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 labourers’ 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 stencilling 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 history 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.”
Both Sylvia and Jerome turned toward Swimmer as if to test this theory. The cat, who was sitting on a high table with his back to them, and who was staring out of the window, remained totally unaware of their attention.
“I came to love the poem called ‘The Death and Burial of Cock Robin,’ “ Sylvia said.
“I don’t remember many picturebooks from my childhood,” said Jerome. “Not too many poems either. My mother tried to teach me a few songs, though, told me that what she remembered most about being small was that she seemed always to be singing—you know, in class, or in church, or even in the playground. Girls’ skipping songs and all that. But I was embarrassed by singing. I don’t remember any of those songs now.”
Sylvia recalled the imaginary music she had so dreaded during her own childhood. “Your mother’s girlhood must have been lovely if it was filled with singing,” she said to Jerome. “Serene almost … and happy. My husband’s youth was like that as well, but I can’t imagine that Andrew’s was, though he never talked about that. I knew so little about him, really, his parents, his schooldays.”
The expression on the young man’s face tightened. “Serenity and joy are not things I would associate with my mother.” He looked at the floor for a moment or two, then glanced at his wrist.
“Is it time for me to go?” Sylvia asked, then reddened. It occurred to her that she had not said these words since she had been with Andrew.
“No, no, it’s fine, not yet,” said Jerome. He had begun to fiddle with his watch. “It’s old, this watch … belonged to my father. I should probably get a new one.” He rearranged his sleeve, looked up. “You know, I had a tendency to forget about time altogether when I was out there alone on the island. I just worked all day and went back to the sail loft when I felt I had done enough or when the light began to dim. It was quite wonderful, the sail loft.”
“The men who worked with the sails were mostly French, I think.” Sylvia tilted her head to one side, remembering. “Andrew told me that the island was divided—quite amicably—but divided nevertheless between French and English notions of how things should be. Not just because of language: it had a lot to do with waterways. The English knew the lake, you see, and the French, the French would be more familiar with the river.”
“Yes,” said Jerome. “Yes, I like that idea. Geographical allegiances. Allegiances to bodies of water.”
The huge wet shroud of a schooner’s sail moving in lake water and the drowned nineteenth-century boys surfaced in Sylvia’s imagination. “Sometimes human beings are confined by geography,” she said, “and sometimes,” she added, “they are overwhelmed, destroyed by it.”
Jerome told Mira that he was not sure about using the woman’s given name, that he had not yet decided how to address her. The woman had used his own first name on occasion, but still he found it difficult to say the word Sylvia when she was with him in the room. She was so obviously from another generation, he was tempted to call her Mrs. Bradley. But the intimacy of what she had been telling him made the formality of that seem somewhat absurd. “And yes,” he said to Mira, “they were lovers, just as you suspected.”
“I didn’t suspect, as you may remember,” said Mira. “I knew.”
Jerome ignored this clarification and changed the subject. “She told me that no one so far had really determined if that island belonged to the lake or the river. The French said it was a river island, the English maintained
it belonged to the lake … and so on.” He pondered this. “I thought about that too,” he said. “ When I was there. I’d like to go back in summer and look at the geography … the geology. Maybe,” he said, “we could answer the question.”
This was the first time he had made reference to the possibility of returning and, quite suddenly, he became aware that, if this were to take place, he would not want to be on his own. He could see himself standing on the shore, alone with the new knowledge of the woman’s grief and, almost before the picture had fully taken shape, he turned his mind away from it.
“She also talked about a poem from her childhood, Cock Robin, of all things,” he said.
“Cock Robin?” Mira did not look up from her knitting. She was making a “swaddle” for the rusted galvanized pail she had found in the alley the previous weekend, a pail that, once it was covered, she would use as a prop in her next performance piece. The wool she was using was pink mohair, and particles of it clung to her dark sweater along with cat hair from Swimmer, who had recently spent some time in her arms. It was often only in the evenings now that she had time for such things, the gallery taking up many of the daylight hours. Just recently she had been told that she would be working on Sunday afternoons.
Jerome sat up straight, became more attentive and formal as he always did when it became clear to him that there was something he could explain to her. He was struck, suddenly, by the familiar pleasure he felt when he knew there was something, even a kindergarten poem, that he could unravel for her. It gave him an edge, a brief flush of superiority. “Robin” he told her, “the bird. From a nursery rhyme.”
Jerome watched as the girl bent to unwind a skein of wool from a large pink shape—rather like candy floss—that rested near her left foot. Sometimes all he wanted to do was sit across the room and look at her. He, who had always been so prone to activity, so dependent on plans, so restless and so easily bored, now found himself becalmed, happy to float in the vicinity of a knitting girl. Her beautiful arms, the tilt of her head. Over and over he was surprised by such things.
“ ‘Who killed Cock Robin? I, said the sparrow, with my bow and arrow, I killed Cock Robin,’ “ he quoted. And all at once he wondered how it was that the rhyme had been implanted in his own memory since he had never seen it in a book. Had his tired mother recited it to him? It seemed unlikely. How, then, had this bird-filled children’s dirge entered his family’s suburban world of freeways and strip malls and cement apartment buildings on the edges of the city? A world conducive to neither birds nor children. The memory of his bicycle came again into his mind, the sight of it rusting in dirty snow on the winter balcony of their apartment, then twisted and broken in a drift ten storeys below. He had stopped riding it once they began to live in the apartment—too humiliated by the journey in the elevator with the bicycle resting uselessly against his hip, too shy of the inevitable adult who would enter the elevator and ask, as if it were not utterly obvious, if he intended to go for a ride.
Mira looked up from her work and gazed at the cat, who was ambling toward her like a sleepwalker. “There were many rhymes, many stories when I was growing up, stories about animals who wouldn’t be able to survive in this climate. Some of the animals in the stories were Gods—Ganesh, for example—so I believed that all tropical animals were deities and that’s why I figured I didn’t see them hanging around the neighbourhood.”
“It would be wonderful, though, to find Ganesh strolling through the streets of this city,” Jerome said.
“How about Saint Jerome’s lion? He has certainly taken to the streets … particularly in the alley in the vicinity of garbage pails.”
“Just like an autumn bee.” Jerome stood now and moved to the back of Mira’s chair, then placed his hands on her shoulders, allowing his fingers to rest in the twin hollows between the muscles of her upper back and her collar bones. He bent toward her ear. “I think that in your previous life you were most likely a bee,” he whispered. “Or was it a wasp?”
Jerome was intrigued by the fact that Mira was fascinated by bees and had once even taken a course in beekeeping. She liked their colour, their shape, their commitment to labour. Most of all, she was impressed by the way they enthusiastically constructed the hives she referred to as “paper houses.” Unlike any other woman Jerome had known, Mira would announce the presence of a bee with joy rather than with terror. There was something oddly beelike about her, Jerome had concluded; she was so industrious, so alert she almost buzzed, and often when she was near him, walking through the galleries, shopping at the market, her presence felt focused, airborne, as if she were hovering above flowers. He was tremendously attracted to her at such moments, when she was absorbed by some task or when her attention shifted to things in the material world. There was an admirable adaptability about her, a generosity toward the beginnings of things. Thinking of this, he studied her busy hands, the frown of concentration on her downcast face. A part of her was gone from him, and yet she was still tantalizingly within reach.
She stopped knitting, rested her head on the back of the chair, and looked up at him, the wool a pink pool on her lap. It occurred to Jerome that he had no idea whether people knitted in India, a country, he now realized, that was difficult to associate with wool, but he didn’t want to ask her, show his ignorance, and anyway he was more interested in her smooth shoulders, her beautiful arms. He was aware that even after three years of intimacy there was always a moment or two when she hesitated, but he also knew that these moments passed. She would respond once he was able to touch her, to touch her and to use the word love. Then her arms would lift, encircle his neck.
“Probably,” she said, “probably I was a bee. And if so I would have liked peonies best.”
He thought of how she would stand entirely still, mesmerized by the small front gardens in their neighbourhood. Once or twice she had remained long enough that an owner had emerged from inside the house to ask if she needed assistance. Jerome had never seen anyone examine all of the external world with such care. Sometimes she became so absorbed by one thing or another he felt she had completely forgotten he was there. How was it possible, he wondered, that with all the other concerns and interests that fought for space in her mind, work and art and the whole complicated network of family and friends that she attended to, at the end of each day she calmly took the decision to return to the place where he was waiting in order to share his evening meal, his bed? Equally mysterious to him was the fact that he himself was always there when she arrived.
“Please?” he said now.
There it was, that moment of hesitation. Then she stood, placed the wool on the kitchen counter, turned, lowered her eyes, and took his hand.
The man behind the desk always looked up when Sylvia entered but never said anything. She too remained silent, her key, which had been recently removed from her handbag, dangling in her gloved hand, the salt shaker clinking slightly against the loose change in her coat pocket as she crossed the tile floor.
It had been three days since her train had departed from Belleville Station, three days since she had mailed the car keys back to Malcolm, three days since she had left the message on the answering machine at his office. Soon Malcolm would discover where she was and would come to fetch her home. Sometimes, here in the hotel when she closed her eyes just before sleep, she saw him in his study, focused on the texts that might give him a description of this new, this inexplicable dance of disappearance she had undertaken. The protective side of him touched her in an odd way at such moments, and she wondered if what she was feeling might be what someone else might call pity. It was, however, a feeling that she experienced only in relation to his faithful attachment to her disability, if that is what it was, a disability. That and the fact that he had chosen to come so completely into the physical spaces that made up her ancestral history. Her father’s desk, her great-grandmother’s china. The antique marriage bed that would have been, on more than one occasion, a deathbed: all the details t
hat made up what she thought of as her known and knowable place had been fully accepted by him, incorporated into his life’s work. Her in her natural habitat. His life’s work.
Andrew had believed that the cells of humans, like those of birds and animals, were programmed to recognize the smells and sights and sounds of their natural habitat. Even if he had not been born in Italy, for example, a New Yorker whose grandparents had been Tuscan might experience a sense of familiarity with, say, the hills around Arezzo when first stepping onto the soil of that region. “In a particular kind of light in certain landscapes,” he had told her, “all you can see are ruins, all you can feel is the past, your own ancestry or that of someone else.” She understood this, although in her case, until Andrew opened the door of the world for her, the physicality of the past was mostly brought toward her by objects stored like relics inside her family home.
Whenever she entered the hotel room, she would remove the two green leather journals from her handbag, place them on the desk, then, using the hotel stationery, she would write for an hour or so. Today, however, pulling back to look at the sheet of paper in front of her, she found she was slightly startled by the appearance of her own handwriting, which was tight and dark on the page, and which was coming in and out of focus before her eyes. Knowing she was tired, she rose and walked over to the pristine bed and, without removing the coverlet, she lay down.
Soon she began to go through the inventory of the house she had left behind, an inventory she had made in early childhood and had never forgotten. Even here, even during these uncertain days, it was a comfort to her. Mentally opening the door with the key she had learned to use when she was seven, she walked into the front hall, past the umbrella stand, with its diamond-shaped mirror, and the walnut table whose bird’s-eye maple drawers were filled with flowered calling cards engraved a century ago with the names of neighbours, neighbours whose years of birth and death had since grown indistinct under the rain that had washed over their marble grave markers. On the wall above the table hung a print of the Niagara River rendered downstream from the famous cataract. There is a print of that river on the wall of my house, she would say when Andrew told her, once, that he was going there to record the remnants of a trolley line abandoned since the 1920s. It is a print I know well, she told him as if this knowledge of lines on a piece of paper could connect her more closely with him and his life without her. But she did know it well; each tree, the rocks, and the small, solitary human figure staring into the current, the cliffs on each side.
A Map of Glass Page 10
