A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [56]
Jerome remembered Sylvia’s suggestion that the relentless stability of her surroundings might have somehow caused her mysterious condition, that and what she said about being trapped, imprisoned by geography. “Aren’t those two vows contradictory?” he asked.
“A bit. But I’ve thought about that and they seem to work together somehow. The first vow has to do with what can be controlled—you can control yourself—the second is about accepting what you can’t control.”
Grant me the serenity, Jerome remembered, to accept things I can’t change, the courage to change things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. His father, returning from a meeting, had told Jerome about this. At the time this directive had seemed to the fourteen-year-old boy to be a miraculous solution to the chaos of a family made miserable by his father’s binges. He had allowed himself to become certain, as he had been so many times in the past, that his father would stop drinking forever, that sanity and predictability would visit their household even though, by then, he had forgotten—if he ever knew—what sanity and predictability looked like, what form they took, how they would feel. But, in the end, the prayer was of little use anyway. Within weeks his father had entered the prolonged bout of inebriation that would be his last. Jerome could recall the horror; the older man weeping, or shouting in anger, his own terror when he was wakened in the night by the sounds of retching in the bathroom, the terrible accusations, the furious silences. “What was the third vow?” he asked.
“Oh, that,” she said, and he could again feel the tremor of her laughter, “is the vow of chastity.”
“Too late for that now.”
“Yes,” she agreed, “far too late.”
His father had used those words. “It’s too late,” he had shouted when Jerome’s mother had begged him to stop. “It’s far too late to stop.” Jerome, wakened by the argument, had stood trembling with rage in a pair of old flannelette pyjamas that, in the past year, had tightened around his chest and thighs in the same way that the apartment, his parents’ drama, and all the cheap furniture of their lives had tightened around him. His father had turned to him then and had said in a voice suddenly calm and cold, “It’s too late for you too, pal. Don’t think that you are immune. Don’t think for a second that you are exempt, you judgmental little shit.”
There had been nothing left to break in the room, nothing that didn’t already bear the mark of his father’s anger, nothing of his own, so Jerome had wrenched open the glass door and had gone out onto the freezing balcony in his bare feet. He had dug with his hands though layers of snow, then had pulled the frozen, rusted bicycle from the corner where it lay and, only peripherally aware of his father’s attempts to restrain him, had tried to smash up this final piece of evidence of his childhood with his fists.
As he thought about this, an image of his mother’s ashen face and wide eyes came into his mind, but he willed himself away from the memory, turned instead back to the girl and placed his forehead against the warm skin on her back. He could tell by the small, involuntary twitches that passed through her body that Mira was asleep, and soon he began to drift into a dream where it was his father, not Andrew Woodman, that he found trapped in the ice near the docks of Timber Island, trapped but still alive. On his ravaged features was an expression of such tenderness that Jerome reached forward to touch the frost-covered face. But when his fingers made contact with his father’s cheek, the whole head fragmented, collapsing into a confusion of thin transparent pieces on a flat surface, and suddenly he was looking at Smithson’s Map of Broken Glass. Each shard reflected something he remembered about his father: a signet ring, a belt buckle, a dark green package of cigarettes, an eye, a cufflink, the back of his hand, and Jerome knew his father was broken, smashed. The