But he frequently felt ungainly, awkward, as if his legs were too long to fit comfortably under the table, his voice either too loud or too soft.

  Today, however, they had arrived at the café early enough that no one they knew had, as yet, emerged from the badly heated studios or cheap apartments they called home, and he and Mira were able to sit near a window, talking quietly.

  “Look,” Mira was saying, “you can see the top of Sylvia’s hotel from here. We could call her, you know, or drop by.”

  Jerome did not respond.

  “She doesn’t know anyone else in the city,” Mira said. “What is she going to do all day?”

  “The map, remember,” Jerome answered.

  Mira was gazing out the window, looking with concern at a couple of half-grown stray kittens who were gnawing on a discarded hamburger bun lying on the sidewalk.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Jerome said to her. “One cat is enough.”

  “Okay,” she said, turning back to him, “let’s go home. I think we should finish reading before tomorrow. And anyway,” she said, looking around the half-empty café, and then at the partially eaten pastry on her plate, “I’m finished. I’ve had enough.”

  Something echoed in Jerome as Mira spoke. It was his mother’s voice, speaking these exact words – I’m finished. I’ve had enough – late at night, when his father had not been home for two days. She had been talking to herself, or perhaps to her husband whose inebriation wouldn’t have permitted him to hear her even if he had been in the room and not in a bar God knows where. The despair in her voice had both frightened and infuriated Jerome; he had wanted to shake her, he had wanted her to forget about his father and his troubles because despite what she was saying, whatever announcement she thought she was making, he knew she hadn’t had enough. His father would return, beg for her forgiveness and receive it, and the whole cycle would begin again, maybe in a matter of weeks, maybe not for a month. He was fifteen years old the night he heard his mother speak these words, believed he hated his father and, in a curious way, also his mother, hated their weaknesses. He wanted them out of his life, out of each other’s lives, or failing that he wanted them to go back to the life they had lived while they had all still been in the north.

  “What are you thinking about?” asked Mira, leaning forward to shake his arm gently. “Where have you gone?”

  “Nothing,” said Jerome. “Nowhere.” But he knew exactly where he had gone: back to the disappeared world of his childhood, the place he couldn’t stop revisiting. Quite often, in recent months, when he had been attempting to complete some ordinary task, he would visualize the long dark avenue of an airshaft he had peered down as a child. Never permitted to enter the mine itself, he had found the shaft housed in a small unlocked building just beyond the perimeter of the site. Terror-stricken and fascinated, he would slip through the door and gaze into a depth of blackness, experience the warm draft on the skin of his face, the pull of the underworld.

  His father would have engineered that shaft, all other ventilation shafts, as well as the shaft that was the route to the underground. The tunnels that followed the threads of gold that branched like a central nervous system through the solid yet vulnerable rock would have been designed by him as well.

  Those were the good years, years when alcohol was a companion, an equal, not a master. Everyone was young; the northern Ontario settlement was a wilderness adventure, the mine a miracle unfolding so far from the rules of ordinary life that no rigid social order was born in its wake. Uneducated immigrant miners and laborers mixed with the collection of necessary professionals assembled by the company. Bosses strolled through the underground labyrinth with the men. A pipefitter might become godfather to the son of an accountant. The doctor might serve as best man at the wedding of a sump-pump operator. Legendary parties celebrated such weddings and christenings (the dog sled delivering the whiskey driven by the mine manager himself) or bloomed on nights when there might be nothing more to celebrate than a record freezing temperature or the fact that the mail had finally got through after a blizzard.

  And in the midst of all this there was Jerome’s handsome, laughing father, architect of the underground: a singer, a dancer, the last man still dancing at dawn.

  Jerome had but the faintest of memories concerning this period, but his mother had resurrected fragments of the narrative after his father’s death. The time his father had insisted that all the girls at the brothel attend the manager’s Christmas party, the time he had arranged for three famous rock bands to be flown in by a squadron of bush planes, the time he had offered to be Santa Claus at the school and had been so exhausted by the previous evening’s revelry he had fallen asleep under the Christmas tree. This was the carefree, madcap side of booze, a sort of good-natured jig on the part of the Grim Reaper performed in advance of sharpening up the sickle. It had infuriated Jerome that his mother took such obvious pleasure in recounting these episodes, as if his father’s intoxication was a life-enhancing achievement rather than the hot destructive windstorm that he remembered devouring everything in its path. But he loved her, and was also grateful, therefore, for these brief sessions when she was free of pain. He had kept his expression neutral, smiled or laughed on cue. He had pretended to listen with eagerness.

  “What’s wrong with you today?” Mira was asking. “You’ve barely spoken since we got up.”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” Jerome said. He began to fish in his pocket for money to pay the bill. These coffee bars, he thought, these pretentious places. “Let’s go back,” he said to Mira. “If you want to finish reading those notebooks, then we’ll finish reading those notebooks.”

  Walking toward the studio Jerome fought off the dark image of the air shaft and attempted to enter the moment, to be a man in the company of a young woman on a Saturday morning in an interesting part of town. But he knew this wasn’t working. Mira was looking at him intently by the time they entered the alley, a number of unspoken questions were in the air, and he could feel resentment rising in him. He wanted to hold on to the privacy of his mood. Her intuition, and her concern about this, was an intrusion.

  Still, once they were inside, and before he had arranged himself on the couch again with Mira, he had begun to soften.

  “Let me read it this time,” he said to her.

  Mira opened the book to the spot where she had placed the piece of wool the night before. Then she handed it to Jerome. He scanned a few lines, then said, “She will probably go, once we’ve read the journals. She only asked for a few days, after all.” The feeling he experienced when saying these words was tinged with something he couldn’t identify. Anxiety. Sadness. Fatigue. Maybe guilt. For a moment he wondered who was leaving whom.

  “Summer after summer,” he began, “ beyond the bright windows of the Ballagh Oisin…”

  Jerome put the notebook on the table and looked at Mira. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what to do about her. I might be about to let her down, somehow.”

  Mira moved closer to him. He could feel the slight expansion and contraction of her ribs, the rhythm of her breath. “It will be okay.” she said. “For now just keep reading.”

  Jerome leaned forward, picked up the notebook. “Summer after summer,” he began again.

  Andrew always said there were people who were emplaced.” Sylvia was standing now, speaking to Jerome’s back while he was busy at the counter making tea. The green notebooks lay on the crate that served as a coffee table but, as yet, Jerome had made no reference to th
em. Walking that morning from the hotel to the alley, she had been lit with anticipation, hungry for Jerome’s reaction to Andrew’s words. But once she had entered the studio, she found she couldn’t bring herself to ask the question, to expose the hook in her mind.

  “It seems that those who are emplaced are made that way by generations of their people remaining in the same location,” she continued, “eating food grown from the same plot of earth, burying their dead nearby, passing useful objects down from father to son, mother to daughter. He said that I was like that to such a degree I was almost like an anthropological discovery. Or perhaps an archeological discovery; something, more or less preserved, more or less intact. I was so emplaced, you see, that it was an adventure – almost an act of heroism – for me to leave the County, travel thirty miles to his hill. Without him… without the lure of him… I never would have done it.”

  Swimmer had jumped up on the crate and draped himself in a casual manner over the notebooks.

  “He also told me that there was always a mark left on a landscape by anyone who entered it. Even if it is just a trace – all but invisible – it is there for those willing to look hard enough. He said this elsewhere, of course, not just to me, said it in lectures and wrote it in his books before he retired and became silent and all but forgotten. But what about his own trace?” Sylvia asked suddenly, a hint of anger in her voice. “When he disappeared no one looked for him, looked hard enough, long enough. We knew it would come to this, they likely thought, a huge final disappearance at the end of a series of lesser disappearances.”

  “Maybe they did look for him,” said Jerome, “maybe they just didn’t know where to look. Perhaps you were the only person who knew where he might have gone.”

  “And yet I didn’t know,” said Sylvia. “I didn’t know where he had gone. But he was walking toward the past, I think. Does that make any sense to you?”

  “It makes sense to me now. I… both of us read what he wrote.” Jerome handed Sylvia a steaming mug. “Because I’d been out there on the island surrounded by the remnants of what had existed in the past, it was astonishing for me to have it all reconstructed, to have it come to life, or come back to life.” Jerome stood in the middle of the room while the slim ribbon of steam from his own mug rose toward his shoulder. “And I was a bit surprised.” He sat on the end of the sofa nearest to Sylvia’s chair and placed his tea on the table. “I was surprised by the humor. I would have thought him to be more consistently serious.”

  “He was serious,” said Sylvia, “but he loved humor, loved laughter. I always thought that Andrew would remember forever how I laughed when I was with him, I, who so rarely laughed. But perhaps to him I was a woman who laughed often, one who was light-hearted, easy to know.”

  Jerome smiled. “We liked the story,” he said, “but somehow it made me think that everything in the world is just a mirage, just a suggestion, gone before it’s graspable. I think I already knew that, some part of me already knew that, the part that avoids” – Jerome searched for the word – “stasis, stability, that emplacement you just spoke of. Stability seems to me, sometimes, to be just another way of saying the end.”

  “Stability was what I always wanted,” said Sylvia, “More than you know.”

  “Perhaps. But you… you lost someone. And I’m worried.” He cleared his throat. “I worry about that.” He paused. “About you.”

  “Oh, don’t,” said Sylvia quietly. “You’re so young. And all of this… it’s well…” For the first time it occurred to her that she might have troubled this young man. “You’ll forget this,” she said.

  “No. No, I won’t.” Jerome looked solemn for a moment, then glanced at Sylvia and smiled. “I won’t want to forget. Not the story. Not the things we’ve talked about.” He moved over to the couch and slowly sat down. “And the truth is, I want to know, I guess I always wanted to know what happened to him. And now I want to know about you. You keep saying you lost him twice.”

  “Yes, twice.” Sylvia sat in the chair and placed her mug on the table. “It is a miraculous truth,” she said to Jerome, “that the same man who introduced me to sorrow by walking away from me would also be the man who, years later, would introduce me to redemption simply by turning around and walking back. It was like a resurrection, really… or so I thought.”

  Sylvia glanced at Jerome. One half of his face was lit by sun from the window. His eyelashes cast a faint shadow on his cheek.

  “The side porch of the house where I live was glassed in long ago,” she said, “probably at the end of the nineteenth century. In the intervening years it has been used first as a sunroom and then as a mudroom for the wet shoes and galoshes belonging to my father’s winter patients. There is something called a health clinic now, where my husband and another doctor share an office and examination rooms, so there are no longer any galoshes, no longer any patients, only me, alone each day, wandering through the rooms.

  “I had begun to use the glassed-in porch to grow geraniums, the only plant with which I have had any success whatsoever.” She laughed. “They remain blooming, despite my lack of botanical skill, for three seasons out there. In the winter, of course, they are brought indoors – though Malcolm is put off by what he calls their musty scent. I, however, believe that the plants have no smell at all. I enter and vacate the house through the glassed-in porch, walking past this unnoticed odor whenever I go out, and whenever I return from wherever it is that I have gone.”

  She had always liked the way that the aging parts of a geranium plant could be so easily, so gently detached from the rest of the plant. No cutting, no snapping: they gave themselves with grace to the experience of being discarded, to the idea that the plant on which they flourished would contain not a hint that they had once been part of its physical composition. She remembered that on the spring morning when she heard the phone ringing deep in the center of the house she had left the sunroom with a geranium leaf still between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand and had begun to walk through the indoor rooms, past all the family furniture, toward the sound.

  In the silence that followed the conversation, she had turned away from the wall that held the phone and stared out the north window at the lilac bush in the middle of the yard. The tree was about to bloom and she could recall thinking, How strange it was that the tight, stiff skeletons of the previous year’s blossoms were still on the branch and that they had looked similar to those that were about to flower. The few remaining dead leaves had a dusty grey hue, as if they were not leaves at all but rather old bits of faded cloth left unprotected in an attic. She recalled the dust that had covered the plastic flowers, on the table, long ago, the last time she had seen Andrew. She recalled some of the words he had said: stop… this… can’t. How had she been able to walk past the memory of words such as these?

  “A single phone call,” she told Jerome now, “and Andrew and I began to meet again after years of silence, even though as the great-great-grandson of the Timber Island empire he should have been aware that to do so was to attempt to bring the timber raft back to the island, to sail backwards and with great difficulty upstream.” She paused, her head to one side. “Were we wrong in our desire? I have no answer for that question. But once we began seeing each other again, I believe we both knew we would have to see it through that place where we would be carried separately back downstream so far apart we would be unable to wave, to shout.”

  “Why?” asked Jerome, “Why would it have to be like that?”

  “Time,” said Sylvia. “Seven years had gone by. When I went to meet him at the cottage I came to realize that no one had been near the place for a long, long time. In the past, you see, the table would have been littered with papers covered by his handwriting and on the floor near the desk there would have been small, irregular towers of journals and books. There had been time. There had been change.”

  “Yes,” said Jerome. “There would have been…”

  “I was tremendously nervous
and began to talk and talk. I told him about the museum, about how now that the last of the old families were leaving the County, we were receiving so many donations that we were likely going to have to rent warehouse space. As it was, the basement of the building was filling up with parasols and baby buggies and high button boots and silver tea sets and crochet work and coal oil lamps and strange pioneer tools: planers, clamps, lathes, all the things Gilderson’s ships would have brought into the County. He was looking at me closely as I spoke and I became self-conscious, unable to finish the sentences I was so earnestly beginning.

  “‘This is what makes me happy,’ he said. ‘This is making me happy.’

  “I should have asked, What is making you happy? Us being here again together? The fact that I will be cataloguing objects? You not working? Looking into my face? But instead I turned away, began to gaze through the window at the struggle a tree seemed to be having with the wind. And he walked away, then turned back, and took my hand. Just the slightest pressure, the most casual touch – his sleeve brushing my arm as he passed me in the room – would cause a kind of sorrow to fall over me like rain, and then I would put my arms around him and everything in me would open.”