Storm Glass

by Jane Urquhart

  When I returned from that city of heat and silence, London seemed noisy and cold. I quickly finalized the arrangements for the marriage my family approved of, one that would pave the way to my present dukedom. My wife and I are very fond of each other. There have been no other women in my life.

  I continued to acquire glass, of course, returning to Venice again and again over the years, and to the rest of Italy, to look for older and finer pieces. Now my rooms are filled with objects so fragile, so delicate, that I can hardly bear to enter them, afraid that one careless movement, or even the slight wind caused by my passing, might bring about the destruction of the empire I’ve spent my life’s energies acquiring. My blown glass obsessions. My delicate vocation.

  And now, after sixty years, this final shift of attention. The rooms of my country house are full, my collection is complete. I have locked the door and walked away for the last time. Thousands of beautiful objects are in my possession, safe behind stronger glass, protected by walls of stone. And I don’t want them, don’t want the burden of them, the fear, the inability to cope with a strong wind or horses galloping by the window. I don’t want them, want instead a memory—a young girl standing in the light, holding a tray filled with glasses of sherry. Want to be able to remember the words she spoke, the colour of her eyes.

  I don’t want the old man who stares back at me from those five dark mirrors. Even though not a single object in his entire collection has ever been damaged, his dreams are filled with broken glass and tears.

  Hotel Verbano

  SLOTH

  Hotel Verbano floats on the still lake like a child’s toy, like the model of an ocean liner under glass, like a pink cloud on the horizon. Occasionally it is just a shadow of itself, occasionally it is more precise than palaces.

  Getting there. The vaporetto cuts the lake in half, gliding on a sharp keel. Behind me a crease like the life line on your palm. There is no wind, little noise, just the ticking of the small motor at the stern and the gentle lick of water at the prow. My arm drops over the side of the boat and my hand is touched by the soft warm lake.

  Around me mountains alter their firm positions. Appearing, then opening up to reveal more mountains. Hotel Verbano increases in size. I recognize the features on the garden statues. I begin to identify flowers. Overhead, a sky of pure white, its surface uninterrupted by cloud formations or areas of blue. The lake, too—smooth, featureless. Tiny beads of moisture begin to cover my skin.

  When I walk through the lobby of Hotel Verbano, my clean damp footprints remain on the marble floor. The key to my room jingles in my hand. Already I am very tired. Closing my eyes in the elevator, I see mountains moving. Firm and calm.

  I never dream at Hotel Verbano. Sleep is neutral, day is dream. Looking from my balcony, I see guests adrift in rowboats, their long white skirts trailing in the water. Some toss their hair back, others sip pastel-coloured iced drinks. Their purple eyes are filled with moving mountains.

  The first day. As I walk in the gardens the statues smile at me. They wear white peacocks as hats and bracelets, wreaths of flowers round their necks. I find I cannot remember their iconography, cannot recall their period, their history. Returning to the room, I sink into a mattress of soft white feathers. The walls are covered with sea shells drawn from an ocean far from here. Each one contains some echo from the sea. I hear its quiet breath before I sleep.

  The second day, I walk around the circumference of the island that is this hotel. This is Verbano’s rough edge. Here I stumble over boulders and my ankles are torn by the branches of fallen trees. I see a vague dark shape in the water, very close to my right foot, and I realize it is a drowned cat, partially concealed by water, moving back and forth with the subtle motions of the lake. Its white fur is beginning to peel and float away from its body. The small waves are a cradle to its long sleep, and the way it moves in them is a dance of decay.

  In the dining-room the waiters walk on noiseless shoes, anticipate my order, and are never mistaken. I eat the soft fish of the lake and white bread. I add milk to my tea to destroy its colour. My wine is always white, like the table-cloth, the saucers, the ceiling over my head.

  Once, after a lengthy sleep, I open the shutters and I see the moon rise over a wall of mountains. The white path it makes on the water is as still as ice, until an empty drifting boat intersects it and the black of the lake is broken into stars. I return to my bed and sleep on until noon.

  Eventually the flowers in the dining-room, the urns on the terrace, the marble statues, the gravel garden paths are all covered by a light mist, as if my eyes cannot quite focus. The pale omelette on my plate, the glass in my hand lose texture, become unfamiliar, soft. A knife dissolves in my grasp. The muscles in my eyelids relax, my mouth begins to droop.

  By the third day, the mist has turned to fog, eliminating mountains. I visit the ten terraces where even the dark cypress has become opaque. The abandoned bird machine stands silent—pale blue doves poised, their mechanical mouths open, miming song. Dusty olive trees shrink below me and mimosa closes at my touch. Past the camphor level sits the greenhouse, empty in this gentlest of seasons. A white sailboat floats, becalmed, almost invisible, halfway from the shore.

  Again in my room, opening the windows for air, closing the shutters for dark, I look once more out to the lake. The seam of the horizon has vanished, leaving a closed circle of atmosphere. The cat floats by. The long train of fur and skin attached to its left rear paw is about to separate forever. Guests adrift in rowboats sing indistinguishable lullabies. I turn towards the comfort of the bed.

  The last thing that I notice is a thin white curtain floating on the breeze that penetrates the shutters.

  FORBIDDEN DANCES

  My grandmother never went to dances; not as a young girl and certainly not later. Her father, whom I imagined as a beak-nosed, square-jawed individual with a Bible in one hand and a whip in the other, absolutely forbade it because of the Devil who was well known to enter even the most Methodist of households once the dancing began. I remember her telling me this in her linoleum-and-wallpapered kitchen, and I remember that when she told it, not a hint of amusement entered her voice. Instead, there was the rumour of sadness and resignation that accompanies the confession of a joy wished for, anticipated, but never experienced and then out of reach forever.

  “He absolutely forbade it,” she would say, twitching a little in her rocker, nervous as a young girl who is waiting to be asked to dance and who knows she never will be.

  I had never heard the word forbid spoken aloud before, though of course, I had read it in novels. My own parents used words like won’t and can’t and it’s not allowed. I’m not allowed to, I had always told friends who wanted me to cross busy roads, or walk over railway trestles, or travel by subway into the dark heart of the city. It was a sentence connected to time. I knew the word not would disappear in a few years and the possibilities of the word allow would open up. Forbid was a closed, sealed and bolted door.

  Grandma lived in the village where she was born, in the large frame house that my grandfather had purchased after he had retired and my uncle had taken over the family farm. You could see the outer fields of the farm from Grandma’s kitchen windows and sometimes my uncle as well going back and forth across them on his red tractor. Grandma was able, therefore, to supervise some farming activities through glass, the way signalmen in their wooden towers supervise trains. This occasionally caused her anxiety. “I hope,” she would say, looking out the south window and letting the piece of cotton she was working on slip onto her lap, “I hope Arnold gets the hay in before it rains, before it’s too late.”

  Every facet of the landscape that surrounded her house was steeped in memory for Grandma. All she had to do, to move from married life to childhood, was walk from the south side of the kitchen to the north and settle herself in a different chair. From her north window she could see the monumental hill that loomed up behind the house and barn her forbidding father had owned.
Once, when she was a young girl, she had been sent to fetch six or seven cows from the top of that hill and one of them had stumbled and fallen, a blur of black and white, all the way down to its death. Was it her fault? I wondered. Was that why her father forbade her to dance?

  She preferred the south side of the kitchen despite the fact that the view from there was a constant reminder of the ever present possibility of crop failure. She preferred it, I assumed, to the memory of a hard climb, a tragic fall, and forbidden dances. Only recently did it occur to me that she probably sat there because the light was better and, since her eyesight was failing, it was becoming more and more difficult for her to work on whatever piece of appliquéd patchwork she was sewing at the time. She had never been much good at needlework, which was odd because she was always at it. This was an activity, she told me, that her father approved of, insisted upon, actually. An enforced pastime that must, despite her lack of skill, have developed into a habit. Her house was crammed with rather shoddy examples of this work; appliquéd quilts on the beds, sloppy cross-stitching on the pillows, embroidered runners on the sideboards. And all the same motif—fabric ladies in long pastel dresses who looked as if they might be preparing to go to a dance, even though the stitches that held them together were unlikely to endure long enough to get them there.

  Grandma often sighed as she moved her fingers through her work basket looking for a certain shade of embroidery thread or the right piece of calico. She sighed and looked out the window and worried about the crops. When she began to sew she moved one black-laced shoe up and down in a rhythmic manner as if she were keeping time to some mysterious inner music. Then with her back to that ominous, dangerous hill, she told me stories of her girlhood.

  It wasn’t until I was almost fully grown, however, that she told me what had happened to her best friend—the girl who had gone to the dances.

  Grandma’s kitchen was filled with knick-knacks, bric-à-brac, little tributes to domesticity, little prayers painted on glass. Oh, Lord of pots and pans and things / Give me comfort, give me wings. And there were instructions and recipes for wifedom as well, burned into thin wooden plaques. Thirty pounds of industry, thirty pounds of prudence, fifteen pounds of good humour, fifteen pounds of necessary pride.

  “What is prudence, Grandma?”

  “Prudence,” said Grandma, “is what my best friend had very little of. Oh, she was beautiful all right, and she could dance, but she was not prudent. Did I ever tell you about the runaway horses?”

  “No,” I said, lying, because I wanted to hear the story again.

  “We were twelve and her father had let us take the horses and the cutter to Centerton, at night, mind you. My father would never let me take horses anywhere, any time. Women’s hands are not made for reins and whips, he said to me.” Grandma walked across the room and opened the curtains that covered the north window as if the view out there were a stage on which this particular drama was to be acted out. Then she began to clear the breakfast dishes from the table.

  “So we went there, visited someone … I don’t remember who … and on the way back the horses ran away with us.”

  “Did she make them run away, Grandma?”

  “No, but she let them run away which is just as bad or maybe worse. So there we were, two young girls, streaking across the snowy fields in the dark. She thought they’d stop at the fence but what she didn’t know and what I did know is that a runaway horse doesn’t even see a fence.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing much because of the snow. The fence was damaged, the cutter was damaged but we, and the horses, were fine. She just sat there laughing to beat the band, up to her waist in snow.”

  I smiled, imagining Grandma’s best friend in her dancing attire laughing in a moonlit drift.

  “But you couldn’t call that prudent, now, could you,” said Grandma, “being so carefree and all about runaway horses and fences? No,” she answered herself thoughtfully, “you couldn’t call that prudent at all.”

  Across the road from Grandma’s house, behind an abandoned turnip factory, was a woods filled with a series of wonders entirely formed by water. The crick, as Grandma called it, wound through this shady territory expanding at times to form deep black pools and then contracting again to dance in a reckless fashion over pastel-coloured pebbles. Spending a lot of time in this spot, which was sealed off by cedars from the rest of the world, was not forbidden by Grandma and so all through my childhood visits I made daily treks down there to watch water spiders tango across the little ponds and to observe the plentiful trout perform their sinuous gavotte. Dragonflies waltzed over water, their wings like taffeta skirts. Down there, in there, everything appeared to be dancing. Everything but my own reflection on the surface of a small dark pool. Both my reflection and I were merely watching; watching and waiting for something, anything, to ask us to dance.

  Returning from that cool place I could see Grandma’s square frame house, sturdy as a fortress, across the road. The straight lines of its clapboard, the clean gleam of its windows. I can see it now, too. Even after all these years it is a memory so vivid I can walk through its rooms any time I choose and examine its contents the way I did when I was a child. This was an activity of which I never tired and another that was not forbidden. I learned about my deceased grandfather through his untidy desk whose drawers contained I.O.U.s and farmer’s almanacs and worthless insurance policies and dried-out rubber bands and Victory Bonds and Liberal Party newsletters, and through the stern bearded gentlemen who adorned his unused Gillette razor blades. My two mysterious dead uncles I came to know by investigating their mutual bedroom which revealed a closet full of World War Two uniforms and dresser drawers rife with the strange things young men keep; matchbooks, theatre stubs, marbles, coins, sticks of old rigid chewing gum, single cuff links, garish bow ties. And by just staying in that house, by sleeping under its quilts and resting my head on its embroidered pillows, I became acquainted with Grandma’s best friend. Because, you see, she was that endless series of pastel-clothed girls that my grandmother so awkwardly, and so obstinately, created.

  My own first dance is a memory that I’d rather turn away from; turn away from the dark pool of dancing, walk back along the cedar-lined path towards the kitchen, the sunlight, the linoleum. I really liked that linoleum. I liked the battered tins filled with oatmeal cookies too, and the old wood stove in whose warming oven I could dry my shoes if I had slipped into the crick while attempting to cross it on a log. I liked all of Grandma’s house right down to the last pearl button, forgotten and wedged between the slats of a bedroom drawer. I liked the old Christmas cards and the strange striped suspenders that hung, untouched for years, on hooks at the far end of clothes cupboards. I even liked the cluster flies that remained, brittle and dead, on the sills of windows in the vacant bedrooms. I liked all of this but I did not like my first dance.

  I was not asked of course, and wouldn’t have known how to dance even if I had been. Yet it was a deep, deep pool, that basement of what was, ironically, a Methodist church, where everything moved but me.

  The still pool of my shame growing darker and darker as the evening progressed until I wasn’t sure whether I had become it or was merely reflected upon its surface. The girls I knew floating around the room in pastel dresses, just grazing the surface like dragonflies; their thin, young partners as awkward and as beautiful as water spiders—God, how I wished my father had forbidden the whole thing.

  She was very beautiful, this friend my Grandma draughted on swaths of fabric, over and over, in her spare time, distracted only now and then by a threat of hail or a fear of drought. She was very beautiful, said Grandma, owned beautiful pastel dresses and could dance like the wind though Grandma had never seen this because it was forbidden. Poor Grandma was more concerned at that stage of her life with the exact black and white of a dead cow than the way dusty rose or powder blue looks when you move inside it across an oak wood floor. More concerned, I suppose, wit
h getting those cumbersome beasts down that terrifying hill without killing them.

  Grandma’s friend had danced and danced in her soft yellow dresses, her dusty rose, her taffeta …

  The dark pool that was at the heart of me was not asked to dance for a long, long time. You remember, the one surrounded by cedars, the one where the sun is shut out, the one you leave the bright blaze of the kitchen for. That one was not asked to dance, no, not for a long, long time. The request was finally made, however, and not by anything that hovered or scuttled over the surface either. This had nothing to do with taffeta, or even oak wood floors. The request was made slowly, gracefully, and deeply.

  Come down. Come down.

  “She was very beautiful,” said Grandma, “she went to dances and she drowned.”

  I was fifteen, had stopped exploring the house, but had not stopped visiting the chain of pools.

  “How did she drown, Grandma?”

  “She drowned,” said Grandma, picking a bright yellow strand of embroidery thread from her basket and holding it with the needle to the light. “She drowned herself.”

  Drowning … dancing.

  “There was a man,” said Grandma. “A man she wasn’t married to. He left town.”

  “Did she never marry, then?”

  “No.” Grandma cut out a miniature yellow skirt with her sharp scissors. “No … she was already married.”

  “But you said she wasn’t married to him.”

  “That’s right,” said Grandma, placing the skirt on a soft mauve ground, “She was married to somebody else.”

  “Was it the dancing?” I asked urgently, the memory of my own first dance still sharp and painful in my mind.