A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [127]
What had made her again take such journeys away from her backyard and kitchen, away from the familiar patterns of her dishes, the sheets and towels that normally touched her body, away from the easy cadence of a shared daily life toward tension and deceit and a growing knowledge of inevitable bereavement? She had called it love, of course, but perhaps that was just her way of disguising something deeper, something darker, a desire to put everything solid and respectable at risk. Andrew had always been less reflective, and therefore, she supposed, more honest … more honest in that he resisted any attempts at interpretation, refused to name their connection at all.
“No,” she said suddenly. “I believe … I am certain that I loved him, or at least I loved the version of him that I was given. I loved that fragment of him that I was given. Only now and then did we speak of our connection and then almost always contentiously. When I felt him drifting far from my shore, as I sometimes did, I would want some kind of declaration, some sort of explanation. He always resisted this, often with cruelty. But there was a great deal of tenderness as well. Yes, there was tenderness. And when we spoke about history, about the past, about the generations of his family, and about mine, about lost landscapes and vanished architecture, there was … I still believe this … quite a lot of joy.”
Sylvia was remembering the rasping texture of Andrew’s unshaven face against the palm of her hand, or grazing the skin on her stomach, the heels of his hands pushing into the muscles of the small of her back. Had he known even her name the last time they had clung together like that? Were his expressions of passion a request for response or were they cries of alarm at an act he did not recognize and would not remember, an act of love lost forever the minute it ended or perhaps even while it was happening? For the first time she attempted to struggle away from the anguish thoughts such as these carried in their dark arms. She wanted to come back into this room, back to the young man to whom she had been speaking, wanted to greet even the offensive tubes of artificial light that flickered over his head. But when she looked up, Jerome was gone.
His absence was temporary, however. He walked back toward her from the inner room and carefully laid six black-and-white postcards in a line on the floor at her feet. “This is all that I have from my early childhood,” he said, “all that is left.”
Sylvia was careful not to pick up the cards, change the pattern, the sequence he had chosen. She leaned to one side and dug in her handbag for her glasses, then bent forward and looked. The head frame and outbuildings of a mine, a log house situated on a point of land that reached into a lake, a partly built town site with a new church and evidence of a forest fire blossoming on the horizon, several men standing beside a dog team with the message 4 feet of snow, 38 below zero !!! written beneath them, a trio of miners posing in a rough-hewn underground tunnel, one man pouring liquid gold from a furnace, the town site now fully developed with a drugstore, soda fountain, small frame hotel.
“Its all gone now,” said Jerome. “The mine closed and everything disappeared. It had hardly begun and then it was over. There is nothing left, nothing at all.” He was silent for a moment. “They said there was no more gold. But the truth was that my father made a mistake. His mistake closed everything.”
Jerome was hunkered down quite near