Jane Urquhart

by A Map of Glass (v5)

  “That’s right, Andrew Woodman. I suppose she told you she was his lover, had been his lover for some time.”

  “I don’t think we should talk about this,” said Jerome, his eyes narrowing. “Whatever Sylvia said, she said it to me… in private.”

  “Well, he wasn’t,” said Malcolm, “he wasn’t her lover. He would never have known her, never have met her. She read about him, about the discovery of his body, last year at the same time that she read about you. It happened like this once before: she collided with someone on the street, and he was her lover too, though she claims it was the same man – one lover encountered several times.”

  Jerome turned away from Malcolm, then looked at him suspiciously from the corner of his eyes. He totally distrusted this man, believed he could sense the anger brimming in him, though his manner was friendly, polite. From the next room he could hear the sound of Mira’s voice, and he wished that she were here with him.

  “It’s the condition,” Malcolm continued. “It sometimes manifests itself this way in a kind of hallucinogenic imagination. It’s quite rare, but it does happen. It’s a sort of inversion of the way the symptoms usually appear. Sylvia is particularly interesting for this reason. And she is, has always been, such a reader, she has trouble, you see, separating reality from what happens in books. We avoid films for this reason.” He smiled. “Not that there are many films to avoid where we live.”

  Jerome was aware that his heart had begun to pound disturbingly. More than anything he wanted to be apart from this man, away from the things he was telling him. “Would you like to sit down?” he asked, indicating the chair. Sylvia’s chair, he thought.

  “No, no… thank you. We’ll have to be going. It takes a couple of hours to get back to the County. And we’ll be wanting to get back early. Sylvia will be quite tired” – Malcolm looked around the studio with what Jerome believed was disapproval – “after all this.”

  During the silence that followed, Malcolm walked around the room inspecting the various images tacked on the wall. He stopped when he came to the reproduction of the Flemish painting. “Is this one of yours?” he asked.

  Jerome did not move from the place where he was standing. “No,” he said, “that’s a poster of a Patinir, Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, sixteenth century, couldn’t possibly be mine.” There was a hint of contempt in his voice. This man knows nothing, he thought, and then, for just a moment, he remembered Branwell’s distant blue landscapes.

  “I know so little about art,” said Malcolm, as if sensing the route Jerome’s mind had taken, “but what with Sylvia and my practice I haven’t the time to explore much of anything else.”

  Surely this man in the flawless trench coat, the expensive silk scarf, the ridiculous toe rubbers didn’t expect sympathy. The very notion that this might be the case set Jerome’s teeth on edge; he had no time at all for sympathy-seekers. He recalled his father’s whining, his pleading, his uncanny ability to make his mother really believe that everything – the drink, the disappearing money, the unexplained absences, the sudden bouts of abuse – was her fault and, by association, by the mere fact that he was her son, his fault as well. His mother had trained him early on, so early on he had no memory of the training, to step carefully around his father in certain moods and at certain levels of inebriation. As a young child he had feared all this. As a teenager he had hated it. Now, suddenly, he remembered his father baiting his mother across a table filled with the dinner she had cooked to please him, and how, unable to bear one more minute of it, he had sprung to his feet prepared if necessary to beat the weakness and cruelty out of him. But his mother had intervened, had taken his father’s side, and, by the time Jerome had exploded out of the apartment, his mother was holding the sobbing broken man his father had become in her arms, apologizing for her son. “Your son,” was the way his father had always put it when registering a complaint, overlooking, it seemed to Jerome, the fact that he was his son as well.

  Jerome became aware that Malcolm had begun to speak again. “She confessed her imaginary life to me after she read the item in the paper, after she had read about you,” he paused, cleared his throat, “and about him. She couldn’t stop herself from speaking, actually, couldn’t help but confess; she was that distraught. Just because it didn’t happen does not mean that it does not, at certain times, seem real to her…” For the first time Malcolm showed some emotion, there was a tremor in his voice. “She has suffered a great deal.”

  “Yes,” said Jerome. He was standing as far away as possible from the man, his arms crossed protectively over his lower ribs, his head down. Not since he had been a teenager had he shown such visible signs of sullenness, and he was peripherally aware of this and oddly embarrassed by it. Sensitivity, he thought, yes, his father had also been able to manifest sensitivity when it suited him, when he had something to gain from it. Any sign of male adult tears caused Jerome to close down completely; he had no faith in these displays. Only Mira’s tears could move him, but even then, even with her, he could feel his guts clenching once the tears began. He could feel himself wanting to escape.

  He decided to speak. “It seems to me,” he said coldly, “that you are suggesting that she, that Sylvia, is telling lies.”

  “Oh no,” Malcolm raised one hand in protest, “she believes, sometimes, that these episodes really took place. But it’s impossible.” He reddened slightly. “You must understand,” he said, “she has no real physical, we have no real physical life. It’s simply not possible, not with the condition. I accepted that when I married her.” He looked at Jerome as if gauging whether to go further.

  Jerome was damned if he was going to continue this conversation, going to ask about their physical life, or demand that this doctor explain the ridiculous condition he had been making reference to.

  “I love her, you see,” the doctor continued, “and that includes accepting everything she is. Everything that is wrong with her.”

  “I don’t think there is anything wrong with her,” said Jerome. “I just don’t believe that. None of this is her fault.” He turned and walked into the other room, where he found Mira bent over a stuffed plastic bag and Sylvia sitting on the futon, her lap filled with colorful ribbons and scraps.

  Both women looked up when he entered, Mira with a length of sparkling rickrack hanging from one small delicate hand as if she had been caught in the act of inventing lightning.

  They were about to depart. Malcolm stood by the door clasping the fabric-filled plastic bag as if it were a large belly that he had miraculously grown in the last few minutes. Jerome was still refusing to look at him.

  Sylvia was bending over the handbag into which she had placed the journals. She was looking for something, a frown of concentration in the center of her forehead. Swimmer, unnoticed by her, was threading in and out between her legs. “Oh, here it is,” said Sylvia, pulling out a thick envelope.

  Jerome approached her then, took her arm, and walked her to the opposite side of the room where the drawings she had noticed were pinned on the wall. He had added two or three to the set since then and on a bench beneath these were some of the photographs he had taken on the island – developed just that morning before Sylvia’s arrival. “You haven’t seen these ones yet,” he said. “This is what the floor of the island looked like,” he told her, “up close, under all that snow.”

  “What’s this?” she asked, peering closely, then pointing to the feathers and the blood.

  “Just a bird. Swimmer ate most of it.” Cock Robin entered his mind. “Swimmer killed him, not a sparrow.”

  Sylvia smiled, and as she smiled Jerome leaned closer to her and whispered, “Don’t go back with him. Stay here, stay anywhere, but don’t go back. He’s got it… he’s got you all wrong.”

  “Does he?” asked Sylvia.

  “He doesn’t believe you. He thinks you are inventing everything.”

  “Oh, that,” said Sylvia, smiling again. “Yes, it’s just like that. Nothing h
armful really, just the way it is.”

  “You could stay in the city,” Jerome persisted. “If money is a problem you could probably get paid for making those maps.”

  “Not very much,” said Sylvia, still smiling. “It’s mostly volunteer work. No, no I have to go back.”

  “Why?” asked Jerome. “Why?” In the background he could hear Mira laughing at something Malcolm had said. Little did she know, he thought. Everything in him now wanted to protect this woman.

  “Because people do what they have to.”

  “Just tell me one thing,” said Jerome, his eyes burning, “just one thing then.”

  “Yes?”

  “Was there ever a condition?”

  “Oh Jerome,” said Sylvia softly, sadly, “there is always, always a condition.” She turned slowly away from him and walked across the room to join her husband at the door.

  Just before stepping over the threshold, Sylvia handed the envelope she had been holding to Jerome. “The answer to what happened to Branwell and Ghost is in this envelope. Or, at least the way I imagine it. It’s not long, but still a kind of final chapter, I suppose.”

  They drove out of the city with excruciating slowness in the thick of rush hour, silence a third but strangely benign presence in the car. Once, when they were halted by gridlock on a major thoroughfare, Malcolm pointed out a garbage truck inching down the opposite side of the street, stopping every twenty feet or so to pick up trash. “What the hell are they doing collecting garbage at this time of the day?” he asked with irritation, not expecting an answer.

  Sylvia glanced over her shoulder to look at something as ordinary as a garbage truck, even though her thoughts were still with Andrew, still with the way she had been able to reconstruct his mouth just a few minutes before, the curve of his brows, and how this reconstruction had felt smooth and inevitable, like recalling with pleasure piano music or an old poem one had memorized in one’s childhood. She was about to let her mind slide back into Andrew’s embrace when something caught her eye. A young man, holding onto a steel bar with one hand, rode on the back of the truck, and each time the vehicle stopped he swung easily down to the pavement, picked up a plastic bag with the sweep of an arm, then tossed this bag over his head into the bin, the motion so fluid and filled with such grace, it was as perfect as a dance. Sylvia was able to watch this young man, this repeated gesture, for three or four minutes until the truck moved beyond her peripheral vision. The thought struck her that if she and Andrew had had a son early on, he would have been about that age. By twisting in her seat she might have been able to see more of the dance, but the traffic had begun to move again, the light had changed.

  “Youth,” she thought as she was driven away, “how beautiful.”

  Mira was holding onto Jerome as he wept, shaking in her arms like the child he had never permitted himself to be. Her own eyes were filled with tears, but she would not let herself go fully into his sorrow. This was his territory, his arena; he had opened the door to show her, but he did not want her to enter these dark spaces and she knew this and loved him harder for it.

  After Sylvia had left, he had kicked a cardboard box across the room and punched his fist through the temporary wall that marked the bedroom space. “I want her to get away!” he had yelled at an amazed Mira. “I want her to be finally free of it!” Mira, her eyes wide and mouth partly open, had remained standing as if she would be glued forever to the time when a young man she thought she had known had punched the wall.

  “She wasn’t your mother, Jerome,” she had said quietly.

  “You know nothing about my mother,” he had shouted, and then, once he had seen and fully registered her shocked expression, he had added more softly, “but, goddamn it, she was another chance.”

  He had told Mira then about the nights he had spent listening to his father roam the apartment like an angry nocturnal beast, the sounds of bottles breaking, his father collapsing on the cold tile of the bathroom floor, the smell of urine and vomit. He told her about the long absences, the lost jobs, the threats, the promises, certain humiliating appearances at school functions. He told her about his mother’s withdrawal, how eventually by the time he was eleven or twelve he couldn’t reach her even when she was in the room sitting by his side.

  “There was never any past for her,” he said. “It was all eaten away by my father’s addiction, which was so huge a part of her life that everything else paled in comparison. She never told me about the farm where she grew up, she never told me who her people were, where they had immigrated from, why we were sort of Catholics, why she had called me Jerome. There were some old dishes around for a while that she said had belonged to her grandmother, but he destroyed them… he destroyed them on purpose. I think he broke them to smash up her past, to shatter anything that didn’t relate specifically to him. There were no photo albums, no pictures of anything at all.”

  He told her about looking down from the balcony at the twisted and wrecked shape of his bicycle in the dirty snow, and then that same shape in the dead spring grass, each day after school, until one day when he looked it was gone. It was after he spoke about the bicycle that he had begun to weep.

  His tears unlocked Mira and she went to him and held him as he cried, the sobs coming out of him in long, shuddering gasps. “Who threw your bicycle off the balcony?” she asked. “Who threw it into the snow? Was it your father?”

  “Yes,” Jerome whispered, “yes.” He pulled away from her and placed his head in his hands. “I was trying to smash it up, just trying to smash it up. He came out onto the balcony… drunk, horribly, staggeringly drunk. He pulled it out of my hands and threw it off the balcony. And that was when he fell.” Mira could feel the tears on his face, could hear the bewilderment in his voice as he said these words. “He lost his balance, and he just fell over the railing.”

  Mira wrestled her way back into his embrace and held onto him with a force she wouldn’t have thought possible in the past, held onto him while he cried like a broken child.

  When it was over, they both fell asleep sitting upright on the couch, their heads touching. Swimmer, who had hidden behind the refrigerator when he saw that Jerome was angry, joined them once he was certain all was safe, walked around Jerome’s lap three times in a circle, then settled in and went to sleep as well.

  Mira wakened first and gently leaned forward to retrieve the folded pieces of paper she had placed in the exact spot where the journals had lain on the crate in front of the couch. Jerome rolled his head back and forth against the quilt, then sat up and massaged his head with his hands.

  “Okay now?” Mira’s hand was on his neck.

  “Okay.”

  “Do you want to go out and get something to eat, or do you want to read this first,” Mira held up the folded papers, “and then go out.”

  “Read it,” said Jerome. “We’ll go out later.”

  Swimmer jumped more noisily than usual down to the floor. If they weren’t going to continue sleeping, he wasn’t going to stay.

  Mira began:

  Branwell despised almost everything about the pretentious house that his son’s wife had built on the hill. He hated its stamped brass doorknobs and its carved oak newel posts, he hated its decorative plastered ceilings and its bogus venetian chandeliers, he hated its patterned carpets and its heavy, ornate furniture, he hated the opaque glass ceiling that was also a ballroom floor, and he hated almost everyone that danced on that floor. He did not despise the property because, as I would later discover each time I visited Andrew there, the property was undeniably beautiful. He did not hate the view from the hill because, in certain lights, he almost believed he could see the Ballagh Oisin rising from the sand far off on the peninsula at the eastern end of the horizon, and because the view, too, was undeniably beautiful. And, most of all, he did not despise his grandson, T.J., who had inherited his own father’s obsession with grandfathers and, as a result, was beginning to show an interest in color and shape.

 
Andrew told me that probably Maurice – the Badger – would have been forced to take the old man in to live with him at Gilderwood upon his return from southwestern Ontario. Then, not much later, he likely commissioned a series of murals from his father for the great downstairs hall. Perhaps he hadn’t really wanted the paintings but had hoped that his father’s melancholy would abate if he gave him something useful to do.

  Branwell’s melancholy had not, however, abated and evidence of this fact was painted on the walls of the central hallway of the house. The dusky, fortified European cities were reproduced there, or at least some of them, as were the sins of the artist’s son, in a horrifying array of colors. A variety of animals decked out like Maurice himself, in the usual parliamentary garb of frock coat and top hat, were depicted writhing in the flames of hell as punishment for their sins. A well-dressed horse, for instance, was being broken on the wheel, a huge yellow frog in a top hat was being plunged by a demon into a cauldron of boiling oil, and a great red bear in a waistcoat and pocketwatch was being dismembered alive. There was absolutely no trace of the distant blue landscapes of his early works, some of which can still be seen in the odd old house in the County.

  When Branwell began this Allegory of Bad Government (a parody of the name of a Sienese fresco he had read about), T.J., delighted by the various animals in the piece, had been permitted to assist, and had spent some days coloring a waistcoat or a top hat. Minister Badger Woodman, as he was now famously called, had apparently wondered about the subject of the mural his father was painting in the front hall, but, having a literal mind, was completely unable to interpret the symbolism that Branwell was striving so diligently to convey. Caroline, beyond commenting on the suitability or lack of suitability of the colors, would have given the mural barely a glance. Subjects other than herself did not interest her.

  Branwell had not heard from Ghost in more than two years. It was now the end of one appalling century and the beginning of another, though looking at the serene view from that hill, it would have been almost impossible to believe that entire ecosystems had been eliminated never to return, and that in Europe, home of all those defensive and defended cities that had so disturbed Branwell years before, various leaders were preparing to embark on a series of wars more horrifying than anything the young Branwell could have imagined in the attic of Les Invalides and, in fact, more horrifying than anything he could think of while standing on the edge of a hill, the panorama from which resembled more than anything the beautiful turquoise landscape he had carried with him for most of his adult life.