A Map of Glass (32 page)

“I imagine I’ll have to take all this on faith, though,” Branwell said. “I’ve never been able to see anything but the inside of a tavern, a different tavern, yes, but still a tavern much like all the others.”

Ghost pointed heavenward, explaining that none of the other taverns had tin ceilings like this one. “Not a crack in it and there never will be a crack in it. Even if the tavern fell down there would not be a crack in that ceiling.”

Branwell looked at the ceiling, the ceiling Ghost was so fond of. The decorative swirls were confined to borders that surrounded flat square panels like an embossed baroque frame. He wondered briefly about the machine that would be required to make such a thing as a ceiling. Must the tin be heated or was it soft enough to be pushed into the shape required? Nonetheless, to his eye, there was a monotony about the resulting effect, exaggerated by the rather dirty pale yellow paint that covered it, or perhaps it was white paint, discolored by the pipe smoke that, he was beginning to discover, filled the barroom day and night.

Ghost asked about Branwell’s financial situation, which, admittedly, was shaky at best but which he hoped would improve once he got out to Fryfogel’s.

Lingelbach, who was pretending to be absorbed by the task of wiping down the bar with a damp cloth, moved closer to the side of the room where Branwell sat with Ghost. “Road’s disappeared,” he offered.

Again? thought Branwell. What was it about him that made particles of almost everything want to accumulate wherever he went? What else could possibly happen to him? He half-expected a plague of sawdust, or of iron filings to appear in his future. He wouldn’t have been surprised if brimstone began to descend from the sky. Lingelbach was speaking again. “You’ll have to pay me,” he was saying to Branwell. “There’s the room, the board. You’ll have to pay me one way or another.”

On the fourth day of the storm Branwell descended the stairs at the tavern to be confronted by a strange scaffolding made up of two tall stepladders placed about six feet apart with a couple of wide pine boards resting between them. Ghost, who had clearly been supervising the placement of this scaffold, took Branwell by the arm. “I see pictures on this ceiling,” he said, “and,” he nodded his head in the direction of the bar, “so does Lingelbach. We both see you painting these pictures, starting this morning.”

Branwell had no desire to paint a ceiling. He was tired, sad, and slightly disoriented by being in the company of others after his solitary life in the hotel. He thought about snow falling on the roof of his old home and wondered how the shingles would hold up if this storm were to travel eastward. Looking at the scaffolding, he said, “I’m not Michelangelo, you know, I’m not Tiepolo.”

“Who?” asked Ghost.

“Who?” echoed Lingelbach, once again pretending to be absorbed in sponging down the bar. When Branwell answered with nothing but a sigh, the owner of the establishment added philosophically, “No matter, whoever they were, they would have had to pay for room and board.”

Maintenance, thought Branwell, is so central to human life, it’s a wonder the very enormity of it didn’t cause hopeless exhaustion in those who thought about it. Maintenance and money. There was a price to pay for sleeping at night and a price to pay for waking up in the morning. There was a price to pay for shaving your face and cutting your hair, for the clothes on your back and the food that you ate. And there was an even bigger price to pay, as far as he could tell, for having experienced happiness. I’ve lost everything, he concluded.

“You haven’t lost me,” said Ghost, reading his mind.

When he wasn’t eating or drinking, Branwell spent his remaining few days at the tavern lying on his back. As his friend had predicted several years before, paint did indeed drip into his eyes as well as into his moustache and onto his face. But there was one comfort, and that comfort had to do with weather. Branwell painted nothing but scenes relating to summer: a still millpond at twilight, a farmhouse with buggy tracks visible on a road leading to its door, a few sunny water scenes punctuated by the curve of a sail, several waterfalls.

“I see
another
waterfall,” said Ghost enthusiastically as he watched from below, “a much larger waterfall that will be painted by you in the future. I see Niagara.” And then, in his new self-appointed role as supervisor, “So you can use turquoise… so show me something else! I see
other
colors! I see flowers. Paint some flowers every second square!”

The aesthetes from across the road took a break from their trompe l’oeil efforts to inspect, scoffed at Branwell’s little landscapes, and went away. The blacksmith arrived, announced that tin was not a real metal, that it would rust in a decade, and that therefore all of this painting was a waste of time, and then he too went away. Branwell lay on his back for several afternoons, a brush in his hand and unsolicited memories of his childhood in his mind. He remembered an iceboat moving across Back Bay, snow falling on a young oak tree in the yard, a girl arriving at the wrong door in late winter. All this while he continued to paint a warm season, flower by flower.

After a few days of intimate engagement with the tin ceiling, having slept late because there was no wind rattling the sashes of the window, Branwell was awakened by a spear of sunshine touching his face. He lay quite still, waiting for the wind to pick up, waiting for the light to soften as snow entered it. But the spear remained crisply defined on his pillow and the sharp, ferrous smell of water was in the air. When he opened the curtains he was delighted to see that the icicles hanging from the eaves above the window were releasing glistening drops of water from their tips, but even more exciting, the entire village was chiming with a sound he had never before heard in this district – that of sleigh bells.

He was packed and downstairs in a minute and was standing halfway up the stepladder placing tubes of paint and brushes back into the wooden box when Ghost entered the room. “January thaw in February,” he said. “Better get out of here before Lingelbach gets back from the store. You’re not going to finish the ceiling.”

This seemed self-evident to Branwell, but he told Ghost that he would get back to it after he finished the commission at Fryfogel’s.

“Doubt that,” Ghost replied. “I don’t think I’ll be seeing you for a couple of years.”

“Why not come out to the inn? It’s only a few miles.”

“The current Fryfogel thinks fortune telling is un-Christian and, for some reason, Spectre doesn’t like his horses… maybe they are too pure. Besides, a January thaw in February is always short-lived. Don’t forget about Niagara Falls, though. I see it painted overtop a fireplace in a room upstairs on the brookside of the inn. And a mountain scene would be good too, there being no mountains in this district. Paint a moonlit mountain scene in another room.”

And so, time, it seems, will always apply its patina to human effort, and paintings completed on walls are destined to be altered, damaged, or erased. Stains blossom, cracks appear, and the men of maintenance arrive with trowels and plaster. Electricity and central heating are invented and installed. Meadows and rivers, mountains and night skies are stripped away, concealed, or scraped off. Walls are broken into, the pipes of indoor plumbing are forced into the structure, then begin to decay or burst suddenly in the midst of a deep freeze. Further surgery is required. Each decade insists on its own particular changes.

A few years after Branwell had put the finishing touches on his
Niagara
and his
Moonlit Night
, the Fryfogel, having already undergone the hardship of trying to compete with something as relentless as a railroad, would begin to experience difficulties of a different nature. Peter Fryfogel would die and be buried next to his father in the small family plot to the west of the inn. There would be disputes among various heirs about ownership, and a series of “cautions” would be instated against the property. Eventually, parts of the inn would be leased to spinster sisters trying to make a living by serving home-cooked meals to motorists on what was now a paved highway between Guelph and Goderich. A cairn would be erected nearby to mark and memorialize the blazing of the Huron Trail, now more than a hundred years old. Halfway through the twentieth century, the provincial government would decide to widen the highway and would expropriate much of the front yard. A decade after that there would be an attempt to reopen the building as a hotel, but that attempt would amount to very little, the private company involved would decide to sell the property to the County Historical Society. Various pieces of the adjoining farm property would be subdivided and sold. Heritage easements would be applied for by the Historical Society and would be approved. A drunk driver would lose control of his car and mow down the tombstones in the family plot. Governments at all levels would become more interested in business than in history, and money to keep the inn standing would be in short supply. Squirrels would invade the attic and chew holes through the roof, rats would enter the cellar kitchens, fifth- and sixth-generation pigeons would roost under the eaves, but even so the inn, now entirely emptied of both people and furniture, would continue to stand, its small paned windows rattling each time a tractor trailer roared past its beautifully proportioned Georgian front door.

With each change of ownership – and sometimes even without a change of ownership – a new layer of patterned wallpaper would be slapped over both the mural of Niagara Falls in the upper room on the brookside and the mountain scene across the hall. Finally, the fractured wall paintings would be covered by no fewer than ten layers of paper flowers and paste and the landscapes would be forgotten altogether. And, in the end, a tenant suffering from the effects of a particularly cold winter would punch a stovepipe hole into the wall above the fireplace in the upper west room, little knowing, as he did so, that he had completely destroyed Branwell Woodman’s carefully rendered moon.

S
he stepped into the elevator with her husband and decided not to speak. She would not answer questions, she would not offer explanations. This was a tactic she had used often in the past, a predictable symptom – something she knew would reassure rather than alarm Malcolm. When the steel doors opened to her floor and she walked down the corridor by his side, she continued to keep the silence. Although, if asked, she would not have been able to say who was in the custody of whom, she felt as if they were a jailor and prisoner approaching a cell. When they reached the correct number, she placed the key in the lock, opened the door, and walked into the room with Malcolm following close behind. “Why did you do this?” he asked. There was bewilderment, not aggression, in what he said. She knew he didn’t expect an answer.

Without looking at him, Sylvia quickly undressed and slid into the bed, rolling onto her side and closing her eyes.

She knew that he was standing at the end of the bed looking at her, knew that this would go on for some time. Finally, however, she heard him open the bag he had brought with him, and then the sound of him undressing and preparing for sleep. “Tomorrow,” she heard him say as he lay down, leaving, as always, a respectful amount of space between them. She was kept awake for a while by the worry that, now that Malcolm had come, she might not be able to retrieve the green notebooks or gain one more day with Jerome. She wanted to give him the sheets of paper on which she had been writing these past few nights – a parting gift. And she wanted, even for just one more afternoon, to say the name Andrew aloud. How could she abandon that pleasure, that pain? The bright afterimages from the night street unsettled her as well, remaining on the edge of her consciousness like small flickering insects floating near the bed, as if they wished to attach themselves to her body, her mind.

When she woke the following morning she decided to relent somewhat, spoke when she was spoken to, and allowed Malcolm to guide her downstairs to a restaurant she had not even known was a part of the hotel.

“We’ll leave after breakfast,” he said, once they were seated at a table.

“Not yet,” she said, “wait one more day.”

“All right then,” he replied, indulging her as he always did once she began to speak after a bout of silence, “we’ll be on vacation. We’ve never been on vacation before and I don’t have to be back until tomorrow.” He raised a gleaming white napkin to his mouth, then folded it once and placed it again on his lap. “There are good museums in this city. You are at home in museums.”

“Yes,” said Sylvia, knowing that she was being granted a deferral, “yes, I am at home in museums.”