A Map of Glass

by Jane Urquhart

  “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 odour 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 centre 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.”

  How silent Andrew had been during this reunion, though he had said her name while they were making love.

  “He embraced me with such a sense of ease,” she said to Jerome, “such an air of familiarity that, in a way, time evaporated. Neither one of us said the word change, as people so often do in such situations. Change seemed to be irrelevant to us. What was relevant was the buried past, the dark painted hallways of the hotel under the dunes, the wrecks that littered the floor of the Great Lakes, what I had learned about the sagging timbers, the aged grey-coloured straw of the increasingly abandoned barns in my County. His ancestors. Mine.

  “But in the months that followed, I should have reached across the dead blossoms of the previous season and touched his older face. I should have spoken his name. I should have at least said, Where have you been, where have you been, my love? I should have asked, Why, why did you leave me? I should have asked, Why, why did you leave the young woman that I was then? And why have you summoned the older woman that I am now, and why has she so spontaneously responded to the summons? But I couldn’t do it. I received not the slightest hint of permission to ask these questions. Not from him. Not from myself.”

  What had made her again take such journeys away from her backyard and kitchen, away from the familiar patterns of her dishes, the sheets and towels that normally touched her body, away from the easy cadence of a shared daily life toward tension and deceit and a growing knowledge of inevitable bereavement? She had called it love, of course, but perhaps that was just her way of disguising something deeper, something darker, a desire to put everything solid and respectable at risk. Andrew had always been less reflective, and therefore, she supposed, more honest … more honest in that he resisted any attempts at interpretation, refused to name their connection at all.

  “No,” she said suddenly. “I believe … I am certain that I loved him, or at least I loved the version of him that I was given. I loved that fragment of him that I was given. Only now and then did we speak of our connection and then almost always contentiously. When I felt him drifting far from my shore, as I sometimes did, I would want some kind of declaration, some sort of explanation. He always resisted this, often with cruelty. But there was a great deal of tenderness as well. Yes, there was tenderness. And when we spoke about history, about the past, about the generations of his family, and about mine, about lost landscapes and vanished architecture, there was
… I still believe this … quite a lot of joy.”

  Sylvia was remembering the rasping texture of Andrew’s unshaven face against the palm of her hand, or grazing the skin on her stomach, the heels of his hands pushing into the muscles of the small of her back. Had he known even her name the last time they had clung together like that? Were his expressions of passion a request for response or were they cries of alarm at an act he did not recognize and would not remember, an act of love lost forever the minute it ended or perhaps even while it was happening? For the first time she attempted to struggle away from the anguish thoughts such as these carried in their dark arms. She wanted to come back into this room, back to the young man to whom she had been speaking, wanted to greet even the offensive tubes of artificial light that flickered over his head. But when she looked up, Jerome was gone.

  His absence was temporary, however. He walked back toward her from the inner room and carefully laid six black-and-white postcards in a line on the floor at her feet. “This is all that I have from my early childhood,” he said, “all that is left.”

  Sylvia was careful not to pick up the cards, change the pattern, the sequence he had chosen. She leaned to one side and dug in her handbag for her glasses, then bent forward and looked. The head frame and outbuildings of a mine, a log house situated on a point of land that reached into a lake, a partly built town site with a new church and evidence of a forest fire blossoming on the horizon, several men standing beside a dog team with the message 4 feet of snow, 38 below zero !!! written beneath them, a trio of miners posing in a rough-hewn underground tunnel, one man pouring liquid gold from a furnace, the town site now fully developed with a drugstore, soda fountain, small frame hotel.

  “Its all gone now,” said Jerome. “The mine closed and everything disappeared. It had hardly begun and then it was over. There is nothing left, nothing at all.” He was silent for a moment. “They said there was no more gold. But the truth was that my father made a mistake. His mistake closed everything.”

  Jerome was hunkered down quite near her. She could see that there was a moth hole in the shoulder of the sweater he was wearing and that his blue jeans were worn at the knees. Mothers, she knew, sometimes attended to things that needed mending.

  “The mistake,” Sylvia said. Malcolm had taught her that one need not always use the interrogative. Sometimes a repetition was enough encouragement, and she found herself wanting to know.

  Jerome pointed to a man on the fourth card. “You see that miner?” he said. “That was the miner who died, fifth level down, one level too far. His name was Thorvaldson.” He turned the card over to check the list of names on the back. “Yes, from Iceland. The men came from all over northern Europe, you know, and from Cornwall and Wales. There was a rock burst. Everyone else—my father included—got out.”

  “I’m sorry, but I know nothing about mines … your father was a miner?”

  “No, he was the engineer, so he should have known, probably did know. The veins … the veins of gold became larger at deeper levels, but everything would be less stable. The mine closed after that, the community disintegrated.”

  “Because of the miner who died?”

  “Because the company bosses finally became aware—as a result of the burst—that they weren’t going to be able to get any more gold out of that ground.”

  Jerome stood and began to walk back and forth across the concrete floor. “My father smashed the glass of the frame that held his diploma. He tore up the diploma itself and tossed it into the fire. I remember this. He was drunk, of course, enraged. My mother and I were terrified. He never went near a mine again—no one would have hired him anyway. We moved to the city, or at least to the edge of the city. He worked for a while making geological maps for a metallurgical company, then, when his hands began to shake too much, as a janitor for the same company, and, finally, he didn’t work at all.”

  The term alcoholism slid into Sylvia’s mind. It occurred to her that like so many things that can go wrong, the word started with the letter a.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to Jerome.

  “What’s to be sorry about,” he replied. “He was the one who made the mistake.” Jerome’s anger was so visible that Sylvia, who had rarely experienced anger, could feel it hissing in her own blood. Her fear of the fluorescent lights began to return. She wondered about the lighting in the mine, and remembered a photo she had seen of men with lights, or was it candles, in their hats. “People do what they have to do,” she said, something she remembered Branwell saying in Andrew’s writing. “And,” she said, recalling the story of the timber, the barley, the sand, “and they almost always go too far.”

  Jerome bent down and snatched the cards from the table, as if he were a gambler sweeping up a suit of cards. “Did he have to drink so much that you could smell it coming from his pores day and night?” he said. “Did he have to take us down with him?”

  “Yes,” said Sylvia. “He probably had to do all of that.”

  “Did he have to kill my mother? The whole thing, the drinking, the humiliation, the crummy apartments, his sordid death, all of it killed her … and not quickly either … it killed her by degrees. She didn’t last two years after he was gone.”

  “No,” said Sylvia uncertainly. “He didn’t have to do that. But she, she likely had to die for him.”

  Jerome stood, postcards in hand, looking directly at Sylvia, and she willed herself to look back. The air was thick with anticipation, as if anything at all might happen and she was momentarily aware of the risks two people took simply by being alone together in a room. Murder, love, collision, caress, were they not all part of the same family?

  Jerome turned away. “I’ll take these back now,” he said, looking at the postcards in his hand. “I’ll put these away.”

  When Jerome returned to the room, his expression was neutral, removed. He sat on the couch and folded his arms over his chest. “My childhood,” he said. “I don’t know why I brought it up. It’s all over anyway. It’s finished. I shouldn’t have bothered you with any of it.”

  “Please,” Sylvia said, leaning forward. “I wasn’t bothered. I’m glad you told me.” She smiled. “Now I will be able to remember that I knew you,” she added, then looked away, feeling almost shy. “How little, in the final analysis, we really know about another person.”

  Jerome raised his eyebrows at this and nodded. “But, still,” he said, reconsidering, “after reading Andrew’s journals, I think maybe landscape—place—makes people more knowable. Or it did, in the past. It seems there’s not much of that left now. Everyone’s moving, and the landscape, well, the landscape is disappearing.”

  “Have I mentioned that the old cottage was approached by way of a grove of trees?” Sylvia asked. “These were planted a century ago to line the driveway that swung up toward the marvellous entranceway of Maurice Woodman’s old house. Andrew and I would have to walk past the lightning-struck burnt foundations of that house in order to meet.”

  In the early days, she’d often had to walk though a herd of staring cows as she moved along the edge of the hill. There was always a soft wind, an echo of the breezes that would have touched the shore of the prehistoric lake, and she had always stopped to look at the view, which included the village below, rolling farmland and woodlots to the west, the charmed surface of the lake in all directions, and the arm of her peninsular County bending around the waters at the eastern horizon. Then, after passing through the dying orchard, and walking farther, she would begin to sense a shift in the land underfoot, as she moved past the scattered fieldstones, and in some spots the vestiges of the walls and crumbling mortar that were the last remains of the foundation of the great burnt house, the grassy basins of its cellars and kitchens. Andrew had done some digging in these basins and had come across a few ceramic marbles, ones he believed that his own father, T.J. Woodman, must have played with as a boy, and a porcelain cup and saucer, miraculously undamaged. But most exciting to her were the large, smooth,
oddly shaped pieces of melted glass, which he had come across, evidence that the rumour about the glass ballroom floor was true.

  “It was true?” exclaimed Jerome when she told him all this. “The artist Robert Smithson would have been fascinated by that. I keep thinking all the time about a piece he made. It was titled Map of Glass. I’ve never known if he meant a map of the properties of glass, or if he was referring to a glass map, which would then be, of course, breakable. But even he … I don’t think even he would have thought about melted glass. A ballroom with a glass floor, on fire and then melting. That’s just wonderful!”

  Sylvia laughed at Jerome’s reaction. “Andrew told me that lightning striking sand can cause glass to form spontaneously. I never knew that, did you?”

  “No,” said Jerome. “No, I never knew that.”

  “Once, toward the end of that last summer, Andrew said that he wanted me to think about the great cities of Earth, to think about them not being there any more, about them never having been there at all: the forests of Manhattan Island, the untouched riverbanks of the Seine or the Thames, the clear water moving through reeds near the shore, the unspoiled valleys that existed before agriculture, then architecture, then industry changed them.”

  They had been looking through the windows of the cabin into the forest as he spoke and occasionally deer would drift by, soft and brownish grey, between the tall trunks of the trees. Andrew once pointed out that the earth colours of their coats echoed a patch of yellow dried grass, or a pale grey log, brown bark, or the rust of fallen pine needles.

  As he had told her this, every part of her was touched by his voice. There had been the warmth of his skin against hers, and the delivery of syllables all through the sunny afternoons. Later when the rains came, the sound of water falling through the holes in the roof into the pans they had placed here and there on the floor was like punctuation marking the cadence of his speech.

  “You, Jerome, may never know what it is to enter another kind of partnership, what is given to you in such circumstances. Somehow, neither person leaves a footprint, casts a shadow. We remained utterly unrecorded, unmarked.”