A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [139]
“There was never any past for her,” he said. “It was all eaten away by my father’s addiction, which was so huge a part of her life that everything else paled in comparison. She never told me about the farm where she grew up, she never told me who her people were, where they had immigrated from, why we were sort of Catholics, why she had called me Jerome. There were some old dishes around for a while that she said had belonged to her grandmother, but he destroyed them … he destroyed them on purpose. I think he broke them to smash up her past, to shatter anything that didn’t relate specifically to him. There were no photo albums, no pictures of anything at all.”
He told her about looking down from the balcony at the twisted and wrecked shape of his bicycle in the dirty snow, and then that same shape in the dead spring grass, each day after school, until one day when he looked it was gone. It was after he spoke about the bicycle that he had begun to weep.
His tears unlocked Mira and she went to him and held him as he cried, the sobs coming out of him in long, shuddering gasps. “Who threw your bicycle off the balcony?” she asked. “Who threw it into the snow? Was it your father?”
“Yes,” Jerome whispered, “yes.” He pulled away from her and placed his head in his hands. “I was trying to smash it up, just trying to smash it up. He came out onto the balcony … drunk, horribly, staggeringly drunk. He pulled it out of my hands and threw it off the balcony. And that was when he fell.” Mira could feel the tears on his face, could hear the bewilderment in his voice as he said these words. “He lost his balance, and he just fell over the railing.”
Mira wrestled her way back into his embrace and held on to him with a force she wouldn’t have thought possible in the past, held on to him while he cried like a broken child.
When it was over, they both fell asleep sitting upright on the couch, their heads touching. Swimmer, who had hidden behind the refrigerator when he saw that Jerome was angry, joined them once he was certain all was safe, walked around Jerome’s lap three times in a circle, then settled in and went to sleep as well.
Mira wakened first and gently leaned forward to retrieve the folded pieces of paper she had placed in the exact spot where the journals had lain on the crate in front of the couch. Jerome rolled his head back and forth against the quilt, then sat up and massaged his head with his hands.
“Okay now?” Mira’s hand was on his neck.
“Okay.”
“Do you want to go out and get something to eat, or do you want to read this first,” Mira held up the folded papers, “and then go out.”
“Read it,” said Jerome. “We’ll go out later.”
Swimmer jumped more noisily than usual down to the floor. If they weren’t going to continue sleeping, he wasn’t going to stay.
Mira began:
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