A Map of Glass (11 page)

The book had been Andrew’s last gift to her at a time when his gifts could take any shape at all – an empty shoebox, an oddly shaped stick, and once a Sears Catalogue from 1976. He would rise in the middle of a conversation, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, cross the room, rummage through the bookshelves or the box near the fire, and return to her with some object or another in his hands. “Please take it,” he would say. “It would mean so much to me if you did.” Once, he had approached her with a loaf of bread in his hands. “Please accept this bouquet,” he had said. And when she had laughed, he had laughed with her, and then had spoken the word
joy
while removing her blouse. This book, then, was the final offering from his hand, and she had kept it near her in the hope that, when she could bring herself to read it, there might be some message from him encoded in its chapters, though she knew this to be irrational, wishful thinking. Andrew was not the kind of man who sent symbolic messages, not even the younger Andrew, twenty years before. No, all of the messages she had read – in the objects that were near him or in the cloud formations that passed over him, even, sometimes, in the expressions that visited his face – were often, she now acknowledged, envisioned by her alone, invented by her need. She reached for the book, let it fall open to a page near the back, and forced herself to read a thumbnail-marked quotation by a man named York Powell:

She lifted her eyes from the page and stared at a small red light below the television that was beating soundlessly like something alive. She had not heard of the author who had written these lines or the scholar to whom the quotation referred, but the words described Andrew so accurately they stirred her heart and awakened her grief and she turned her face to one side, closed the book, and placed it back on the table.

T
he next afternoon at two o’clock, as Sylvia approached Jerome’s door, she saw that it was held open by a broken piece of timber. Timber, she thought, no one uses the word any more, a light, musical word, so much better than lumber or wood. As a teenager she had often whispered to herself a sentence that sounded to her like poetry:
My house is made of timber and of glass
. The sentence had comforted her, especially when she found herself outside the house walking to school. Now as she stepped over the threshold of this interior that was so new to her, Sylvia found that she was in an empty room: no sign of Jerome and no fluorescent light either. “I’m in here,” the young man called from the adjoining space. “I’ll be with you in a moment.” He emerged a few seconds later looking distracted, distant.

“Is something wrong?” Sylvia asked and then, by habit, made a mental note that she had read the expression of another, the way Malcolm had taught her to do.

Jerome glanced in her direction, then lowered his gaze. “No, nothing, I was just looking at some drawings, some things I haven’t finished yet.”

Sylvia wondered if she should ask to see these drawings but decided against making the request. She seated herself in the customary chair. Jerome walked over to the wall, flicked some switches, and looked up as two banks of fluorescent lights quivered toward full illumination. Then he walked across the room and leaned against the counter near the sink. “Would you like some tea?” he asked. “Mira has green tea. I could make some.”

“No, I’m fine,” said Sylvia. “I’ve had lunch.” The restaurant had been one geared toward sandwiches; the variety of contents displayed behind the glass counter had almost driven her back out to the street until she realized she could simply mimic the choices of the customer who preceded her. Sylvia was beginning to appreciate the neutrality of the city, the fact that its inhabitants had absolutely no interest in her. Perhaps her life would have been easier to manage had she always been a stranger.

“Okay then.” Jerome walked quietly over to the couch and slowly sat down, as if he felt that any sudden movement might be too disruptive, might startle her.

He believes I am a problem, thought Sylvia, much like everyone else. She found this oddly unsettling, as if she had wanted to impress this young man and had failed somehow. Still, she had come this far and was not going to retreat into silence. She placed her handbag on the floor by her feet, removed her coat, and began to speak.

“My father was a doctor and I married my father’s partner, a man called Malcolm Bradley. I married a kind man who came into my father’s life as a locum. Malcolm, who wanted to look after me.”

She smiled after she said this, and Jerome smiled as well, out of politeness probably, for where was the joke? What she had said should not have been spoken lightly, she realized. Sometimes in recent years when she had stood in the evenings unnoticed at the doorway of Malcolm’s office, watching him turn the pages of the books that might or might not have described her condition, her heart nearly broke in the face of his need to believe in the purity of diagnosis. He was so innocent at these moments, this man who felt that everything deserved what he called “the dignity of a scientific explanation.” Had he taken her character through the several stages of the scientific method, spent months making observations, before carefully, deliberately, drawing his conclusion? Had he in fact married his conclusion?

“‘She will have a good life,’ he assured my parents, ‘a good life with me. I understand her.’”

Sylvia sat very still, fearing that Jerome might ask what was wrong with her. It was the inquiry she dreaded more than anything, this question. When it was clear that he was not going to do so, she relaxed and said, “Did they tell you that Andrew Woodman was a landscape geographer?” she asked.

“No,” said Jerome, sitting back against the couch, “I think I read about that… afterwards, in the newspaper.” He cleared his throat. “And you told me as well.”

“Did I? He claimed that everywhere he went he found evidence of the behavior of his forebears: rail fences, limestone foundations, lilac bushes blooming on otherwise abandoned farmsteads, an arcade of trees leading to a house that is no longer there.” She looked down. Her hands lying in her lap looked to her like two dead birds “All that sad refuse, Andrew used to say. And that island, of course… your island… abandoned by those ancestors a century before. He recorded everything that was left behind there, each sunken wreck, the remains of pilings, iron pulleys, cables, broken axels. You must have seen remnants… something?”

The young man nodded. “There were empty buildings and a couple of smaller sheds that had collapsed. And one huge anchor near the jetty. But I never saw the wrecks. I was hoping that the ice would clear enough for me to catch sight of one or two, but then…” He placed his elbow on his bent knee and ran his hand through his hair, not looking at her.

What is he seeing in his mind? Sylvia wondered. Certainly not Andrew. He wouldn’t want to remember that, wouldn’t want to think about it. Jerome’s hand was still in his hair, cupping the shape of his skull as if he were attempting to prevent the image of Andrew, or some other image, from entering his mind. As a younger woman Sylvia had been baffleed by the gestures of others. She could never understand, for example, why people raised their hands when they spoke. The sudden lifting of arms and hands in the middle of speech had seemed to her to be aggressive, imposing, a ceremonial display of weapons by warriors preparing for battle. But here, now, this simple gesture seemed to her to suggest frailty, vulnerability, and she found she was moved by it.

When Jerome eventually glanced in her direction, she locked eyes for a moment with him. Then she looked away and continued, “Andrew’s great-great-grandfather, the first Woodman to come to Canada in the nineteenth century, settled on the island as a timber merchant,” she said. “Before that he had been in Ireland briefly as one of several engineers sent out by the British government to investigate, then to map and file reports on the state of the bogs of Ireland. County Kerry mostly.” She ran one hand up and down the sleeve of her cardigan. “According to Andrew,” she said, “Joseph Woodman had a complicated relationship with Ireland – the people, the landscape.”

“A complicated relationship with landscape,” Jerome repeated. “How could that be?”

Sylvia looked up now and studied the young man she was talking to, his smooth forehead and long perfect hands, his thoughtful, serious expression. It seemed she had never really seen anyone this young, and she doubted she had ever looked this young herself. “He wanted, or at least Andrew said he wanted, to drain everything: the lakes, the rivers, the streamlets, and every acre of bog. Andrew always said that old Joseph Woodman wanted to squeeze all moisture out of the County of Kerry, as if it were a dishrag. He was convinced, you see, that with proper drainage, fields of wheat could be made to replace the bogs. When he presented his report to the British Crown, his ideas were utterly dismissed. One month later he immigrated to Canada in a full-blown fit of pique, a man still young enough – and ambitious enough, Andrew claimed – to cause serious damage. Thousands of acres of forests would be floated to his docks on Timber Island, so that the logs could be assembled into rafts. Then the rafts would be poled downriver to the quays at Quebec, where the timber was loaded onto ships bound for Britain. This went on for years and years, until all of the forests were gone.”

“But he couldn’t have been the only timber merchant.”

“No, no, of course not. But Andrew never forgot that his own family was involved. He could never let go of the picture of a raped landscape. He didn’t forget this, at least he didn’t forget for a very long time.” Sylvia twisted the ring on her left hand. “Forgetting would come later.”

Sitting in silence, she wondered if Jerome would ask her a question, would in some way begin to interview her. She would not have liked it if he had.

“Sometimes,” he began, “it’s best just to let them go, family things. Otherwise… well, what’s the point? There’s nothing you can do anyway.” He was looking at the wall behind and slightly above Sylvia’s head. “But this would be a sort of ecological forgetting, another kind of letting go, I suppose…”

Jerome’s angle of vision remained unchanged, and Sylvia felt an urge to turn in her chair and follow his gaze. She suppressed this, however, and spoke again. “All those years ago when we first began to meet – began to know each other – that inherited memory of destruction was still in Andrew’s mind,” she said. “He spoke to me about it.” She paused again, catching just a glimpse of Andrew’s face in her memory, the expressive mouth, the sad eyes. “That we should have been alive at the same time,” she said to Jerome, “that we should have somehow walked from such distance toward each other, and that he would speak to me about the things that troubled him… all this seemed miraculous to me. I took everything he told me and kept it deep inside me – so deep that I could hear him speaking when he was not there. And the truth is, he was most often not with me, not there. We were not able to meet with any kind of frequency, and sometimes there were months when he was traveling, months when we were not able to meet at all.”

He had become, in spite of his absences, or perhaps, she thought now, because of his absences, the vital center of her inner world. Her daily life had strutted around her like theatre, like a performance needing neither her participation nor her attention. Even during painful, disorienting times – her father’s sudden heart attack and death and, years later, her mother’s stroke – she could bring the curtain down and permit Andrew’s distant light to dominate. Because he had spoken about the wind from the lake, there was no longer anything neutral about the wind from the lake; because they had talked together on the dunes, a child’s sandbox glimpsed in a neighbor’s yard brought with it the idea of Andrew as palpably as if it were a letter written by his hand. But there were no letters written by his hand; often he didn’t communicate with her for weeks, or would make the briefest, the most perfunctory, of calls during the empty hours of the day.

“During these periods of absence, of withdrawal,” she told Jerome, “I would believe that he was communicating with me through dreams, or thoughts, or omens, a belief I maintained during this last, this final absence.”

“Yes,” said Jerome, leaning forward to pick up the cat near his feet. “It’s odd how people who die come into your dreams. My father’s been gone for more than ten years, and still I have these dreams. About him.” He watched as the cat leapt back to the floor. “I never dream about my mother. Never about her, and never about them together.”

Sylvia tried to envisage Jerome’s parents, the people who had given birth to the earnest young man who sat opposite her. They would have a familiar domestic life, she imagined, not unlike, in some ways, her and Malcolm’s, a shared daily space, but with room for a child, of course. There would be that difference and other differences as well. But all of it, the rooms, the partnership, would be there on a daily basis.

She began to think about the first time she entered the place where for twenty years she and Andrew would meet and part, and meet and part. An old cottage, almost deserted, situated on a wooded hill thirty miles or so down the lakeshore from where she lived on property left to Andrew by his father because no one else wanted it. In the summer the cottage smelled of racoons and damp. In the winter the wood stove’s fire barely penetrated the cold. It had been winter that first time, and during her walk from the car, deep snow had fallen over the tops of her boots, burning her legs when it melted against the skin. There had been no talk, at least not at first. It had been far too cold to undress, and as they had fumbled through layers of clothing in order to touch, fear had set off its sirens in her brain. But she overcame this, barely knowing what was taking place, only that she could not stop it. She had learned next to nothing that first winter about Andrew’s long, angular body, the bones and ligaments and pale, faintly bluish skin that would become so familiar to her. So familiar that, as the years passed, she would sometimes confuse it with her own. Unlike the awkward disruption of Malcolm’s sad, brief attempts to establish a physical relationship with her, there would come to be nothing foreign or invasive about Andrew’s lovemaking, just the comfort, the consolation of full embrace.