A Map of Glass

by Jane Urquhart

  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 on to him with a force she wouldn’t have thought possible in the past, held on to 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 colour 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 colours. 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 colouring 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 colours, 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.

  August is the month of lightning on the Great Lake Ontario and the shores that surround it. Often, one can stand at the lake’s edge in the evening and watch sheet lightning move like a distant beautiful war along the seam of the horizon where water touches sky. But it is the other kind of lightning I am referring to, the kind that is built from heat and moisture, the kind that is a companion to storm. In some ways, this kind of lightning is like the approach of someone significant in your life: a friend, a lover, an enemy. You see the lightning, then you count out the beat of the distance until the thunder comes. Julia says that it is the interval between thunder and lightning that is the closest she comes to being able to see weather. When the interval closes, the meeting takes place and the lightning strikes.

  No one in the large house was hearing thunder or listening to intervals, as all were soundly asleep. Ghost, however, galloping on a white horse down the King’s Highway toward the village beneath Gilderwood Hill, was measuring the distance of the storm on the one hand, and the distance he must cover on the other. He knew what was going to happen. He hoped he would get there in time.

  When he arrived at the top of the hill the fatal strike had already taken place, the fire had begun and flames were emerging from attic windows. By the light of these flames Ghost was able to see that two or three people were standing out on the lawn dressed in nightclothes—servants, likely, who would have inhabited the attic and who would have felt the strike and fled the house. They had left the magnificent front door open in their flight.

  Ghost, seeking Branwell, and seeking also someone close to Branwell, did not dismount but rode his white horse right through the entrance, down the hall past Allegory of Bad Government, and straight up the wide stairs. In Branwell’s bedroom, Ghost leaned down from his horse and lifted his friend out of the bed by his nightshirt. “Get on the horse,” he shouted, “but there is someone else. Who is it? Where is he?”

  Branwell was convinced that he was dreaming, and the smoke that was blossoming in the upper air of his room did nothing to dispel this conviction. Nevertheless, he knew the answer to Ghost’s question. “T.J.,” he said. “In the next room.”

  And so the child that would become Andrew’s father burst out of the burning house and into the safety of the landscape riding with two white-haired men on a white horse bac
klit by red and orange flames. And Andrew—the future—was riding that white horse as well, along with his life and what that life would do to my life and all the other lives it would touch.

  Andrew told me that if you now asked anyone in the village below the hill about the house they would talk about the lightning strike, the fire, the subsequent loss of life, and the glass ballroom floor. They would talk about the painted hallways, and about a rumour that suggested that someone had once ridden a white horse up the central staircase. They had forgotten all about the subject of the murals, they had forgotten about the rescue, they had forgotten all about the boy who had been raised by two old men in a cottage that was still standing on the property.

  Perhaps, Jerome, all of life is an exercise in forgetting. Think of how our childhood fades as we walk into adulthood, how it recedes and diminishes like the view of a coastline from the deck of an oceanliner. First the small details disappear, then the specifics of built spaces, then the hills fall below the horizon one by one. People we have been close to, people who die, are removed from our minds feature by feature until there is only a fragment left behind, a glance, the shine of their hair, a few episodes, sometimes traumatic, sometimes tender. I have not been close to many people, Jerome, but I know that once they leave us they become insubstantial, and no matter how we try we cannot hold them, we cannot reconstruct. The dead don’t answer when we call them. The dead are not our friends.

  All of this is terrible, unthinkable. But, it is not as terrible as being forgotten by the man you love while he is breathing the same air, while he is standing in the same room. He has forgotten you and yet some part of him remembers that he should touch you, and he does this, but as he moves against you he no longer speaks your name as he plunges his hands into your hair because he has forgotten your name. When he undresses you he registers surprise that your flesh is imperfect. He has forgotten your age. He has forgotten the many years that have passed since he first desired you, and the suffering during those years that has changed your face, the texture of your skin, the curve of your spine. The accumulated absences, the accumulated distances—he has forgotten all of these. He thinks that it was just yesterday that you collided near the stoplight of a town whose name he can no longer recall. He thinks the smooth legs that took you to the dunes above a buried hotel are the same legs that brought you back, years later, to the meeting place, the room in which you have fallen over and over again onto a bed whose springs are now rusty, whose mattress is now filled with dust. He has forgotten the love. His body knows what to do, but his mind has forgotten, his heart has been stilled.

  I have scraped my memory like a glacier through my mind, with as much cold rationality as a person like me is able to muster, trying to determine, trying to remember when each story was told to me. What was outside the window when Andrew spoke of Annabelle? There is a flicker of white, but whether this is the white of trilliums on the forest floor or the white of snow floating though the pines I can’t now say. Perhaps it’s the continuous white of cotton sheets that stays with me for, during the hours we spent together, we clung to that bed as if it were an island and we the only two survivors of one of Annabelle’s marine disasters. And what age were we at this time or that time? What made him decide that we needed a particular story on a particular day or during the course of a particular year? Was his hair brown, or grey or white, as he spoke the words? In the end, though, it does not matter, just as it does not matter that although I believed that he had returned because—miraculously—he wanted to begin again, he had really returned because he had forgotten that we had ever stopped. What matters was the miracle that we ever met at all, the miracle of the life I never could have lived without the idea of him, and the arm of that idea resting on my shoulder.

  All the while I have been talking to you I have been listening for the sound of Andrew’s voice, because they are his stories, really, these things he told me. But now I have to admit that I have been listening in the way I listened to a stethoscope that belonged to my father. When I was a child, I removed it from his office so many times that eventually, as a kind of joke, I suppose, I was given an instrument of my own for Christmas. I loved the rubber earpieces that shut out the noise of the world. But, even more, I loved the little silver bell at the end of the double hose, a bell I could place against my chest in order to listen to the drum, to the pounding music of my own complicated, fascinating heart.

  Jerome remained silent while Mira folded up the papers and placed them on the arm of the couch. He was trying to remember the last time he had been read to, who had done the reading. It would have been during his childhood, but the feeling associated with the faint memory was good, warm. There had been an encircling arm, so it would have been early on—his early childhood. Sometimes there had been stories, he suddenly knew, sometimes poetry.

  “God,” said Mira. “How sad, how terribly, terribly sad. Do you think we’ll ever see her again?”

  “ ‘The boy stood on the burning deck,’ ” said Jerome quietly “ ‘when all but he had fled.’ ”

  “Jerome … ?”

  “Wait,” he said, not looking at her, then slowly turning, his eyes wide. “I think it was him.” Mira was searching his face.

  “I think it was him.” He closed his eyes, then opened them again and grabbed Mira’s arm. “It was my father,” he said with amazement, the shock of something resembling pain, or perhaps joy, making it necessary for him to have to steady himself. “He read to me,” he said with wonder in his voice. “It was my father who read to me.”

  He leaned back to allow the memory to take shape and could hear the sound of his father’s voice reading a story about a toy canoe launched at the head of Lake Superior, not far from where they had lived in the north. The small watercraft had been taken by currents of water far from its birthplace. Moving through one Great Lake after another, past cities and farms in the company of freighters and pleasure boats, tumbling over the falls of Niagara, rotating in whirlpools, passing perhaps Timber Island, reaching the St. Lawrence River, floating under the bridges of Montreal and Quebec City, it always carried with it the certain knowledge of the eventual salt sea as a desired destination. What had happened then? What had happened once this tiny object reached the desired destination?

  It could only have been overwhelmed, Jerome decided, swallowed up—destroyed, in fact—by the enormity of its own wishes.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  During the four years that passed while I was writing this novel, a great number of people helped and encouraged me, both personally and professionally. In particular I would like to thank Mieke Bevelander, Pat Bremner, Anne Burnett, Liz Calder, Adrienne Clarkson, Ellen Levine, Allan Mackay, Ciara Phillips, Emily Urquhart, and Tony Urquhart. Pertinent bits of valuable information, or inspiring thoughts, were provided by Mamta Mishra, Rasha Mourtada, and Alison Thompson, as well as by archivists at the Library and Archives Canada and the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes at Kingston, Ontario. Without Pat Le Conte I would not have been able to finish the novel in comfortable surroundings. Without the luck brought to me by a certain multiple of three, there would have been much less joy.

  Several publications were also very important to me, especially John K. Grande’s essays on earth sculpture and the two wonderful volumes describing the Calvin Timber Business on Garden Island: A Corner of Empire by T.R. Glover and D.D. Calvin and A Saga of the St. Lawrence by D.D. Calvin. The imaginary timber empire described in the central section of A Map of Glass is very loosely based on the Calvin business, but all characters and events are purely fictional. Another book I found helpful was Great Lakes Saga by A.G. Young. The phrase “the ugliest species of watercraft ever to diversify a marine landscape” used on this page and this page was borrowed from this volume.

  I would also like to thank the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) for information concerning tactile maps and the Perth County Historical Foundation for information on the Fryfogel Inn.

  I
am very grateful to Heather Sangster for her careful attention to details.

  I would like to thank my much loved late father, Walter (Nick) Carter, who was a benign, careful, and highly respected mining engineer and prospector, and whose affection for his profession led to my own, admittedly now diminished, knowledge of the mining world.

  Finally, a special thank you to my editor, close friend, and best adviser, Ellen Seligman.

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS FOR READING GROUPS

  1. Jane Urquhart doesn’t title individual chapters, instead she divides her novel into three large sections: “The Revelations”; “The Bog Commissioners”; “A Map of Glass.” Look at each of these sections and discuss why it is given that particular title. The name of the second section, “The Bog Commissioners,” is at first mysterious because Joseph Woodman only stayed in Ireland as a bog commissioner for less than half a year. But something of the mentality or attitude he demonstrates in Ireland travels with him to Canada, and it informs other characters too. What is that attitude, and how does it play out in the novel? When discussing the name of the last section, “A Map of Glass,” also consider why Urquhart chose that as the title of the book.

  2. The epigraph of the novel tells us that the “logical, two dimensional picture” provided by a diagram, plan, or map “rarely looks like the thing it stands for.” Which characters make maps or diagrams? What function do they serve? How do they relate to some of the book’s central concerns? What makes a “true” map?