The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [56]
‘She's just the same,’ said Owen. ‘She cries for everything that doesn't have a home. And in spite of the fact she only has one good ear, she thinks she hears everything.’ Owen nodded to himself, already considering the traffic.
‘Yes,’ said Owen, waiting for his chance to pull out, ‘it's written on your face. When you ask someone how he is, what you're really asking is “are you in love?”’
There were meetings now regarding the lighting and ventilation of the rebuilt temples, factors to be planned for in the construction of the concrete domes. The domes were to be cylindrical over the front of the Great Temple, gradually expanding into a sphere; no part of the dome could touch the temple, for fear that any pressure during the settling of the cliff would damage the fragile ceilings. Each dome would carry a cliff load of one hundred thousand metric tonnes.
– My father and I, said Avery – sleepless with Jean in the night, the skin of her emerging belly dry and hot and smooth as clay – stood together in the Scottish rain, in our thick-soled boots; he saw the great achievement of engineering man where now I saw blunt, brute force and the submission of the river. This leaching of faith had been so gradual, I cannot tell you when it first started, but the moment shocked me. I loved and admired everything about my father, the solid sensual reality of him: his wet wool and his pipe-smoke smell, the bulk of him, his caps of canvas or tweed, his authority that, to this day, fills me with awe. And, deepest of all, although I hadn't the words for it when I was a child, what I came to understand was his complete engagement with all he saw – with every place he went and everyone he met. I watched him squatting down and digging into the earth, sitting at tables with businessmen or on the grass with children, soliciting the opinions of students, schoolteachers, farmers, mayors – and farm animals and birds! He had a curiosity about every living and inanimate thing, natural and man-made; in the great vales of Scotland, in the hill towns of Italy and India, in the marshes of Ethiopia and Ontario, at public rallies and alone in the desert, I saw he could find his way to belong anywhere. I watched him ruminating, sorting things out, as he observed various elements combine and recombine. He would unfurl maps across his knees, lay plans across camp tables, and I would watch as he altered the landscape with a stroke of his pencil, rerouting rivers and strangling waterfalls, bringing forests to the desert, and emptying entire lakes. Altering water tables millions of years old. And I wished I could snip the dams away like a stitch in a cloth, bring breath to the choked throat, bring all the water back with a single scrape of an eraser, bring back the houses, the graves, the gardens, the people. He would sit next to me and grab my arm with excitement. He brought me with him to the sites, to meetings in Quonset huts and expensive restaurants, to the first blasts of rock, to inauguration ceremonies.
My father looked at a bridge and he could hear it humming. He could hear the loom of forces, the warp and weft of stresses clattering in the span. It was instinctive, an intuition. But it's not that way for me, said Avery. I must work all the time. It's not in my skin. I'm like a pianist who must continually watch his hands. I have always wanted to feel what he felt. As a boy I craved to belong to him, to prove our bond. I felt I would always love him more than he loved me. I don't know why I felt this. He wanted me with him wherever he went; he wanted to show me everything, to teach me.
– You wanted him to be proud of you, said Jean. Perhaps you couldn't see how much he wanted you to feel proud of him.
– My father could really draw, he had such a brilliant hand. You could feel the structure inside the machine, feel how something worked. But when he tried to paint landscapes, my mother used to say she could feel the immense G.I. forces – gravity and inertia – but she also said there was