Storm Glass

by Jane Urquhart

  “I suppose that must have been part of it,” sighed Grandma.

  It was late afternoon. The kitchen was turning shades of blue and grey. Grandma stopped her handiwork for a moment, two or three completed dancers on her lap, and looked out the window towards the fields. There was a threat of storm on the horizon. I could hear the hum of my uncle’s tractor.

  “Grandma,” I asked, “Grandma, why did he leave town?”

  “He left town,” she replied, putting away the fabric, the scissors, the thread, “because he was finished with her.”

  I immediately thought of the room upstairs that had been inhabited by my two dead uncles while they were still alive. I thought about the foreignness of it, the strangeness—how they kept things that wouldn’t have interested me in the least, those matchbooks and baseball cards. And the male smell of them still there after years of absence: sweat in a glove, stains under the arms of their uniforms. How odd it was, how other. How unlike Grandma’s room with Grandpa gone. A room that smelled of lavender and wild rose sachets. A room … a room …

  Yes, I thought, he would keep the oddest things and he would throw away Grandma’s best friend … the dusty rose … the lavender.

  Let’s look out the north window towards Grandma’s girlhood. How tidy its fields are, how docile its well-behaved, fenced horses. In front of the barn are six clean, perfect cows and behind it that hill, blocking the view to anywhere else.

  When I looked out that window I imagined him as a large and fearsome trout of odd foreign colours attracted by a bright fly, then, perceiving the hook attached, vanishing into a far corner of the pond where he could never be found.

  When I looked out the south window I imagined him to be shiftless, uncaring—a shirker of duty, a handsome heartbreaker. More like a fickle, skittish water spider, darting from place to place, never fixed or settled.

  It seems I spent a great deal of my girlhood imagining him as one thing or another. But either way I always imagined him gone.

  I knew all about Ophelia, of course, all about the Lady of Shalott. All through my girlhood I had sympathized with their long, sad journeys on rivers; journeys taken after they had been discarded. In my mind’s eye they always looked to me like beautiful refuse in the water, bright bits of garbage, everything trailing and coming apart at the seams. Hair, shawls, arms, fingers. I loved the way they never even tried to swim … just let the river carry them along on their last, broken solitary voyage. Yes, I knew all about them. Still, after Grandma told me, it wasn’t them I was looking for while I walked through knee-high ferns, down the cedar-lined path towards the dark transparent water. It wasn’t them. It was Grandma’s best friend.

  “For a few months afterwards,” continued Grandma, empty-handed now, rocking in her chair, “several of the women in town would rise and leave the church if ever she came in, but only a few months afterwards because there only were a few months afterwards.” The black shoe at the end of her lisle stocking moved quickly up and down. The music that I couldn’t hear had increased in tempo.

  “Why did they do that, Grandma?” I was visualizing a dark congregation and Grandma’s best friend, the only pastel flower, waltzing down the aisle.

  “They did that,” said Grandma, “because they knew and they felt they had to register their disapproval.”

  “Did her husband leave with them?”

  “No, her husband stayed with her. But he knew, too, there was no doubt of that. He just stayed with her all the time. They were always together.”

  “At the dances?”

  “There were no more dances, at least for them. There were never any for me. My father forbade it.” Grandma walked across the room to the north window and stared, for just a moment, almost angrily, at her girlhood.

  “He absolutely forbade it,” she said.

  Grandma had been dead for some time before the dark pool at the heart of me was asked to dance. I had been responsible for selling her house. Farewell to the linoleum and cookie tins, farewell to her lavender and cluster flies, the Gillette razor blades, still there, still wrapped. Farewell to the north window of her girlhood and the south window of her married life, her rocking chair, her warming oven, her cupboards. Farewell to her bright, warm kitchen. But not farewell to her best friend. I took some of her with me; a quilt, an embroidered runner, a cutting of pastel cotton.

  I took those items and a memory of a chain of dark pools. I hadn’t asked Grandma where her best friend drowned because I’d seen her down there many times, gazing back at me as I stared into the water—a water spider dancing on her forehead, a trout passing obsessively back and forth behind her eyes. Until I reached for him once and he moved into that distant corner where he could never be found.

  I took some other objects, as well, from Grandma’s kitchen and placed them in my own when I finally got one. They looked uncomfortable there, difficult—the wooden plaques, the salt and pepper shakers. Eventually it seemed imperative that I remove them. But by then I wasn’t spending a lot of time in the kitchen. By then that dark part of me had accepted an invitation. I’d started dancing.

  Autumn and early evening at Grandma’s house. She was working on the surface of a cotton apron where six pastel ladies danced on a pure white ground. Outside, the north hill of her girlhood glowed as if all light and attention were focused on it and the south fields of her married life lay covered by the long shadows of the surrounding trees. I was reading a Victorian girl’s book that had flowers on its embossed cover and words like forbid on its cream-coloured pages.

  Grandma rose from her rocking chair and walked across the room to the upright cupboard in the corner. From one of its two drawers she removed an ivory-coloured box and, after lifting the lid, she placed it on my lap so that I could look at the contents as though I had never seen them before.

  Brittle, broken, faded, I thought.

  “That,” said Grandma, “is my wedding bouquet.”

  “I know,” I said.

  I knew about her wedding gown too which was upstairs in the storeroom and which I had tried on every year since I was five years old. It lay, folded, in an old brown trunk together with some pillow shams that Grandma had begun to sew before her wedding, which (perhaps because their embroidered design contained no pastel ladies) she had never finished.

  “My wedding gown is upstairs in the storeroom,” said Grandma. She paused and examined her hands, first from the front, then from the back. “I was very happy,” she said.

  The book I was reading concerned a young girl who had forsaken her true love in order to nurse her aged parents. “Alas, I cannot marry,” she had just said. Forsake was another one of those words that hardly anyone had ever spoken aloud in my presence.

  I handed the boxed bouquet back to Grandma. She stood in her green kitchen and stared down at its faded colours. Then she returned it to the drawer.

  “And one more thing …,” she said.

  I looked up from my book.

  “I was one of the women … one of the women who walked out of the church.”

  Years go by and the furnishings of the past are scattered. Landscapes are altered. A kitchen fades into the night and smooth highways invade leafy places. Hastily made quilts disintegrate in the washing machine and all the dancing ladies come apart at the seams.

  A request is finally made, however, and when it is you recognize it immediately. Runaway horses crash through unseen fences, dance floors appear where they have absolutely no right to be, chains of dark pools unfurl across the forehead. Then a dancer beckons from moist hidden places and the world is shut out.

  When he leaves me, Grandma, which will be very, very soon now, I know exactly what I’ll do. Goodbye to the north light of girlhood, the south light of married life. Farewell to the relics in vacant bedrooms: the lavender and talc. I’ll put on that pastel dress you made for me, Grandma, with its loose stitches and ill-fitting sleeves, its crooked hem and sloppy embroidery. I’ll leave behind your kitchen and walk beside the dan
cing crick, along the cedar-lined path, down to the dark heart of the pool I have become.

  She’ll be waiting for me there, Grandma, she always was. Together we’ll recall forbidden dances.

  ITALIAN POSTCARDS

  Whenever she is sick, home from school, Clara the child is allowed to examine her mother’s Italian postcards, a large pile of them, which are normally bound with a thick leather band and kept in a bureau drawer. Years later when she touches postcards she will be amazed that her hands are so large. Perhaps she feels that the hands of a child are proportionally correct to rest like book ends on either side of landscapes. Or maybe it’s not that complicated; maybe she just feels that, as an adult, she can’t really see these colours, those vistas, and so, in the odd moments when she does, she must necessarily be a child again.

  The room she lies in on weekdays, when she has managed to stay home from school, is all hers. She’ll probably carry it around with her for the rest of her life. Soft grey wallpaper with sprays of pink apple blossom. Pink dressing table (under the skirts of which her dolls hide, resting on their little toy beds), cretonne curtains swathed over a window at the foot of the bed she occupies, two or three pink pillows propping her up. Outside the window a small back garden and some winter city or another. It doesn’t really matter which.

  And then the postcards; turquoise, fuchsia, lime green—improbable colours placed all over the white spread and her little hands picking up one, then another, as she tries to imagine her mother walking through such passionate surroundings.

  In time, her mother appears at the side of the bed. Earlier in the morning she brought the collection of postcards. Now she holds a concoction of mustard and water wrapped in white flannel and starts to undo the little buttons on the little pyjama top.

  While the mustard plaster burns into her breastbone Clara continues to look at the postcards. Such flowers, such skies, such suns burning down on such perfect seas. Her mother speaks the names of foreign towns; Sorrento, she says, Capri, Fiesole, Garda, Como, and then after a thoughtful pause, You should see Como. But most of all you should see Pompeii.

  Clara always saves Pompeii, however, until the end, until after her mother has removed the agonizing poultice and has left the room—until after she has gone down the stairs and has resumed her orderly activities in the kitchen. Then the child allows the volcano to erupt, to spill molten lava all over the suburban villas, the naughty frescos, the religious mosaics. And all over the inhabitants of the unsuspecting ancient town.

  In the postcards Pompeii is represented, horrifyingly, fascinatingly, by the inhabitants themselves, frozen in such attitudes of absolute terror or complete despair that they teach the child everything she needs to know about heartbreak and disaster: how some will put their arms up in front of their faces to try to ward it off, how others will resign themselves, sadly, to its strength. What she doesn’t understand is how such heat can freeze, make permanent, the moment of intensest pain. A scream in stone that once was liquid. What would happen, she wonders, to these figures if the volcano were to erupt again? How permanent are they?

  And she wonders about the archaeologists who have removed the stone bodies from the earth and, without disturbing a single gesture, have placed them in glass display cases inside the museum where they seem to float in the air of their own misfortune … clear now, the atmosphere empty of volcanic ash, the glass polished.

  These are the only postcards of Pompeii that Clara’s mother has. No bright frescos, no recently excavated villas, no mosaics; only these clear cases full of grey statues made from what was once burning flesh.

  Twenty-five years later when Clara stands with her husband at the entrance to Hotel Oasie in Assisi she has seen Sorrento, Como, Capri and has avoided Pompeii altogether.

  “Why not?” her husband asks.

  “Nobody lives there,” she replies.

  But people live here, in this Umbrian hill town; the sun has burned life into their faces. And the colours in the postcards were real after all—they spill out from red walls into the vegetable displays on the street, they flash by on the backs of overdressed children. Near the desk of the hotel they shout out from travel posters. But in this space there is no sun; halls of cool remote marble, sparse furnishings, and, it would seem, no guests but themselves.

  “Dinner,” the man behind the desk informs them, “between seven and nine in the big salon.”

  Then he leads them, through arched halls, to their room.

  Clara watches the thick short back of the Italian as she walks behind him, realizing as she does that it is impossible to imagine muscle tone when it is covered by smooth black cloth. She looks at the back of his squarish head. Cumbersome words such as basilica, portcullis, Etruscan and Vesuvius rumble disturbingly, and for no apparent reason, through her mind.

  Once the door has clicked behind them and the echoing footsteps of the desk clerk have disappeared from the outside hall, her husband examines the two narrow beds with displeasure and shrugs.

  “Perhaps we’ll find a way,” he says, “marble floors are cold.” Then looking down, “Don’t think these small rugs will help much.”

  Then, before she can reply, they are both distracted by the view outside the windows. Endless olive groves and vineyards and a small cemetery perched halfway up the hill. Later in the evening, after they have eaten pasta and drunk rough, red wine in the enormous empty dining room, they will see little twinkling lights shine up from this spot, like a handful of stars on the hillside. Until that moment it will never have occurred to either of them that anyone would want to light a tomb at night.

  Go and light a tomb at night

  Get with child a mandrake root.

  Clara is thinking Blake … in Italy of all places, wandering through the empty halls of Hotel Oasie, secretly inspecting rooms. All the same so far; narrow cots, tiny rugs, views of vineyards and the graveyard, olive trees. Plain green walls. These rooms, she thinks, as Blake evaporates from her mind, these rooms could use the services of Mr. Domado’s Wallpaper Company, a company with one employee—the very unhappy Mr. Domado himself. He papered her room once when she was a sick child and he was sick with longing for his native land. When Italian postcards coincidentally littered her bedspread like fallen leaves. Ah, yes, said Mr. Domado, sadly picking up one village and then another. Ah, yes.

  And he could sing … Italian songs. Arias that sounded as mournful as some of the lonelier villages looked. Long, long sobbing notes trembling in the winter sunshine, while she lay propped on pink pillows and her mother crept around in the kitchen below silently preparing mustard plasters. Mr. Domado, with tears in his voice, eliminating spray after spray of pink apple blossoms, replacing them with rigid geometric designs, while Clara studied the open mouths of the stone Pompeii figures and wondered whether, at the moment of their death, they were praying out loud. Or whether they were simply screaming.

  Screaming, she thinks now, as she opens door after door of Hotel Oasie, would be practically a catastrophe in these echoing marble halls. One scream might go on for hours, as her footsteps seem to every time she moves twenty feet or so down to the next door, as the click of the latch seems to every time she has closed whatever door she has been opening. The doors are definitely an addition to the old, old building and appear to be pulled by some new longitudinal force back into the closed position after her fingers release their cold, steel knobs. Until she opens the door labelled Sala Beatico Angelico after which no hotel room will ever be the same.

  Neither Clara nor her husband speak Italian, so to ask for a complete explanation would be impossible.

  “A Baroque church!” she tells him later. “Not a chapel but a complete church. All the doors are the same, this door is the same except for the words on it, and you open it and there, instead of a hotel room, is a complete church.”

  “It appears,” he says after several moments of reflection, “that we have somehow checked into a monastery.”

  Sure enough, when she ta
kes herself out to the rose garden later in the afternoon to sit in the sun and to read The Little Flowers of Santa Chiara in preparation for the next day’s trip to the basilica, the hotel clerk greets her, dressed now in a clerical collar. Clara shows no surprise, as if she had known all along that hers was not to be a secular vacation; as if the idea of a retreat had been in her mind when she planned the trip. She shifts the book a little so that the monastic gardener will notice that she is reading about St. Francis’s holy female friend. He, however, is busy with roses; his own little flowers, and though he faces her while he works his glance never once meets hers. She is able, therefore, to observe him quite closely … the dark tan of his face over the white of his collar, his hands, which move carefully but easily through the roses, avoiding thorns. Clara tries, but utterly fails, to imagine the thoughts of a priest working in a rose garden. Are they concerned, as they should be, with God … the thorns, perhaps, signifying a crown, the dark red stain of the flower turning in his mind to the blood of Christ? Or does he think only of roses and their health … methods of removing the insect from the leaf … the worm from the centre of the scarlet bud? His face gives her no clue; neither that nor the curve of his back as he stoops to remove yet another vagrant weed from the soft brown earth surrounding the bushes.

  Clara turns again to her book, examining the table of contents; “The Circle of Ashes,” “The Face in the Well,” “The Hostage of Heaven,” “The Bread of Angels,” “The Meal in the Woods,” and finally, at the bottom of the list, “The Retinue of Virgins.” St. Francis, she discovers, had never wanted to see Chiara. The little stories made this perfectly clear. Sentence after sentence described his aversion. After he had clothed her in sackcloth and cut off all her hair in the dark of the Italian night, after he had set her on the path of poverty and had left her with her sisters at St. Damien’s, after she had turned into a hostage of heaven and had given up eating all together, Francis withdrew. Beware of the poison of familiarity with women, he had told his fellow friars. In a chapter entitled “The Roses,” the book stated that Francis had wanted to place an entire season between himself and Chiara. We will meet again when the roses bloom, he had said, standing with his bare feet in the snow. Then God had decided to make the roses bloom spontaneously, right there, right then, in the middle of winter.