Jane Urquhart Read online

  “Tell me,” said Jerome. “Tell me about Andrew Woodman, how you came to know him.”

  The evenness of his tone did not discourage her, made her, in fact, feel more relaxed than any degree of eagerness. Eagerness implied expectation and she had never been at ease with expectation.

  And so she began to talk in a room with a steel door, cement walls, and no comforts, a room that had not been conceived with conversation in mind. She talked about the County, its farms and lakeside villages, its graveyards and ancient houses, its churches and meeting halls. She described Andrew, a tall man with an angular face, one who liked to be alone and who had never married; a man who had believed that domesticity would soften the focused attention he needed to give to the physical details of the earth. Outside was the constant hum of the city, the unknown world. Inside the young man shifted his position now and then on the old couch, leaning forward, or nodding to indicate that he was listening. Sylvia found herself speaking slowly and carefully, as if rehearsing a speech she had memorized.

  “The day that you found Andrew you became the present, the end of the story, the end of my story, the reply to the last unanswered question,” she told him. “And you were the end of Andrew’s story as well. You were, in a way, the last thing he told me. Toward the end, one of the very last things he said aloud was something about a hook of the past sewing us together. By then it was difficult to grasp what he was talking about. I’ve always pictured the kind of needle sailors used for making sails. I saw these in the museum… the museum where I sometimes do volunteer work.” She paused. “They look a bit like long silver question marks.”

  Andrew had gone to the museum to see the needles after she had told him about them, but he had gone on a day when he was certain she would not be there. It was she who had insisted on this, unable by then to bear the idea of seeing him in a place that was not entirely their own. The whole room between them. She had read that line in a book somewhere and had never forgotten it. The room was never between them when they met privately. The room was a part of them then, an extension of the story Andrew was building, sentence by sentence, the long journey through the tangled highways of his family’s past.

  “Memories are fixed, aren’t they?” she said. “They might diminish, they might fade, but they don’t change, become something else. I am now, you see, his memory.” She sat forward in her chair. “Andrew thought he was the history that his forebears created, he felt responsible for that history, I think, and for those people. They are my responsibility now.”

  Jerome glanced at her. Then he looked quickly away as if he felt suddenly shy or embarrassed. Sylvia couldn’t tell by the expression on his face what he was thinking.

  “I’m not certain that what you said about memory is correct,” he said. “I think it can change.”

  “Can it? Perhaps it only becomes stronger, purer.” What she wanted was to sharpen her memories of Andrew, memories she feared were beginning to separate themselves from her. She had never before felt separate from Andrew. No, that was not quite accurate. There had been times when she had wanted to remain apart even in her imagination, times when she would spend an entire day examining, one by one, the goblets and candlesticks and wineglasses of her mother’s cranberry glass collection rather than think of him at all, because the slightest shadow of him in her mind brought with it too much pain. But once she had seen him again, she would begin to crave inclusion, the encircling arm, the connection. She had never felt anything like it before. She began to believe that she could feel him moving toward her and then turning away from her, even when they were hundreds of miles apart. Such was her affliction. Despite her parents’ care, despite her husband’s love, she believed that the only family she had had until him was the family of the dead. Objects, maps, and vanished children.

  “What kind of a young man found Andrew, I wondered,” she said to Jerome now. “How would what he saw have affected him?” Because she read that he was an artist, she suspected that he might have been looking for a way to become haunted, by something, anything, and that being the case, this event might have entered his psyche like a dark, permanent gift. “All I really knew about you was that you were a painter.”

  “Actually, I am not a painter,” offered Jerome. “I’ve never been a painter, really. What I do is more sculptural… involves three-dimensional space.”

  Sylvia hesitated at this point. Then, after a few moments of silence, she began to speak again. “Andrew felt that he had been destined to become a historical geographer,” she said. “He told me that the mistakes of his ancestors had made this a kind of dynastic necessity. Unlike his forebears, you see, he paid careful attention to landscape, to its present and to the past embedded in its present.”

  Sylvia studied the face of the young man she was speaking to, his smooth wide forehead, full lips, and clean dark hair. He appeared to be thoughtful, serious, and yet somehow benignly detached. She was thankful for this detachment. She smiled at him and continued.

  “Andrew never forgot his ancestors: they were always with him. One of the first stories he told me was about the dunes at the end of the peninsula, dunes that were strongly associated with his family. We barely knew each other, yet I had driven out there with him. I had said that I wanted these lovely, soft mountains of sand to remain in place forever. He maintained that these were a mistake, a man-made mistake, that the dunes were not natural, were, instead the result of human carelessness. You see, Branwell Woodman, Andrew’s great-grandfather and the son of old Joseph Woodman, the timber merchant, had bought a hotel near there, a hotel that became entirely engulfed by sand.”

  Andrew had been looking across a billow of sand that sloped down to the edge of the water when he spoke of this. Sylvia remembered distinctly now, his light brown, slightly greying hair, the perturbed, almost angry expression of his face in profile. He had lifted his left arm to point in the direction of the long-vanished hotel. There was an ordinance survey map twitching in the wind at the end of his right hand. Abruptly he had turned toward her, his face for the first time collapsing toward softness, tenderness. And then his left hand had moved toward her hair. “Still, some mistakes can be beautiful,” he had said.

  Sylvia held this inner picture for as long as she could, but then, as always, it began to dissolve. She could still see the dunes but not Andrew, not his hair, not his hand. “Everything,” she said to Jerome, “almost everything seems to disappear in one way or another.” Emerging slightly from her open handbag, the spines of the two green notebooks shone in the afternoon light. She leaned forward to touch them, then twisted around in her chair, having heard the sound of the door opening. The girl called Mira walked into the space in the company of the cat who was circling around her feet and rubbing up against her legs. “Hello,” she said, placing two bulging plastic bags on the floor. “What’s been going on?”

  Sylvia tightened the scarf she was wearing around her throat. “I scarcely know,” she said. “I seem to have just gone on and on. I should probably go now.” She pushed one arm and then another into the sleeves of her coat.

  “We were just talking about memory,” Jerome said, “about memory and change. Where did you find Swimmer? He shot out of the door like an arrow, no stopping him.”

  “I barely know,” Sylvia continued, “whether I made any sense. I’ve been told that there are often times when I make no sense.”

  Mira turned to Jerome. “I tried to call you, but you didn’t answer. I spent the whole afternoon with that client I told you about. The one who takes paintings home on approval, then always brings them back. I wonder if he’ll ever really buy anything. Maybe he secretly hates art.”

  “The phone was turned off,” said Jerome. Sylvia could see that the young man had brightened just looking at the girl. The intimacy between them included a kind of electrical awakening, even with the introduction of such an ordinary subject as a cat or a telephone. As she rose to go, both young people turned to look at her as if for the first tim
e.

  “Shall I come back tomorrow?” she asked, surprised that she was addressing this question to the girl.

  “Oh yes,” said Mira, “I think all this is good for him.” She smiled at Jerome, then reached into one of the grocery bags, pulled out an orange, and tossed it in his direction. “Vitamin C,” she said, then laughed as Jerome, having missed the catch, chased the fruit across the room.

  The girl stretched her arms into the air then, keeping her back straight, bent at the waist, and swung her arms behind her where they remained extended like wings.

  Sylvia thought about this odd gesture as she walked down the alley toward the street. The light was beginning to decline. She buttoned her coat against the cold.

  Sylvia began to think of her husband, of the way he came into her life. A good young doctor, her father had said, feeling fortunate to have enticed him away from the city and into the backwater that was their County in order to join the practice. He had been speaking, of course, to her mother, not to her. He attempted to converse with Sylvia only occasionally, and when he did, he used the tone one reserves for a very young child. Sylvia was twenty at the time, but had not often left the house since she had completed high school and had walked forever away from a world where – despite her anxiety and confusion in the face of anything social, answering only when spoken to – she had felt almost happy when lost in the satisfying task of learning facts. There had been no talk about university, though her grades had always been exceptional: there were no universities in the County and both parents had accepted that their daughter would never leave home. And she hadn’t left home, had not been “admitted,” despite her mother’s frequent threats when she was a child, and had not gone away for the suggested stint at a summer camp for “special” children. It had been her quiet father who had protected her from such departures, his grim silence eventually winning out over her mother’s desperate requests, her mother’s arguments.

  The good doctor had been invited to dinner soon after his arrival in town. This customary courtesy when taking on a new locum or partner had been endured by Sylvia two or three times in the past. A stranger in the house could cause almost anything to happen to her: utter paralysis, a loss of motor skills, total withdrawal, awkwardness, collisions with furniture, or, at best, rote behavior of a more or less civilized kind. Still her father had not wanted to exclude her. He had accepted, and expected others to accept, her disability, though no one had been able to identify the affliction.

  She wondered now how she had been explained to Malcolm. What exactly did her father say about the strange daughter in order to prepare the young man for her presence? My daughter is disabled was a sentence she had heard him use on more than one occasion, often in her presence as if she hadn’t been there at all, or as if she were locked in an adjoining room. If the person he was speaking to was a stranger, he or she would often look her over in a puzzled sort of way, seeking the flaw, and when unable to find it, no one had had the courage to make an inquiry. Only one very elderly and courtly man, whom she and her father had encountered while out walking, a man revisiting the town of his youth, had been able to come up with an interesting reply. “Your daughter,” he had said with sadness, “is disabled by her beauty.” Sylvia would always remember this, and often whispered it to herself at night before going to sleep though she had never been able to fully understand what the word beauty meant, at least in reference to her own physical self.

  Malcolm had spent most of the visit gazing at her with an eager, frank curiosity, while she fidgeted under his scrutiny. She had left the dinner table in mid-meal in order to be closer to the three china horses that stood on a table in the corner of the dining room. Her parents had once or twice tried to introduce a pet, a kitten or a dog, into her life, but the unpredictability of live animals had disoriented her, though she had always been and remained delighted by the notion of animals. She preferred the stillness, the sheen, of the three miniature beasts on this table. There had once been four horses, but her mother, cleaning, had broken one. Sylvia had mourned for several months.

  Unlike any other guest, Malcolm had put down his knife and fork and had come across the room to stand beside her. “Oh, please continue with your meal,” her mother had said brightly. “Sylvia just likes to get up now and then to look at the horses, don’t you, darling? Nothing to be concerned about.” But Malcolm had been concerned. To Sylvia’s great discomfort, he had stood beside her and lifted one of the china animals from the polished mahogany. “They’re lovely horses,” he said, and then, “Do you have names for them?” He held the blond horse in his fingers as he spoke.

  “No,” she had whispered. Then with her hand atop his she gently eased the horse back to the tabletop. “They don’t like to be touched, to be changed,” she had said quietly just before she turned and left the room for the night, her eyes on the floor as she walked silently away. In her room she listened to the murmur of the continuing dinner, though she could not make out the words that were spoken. And later, she heard the door close behind the stranger, the sound of his footsteps moving away, the creak of the old wrought-iron gate at the front of the garden.

  She could visualize the path he would take, past the Petersons’ white house with the tower, past the Redners’ brick house with the tall, nodding hollyhocks in the garden. As she had done each time she went to school, he would walk over the one broken sidewalk square and, at the corner, over the square that had the words Brunswick Block 1906 incised into its surface. The drugstore, the five-and-dime store, the Queen’s Hotel, an outdoor bench no one sat on, a tree that was surrounded by a bent iron cage, the war memorial with its steady stone soldier and the names of the dead boys who had made the mistake of leaving home. Several years later she would make a tactile map of all this for Julia. “The curb, the surface of Willow Road, another curb, Church Street,” she would say while her friend’s fingers brushed the surfaces of the textures Sylvia had glued onto a rectangular piece of cardboard. “This is your world,” Julia had said. “How built it is, how different than my farm.” Malcolm would walk up the gravel path to the Morris apartments where he said he was staying. She would not have followed him through the door there. Only her own interior rooms and the cold halls and classrooms of the two schools she had attended were known to her at the time in any intimate sort of way.

  The next time Malcolm came for dinner, he brought her a china horse.

  For the first six months, the horses were all they spoke about, with Malcolm doing most of the speaking. Then, gradually, she began to show him the rest of the house, the particular objects she had animated in one way or another; her grandfather’s important-looking shaving stand with its shining mirror the exact size of a face, a low footstool crouching near a Morris chair. Malcolm had pretended to be interested in all this, or perhaps he had really been interested. His tone when he talked was unthreatening, pleasing, careful. It was not unlike the tone her father had used to coax her out of bed, down the stairs, off to school in the past, except that, unlike her father, Malcolm seemed to want to enter her own world and to discuss what it might be that intrigued her there.

  He did not shut her out of his world either, often describing an appealing child or a colorful adult who had come into the office, or making reference to a picturesque part of the County he had visited when making a housecall. Sometimes, when her parents were in the room, he complained a little about paperwork, how it never seemed to end. There was only one nurse-receptionist in the office: it seemed unfair to expect her to do it all. Maybe, he suggested, Sylvia could come in for a couple of afternoons a week, just to ease the load.

  Her father seemed pleased; her mother had looked irritated, doubtful. “Sylvia will never be able to maintain a job,” she said.

  Malcolm had bristled. “She could most certainly maintain a part-time job,” he said, “even after she is married.”

  “Good Lord,” her mother had replied briskly. “Who on earth would ever have the patience for that?” She
was not referring to the job.

  Sylvia stared across the room and into the hall where she could see a painting of Niagara Falls. She concentrated on the white, indistinct cloud of steam at the bottom of the cataract and the way the river opened out from this spot, purposefully, with some other destination in mind.

  “I would,” Malcolm had said as he reached across the table for the hand that Sylvia immediately withdrew. “I would have the patience for that.”

  Her parents had made a faint attempt to discourage Malcolm, had used words like sacrifice while he had used words of love. Secretly, however, Sylvia knew that they considered the young doctor to be a miraculous blessing, a gift of luck visiting their unlucky home. When it was obvious that he was serious – determined in fact – her father had told her that if she married Malcolm, the young doctor had agreed that he would come to live in the house. “And you’ll never have to leave,” he said, knowing that that would be what she wanted. He was right, that was what she wanted although, until that moment, it had never occurred to her that the house, its objects and corners and stories, might be removed from her life.

  After that, as if repeating a line he had been told he would be expected to say, her father asked if she’d thought about whether she wanted to marry Malcolm.

  She had said nothing; none of it seemed to have much to do with her.

  Her mother had spoken to her harshly one night in the kitchen shortly after Malcolm had left the house. She had spun around angrily from her place at the sink, suds and water dripping from her hands. “You’ll have to let him touch you,” she had hissed in the direction of her daughter. “You’ll have to let him touch you in ways you can’t even imagine. And you have never, never let me, your father, or anyone else touch you. You won’t be able to do it, and he will leave and we’ll all be worse off than before.” But neither the outburst nor what her mother said worried Sylvia. She knew exactly what her mother was talking about. And Malcolm had assured her, had promised her with his hand on the old family Bible. “I will not touch you,” he swore, “until you want me to.” She was never going to want him to; there was never going to be a problem.