A Map Of Glass Part 5

The next window was filled with medical supplies: basins, pumps, walkers, wheelchairs clean, s.h.i.+ning patiently antic.i.p.ating a whole range of infirmities. Mannequins absorbed her in subsequent windows, their stillness and that of their clothing. No wind to move fabric, no weather at all to respond to. She liked that. The damp cement sidewalk glittered faintly beneath her boots, which were now at home on that surface. Behind her, brightly lit traffic rolled on patched pavement. No one paid any attention to her, and she knew then that the city had opened its indifferent arms to her, that she could move or stand entirely still, respond, or refrain from responding, and a strange calmness came over her. The feeling was not foreign, not new to her, but here in the city she did not recognize it for the contentment that it was. It was not happiness; she had experienced that particular exhausting state of alert only three or four times, always in the company of Andrew. Now in the midst of the kind of constantly altering stimuli she had believed she could never incorporate into her life she knew only something she had always known: that this kind of tranquility could never be brought to her in the hands of others.

When she returned to the hotel and walked into the lobby, the desk clerk caught her eye, then glanced toward the black leather chairs that, after the first day, Sylvia had always ignored. She recognized the trench coat first, the hat resting on a knee the coat covered, then, as the figure rose to his feet, the face, and the weary, tolerant expression on the face. Her husband spoke her name, then, "Syl," he said quietly while moving toward her, taking her arm, "Syl, I've come to take you home."

The Bog Commissioners [image]

Timber Island is situated at the spot where the Great Lake Ontario begins to narrow so that it can enter the St. Lawrence River. Scattered islands with odd names appear at this point, islands that are premonitions of the famous Thousand Islands downstream where there is no longer any question about the water one looks at being that of the river. But one hundred and fifty years ago there was much discussion among the residents of my great-great-grandfather's Timber Island empire as to whether the surrounding water belonged to the lake or to the river. The ferocious swells of late-autumn squalls ought to have put the argument to rest, but despite the evidence the populace had such definite opinions on the subject that they formed themselves into two camps, called "lakers" and "streamers." Sports teams and spelling bees were said to have been a.s.sembled in this manner: "lakers" to the left, "streamers" to the right. The "streamers" were most often French: children of the coureurs du bois, or the raft makers, or the rivermen themselves. My father believed that they probably felt more at home with the idea of the river that had so influenced their lives touching this island territory. And from the point of view of geology a good case could be made. The west end of the island is made up of Lake Ontario limestone, the east end of the kind of granite rock that lines the river. It could be argued that the island was a child of both the lake and of the river. And certainly the industry that flourished there made extensive use of both and could not have survived without either.

Shortly before he emigrated to Canada to set up business on Timber Island, my ambitious great-great-grandfather, Joseph Woodman, an engineer by training, was hired by the Crown (along with five or six other men) as part of a commission whose job it would be to investigate and report on the state of the bogs in Ireland. The commissioners were dispatched to the various Irish counties and, as a result, Joseph Woodman was stationed on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry for close to half a year.

According to my father, the fact that the only commerce in this bog-ridden district involved the carrying of b.u.t.ter on a footpath over Knockanaguish Mountain dozens of miles to Cork City had greatly irritated his forebear. He had been appalled to learn that, among other things, there was not a single road in the district capable of supporting a simple donkey cart, and bridges only of the rudest sort, so that the people of the region were often seen carrying baskets of turf, furniture, sacks of potatoes and cabbages, and sometimes even coffins on their backs. Something in him must have rebelled at the very size and scope of a landscape so undeveloped that it supported only scattered potato patches and hard-won fields occupied by few very poor cows. And, of course, the expanse of the bogs in the region, bogs from which men removed turf for their hearths with long, narrow handmade spades that Joseph Woodman would have considered to be almost comical. He wanted the people of Kerry to put down their spades, pick up some good English shovels, and begin the task of draining the bogs so that these murky territories could be replaced with fields of golden grain. But, on the other hand, he wondered if the Irish were capable of completing such a task. Paying little attention to the damp climate and rough geography with which Kerry farmers had always had to contend, he likely ascribed the persistence of the bogs to what he would have seen as the laziness of the men of the district. Yes, my great-great-grandfather was blind to almost everything about the people and the landscape of County Kerry, and yet, for the rest of his days, that landscape had never lost its hold on his imagination. When he returned to England with his report, he did so with the hope that he would be going back to the Iveragh in the company of a vast team of English laborers who would dig the required ditches with proper shovels. He wanted, you understand, to squeeze all moisture out of County Kerry, as if it were a dishrag, but parliamentarians more aware of climate and expense than he apparently was utterly rejected his suggestions. For his efforts, he was dismissed from the commission but granted a small island at the eastern end of Canada's Lake Ontario. Filled with humiliation, he gathered together a few possessions and his wife and, one month later, set sail for that location.

A few years later, when he gave his Canadian-born son the Irish name of Bran (which he extended to Branwell to make it seem more English), there were those who were surprised by the notion that Joseph Woodman would commemorate the dissolute brother of the by then famous Bronte sisters as he had never, to anyone's knowledge, read a work of fiction. But, in fact, as family lore would have it, he knew nothing at all about the Brontes, had named his son instead after a magical dog in an intriguing story he'd heard from an old man with a ridiculous spade while they had been standing ankle-deep in a bog near a mountain pa.s.s named Ballagh Oisin in the old Irish Gaelic, a name that had been just recently and, to Woodman's mind, sensibly changed by a British surveyor to the more easily p.r.o.nounceable Ballagasheen.

In time this son, my great-grandfather, Branwell Woodman, would be sent by his now widowed father to Paris to study painting. How his father justified this in a society that must have believed his artistic interests were pure foolishness was never properly explained, but it likely had something to do with getting the young man out of the way. There was whispered mention of a pregnant parlor maid who had been banished from the island once her condition was known. Branwell, however, may not have been eager to give the young woman up, and his father may have wanted an ocean between the pair. Perhaps studying art had been considered simply the lesser of two evils. Besides, the boy had talent not as much as his sister, Annabelle, but enough that sending him to Paris for a year or two would not seem unusual in the eyes of the few families of quality with whom Joseph Woodman was acquainted and from whom the secret of his son's indiscretion had to be kept.

So Branwell took the boat to Le Havre and went to Paris, a city I myself have visited a number of times. Branwell remained in France for a year or two, living the bohemian life of a young art student, while back in Canada his father cursed the steamboats that were replacing schooners in the Great Lakes ("the ugliest species of watercraft ever to diversify a marine landscape!" he was said to have thundered), cursed the steel that was replacing wood, and watched his fortunes slowly recede. When they had receded further, he cut back Branwell's allowance and demanded that the young man return. But by this time Branwell had seen one of his paintings hung in an "exposition," had had a taste, a crumb, of artistic triumph, enough that he was able to at least imagine, if not devour, the whole cake, and, understandably, he did not immediately want to separate himself from a life warmed by these few small victories. Moreover, it seems that he had been quite close to his mother, who had been dead for only three years. Perhaps the memory of his father's sternness, combined with the absence of both mother and lover, made the prospect of returning to the island simply too gloomy for a twenty-year-old boy.

This was not the first time that Branwell had been away from home. From the age of about eleven onwards, while his mother was still alive, he had been sent to one of the English-style boarding schools that were beginning to spring up in a few places in the colonies. There he would have suffered, at least for a time, from unbearable homesickness and from the bullying of older boys until he himself learned to be a bully and learned as well to at least pretend to care about cricket. During the holidays, as an addendum to his education, his father insisted that he keep a journal, a nautical record of any and all of the variations of the wind that bore down on his island home, as well as a listing of the subjects of the sermons delivered by the various visiting Methodist clergymen. My father inherited this journal, which contained many personal references as well, usually written when the boy was miserably unhappy or terribly bored. Those particular entries were mostly about the progress Branwell had been making in the construction of a wind-driven iceboat in the winter and a small sloop in the summer. As for the sermons the young man dutifully recorded, my father could recite the t.i.tles of some of them verbatim. I can recall only two: "An Invitation Incorruptible, Undefiled, and that Fadeth not Away" and "If Sinners Entice Thee Consent Thou Not." The latter was, in Branwell's words, delivered by "a real ranter" bent on giving his audience "a real raking up." The journal (which has, sadly, disappeared) lapsed during Branwell's seventeenth year and was only taken up again when he reached Paris.

While he was overseas, his sister, Annabelle, stayed at home where she would remain for life, keeping house (now that both her mother and the maid were gone) for her father, and occasionally painting burning schooners or schooners smashed to kindling on sh.o.r.es that bore no resemblance to those of the Great Lakes. And yet it was not entirely unthinkable that the s.h.i.+ps she was surrounded by would meet their end on the rocks at the base of foreign cliffs. Often, after they were launched at the quays of the island, and if they were not to be used for the timber trade, they set sail for the wider world, traveling sometimes as far as Australia or Ceylon, carrying an unimaginable variety of objects in their hold, as if at that time it was deemed necessary to displace all the objects of the known world.

Branwell undoubtedly took up with several women in Paris it would have been expected that this would be the case in an attempt to forget about the hired girl altogether. Hers was a different story, her story and the story of their child.

Branwell, after a long night in Paris, perhaps a night of debauchery, had risen one day at noon and had decided to do penance by investigating the museums that would augment his scant knowledge of French history. He had already spent as much time as was required of any self-respecting art student in the Louvre and in the various churches and cathedrals famous for their art. Now he wanted war, he wanted Napoleon and his tomb, he wanted Les Invalides and the Musee de L'Armee. So, after his footsteps had echoed in the Pantheon, he entered the cool halls of Les Invalides with its rotting battle standards and its ancient swords and c.u.mbersome suits of armor. He gazed for a while, no doubt, at Napoleon's a.s.sorted costumes, and with a sort of grisly fascination at the great man's two deathbeds. (It has been rumored that two camp cots were required during the emperor's demise as he moved, albeit with great difficulty and in great pain, back and forth from one to the other.) Eventually, somewhat bored and wandering aimlessly past the detritus of battle after battle, Branwell, upon climbing to the third floor, came to a low wooden door with the words Defense d'entrer Defense d'entrer written on it, and the early recklessness, which later disappeared completely from his personality, caused him without hesitation to walk through the forbidden portal and up a flight of poorly lit narrow stairs. written on it, and the early recklessness, which later disappeared completely from his personality, caused him without hesitation to walk through the forbidden portal and up a flight of poorly lit narrow stairs.

Les Invalides is a large, imposing building, festooned with heraldic carving, originally built to house mutilated soldiers from a never-ending series of wars. Branwell, evidently well aware of this, soon found himself in the vast dark attic of what he would in upcoming days describe in his journal as the architecture of misery, architecture built to house war and wounds and illness, a museum of distress. s.h.i.+ning through the otherwise smoke-colored air were the silver discs of the oeil-de-boeuf oeil-de-boeuf windows that, upon approaching the building, he had admired from the outside. Gradually as his eyes adjusted to the lack of light he began to discern lumpy, abstract shapes on pedestals placed seemingly at random throughout the huge room. When he drew closer he could see that the shapes were tiny papier mache towns and villages, stone walls in good repair, drawbridges pulled firmly up, now evenly coated with several centuries of dust. Branwell, without knowing it, had stumbled across the whole of fortified France in miniature, made, according to the few old labels he could decipher, so that Louis the windows that, upon approaching the building, he had admired from the outside. Gradually as his eyes adjusted to the lack of light he began to discern lumpy, abstract shapes on pedestals placed seemingly at random throughout the huge room. When he drew closer he could see that the shapes were tiny papier mache towns and villages, stone walls in good repair, drawbridges pulled firmly up, now evenly coated with several centuries of dust. Branwell, without knowing it, had stumbled across the whole of fortified France in miniature, made, according to the few old labels he could decipher, so that Louis the XIV XIV might survey his territory at a glance, a territory fearful of strangers and constantly prepared for strife. This, Branwell commented in his journal, was "the architecture of fear, housed in the unused brain of the architecture of misery." might survey his territory at a glance, a territory fearful of strangers and constantly prepared for strife. This, Branwell commented in his journal, was "the architecture of fear, housed in the unused brain of the architecture of misery."

Each tree in a village square, the shutters on a town hall, walls surmounted by crenulations, the sculptured facade of a church or cathedral, cobblestones on a ruelle ruelle were wonderfully and faithfully rendered, but this may not have made much of an impression on Branwell at the time. It might very well have been this view of all of fortified France that made him decide at that moment to leave Europe, for that is exactly what he did. Perhaps there was simply too much of it: too much art, too much architecture, and too much history that included too much war. He must have recalled and with uncharacteristic fondness his island boyhood and everything that had delighted him about it. His father's tyrannical ways may suddenly have felt sane to him, sane and firm, and rooted in a world large enough to include the limits of the family's island empire as well as all the s.h.i.+ps and rafts that set sail from its quays. The s.h.i.+ps, the rafts likely appeared in his mind, and then the verdant sh.o.r.es of the St. Lawrence River dotted with discrete, undefended villages. Home, he would have known, was now what he really wanted. were wonderfully and faithfully rendered, but this may not have made much of an impression on Branwell at the time. It might very well have been this view of all of fortified France that made him decide at that moment to leave Europe, for that is exactly what he did. Perhaps there was simply too much of it: too much art, too much architecture, and too much history that included too much war. He must have recalled and with uncharacteristic fondness his island boyhood and everything that had delighted him about it. His father's tyrannical ways may suddenly have felt sane to him, sane and firm, and rooted in a world large enough to include the limits of the family's island empire as well as all the s.h.i.+ps and rafts that set sail from its quays. The s.h.i.+ps, the rafts likely appeared in his mind, and then the verdant sh.o.r.es of the St. Lawrence River dotted with discrete, undefended villages. Home, he would have known, was now what he really wanted.

A few days later, canvases unstretched, rolled, and packed, he sailed, taking with him two memories: the darkness of Les Invalides and an unshakeable desire to reproduce a particular turquoise painting in the Louvre, by a long-dead northern European artist.

So after a visit to the attic of Les Invalides, Branwell left behind European civilization and returned to his home on the island where everything for a time probably appeared to him to be not pastoral and bucolic as he had preferred to recall it, but raw and unfinished and in what looked to be a state of complete destruction. Felled and ruined trees were being floated down the lake to his father's docks. Raw and unfinished timber was being hastily a.s.sembled in order to construct the merchant s.h.i.+ps that would litter the lake's surface, s.h.i.+ps that would eventually carry not only timber but also animals, barrels, china, furniture, food, bolts and nails, cast-iron cooking utensils, shotguns, salt, axes, hacksaws, looking gla.s.ses, bolts of cloth, cannons, cannonb.a.l.l.s, and human beings. For a time, the sails that surmounted these vessels might have seemed too crisp to Branwell, too free of the patina of age, and the s.h.i.+ps themselves too attached to greed and commerce. Still, all of this would have been preferable to the cities that crouched in the dusty attic of Les Invalides, cities in which, it appeared, each activity, every thought, and all spoken words could only have been a preparation for conflict.

His distracted father had been in the beginning quite pleased to see him: he believed that his son had taken on an air of sophistication as a result of his European adventure and said as much to him during a welcoming dinner cooked by his sister. After a couple of weeks, however, Woodman Senior became uneasy about this sophistication that seemed to be manifesting itself in an att.i.tude of bored listlessness and the inability to take to any form of useful employment.

His sister, a year younger, much less beautiful, and in some ways even odder than Branwell, continued to paint the burning hulks and smashed schooners of which she was so fond but he, the educated one who had gone abroad to study art, painted nothing at all. What was his father to make of this? He offered himself as a subject for a portrait and Branwell complied in order to please him, but Joseph Woodman proved incapable of sitting still long enough for his son to make a creditable likeness (moreover, staring at his father made the painter nervous and his subject even more irritable than usual).

"It isn't what you want," his sister had told him. "Paint something you want to paint, s.h.i.+ps for example."

But, of course, that wasn't what he wanted either.

He finished the portrait. It was hung above the mantel in the parlor where it remained for several decades until his father, in ill-tempered old age, demanded of Annabelle that it be taken down.

As the months pa.s.sed, Branwell was constantly urged by his father to enter into the family business as a clerk in the office. "All he's good for," he told Annabelle, time and again, when she questioned this. Branwell resisted, claiming that had he a female model his artistic prowess would return. This revived earlier fears about his libertinism and made his father long to confine him to a room in which there was nothing but a desk and an inkpot and a ledger. He was twenty-two. It was high time he was making a living.

Annabelle knocked on Branwell's door one evening shortly after one of these conversations with her father. Her brother, who had been lying on the counterpane staring at the ceiling, rose from his bed and opened the door. He had let the fire go out and the siblings could see their breath as they spoke.

"I will be here forever," she told him, "but you can do something. You can get out."

When he said nothing, she asked, "What did you see in Paris that you still see in your mind?"

The awful miniature cities almost took shape in his memory, but he shook them off. "Frescoes?" he said uncertainly. He didn't like to mention naked models to his unmarried sister.

"Frescoes," she said, bending down to nurse a leg rendered almost useless by a childhood bout of tuberculosis, "that's good. I've never seen a fresco. Wall paintings. What else? There must have been something else."

He thought of the painting that had so impressed him in the Louvre. From the Flemish school of the sixteenth century, it was the only picture he could recall in accurate detail despite days spent walking on squeaky parquet past large-bottomed G.o.ddesses, blood-soaked battles, bored or anemic princelings, spoiled dogs, dead rabbits, and rotting fruit, saints suffering under the hands of torturers, Madonnas, Pietas Pietas, baptisms, and the inevitable crucifixions. He had stopped in front of this painting because at first glance it had seemed to be about nothing at all except pure landscape and glorious shades of color: turquoise and grey and emerald green with a touch, here and there, of rose. All of this was surprising, almost shocking, in the midst of the jaundiced yellows and bog browns that darkening varnish had leant to the other masterpieces in the room. There was light in this painting and it wasn't candlelight, or firelight, or torchlight. It was daylight. It was fresh air.

"There was a painting," he ventured, "done long ago, I think, by a Dutchman."

"Yes?" said Annabelle encouragingly. She had a cast in one eye and it seemed at this moment as if she were eyeing her brother with amus.e.m.e.nt. In fact, she was looking at the collar of one of his s.h.i.+rts and thinking that it needed was.h.i.+ng. But she was far from uninterested in what he had to say. "What was the subject of the painting?"

Branwell suspected that she was secretly hoping for s.h.i.+ps. "Not s.h.i.+ps," he said, "no, wait, perhaps one, but far off, far off in the distance." He paused, remembering. "There were great distances in the painting, Annabelle, rivers winding off and around, mountains and towns and many caves." He had shuddered a little when he mentioned the towns, but mentioning the caves had helped him steady his nerves. "There were fields too, and orchards, all miles and miles away. At first I thought that there was nothing but air in the painting but, in fact everything was in it, the whole world." Branwell was warming to his subject.

Annabelle now had the s.h.i.+rt tucked firmly under her arm.

"There was a saint. Very small," Branwell continued. "You might not have noticed him at all. And the lion was even smaller but visible, doing this and that in the wilderness, sometimes chasing a wolf, I think."

Annabelle had always been intrigued by dangerous wild animals, frightened and fascinated at the same time. She exchanged a glance with her brother when he mentioned the wolf. It almost looked as if he were about to say something but decided against it and instead, as she turned to leave the room, he announced, "I want to use these colors, I want to paint these distances, but not on a panel like the Dutchman, on walls." He rose from the bed where he had been lying, took a couple of steps, and caught Annabelle by the arm. "I want to make frescoes, but how on earth am I to do that? Father would never put up with me splas.h.i.+ng color all over this house. He would call it unseemly."

"That's just it," said Annabelle, glancing over her shoulder at her brother. "You'll be forced to travel. You will become itinerant." She paused and then repeated the word itinerant itinerant, as if she had just discovered it, and maybe she had. "This is how you will get out," she added as Branwell released his grip on her arm. "Think about that."

What Branwell did not know about the papier mache towns that had so affected him was that itinerancy was central to their creation. Itinerate draftsmen had been dispatched to the farthest reaches of France to draw the details of each house, public building, garden shed, crumbling wall, broken window, piggery, chicken coop, struggling fruit tree. Some were sent farther afield to the coveted borderlands of Belgium and Prussia, where they innocently measured and recorded the length of streets and alleys, town gates and fortifications, then plotted the dimensions of adjacent outcroppings and caves. They returned to Paris with their leather satchels and portfolios overflowing with accurate drawings of the pristine palaces of the rich, collapsing hovels of the poor, markets, barns, bridges, and towers, and the varying textures of the surrounding fields and fortified or unfortified farms; everything that was needed for craftsmen to reproduce the world in miniature in order to facilitate the battles of a king.

Later that night Annabelle slowly descended the back stairs into the now darkened kitchen and abandoned her brother's s.h.i.+rt on a chair beside the door. Moonlight entered the place through two large windows and settled on the objects in the room as if by design several pitchers, one large bowl, and three pale onions shone. Annabelle always noticed images such as these, but even though, on nights like this, she would sometimes stop and gaze at one dramatically lit object or another, it was only the s.h.i.+ps that she chose to capture in her paintings. Apart from these vessels her art was almost entirely innocent of the actual. Still, even as she limped across a kitchen that had moonlight on the walls and firelight on the floor, the masts of her father's s.h.i.+ps were visible through the windows, and on the ceiling swam a river of silver light.

You might think that with all this reference to moonlight and water and wreckage that Annabelle had a romantic soul, but you would be very wrong. In fact, she read no novels and brooked no nonsense, and was an astute and unsentimental judge of character, particularly the character of her bog-draining, forest-plundering father. She suspected that were Branwell to linger too long here on the island he too would become the object of drainage and plunder of one kind or another and she wanted, as much as possible, to save him from that.

And so, the next day, after a morning spent with the apple-peeling machine and a bushel of apples, a morning during which she noted that the peels falling from the fruit resembled gold and crimson ribbons tumbling to the floor and knowing that she had no desire to paint them, she washed her hands, placed a bonnet on her head, and a shawl on her shoulders, and moved as quickly as she was able across the yard to her father's offices.

What a masculine world Annabelle would have had to tramp through in order to reach her father! There was wood everywhere. Logs were being unloaded from the hulls of the two ungainly timber s.h.i.+ps that had recently arrived from the northern lakes, and scattered here and there were the stacks of planked lumber that would eventually make their way to the opposite side of the island to be used to build schooners and clippers. The first timber raft of the season was being a.s.sembled in the small harbor and this was a noisy French business all round: men were cursing and shouting at each other in a language Annabelle pretended to ignore though she knew the vocabulary well. The enormous dram, or unit of the raft, sixty feet wide and almost two hundred and fifty feet long, had just been completed and the rivermen were now poling sticks of oak timber (along with some pine to ensure buoyancy) into the first crib, which had been fastened by withes and toggles to its neighbor. Annabelle's favorite part of the raft, the temporary frame bunkhouse where the men slept and ate, would not be constructed until later when all of the cribs were filled and the floor of the raft was secure. Then, as a final touch, a mast with a sail attached to it and a recently felled small pine would be erected in the very center of the dram. No one had ever properly explained the presence of the pine to Annabelle, but she secretly believed that it must be an offering of sorts to the wounded spirit of the plundered forests.

The Frenchmen for that matter, the Englishmen who worked for her father paid no attention to Annabelle, having intuited early on that one glance in her direction might result in an abrupt termination of their employment. She wasn't much to look at anyway, with her flat chest, her lameness, her long face, and her severe dark clothing. Annabelle believed that the French thought of nothing but s.e.x, a distasteful subject that never entered her own mind unless she was in earshot of those men, that language.

Her father's whiskers had always looked to Annabelle like a feathered headdress (worn upside down, as if it were a bib) and this headdress had always been white. Moreover, he had always resembled certain powerful Old Testament leaders: the temperamental Isaacs and Noahs and Abrahams even Jehovah himself an angry potentate whose tantrums were kept only temporarily beneath the surface of his character as the result of an enormous act of self-control. As far as she knew, her father smiled only on the occasion of a launching of a s.h.i.+p and even then he appeared to be showing his crooked and oddly pointed teeth rather than displaying any real signs of good humor. He was much admired for his firmness and for the latent ferocity that everyone sensed in him. And, as owner of Timber Island and everything on it, he was considered to be honest and fair by all the men whose lives he controlled. Women were of no consequence to him beyond their ability to cook food and procreate and so he mostly ignored all wives and female children, his own wife included when she was alive. But Annabelle was another matter. She was not afraid of him. And he knew it.

"What is it?" he asked, not looking up from his papers, recognizing his daughter's footsteps as she entered his office. The top of his head shone in the low light. The grate was without fuel. "I haven't much time," he went on, without giving his daughter a chance to speak, "that vile Gilderson over on the mainland has now built a steams.h.i.+p of all things! The ugliest species of watercraft ever to diversify a marine landscape, I'll wager! He has had the infernal nerve to invite me to the launching Sat.u.r.day next, even asked if I'd like to send a small flotilla of sloops to attend the monstrosity's progress out of the harbor. I certainly will not provide anything of the sort and am writing him at this moment to say just that. The fool!"

Despite the fact, or perhaps because of the fact, that he was ten years his junior, Oran Gilderson was Joseph Woodman's chief compet.i.tor in the local s.h.i.+pbuilding trade. They were locked together by envy and a not inconsiderable amount of loathing and, as a result, invariably issued handwritten invitations to each other on the occasion of the launching of a s.h.i.+p, savoring the opportunity for potential humiliations of one kind or another.

Annabelle untied her bonnet, removed it from her head, and placed it on the oak desk directly in front of her. She s.h.i.+fted her weight onto her good leg. There was only one chair in the office and her father was occupying it. "Branwell isn't happy," she blurted. "Your son. He wants to paint walls, to do something that is all his own."

Her father looked up now in irritated astonishment. "Whatever can you mean?" he asked. He had no time for frivolous interior decoration. A succession of mainland drawing rooms of various hues might have pa.s.sed through his mind, drawing rooms in which he would have been ill at ease, bored, and overheated.

"He wants to make frescoes, to paint landscapes in hallways."

"Landscapes? Hallways?" Joseph Woodman removed his reading spectacles and peered at his daughter. "For heaven's sake, why?"

"To give the people here more scenery." Annabelle drew herself up into her nearest approximation of good posture. "Some trees, perhaps..."

"I'll show them trees," said her father testily.

"Live trees," continued Annabelle. "Mountains... waterfalls."

Her father placed his hands flat on the desk and leaned forward. "Don't be foolish," he said. "No one will want these walls. No one at all. Paris was clearly a mistake. It's time he became a man, took some responsibility, and got over his fancy French ways." This declaration was followed by an ominous, angry silence. Then he said, "Has his mind been destroyed by drink, by absinthe?" Joseph Woodman had no doubt heard about the unsavory side of the Parisian art world but had overlooked these rumors in favor of removing his son from the vicinity of the hired girl. "Well," he continued, "did he? Has he?"

It was well known that Joseph Woodman permitted no liquor of any kind to be unloaded on the island in order to prevent the Frenchmen from infecting the more serious workers of Scots and English descent with their fondness for the grape. Since any reference to Ireland brought with it a tinge of remembered frustration and humiliation, no Irishmen were tolerated on the island either, thereby removing that particular brand of alcoholic danger. Joseph Woodman insisted that Timber Island remain a parched community.

"Of course not," Annabelle said. She had read enough about Paris to know that wine, at the very least, would have been imbibed regularly. She didn't know anything at all about absinthe, but was certain that, regardless of what he may have consumed, her brother's mind, though filled with melancholy, was completely intact.

"Well, I won't have it, this business of decorating parlors..."

"Hallways," Annabelle corrected.

"Parlors, hallways, it's all the same and I won't have it." Both of his fists were clenched now as if he were preparing to do battle with these parlors, these hallways, and his face was reddening as his blood pressure rose. Joseph Woodman had been in a particularly foul temper in recent months. The entire treasury of his beloved Orange Lodge (he had been ardently anti-papist ever since his Irish adventure) had been spent in Kingston on a marvelous triumphal arch that had been erected in antic.i.p.ation of a royal tour. The Prince of Wales, however, tired of the wretched Irish question, had refused to dock at Kingston at all, forcing schoolchildren to enter boats in order to serenade him with their patriotic songs. These boats could be seen quite clearly from the sh.o.r.es of Timber Island, and the sweet voices of the youngsters could be heard by Mr. Woodman as he sat seething in his office. "Branwell should stick to portraits," he told Annabelle now, "if he insists on art as a profession. Portraits are what people want." He looked past her shoulder. "But in truth," he said, pointing one long finger in the direction of the outer office, "what he should undertake instead is gainful employment with c.u.mmings."

c.u.mmings was a thin, sallow-faced clerk of indeterminate age who had been a fixture of the outer office for years. Although he was timid and withdrawn, he had nevertheless once, and only once, summoned the courage to leer at Annabelle as she pa.s.sed by his desk. No man had ever looked at her that way before, and she was determined that no man would ever look at her that way again. She had, therefore, since that day resolutely refused to speak to c.u.mmings for any reason at all, though she did not tell her father about the incident.

"That will never happen," said Annabelle. "It's not what he, what Branwell, wants to do. It's not what Branwell should should be doing." be doing."

No woman, not even Annabelle, was going to give Woodman advice. "I'll be the judge of what he should or shouldn't do," he thundered. "And I say that he starts in that office Monday next."

Annabelle placed her bonnet back on her head and tied the ribbons under her chin. The bow looked like dark bird's wings on either side of her narrow face. She gave her father a determined look, which was all the more unnerving because of the one wayward eye. Then she turned, left the room, walked through the outer office, and into the noise and disarray of the yard.

A half an hour later Annabelle found herself in Back Bay, or, as it was sometimes called, Wreck Bay or Graveyard Bay, one of her favorite island locations. It was a shallow, muddy, weed-fringed spot where annulled s.h.i.+ps were brought to die, and several vessels that had been recently towed there were now in the process of doing just that. Others, having been stripped of anything considered useful, had already sunk beneath the surface of the water. In summer, Annabelle liked to glide across the bay in a rowboat in order to peer down at the vague shapes of scuttled s.h.i.+ps wavering at the bottom of the lake, but today she would remain on the sh.o.r.e. As always, she carried her sketchbook with her in her ap.r.o.n pocket, though, at this moment, she had removed neither it nor her pencil. She sat on a remnant beam near the water, dressed in her dark outfit, dwarfed by a collection of broken masts, frayed ropes, ragged sails, and water-stained hulls in varying stages of decay and levels of submersion. Booms groaned in the increasing wind, chains clanked and knocked against rotting timbers, but Annabelle took no notice of these sounds. She was thinking about Marie. And she was thinking about the baby. If it had been born alive, it would be just two years old by now.

It is a sad fact that into any individual's life there will stroll only a very few irreplaceable fellow creatures, friends who, when they are absent, leave one bereft, awash in one's own solitariness. For the islanded Annabelle, whose dealings with the outside world were severely restricted by her gender and by her geography, there had been her brother, who was largely unconscious of the magnitude of his importance in her life, and there had been Marie. When Marie had been sent away from Branwell, he had suffered from her absence and Annabelle had been denied the companions.h.i.+p of her dearest friend. Marie, at least, like Branwell, had been sent away, had been given a change of scene, however grim that scene might turn out to be. But Annabelle had been left behind in the silent, empty house. This echoing, vacant region, she had concluded, was to be her territory, her prison. She would bang up against its walls as long as she breathed while, mere steps from her window, all those wonderful cathedral-like s.h.i.+ps moved soundlessly, like floating works of art, away from her sh.o.r.e. It is sometimes difficult to believe in Annabelle's fondness for all the schooners and sloops and privateers that were moored at the docks of Timber Island, or which cut through the waves of the lake, or whose sails dipped and flashed on the horizon, and yet, despite all the paintings she made of the demise of such vessels, she couldn't help but be affected by their beauty.

Joseph Woodman had told his children that the word schooner schooner came into being as the result of a young man shouting into the crowd at the launching of such a vessel, "See how she schoons!" What could it mean, this verb came into being as the result of a young man shouting into the crowd at the launching of such a vessel, "See how she schoons!" What could it mean, this verb to schoon to schoon? To lean into the wind and move swiftly forward, Annabelle had concluded. She had been known to use the verb now and then when describing the activities of another person, most often, because of her friend's vitality, in relation to Marie.

If Marie had been with her at this moment, she and Annabelle would have been engaging in one of their favorite pastimes: discussing what was wrong with Branwell. They never tired of this topic, which they had approached from every imaginable angle and related to which they had considered the most improbable questions. Why, for instance, would he not eat broccoli, or raw tomatoes, or any of the cook's delightful relishes? What made him want the crusts cut off his bread? He could talk at length when enthusing about his iceboats and then refuse to reveal anything about the inner torment that the girls were certain resided in his soul. Why would he not confess his adoration for Marie when it was clear to both the object of that adoration and to his sister that that adoration existed? Would he never want to be a soldier and fight wolves and Americans and other enemies? How was it that he could think of nothing? (When they asked him what he was thinking about, he always said, "Nothing.") If Marie were here now, the question Annabelle would ask to open the conversation would have been something like, "Why did I have to make it clear to him, and to my father, that he wants to paint hallways?" And then she would have added, "Doesn't he know how fortunate he is to be a boy who can, with or without parent approval, do what he wants with his life, who can become itinerant, who can get away?" In the end, though, she would have softened. Poor Branwell, she might have said, trapped in a world where the expectation was that, regardless of the detours of his youth, the road he walked would eventually lead him back to the grinding routine of the family business.

Annabelle took the pencil and the small sketchbook out of the pocket of her skirt, stared for a while at one blank page, and began to draw the outline of a raft from memory. She had considerable trouble with the perspective. Having never before attempted to render something so thoroughly horizontal, she was unable to make the structure look as if it were lying flat in the water. Frustrated by this, she concluded that this was not to be a day during which the making of drawings was possible, so she returned the sketchbook and the pencil to her pocket, rose to her feet, and began to walk back to the house.

Pa.s.sing the quay, she noticed that several of the men were on their hands and knees testing the withes that held the timbers in place. The raft was nearing completion. Soon it would begin its journey down the river, past a scattering of villages and a quant.i.ty of islands, moving through the shallows and rapids out into the world.

Annabelle could recall quite vividly the March day in her twelfth year when Marie had been brought across the ice, how she had been transported and then delivered like a package during the least negotiable month when, because of rising temperatures, it was necessary for islanders to make use of a contraption half canoe, half sleigh in order to make the journey back and forth to the mainland. This vehicle either slid with great difficulty (pushed by its pa.s.sengers) over frozen b.u.mps and cracks, or it floated in constant slush and broken ice through frigid and partly thawed waters. The girl, who from a distance appeared to be paralyzed either by fear or by frost, sat upright in the bow, not moving when the other pa.s.sengers climbed out onto the ice to push, as they made their slow progress from Kingston Harbour to the island.

Annabelle was not a pretty child, and there were moments when, despite her almost complete lack of vanity, she felt a twinge of resentment at the injustice of this arbitrary fact of nature. That March morning, looking through the watery gla.s.s of one of the parlor windows toward the partly frozen lake, however, she'd had the odd, inexplicable notion that the small, distant girl in the boat was her other, her more beautiful self being conveyed to her, and that when this girl eventually stepped into her house their two bodies would overlap and become three-dimensional like the twinned images on the photo cards she slipped into the stereoscope on Sunday afternoons. She was mad with excitement, convinced that the girl's imminent arrival would be more of a longed-for reunion than a first encounter. She stood by the window, transfixed, as the skipper heaved the brown mail sacks onto the dock, then held out a hand to the child who had not moved one inch. The man made no effort to escort the girl, but pointed instead at the big house where Annabelle waited.

Branwell, who was then in his thirteenth year, and home for late-winter holidays, joined Annabelle at the window. As he watched the girl limp toward the house, he said disapprovingly, "She'll never do, she's too thin. And, look, she's lame."

Annabelle, who was thinking of her own damaged leg, said nothing at first, then whispered, "I think she will be beautiful."

"Doesn't she know that she's supposed to come to the kitchen door?"

The girl's pale face was visible now. She was about to climb the front steps. Branwell rapped on the gla.s.s to get her attention and Annabelle saw two startled dark eyes glance toward the window. "Next door down," Branwell shouted with more volume than was necessary. "Not here."

The girl looked at them for some time long enough to cause discomfort and the look combined curiosity and a not insignificant amount of contempt. Then, quite suddenly, she stuck out her tongue before moving toward the appropriate door. Annabelle and Branwell racketed through the intervening rooms of the house to the kitchen. They had both fallen hopelessly in love. But at that moment Annabelle was the only one of them who knew this.

Inside the kitchen Annabelle and Branwell grabbed each other's arms and pulled at each other's clothing, each wanting to be the one who opened the door to the stranger. When Branwell advanced, Annabelle kicked him in the left s.h.i.+n and he swore and lost his grip on the porcelain k.n.o.b. "d.a.m.n," he said in a tone much like his father's, and then again when he saw that his sister was drawing the girl into the room by the sleeve of her tattered coat.

"Leave go of me," the girl hissed. She jerked her arm out of reach, then sat on the floor and began hastily untying her boots, ignoring altogether, it would seem, the presence of the other two children in the room. Annabelle withdrew slightly and took in the girl's costume: a soiled bonnet, worn overcoat, and grey lisle stockings with holes in the knees. Some kind of pinafore was visible where the coat fell open over one raised leg, then the other. Once the boots were off, two white hands covered the dark grey cloth on the feet. She's not lame at all, thought Annabelle with a rush of disappointment, just frostbitten. The sodden boots lay like small dead animals near the fire. Tears of pain gleamed on the girl's eyelashes, eyelashes that were dark and plentiful. The sight of those wonderful lashes was to be among the first of many things about Marie that Annabelle's mind would retain indefinitely.

"Well," said Branwell in the condescending tones of an adult, "what's your name then, girl?"

The child sat clutching her toes. She stared at Branwell but did not answer him. Then she sniffed, looked away, and announced, "I don't have to tell you that. I've only got to tell things to the Missus." She scanned the kitchen, as if she expected to find this person hidden in a shadowed corner.

"My mother is in bed," said Branwell truthfully. "She stays there all the time," he added. This was somewhat of an exaggeration. Mrs. Woodman was p.r.o.ne to bouts of migraine more p.r.o.ne in winter than in summer and withdrew for days at a time. But in fair weather, and sometimes even in the coldest season, she would be a more or less cheerful if somewhat vague and occasional presence in the kitchen.

"She stays in bed all the time," continued Branwell with an air of authority, "so you'll have to wait on her and I'll be the one telling you what to do."

"No he won't," said Annabelle indignantly. "He's good for nothing. My father says so."

Just then, the cook, a tiny woman with a disproportionately large face marked by two fierce black eyes, entered the room. "What's this?" she asked, surveying the still-huddled child. "Oh, yes, the girl from Orphan Island." She shot a look in the direction of Branwell and Annabelle. "What are you two up to?" she asked and, without waiting for a reply, turned again to the recent arrival. "We don't sit on the floor here," she offered and then, "I expect you're far from clean."

"Far from clean," echoed Branwell. from clean," echoed Branwell.

"No one asked for your opinion," said the woman testily. "In fact, no one asked for you either of you to be in here at all. Both of you back into the house!"

The siblings reluctantly withdrew, but not before Annabelle and the girl had exchanged a brief complicitous look.

How forbidden Marie was! Annabelle's father had made it clear to her and to her brother that they were not to consort with this girl who was an orphan who would therefore have come from G.o.d knows where, the progeny, most likely, of a drunken lout and a shameless hussy. Furthermore, she was there to work, not to lollygag about with the likes of them. Mackenzie, the cook, who up until that time had tolerated the children's presence in the kitchen only occasionally, now barred them completely from the premises on the grounds that they were too much of a distraction. Banishments and admonishments did nothing to dispel the air of romance and mystery that Annabelle believed was attached to the girl, and, as the days went by, she thought about little else. Often she found herself standing behind the open kitchen door, watching Marie through the s.p.a.ce between the hinges while the girl went about her various tasks and was, more or less, bossed and pushed around by Mackenzie, who eventually softened somewhat under the influence of Marie's stubborn pride and unquestionable beauty.

One day, while Annabelle stood in the V-shaped shadow behind the door, Marie, who was scrubbing the floor, began to crawl toward the spot with brush and suds and pail until Annabelle could see quite clearly her small, soapy knuckles and thin, damp wrists. She hunkered down and reached into her ap.r.o.n pocket for a pencil and one of the small pieces of butcher paper she always kept with her in case she might want to make a sketch. Squinting in the gloom, she wrote a message that told the girl to come to her room late at night for a secret that would be told.

Annabelle wondered if the girl could read, doubted, in fact, that she could, but had made the decision, nonetheless, to make this attempt to communicate with her.

At first the girl ignored the sc.r.a.p of pinkish-brown paper as if its sudden appearance in her line of vision had caused her no curiosity whatsoever. Then, quite abruptly, she s.n.a.t.c.hed the paper from the floor and crammed it into the pocket of her pinafore. Mackenzie said something about the fire, the oven, and then something else about the length of time it was taking Marie to finish the floor. The girl did not look up from the brush in her hands, glanced neither toward the door nor toward the cook stove, and even when Mackenzie left the room, she did not remove the paper from her pocket. Just as I thought, she can't read, Annabelle concluded and having thus concluded did not bother to invent a secret.

Still, believing the girl to be illiterate had no diminis.h.i.+ng effect upon her fascination, and the following day Annabelle was back at her post. She had the odd sense that her already small world had in fact shrunk, and now included only the dimensions of this triangle of shadow and the limited view that could be seen from it. A spider shared this s.p.a.ce with her, but it didn't disturb her at all. Branwell might have screamed and run away, but not her. She wasn't afraid of spiders, and even had she been, there was theatre on the other side of the door crack and she was able to watch it all day long for months and months if she chose to do so. She was not required, as Branwell was, to partic.i.p.ate in any formal kind of education because she was a girl so, even when her brother returned to school, she would be able to remain in close proximity to Marie. When she told Branwell about her luck he repeated his father's words about the drunken lout and the shameless hussy and predicted that Annabelle would catch cooties from the girl if she didn't keep her distance.

Her mother, though as listless and seemingly preoccupied as always, made the odd appearance. Occasionally, she would drift into the kitchen, where she would look at Marie not with curiosity exactly but with detached puzzlement until Mackenzie explained, for the fourth or fifth time, who Marie was and what she was doing there. Annabelle squirmed in embarra.s.sment behind the door at these moments. What was it, she wondered with some impatience, her mother thought about all day, what made her seem so absent even when she chose to leave her room and be among them? Though Annabelle didn't know this, the truth was that Mrs. Woodman had never successfully managed to emigrate from England in her mind, and even as she stood in these rooms and gazed out the windows of this house, a landscape of a very different kind lit her imagination. Only Branwell would listen with any interest when their mother described stone villages and picturesque fields. Annabelle had no time for this rhapsodizing about distant places, places she doubted she would ever see and knew her mother would never see again.

"The girl from Orphan Island," Mackenzie would say, and Annabelle's mother would reply, "Oh yes, of course," then move vaguely around the kitchen touching a pewter jug, an earthenware bowl, as if she hoped that something in the kitchenware's insistence on being solid might pull her back from the lost green landscapes of the past and into the overheated interiors of the present.

On one of these days, shortly after Mrs. Woodman had floated out of the kitchen to wander aimlessly through the other rooms of the house, Marie was commanded by Mackenzie to once again scrub the floor while the cook went to fetch a brisket of beef at the island's butcher shop. What a thin back she has, thought Annabelle, looking at the nearby laboring figure. Her clothing, which was not finely tailored as Annabelle's, fell away from her spine toward the floor and appeared to be much too big for her frame. She watched the girl's muscles move under her cotton clothing and, as she was watching, one arm shot out from the body and shoved a familiar piece of butcher's paper under the door. Annabelle stooped to retrieve it and, in the gloom, read her own message. Then she turned the paper over in her hands and was confronted with a one-word message: No No.

It wasn't as if Annabelle was unaccustomed to this word: her father often shouted it across the s.h.i.+pyards, or yelled it in the direction of Branwell and her when they were making demands. It wasn't that she hadn't seen it scrawled in two large characters across various letters of request on her father's desk. But to have the negative emerge from such a small, such a powerless source shocked her deeply and hurt her in a way she hadn't been hurt before. What could it mean, this refusal, this annulment?

Annabelle crumpled the paper in her fist, then walked into the parlor where she stood looking out the window at late-spring snow falling on vessels that had remained useless and dry-docked all winter long. In the corner of the room the recently fed Quebec stove roared as it devoured wood. Overhead she heard Branwell's quick steps progressing along the floorboards of the upper hall toward the back stairs, along with the clicking sounds made by the dog's nails. Soon, from the direction of the kitchen, Annabelle could make out the sound of Branwell's voice demanding that Skipper perform the one trick he had managed to teach him. "Roll over," he said and, shortly after, and much to her chagrin, she heard Marie's laughter followed by some light scolding about dog hair on the floor, and then the sound of Branwell and the dog beating a hasty retreat when Mackenzie must have been coming up the walk.

Nothing was ever going to happen to her, Annabelle suddenly knew. Plenty was going to happen to Branwell, she suspected. A great deal had undoubtedly already happened to the rejecting Marie, but she, Annabelle, was never going to be granted access to that intriguing history. She felt as if she were now and would be forever outside of everything, forced to dwell in the shadows, witnessing only a fraction of the world through a thin crack of light. With this feeling came a considerable amount of resentment.