Jane Urquhart Page 10

  Both Sylvia and Jerome turned toward Swimmer as if to test this theory. The cat, who was sitting on a high table with his back to them, and who was staring out of the window, remained totally unaware of their attention.

  “I came to love the poem called ‘The Death and Burial of Cock Robin,’” Sylvia said.

  “I don’t remember many picturebooks from my childhood,” said Jerome. “Not too many poems either. My mother tried to teach me a few songs, though, told me that what she remembered most about being small was that she seemed always to be singing – you know, in class, or in church, or even in the playground. Girls’ skipping songs and all that. But I was embarrassed by singing. I don’t remember any of those songs now.”

  Sylvia recalled the imaginary music she had so dreaded during her own childhood. “Your mother’s girlhood must have been lovely if it was filled with singing,” she said to Jerome. “Serene almost… and happy. My husband’s youth was like that as well, but I can’t imagine that Andrew’s was, though he never talked about that. I knew so little about him, really, his parents, his schooldays.”

  The expression on the young man’s face tightened. “Serenity and joy are not things I would associate with my mother.” He looked at the floor for a moment or two, then glanced at his wrist.

  “Is it time for me to go?” Sylvia asked, then reddened. It occurred to her that she had not said these words since she had been with Andrew.

  “No, no, it’s fine, not yet,” said Jerome. He had begun to fiddle with his watch. “It’s old, this watch… belonged to my father. I should probably get a new one.” He rearranged his sleeve, looked up. “You know, I had a tendency to forget about time altogether when I was out there alone on the island. I just worked all day and went back to the sail loft when I felt I had done enough or when the light began to dim. It was quite wonderful, the sail loft.”

  “The men who worked with the sails were mostly French, I think.” Sylvia tilted her head to one side, remembering. “Andrew told me that the island was divided – quite amicably – but divided nevertheless between French and English notions of how things should be. Not just because of language: it had a lot to do with waterways. The English knew the lake, you see, and the French, the French would be more familiar with the river.”

  “Yes,” said Jerome. “Yes, I like that idea. Geographical allegiances. Allegiances to bodies of water.”

  The huge wet shroud of a schooner’s sail moving in lake water and the drowned nineteenth-century boys surfaced in Sylvia’s imagination. “Sometimes human beings are confined by geography,” she said, “and sometimes,” she added, “they are overwhelmed, destroyed by it.”

  Jerome told Mira that he was not sure about using the woman’s given name, that he had not yet decided how to address her. The woman had used his own first name on occasion, but still he found it difficult to say the word Sylvia when she was with him in the room. She was so obviously from another generation, he was tempted to call her Mrs. Bradley. But the intimacy of what she had been telling him made the formality of that seem somewhat absurd. “And yes,” he said to Mira, “they were lovers, just as you suspected.”

  “I didn’t suspect, as you may remember,” said Mira. “I knew.”

  Jerome ignored this clarification and changed the subject. “She told me that no one so far had really determined if that island belonged to the lake or the river. The French said it was a river island, the English maintained it belonged to the lake… and so on.” He pondered this. “I thought about that too,” he said. “When I was there. I’d like to go back in summer and look at the geography… the geology. Maybe,” he said, “we could answer the question.”

  This was the first time he had made reference to the possibility of returning and, quite suddenly, he became aware that, if this were to take place, he would not want to be on his own. He could see himself standing on the shore, alone with the new knowledge of the woman’s grief and, almost before the picture had fully taken shape, he turned his mind away from it.

  “She also talked about a poem from her childhood, Cock Robin, of all things,” he said.

  “Cock Robin?” Mira did not look up from her knitting. She was making a “swaddle” for the rusted galvanized pail she had found in the alley the previous weekend, a pail that, once it was covered, she would use as a prop in her next performance piece. The wool she was using was pink mohair, and particles of it clung to her dark sweater along with cat hair from Swimmer, who had recently spent some time in her arms. It was often only in the evenings now that she had time for such things, the gallery taking up many of the daylight hours. Just recently she had been told that she would be working on Sunday afternoons.

  Jerome sat up straight, became more attentive and formal as he always did when it became clear to him that there was something he could explain to her. He was struck, suddenly, by the familiar pleasure he felt when he knew there was something, even a kindergarten poem, that he could unravel for her. It gave him an edge, a brief flush of superiority. “Robin” he told her, “the bird. From a nursery rhyme.”

  Jerome watched as the girl bent to unwind a skein of wool from a large pink shape – rather like candy floss – that rested near her left foot. Sometimes all he wanted to do was sit across the room and look at her. He, who had always been so prone to activity, so dependent on plans, so restless and so easily bored, now found himself becalmed, happy to float in the vicinity of a knitting girl. Her beautiful arms, the tilt of her head. Over and over he was surprised by such things.

  “‘Who killed Cock Robin? I, said the sparrow, with my bow and arrow, I killed Cock Robin,’” he quoted. And all at once he wondered how it was that the rhyme had been implanted in his own memory since he had never seen it in a book. Had his tired mother recited it to him? It seemed unlikely. How, then, had this bird-filled children’s dirge entered his family’s suburban world of freeways and strip malls and cement apartment buildings on the edges of the city? A world conducive to neither birds nor children. The memory of his bicycle came again into his mind, the sight of it rusting in dirty snow on the winter balcony of their apartment, then twisted and broken in a drift ten stories below. He had stopped riding it once they began to live in the apartment – too humiliated by the journey in the elevator with the bicycle resting uselessly against his hip, too shy of the inevitable adult who would enter the elevator and ask, as if it were not utterly obvious, if he intended to go for a ride.

  Mira looked up from her work and gazed at the cat, who was ambling toward her like a sleepwalker. “There were many rhymes, many stories when I was growing up, stories about animals who wouldn’t be able to survive in this climate. Some of the animals in the stories were Gods – Ganesh, for example – so I believed that all tropical animals were deities and that’s why I figured I didn’t see them hanging around the neighborhood.”

  “It would be wonderful, though, to find Ganesh strolling through the streets of this city,” Jerome said.

  “How about Saint Jerome’s lion? He has certainly taken to the streets… particularly in the alley in the vicinity of garbage pails.”

  “Just like an autumn bee.” Jerome stood now and moved to the back of Mira’s chair, then placed his hands on her shoulders, allowing his fingers to rest in the twin hollows between the muscles of her upper back and her collar bones. He bent toward her ear. “I think that in your previous life you were most likely a bee,” he whispered. “Or was it a wasp?”

  Jerome was intrigued by the fact that Mira was fascinated by bees and had once even taken a course in beekeeping. She liked their color, their shape, their commitment to labor. Most of all, she was impressed by the way they enthusiastically constructed the hives she referred to as “paper houses.” Unlike any other woman Jerome had known, Mira would announce the presence of a bee with joy rather than with terror. There was something oddly beelike about her, Jerome had concluded; she was so industrious, so alert she almost buzzed, and often when she was near him, walking through the galleri
es, shopping at the market, her presence felt focused, airborne, as if she were hovering above flowers. He was tremendously attracted to her at such moments, when she was absorbed by some task or when her attention shifted to things in the material world. There was an admirable adaptability about her, a generosity toward the beginnings of things. Thinking of this, he studied her busy hands, the frown of concentration on her downcast face. A part of her was gone from him, and yet she was still tantalizingly within reach.

  She stopped knitting, rested her head on the back of the chair, and looked up at him, the wool a pink pool on her lap. It occurred to Jerome that he had no idea whether people knitted in India, a country, he now realized, that was difficult to associate with wool, but he didn’t want to ask her, show his ignorance, and anyway he was more interested in her smooth shoulders, her beautiful arms. He was aware that even after three years of intimacy there was always a moment or two when she hesitated, but he also knew that these moments passed. She would respond once he was able to touch her, to touch her and to use the word love. Then her arms would lift, encircle his neck.

  “Probably,” she said, “probably I was a bee. And if so I would have liked peonies best.”

  He thought of how she would stand entirely still, mesmerized by the small front gardens in their neighborhood. Once or twice she had remained long enough that an owner had emerged from inside the house to ask if she needed assistance. Jerome had never seen anyone examine all of the external world with such care. Sometimes she became so absorbed by one thing or another he felt she had completely forgotten he was there. How was it possible, he wondered, that with all the other concerns and interests that fought for space in her mind, work and art and the whole complicated network of family and friends that she attended to, at the end of each day she calmly took the decision to return to the place where he was waiting in order to share his evening meal, his bed? Equally mysterious to him was the fact that he himself was always there when she arrived.

  “Please?” he said now.

  There it was, that moment of hesitation. Then she stood, placed the wool on the kitchen counter, turned, lowered her eyes, and took his hand.

  The man behind the desk always looked up when Sylvia entered but never said anything. She too remained silent, her key, which had been recently removed from her handbag, dangling in her gloved hand, the salt shaker clinking slightly against the loose change in her coat pocket as she crossed the tile floor.

  It had been three days since her train had departed from Belleville Station, three days since she had mailed the car keys back to Malcolm, three days since she had left the message on the answering machine at his office. Soon Malcolm would discover where she was and would come to fetch her home. Sometimes, here in the hotel when she closed her eyes just before sleep, she saw him in his study, focused on the texts that might give him a description of this new, this inexplicable dance of disappearance she had undertaken. The protective side of him touched her in an odd way at such moments, and she wondered if what she was feeling might be what someone else might call pity. It was, however, a feeling that she experienced only in relation to his faithful attachment to her disability, if that is what it was, a disability. That and the fact that he had chosen to come so completely into the physical spaces that made up her ancestral history. Her father’s desk, her great-grandmother’s china. The antique marriage bed that would have been, on more than one occasion, a deathbed: all the details that made up what she thought of as her known and knowable place had been fully accepted by him, incorporated into his life’s work. Her in her natural habitat. His life’s work.

  Andrew had believed that the cells of humans, like those of birds and animals, were programmed to recognize the smells and sights and sounds of their natural habitat. Even if he had not been born in Italy, for example, a New Yorker whose grandparents had been Tuscan might experience a sense of familiarity with, say, the hills around Arezzo when first stepping onto the soil of that region. “In a particular kind of light in certain landscapes,” he had told her, “all you can see are ruins, all you can feel is the past, your own ancestry or that of someone else.” She understood this, although in her case, until Andrew opened the door of the world for her, the physicality of the past was mostly brought toward her by objects stored like relics inside her family home.

  Whenever she entered the hotel room, she would remove the two green leather journals from her handbag, place them on the desk, then, using the hotel stationery, she would write for an hour or so. Today, however, pulling back to look at the sheet of paper in front of her, she found she was slightly startled by the appearance of her own handwriting, which was tight and dark on the page, and which was coming in and out of focus before her eyes. Knowing she was tired, she rose and walked over to the pristine bed and, without removing the coverlet, she lay down.

  Soon she began to go through the inventory of the house she had left behind, an inventory she had made in early childhood and had never forgotten. Even here, even during these uncertain days, it was a comfort to her. Mentally opening the door with the key she had learned to use when she was seven, she walked into the front hall, past the umbrella stand, with its diamond-shaped mirror, and the walnut table whose bird’s-eye maple drawers were filled with flowered calling cards engraved a century ago with the names of neighbors, neighbors whose years of birth and death had since grown indistinct under the rain that had washed over their marble grave markers. On the wall above the table hung a print of the Niagara River rendered downstream from the famous cataract. There is a print of that river on the wall of my house, she would say when Andrew told her, once, that he was going there to record the remnants of a trolley line abandoned since the 1920s. It is a print I know well, she told him as if this knowledge of lines on a piece of paper could connect her more closely with him and his life without her. But she did know it well; each tree, the rocks, and the small, solitary human figure staring into the current, the cliffs on each side.

  The hall led into the dining room (the domain of horses) if one walked straight ahead, or into her father’s office (now Malcolm’s study) if one turned to the right, or off to the realm of the vast double parlor if one turned to the left. What huge, multidimensional worlds those parlors had seemed to her when she was a child, and sometimes later as well; Africa and Asia couldn’t have been larger, more filled with changing light and shades of color, with the sudden rumble of a furnace hidden beneath the boards of oaken floors polished to such a degree the furniture was reflected in them like architecture placed at the edge of vast golden lakes. There were the carpets and the confusing, mesmerizing patterns of the carpets, the different paws and hooves of chair legs lurking near the fringed edges of the carpets. The two round mirrors with the child, and then the girl, and now the mature woman in them, always with the same carved eagle on the frame hovering over her head, benignly some days, and on others hunting, about to unfurl its talons, wanting to carry off her brain.

  Sylvia, lying now on the bed in a modern, urban hotel room, ran all these things through her memory. She knew the contents of the drawers: twelve knives, eleven soup spoons, twelve forks, one serving fork, or fourteen folded linen napkins, and the small, silver tongs with tiny hands fashioned like maple leaves. The napkin rings with the names of previous children of the family etched into them in flowing script; Ronnie, Teddy, Addie, the names old-fashioned, tender in the use of the diminutive. Platters depicting the wildflowers of England or France dwelt inside a cumbersome mahogany sideboard beside a set of plates depicting the rivers and mountains and pavilions and bridges of the Orient in shades of blue, and one large dish that must have been much loved by Addie and Ronnie, a plate with a fully decorated Victorian Christmas tree painted on its surface, toys like those now occupying the attic placed under its boughs. And everywhere, in all the rooms of the house, stood the china figurines, the horses and the Creation piece, of course, but shepherdesses as well, and horsemen and dancers and soldiers whose relationships had kept Sylvia
busy with gossip when she was little and at certain times – before Andrew – as an adult.

  Sometimes, however, she had been prone to exhaustion. When she had been unable to give weight or order to the variety of sounds and sights and smells that were near her, she had been convinced that each impression she received was insisting on its own importance. Like a series of ego-driven guests, the fold of a sheet, the sound of a dripping tap, the click of a closing door, her shoes huddled together in the closet all demanded equal attention. It was at these times that she would begin to shut down, to disappear. She was surprised to realize now that it had been Jerome, not her, who had seemed occasionally to be absent while they had been talking, and she wondered whether it had been her, or something else, perhaps some fear she was unaware of, that had caused him to drift and then come back again. Did he have a collection of objects from his childhood he could go to at such times? She thought not, knowing by now that such peculiarities of character were certain to be hers alone.

  She got up and went over to the closet and took the salt shaker out of her coat pocket. Then she crossed the room and placed it on the desk beside the journals. How intimate she had been all her life with things like this. As she again allowed the objects in her house to appear, one after another, in her imagination, here in this room in the city, she did not question whether she had left them behind. There was their world and her world and the times of day when both worlds intersected. Sometimes, as now, as dusk entered the city that was not her home, the intersection took place simply in a state of recall. But there were other times when she could lift the ceramic figures from the furniture that sheltered or displayed them, lift them up to the light, and then hold them for a few comforting moments in her hands.