The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [18]
– No. It was very beautiful here … a month ago.
She looked at the ground.
– I used to come here, she said, with my father.
She hesitated, then stepped down into the riverbed and leaned the full length of her back against a boulder. He followed and sat down, a few feet “upstream.”
– A month ago we wouldn't have been sitting here, said Avery.
– No, said Jean.
Jean would never forget what Avery spoke of, their first afternoon in the abandoned river: of the Hebrides, where sea and sky are driven wild by the scent of land; of the Chiltern Hills, with its stone forests of wet beeches; and of his father, William Escher, who, in the months before he died, had arranged for this work on the seaway for Avery, as his assistant. Now he was working with another engineer, a friend of his father. Jean felt Avery's loneliness for him, even in this briefest recounting. She saw how nervously Avery wound and rewound the strap of his binoculars through the straps of his rucksack. Now it was her turn to feel an un accountable depth of loss, fearing that at any moment he would stop talking and walk away from her.
– There's a cinema in Morrisburg, Avery said at last. Would you meet me there some time?
Jean looked into Avery's face. She had never been to the cinema with any man but her father. Then she looked away, downriver, feeling the poverty of her experience in the endless length of exposed clay.
– All right, said Jean.
They had emerged from the cinema into a long summer evening, not quite dark.
– You can drive me home, Jean said.
– Yes, of course, said Avery, feeling a sharp stab of dejection that she wished to leave so soon. Where do you live?
– About four hours from here …
It was past midnight by the time they reached Toronto. Clarendon Avenue was treelined, empty. The leaves of the maples gathered in the warm wind. Jean pushed open the wrought-iron door of an old stone apartment building, pendulous glass lanterns glowing in the entranceway.
– Step outside, said Jean, holding the door open for Avery to enter.
Inside, the foyer ceiling glowed with stars.
– This is where my mother and father lived when they were first married, said Jean. The painter J. E. H. MacDonald designed everything – the symbols of the zodiac, the patterns on the beams – and his apprentice, a young man named Carl Schaefer, climbed the ladder and painted them. Schaefer worked at night, with the door to the courtyard open. How moving it must have been to paint the night sky in gold leaf while the real night was all around him … Later my parents moved to Montreal, and my mother used to say that she started her garden there because she no longer had the stars. Almost immediately after they moved, her brother died in the air, flying at night. He was in the RCAF. My father said my mother always connected the two events, though she felt too foolish to confess it. The moment she stopped keeping watch over the night sky, he was lost. There were only the two children – my mother and her brother – and they died within three years of each other.
Avery and Jean walked under the stars. The floor of the lobby was marble and ceramic tile; ornately braided stone archways led to the lift.
– This is the first ceiling in Canada made of poured concrete, said Jean proudly. The paint is acid-proof with Spar varnish; the heavens will never crack or fade!
– No one would ever guess the whole of heaven was here, said Avery, inside this stone building.
– Yes, said Jean, it's like a secret.
They had driven for hours together, but the night fields had been all around them and, between them, through the open car windows, the cool summer wind. Now in the tiny lift they stood cramped and awkward.
Upstairs, Jean opened the door to moonlight and street-lamp light; she'd left the curtains open and the living room floor, covered entirely with plants, glowed, the light glinting off the edges of hundreds of jars filled with seedlings and flowers.
– Here are some good examples of indigenous species, said Jean. And she thought, Here I am.
They left Avery's car at the