The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [69]
It was almost midnight when he telephoned Jean. They lay together with the few city blocks between them, his voice in her ear. He talked about what he would learn: the meaning of space, the consequences of weight and volume. Then he hung up and remembered her. He had not said what he wanted: send me a signal across the river, by lantern light or bird call, come under cover of darkness, I will know you by your smell, come with the rain …
Jean did not understand what her botany meant to her now, nor what to do with it. At Marina's suggestion, she enrolled in the university part-time. Many days, instead of going to her classes, she drove to the marsh to work in her mother's transplanted garden. Then she would cook for Marina while Marina worked. She would set out on the table thick square loaves of bread, round cheeses, vegetables pulled from the black fields. But she herself had no appetite. Marina did not ask questions. Instead she talked to Jean about Avery: “He's so much older than the other students. He keeps to himself. Except for Avery and the professor, everyone else was born on the other side of the war, and those few years have made another species of them … Sometimes, Avery says, he looks to the professor for brotherhood, but the man looks away, ignores him completely, too busy himself trying to squeeze into that lifeboat of youth. He says he feels alien, as if his English were a second language …”
As Marina spoke, Jean could feel Avery, his concentration, his earnestness, his self-restraint.
Marina told stories of Avery's childhood, about her life during the war living with William's sister and the cousins, the seclusion with William gone; and she talked about her work, painting all night, with a magnifying glass, the woven fabric of a child's winter coat against the bark of a tree, as if it were the most important thing to make this imaginary child a proper coat.
Jean always drove back to the city just before dark. The windows of the houses on Clarendon were filled with early lamplight. Dusk was chill, no longer pale; the beginning of a deep autumn blue. If the lobby was empty when she came home, she stood and looked at the ceiling. The constellations continued to float, a golden net, in their zodiacal sea. Afterwards, she lay on her mattress on the floor, watching the shapes of the trees in the window. She imagined Carl Schaefer, painting the stars with the door to the courtyard open to the keenness of the autumn night; and her mother, twenty years old and newly married, coming home under those stars, in her long red coat with the black buttons that Jean remembered from her childhood. She thought about her father. “I adored your mother, I adored her.” She imagined Avery, reading on Mansfield Avenue, his mechanical pencil dangling from his hand; and Marina taking her night walk on the marsh, trying to see in the dark.
Who was the last person to hold our child? Jean sobbed instead of driving six hours to the cemetery north of Montreal to find and to look upon – she did not even know whether in order to thank or to excoriate – the one who had dug the hole.
Avery, having given up on sleep, fell into naps, in the early evening, in the hour or two before sunrise, between classes. At the moment of waking he instantly plunged his mind back into work … Every building makes space, and great buildings make room for the contemplation of death … He remembered parting the blanket to look at his daughter entire, and Jean's face when she woke in the hospital, seeing in