The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [25]
– But why, insisted Jean, must flooded land be deconsecrated? Can it not remain holy even when it is covered in water?
At that moment the phone rang in the church office. The priest excused himself and did not reappear, though they waited outside for some time.
When Avery drove from the St. Lawrence to Clarendon Avenue those first weeks, Jean had breakfast waiting. The little table was pushed under the open kitchen window and was set not only with dishes and cutlery, but with books and flowers, postcards, photographs – all the things Jean had put aside to show him. The eagerness, the earnestness, the innocence of the scene was so affecting that Avery felt a deepening bond each time he took his place at her table.
Sometimes he drove to her in the early evening, and he watched Jean as she cooked for him. She worked in the twilight kitchen until it was almost too dark to see and they ate in that near darkness, listening to the wind in the trees through the small fourth-floor kitchen window. Sitting alone with Jean, Avery felt for the first time that he was part of the world, engaged in the same simple happiness that was known to so many and was so miraculous.
He wanted to know everything; he did not mean this carelessly. He wanted to know the child and the schoolgirl, what she'd believed in and whom she'd loved, what she'd worn and what she'd read – no detail was too small or insignificant – so that when at last he touched her, his hands would have this intelligence.
– My mother kept a commonplace book, said Jean, a record of oddments she wished to remember: poems, quotations from books, the lyrics of songs, recipes (ice-water shortbread, cucumber and beet chutney, fish soup with verbena). These yellow copybooks were also filled with cryptic phrases that I both longed to understand and was thrilled not to, their mystery increased their value for me. They sat in a square stack, fifteen of them, on the corner of her writing table. Only sometimes she dated her entries, and this I take to mean that my mother wanted to place a particular strand of thought, a loose thread of a quotation, next to a moment of particular personal potency, the here and now, say, of 22 November 1926 at 3 p.m., when Keats made her feel the keenness of things, somehow marked her place in the world, marked a secret event I would never know. One day, when I was thirteen, my father brought home a notebook for me, ‘just like the ones my students use for their sums, and to mangle their maps of the world,’ and he also handed me the packet of my mother's copybooks to keep, and a Biro my aunt had sent from England a few months before she died, of a sudden illness, a lung disease. I remember writing with that Biro in that copybook: Aunt Grace died across the ocean. I also remember thinking how strange it was that she had lived her whole life and had died in a place I had never seen, the kind of common revelation that, at thirteen, fills one with an aching wonder and a sorrow, an excitement and a disorientation, and the beginning of the very slow realization that one's ignorance continues to grow at precisely the same rate as one's experience …
All this Jean recounted to Avery in those moments that are the mortar of our days, innocent memories we don't know we hold until given the gift of the eagerness of another. They both felt the randomness of fortune, the unnerving shadow of what so easily might never have happened, as they sat next to each other in the kitchen on Clarendon, talking, listening to the night radio, Avery fingering Jean's hair ribbon that marked his place in an engineering journal, an article on steel, and that gave him the wrenching thought that some day, in the distant future, this ribbon might be discovered in this magazine by someone, a son perhaps, like one of Jean's mother's never-to-be-solved clues, connecting the future to this otherwise unrecorded moment.
– If my mother hadn't died, would I remember things so vividly? Long after you've forgotten someone's voice, said Jean, you can still remember