A Map of Glass (40 page)

Branwell despised almost everything about the pretentious house that his son’s wife had built on the hill. He hated its stamped brass doorknobs and its carved oak newel posts, he hated its decorative plastered ceilings and its bogus venetian chandeliers, he hated its patterned carpets and its heavy, ornate furniture, he hated the opaque glass ceiling that was also a ballroom floor, and he hated almost everyone that danced on that floor. He did not despise the property because, as I would later discover each time I visited Andrew there, the property was undeniably beautiful. He did not hate the view from the hill because, in certain lights, he almost believed he could see the Ballagh Oisin rising from the sand far off on the peninsula at the eastern end of the horizon, and because the view, too, was undeniably beautiful. And, most of all, he did not despise his grandson, T.J., who had inherited his own father’s obsession with grandfathers and, as a result, was beginning to show an interest in color and shape.

Andrew told me that probably Maurice – the Badger – would have been forced to take the old man in to live with him at Gilderwood upon his return from southwestern Ontario. Then, not much later, he likely commissioned a series of murals from his father for the great downstairs hall. Perhaps he hadn’t really wanted the paintings but had hoped that his father’s melancholy would abate if he gave him something useful to do.

Branwell’s melancholy had not, however, abated and evidence of this fact was painted on the walls of the central hallway of the house. The dusky, fortified European cities were reproduced there, or at least some of them, as were the sins of the artist’s son, in a horrifying array of colors. A variety of animals decked out like Maurice himself, in the usual parliamentary garb of frock coat and top hat, were depicted writhing in the flames of hell as punishment for their sins. A well-dressed horse, for instance, was being broken on the wheel, a huge yellow frog in a top hat was being plunged by a demon into a cauldron of boiling oil, and a great red bear in a waistcoat and pocketwatch was being dismembered alive. There was absolutely no trace of the distant blue landscapes of his early works, some of which can still be seen in the odd old house in the County.

When Branwell began this
Allegory of Bad Government
(a parody of the name of a Sienese fresco he had read about), T.J., delighted by the various animals in the piece, had been permitted to assist, and had spent some days coloring a waistcoat or a top hat. Minister Badger Woodman, as he was now famously called, had apparently wondered about the subject of the mural his father was painting in the front hall, but, having a literal mind, was completely unable to interpret the symbolism that Branwell was striving so diligently to convey. Caroline, beyond commenting on the suitability or lack of suitability of the colors, would have given the mural barely a glance. Subjects other than herself did not interest her.

Branwell had not heard from Ghost in more than two years. It was now the end of one appalling century and the beginning of another, though looking at the serene view from that hill, it would have been almost impossible to believe that entire ecosystems had been eliminated never to return, and that in Europe, home of all those defensive and defended cities that had so disturbed Branwell years before, various leaders were preparing to embark on a series of wars more horrifying than anything the young Branwell could have imagined in the attic of Les Invalides and, in fact, more horrifying than anything he could think of while standing on the edge of a hill, the panorama from which resembled more than anything the beautiful turquoise landscape he had carried with him for most of his adult life.

August is the month of lightning on the Great Lake Ontario and the shores that surround it. Often, one can stand at the lake’s edge in the evening and watch sheet lightning move like a distant beautiful war along the seam of the horizon where water touches sky. But it is the other kind of lightning I am referring to, the kind that is built from heat and moisture, the kind that is a companion to storm. In some ways, this kind of lightning is like the approach of someone significant in your life: a friend, a lover, an enemy. You see the lightning, then you count out the beat of the distance until the thunder comes. Julia says that it is the interval between thunder and lightning that is the closest she comes to being able to see weather. When the interval closes, the meeting takes place and the lightning strikes.

No one in the large house was hearing thunder or listening to intervals, as all were soundly asleep. Ghost, however, galloping on a white horse down the King’s Highway toward the village beneath Gilderwood Hill, was measuring the distance of the storm on the one hand, and the distance he must cover on the other. He knew what was going to happen. He hoped he would get there in time.

When he arrived at the top of the hill the fatal strike had already taken place, the fire had begun and flames were emerging from attic windows. By the light of these flames Ghost was able to see that two or three people were standing out on the lawn dressed in nightclothes – servants, likely, who would have inhabited the attic and who would have felt the strike and fled the house. They had left the magnificent front door open in their flight.

Ghost, seeking Branwell, and seeking also someone close to Branwell, did not dismount but rode his white horse right through the entrance, down the hall past
Allegory of Bad Government
, and straight up the wide stairs. In Branwell’s bedroom, Ghost leaned down from his horse and lifted his friend out of the bed by his nightshirt. “Get on the horse,” he shouted, “but there is someone else. Who is it? Where is he?”

Branwell was convinced that he was dreaming, and the smoke that was blossoming in the upper air of his room did nothing to dispel this conviction. Nevertheless, he knew the answer to Ghost’s question. “T.J.,” he said. “In the next room.”

And so the child that would become Andrew’s father burst out of the burning house and into the safety of the landscape riding with two white-haired men on a white horse backlit by red and orange flames. And Andrew – the future – was riding that white horse as well, along with his life and what that life would do to my life and all the other lives it would touch.

Andrew told me that if you now asked anyone in the village below the hill about the house they would talk about the lightning strike, the fire, the subsequent loss of life, and the glass ballroom floor. They would talk about the painted hallways, and about a rumor that suggested that someone had once ridden a white horse up the central staircase. They had forgotten all about the subject of the murals, they had forgotten about the rescue, they had forgotten all about the boy who had been raised by two old men in a cottage that was still standing on the property.

Perhaps, Jerome, all of life is an exercise in forgetting. Think of how our childhood fades as we walk into adulthood, how it recedes and diminishes like the view of a coastline from the deck of an oceanliner. First the small details disappear, then the specifics of built spaces, then the hills fall below the horizon one by one. People we have been close to, people who die, are removed from our minds feature by feature until there is only a fragment left behind, a glance, the shine of their hair, a few episodes, sometimes traumatic, sometimes tender. I have not been close to many people, Jerome, but I know that once they leave us they become insubstantial, and no matter how we try we cannot hold them, we cannot reconstruct. The dead don’t answer when we call them. The dead are not our friends.

All of this is terrible, unthinkable. But, it is not as terrible as being forgotten by the man you love while he is breathing the same air, while he is standing in the same room. He has forgotten you and yet some part of him remembers that he should touch you, and he does this, but as he moves against you he no longer speaks your name as he plunges his hands into your hair because he has forgotten your name. When he undresses you he registers surprise that your flesh is imperfect. He has forgotten your age. He has forgotten the many years that have passed since he first desired you, and the suffering during those years that has changed your face, the texture of your skin, the curve of your spine. The accumulated absences, the accumulated distances – he has forgotten all of these. He thinks that it was just yesterday that you collided near the stoplight of a town whose name he can no longer recall. He thinks the smooth legs that took you to the dunes above a buried hotel are the same legs that brought you back, years later, to the meeting place, the room in which you have fallen over and over again onto a bed whose springs are now rusty, whose mattress is now filled with dust. He has forgotten the love. His body knows what to do, but his mind has forgotten, his heart has been stilled.

I have scraped my memory like a glacier through my mind, with as much cold rationality as a person like me is able to muster, trying to determine, trying to remember when each story was told to me. What was outside the window when Andrew spoke of Annabelle? There is a flicker of white, but whether this is the white of trilliums on the forest floor or the white of snow floating though the pines I can’t now say. Perhaps it’s the continuous white of cotton sheets that stays with me for, during the hours we spent together, we clung to that bed as if it were an island and we the only two survivors of one of Annabelle’s marine disasters. And what age were we at this time or that time? What made him decide that we needed a particular story on a particular day or during the course of a particular year? Was his hair brown, or grey or white, as he spoke the words? In the end, though, it does not matter, just as it does not matter that although I believed that he had returned because – miraculously – he wanted to begin again, he had really returned because he had forgotten that we had ever stopped. What matters was the miracle that we ever met at all, the miracle of the life I never could have lived without the idea of him, and the arm of that idea resting on my shoulder.

All the while I have been talking to you I have been listening for the sound of Andrew’s voice, because they are his stories, really, these things he told me. But now I have to admit that I have been listening in the way I listened to a stethoscope that belonged to my father. When I was a child, I removed it from his office so many times that eventually, as a kind of joke, I suppose, I was given an instrument of my own for Christmas. I loved the rubber earpieces that shut out the noise of the world. But, even more, I loved the little silver bell at the end of the double hose, a bell I could place against my chest in order to listen to the drum, to the pounding music of my own complicated, fascinating heart.