Storm Glass (7 page)

It was winter that made her a handful. In a town where nothing happens in the summer, less than nothing happens in the winter and Madame Delacour became bored. Nothing helped: not the television, which by virtue of its size blocked the only window in the house; not the kids, whose collective naughty imagination would keep the most blasé among us on our toes; not the constant supply of chocolate which was made possible by cheques from the state that arrived at the door. Winter bored her, absolutely and completely, and nothing helped. Nothing, that is, except death.

Madame Delacour was fervently drawn to the drama and ceremony of death. Not her own, of course. That was, as she wisely knew, a party she could not attend. But anyone else’s fascinated her. She appeared at all the funerals she could, dressed appropriately for the occasion in her vast purple dress and with lipstick smeared all over her wide mouth and sparse teeth. She mourned with the mourners and eulogized with the eulogizers. Often her sadness was sincere, but more often the excitement that death causes in a small town cancelled all but the most fleeting of sorrows. Madame Delacour at a funeral was like a child at a birthday party, and the corpse like a brand new, recently unwrapped gift.

But there was a small problem. There were simply not enough deaths to keep her occupied. The tiny population of the town could only produce a certain number each year, and although most of these occurred, conveniently, in the darkest and most boring part of the winter, Madame Delacour became restless and dissatisfied. Boredom waited for her on the street after each funeral. She began to invent deaths.

And so it came to be that, after a few long dark winters, almost everyone in the town had been reported dead three or four times before they, in fact, expired. Madame Delacour became, as Monsieur Delacour so aptly and so silently put it, a handful. Even the dogs and the chickens avoided her chatter. Everyone likes to discuss the actual death of a neighbour, but invented death is something else. It’s foolish to weep and bemoan the fate of a friend who, at that very moment, is buying two tins of pâté and a grosse baguette in the local épicerie. And it’s most embarrassing if and when the friend in question finds out about your outburst of emotion. And so, as Madame Delacour found fewer and fewer people with whom to discuss imaginary death she turned more and more to her husband.

Monsieur Delacour loved his wife. And it wasn’t that he was against death either. He just didn’t care about it one bit. Someone or something could come and snatch it away for all the difference it would make to him. He was far more interested in the children, chickens and rabbits who all fitted nicely, if a little snugly, into his small corner in the square. He liked to watch their numbers increase. It was something he could count on. He wished his wife had something she could count on too, for Monsieur Delacour was as certain as could be that all of the important deaths had already happened.

Because he could not speak, Monsieur Delacour’s thoughts consisted mostly of observations and explanations, which he put to himself in the form of announcements. Questions were, you might say, out of the question since they could not be articulated. And only occasionally did he make decisions; only when it was absolutely necessary. He felt it was necessary now.

“Spring is here,” he announced, silently, to himself. “In spring Madame Delacour visits the larger square near the church and watches the tourists come and go. Then she makes up stories about the people she has seen there; movie stars and counts and earls, thieves and convicted murderers, millionaires and soccer players, queens and presidents all stream into her imagination and the power of death subsides. She will be perfectly happy watching this parade of strangers that lasts through the summer and on into the fall. But then the fanciful funerals will begin again. Something has to be done about her.”

And, oddly enough, just that morning Social Services had decided that they must do something about Monsieur Delacour. Around nine o’clock a plump, cheerful man had leapt out of a white van. Then he had dragged a brand new wheelchair into Monsieur Delacour’s kitchen. He had sat in it himself in order to demonstrate its safety and efficiency. He had shown Monsieur Delacour how to work the gears and manipulate the wheels. It had shone in the grimy kitchen as brightly as a diamond tiara. It was like a carriage for a king. And Monsieur Delacour didn’t care about it at all. It seemed to him to be just one more contraption that might be snatched away at any moment. So, as soon as the white van had pulled away, Monsieur Delacour hopped outside to his stone bench in order to watch for spring.

It was the combination of the change of the season and the appearance of the wheelchair that gave him the idea and that brought about the decision. He would give Madame Delacour the wheelchair for the winter. He didn’t, after all, care about it one bit and, unlike the use of his voice, left arm and left leg, he could be sure that he had donated it to a worthy cause. With a little goat’s bell attached to it, and a colourful cushion placed in the seat, it would be the perfect vehicle for her imagination. She could spend the winter months inventing the illnesses that had forced her into the chair; illnesses that were awe-inspiring but not fatal—a party she could attend. She would turn her attention away from other people’s deaths and towards her own diseases.

Monsieur Delacour leaned back against the cold stone wall behind him. Anticipation rattled happily through his brain. First he anticipated the summer afternoons when the sun would warm (though never dry) the stones around his corner. Then he anticipated the seven pink petunias Madame Delacour could place in a box outside the single window that the television blocked. Then he thought about his own death, which he didn’t care about in the least, but which would be the greatest of his gifts to Madame Delacour. And finally, with a definite smile, he thought about Madame Delacour, herself, and how she would look in her winter wheelchair, moving through the streets of town, accompanied by the distant voice of a tiny bell. Freed from the clutches of boredom her face, he decided, would reflect a combination of invented pain and immeasurable happiness.

A
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but one of his students were drawing the canopied bed. Eleven of them were fixed, with furious attention, on the object, puzzling out the perspective and gritting their teeth over the intricate folds provided by the drapery of its rather dirty velvet curtains. Pencils in hand they twitched, scratched heads, scratched paper and erased. Individually, each studied his neighbour’s work and vowed to give up drawing altogether. Collectively, they laboured with a singleness of purpose worthy of great frescoed ceilings and large blocks of marble. All for the rendering of a rather tatty piece of furniture where someone, long forgotten, had no doubt slept and maybe died.

He walked silently behind the group, noting how the object shrank, swelled, attained monumentality, or became deformed from notebook to notebook. What, he wondered, brought them to this? In a building full of displayed objects, why this automatic attraction to the funereal cast of velvet and dark wood? This must be the bed that the child in all of them longed to
possess; to draw the dusty curtains round and suffocate in magic of contained privacy. It would be as cosy and frilly and mysterious as the darkened spaces underneath the fabric of their mother’s skirts. The womb, he concluded, moves them like a magnet in all or any of its symbolic disguises.

The twelfth of the bunch was drawing a stuffed bird. Mottled by time and distorted by the glass bell that covered it, it pretended, without much credibility, to be singing its heart out perched on a dry twig. Its former colours, whatever they might have been, were now reduced to something approaching grey. The face of the young man who had chosen to reproduce this bundle of feathers was reflected once in the glass bell and again in the display case, and was also greyish. The drawing master glanced quickly over the young man’s shoulder and discovered, as he had expected, a great deal of nothing. Fifteen years in the profession had taught him to read all signs with cynicism. A student who kept aloof from the crowd, or chose alternate subject matter: these, to his mind, were social rather than creative decisions.

“You must like birds, Roger,” he commented wryly, and then, “There are some who seem to prefer beds.”

The young man’s face acquired a spot of colour, but in no other way did he respond to the remark.

The drawing master moved on. At this point there was little he could do for them except leave them alone. This was usually the case once he had taught them the rules: he believed, through it all, that the rules were the bones of the work. Within the structure they provided, great experiments could be performed, giant steps could be taken. And so his students suffered through weeks of colour theory, months of perspective. They reduced
great painting to the geometry of compositional analysis. Like kindergarten children, they arranged triangles and squares on construction paper. Then, after a written test, in which the acquired basics were transposed to paper, he hired a small bus and drove them to this old, provincial museum, where he allowed them to choose their own subject matter. Year after year, the drawing master searched in vain for the student who would make the giant step, who would perform the great experiment, just as year after year he looked for evidence of the same experiment, the same step, in his own work.

The drawing master moved on and now he was looking for his own subject matter. For he had brought with him a small bottle of ink and a tin box in which he kept his straight pen and his nibs. He could feel this paltry equipment weighing down his right-hand pocket, altering somewhat the drape of his jacket. Aware of this, he often rearranged the tools giving himself the look of a man with an abundance of coins that he like to jingle. Then he shifted his shoulders back and mentally convinced himself that a slight bulge at the hip could not alter a look of dignity so long in the making. There were still, after all, the faultless cravat, the leather pants, and the well-trimmed beard speckled with grey.

And now he began to move past display cases; one filled with butter presses, another with spinning wheels, still another containing miniature interiors of pioneer dwellings, complete with tiny hooked rugs and patchwork quilts. He paused briefly before the collection of early Canadian cruets, interested in the delicate lines of twisted silver. But they turned to drawings so quickly in his mind that the actual execution on paper seemed futile and boring and he walked away from them. Past blacksmith’s tools
and tomahawks, past moccasins and arrowheads and beadwork, past churns and depressed glass, past century-old pottery from Quebec and early models of long-silent telephones, past ridiculously modern mannequins clothed in the nineteenth century, until he found himself looking through the glass of a window and out into the fields.

And then he thought of the drive through the countryside to this small county museum, which had been situated, with the intention of pleasing both, between the two major towns of the surrounding vicinity. The students, nervous and silent in such close quarters with their teacher, had offered little interference to the flow of his consciousness and he had almost become absorbed by the rush of the landscape as it flashed past the windows of the van. A strong wind had confused the angle of fields of tall grass and had set the normally well-organized trees lurching against the sky. Laundry had become desperate splashes of colour in farm-yards. Even the predictable black-and-white of docile cows seemed temporary, as if they might be sent spiralling towards fence wire like so much tumbleweed. The restlessness of this insistent motion, this constant churning hyperactivity, had distracted the drawing master, but he had felt the strong, hard-edged responsibility of the highway to such an extent that even now, when he observed the landscape through the safe, confining frame of the window, he was somehow unable to grasp it. And he turned back towards the interior of the museum.

Here he sketched, for his own amusement and possibly for the amusement of his children at home, two or three elderly puppets that hung dejectedly from strings attached to flat wooden crosses. Completing, with a few well-executed strokes,
the moronic wide-eyed stare of the last one, he cleaned the nib of his pen with a rag that he carried with him for that purpose, and prepared to return to his class. Then his eye was caught by a large white partition set back against the left-hand corner of the room. He walked over to it with a kind of idle curiosity and peered around its edge.

There, awaiting either repair or display case, and hopelessly stacked together like tumbling hydro towers, were five Victorian wicker wheelchairs. A few had lost, either through over-use or neglect, the acceptable curve of their shape and sagged over their wheels like fat women. One had retained its shape but the woven grid of its back was interrupted by large gaping holes. The small front wheels of another had become permanently locked into a pigeon-toed position through decades of lack of oil. All in all they appeared to be at least as crippled as their absent occupants must have been—as if by some magic process each individual’s handicap had been mysteriously transferred to his chair. The drawing master was fascinated. He had found his subject matter.

An hour later he had completed five small drawings. They were, as he knew, his best. The crazy twisted personality of each chair distributed itself with ease across the surface of the paper. Expressed in his fine line their abandoned condition became wistfully personal, as sad as forsaken toys in the attic or tricycles in the basement, childless for years. Vacant coffins, open graves, funeral wreaths—they were all there, competing with go-carts and red wagons. The drawing master carefully placed his precious drawings in his jacket pocket. When he arrived home that evening he would mat and frame them and put them under glass. But now he would stroll casually over to his pupils, who
had dispersed and were wandering around the room gazing absently into display cases.