Read Online The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels - Free Book Online

Jean was crying. Everything to do with our life together was painfully beautiful. Everything between us was remembering my mother. What she might have liked, what she might have thought. My life formed around an absence. Every bit of pleasure, each window of lamplight against the night snow, the drowsy smell of the summer roses, attached itself to the fact of her absence. Everything in this world is what has been left behind.
    In my final year of school, my father suggested we move to Toronto so I could go to university there. There was never any mention of my going alone. It was unthinkable for both of us. Sometimes things change simply because the time has come, an inner moment is reached for reasons one cannot explain – whether grief takes six months or six decades or, as in our case, eight years. Something latent in the body awakens. Sorghum seeds can lie dormant for six thousand years and then stir themselves! It happens all the time in nature; we should not be surprised when it happens in human nature. When we began to talk about moving, there was a light heartedness in my father, and I began to feel that there could be a new life for both of us. But I think now, for him, it was the opposite, a way to recapture something.
    He wished to return to Clarendon Avenue. We made one trip to Toronto to see the flat together and later that evening we went to a concert at Massey Hall. Elgar's Cello Concerto, one of my father's favourites. After the concert, as we were about to leave, he hesitated, then led me by the hand back to our seats. ‘Listen with me,’ he said. Sitting again in the empty hall I found I could still hear the music, it was a kind of haunting. ‘Your mother and I,’ said my father, ‘used to do this whenever we went to the symphony; we'd wait for everyone to leave and then keep listening.’ We sat together while the music again unfolded, until the usher came and said it was time to leave …
    My father died before we'd moved. This happens so often – death at a time of change – that I think there should be a word for it. Perhaps there is: betrayal, or violation; not stroke or aneurism … Our house in Montreal was already sold. There was nothing else to do but continue to pack up and to move alone. I took cuttings and seeds from every plant in my mother's garden, but there's no place for them. Now her whole garden is in pots and jars on my living room floor. That was two years ago … I think of the last gardens on the river, I mourn them …
    The light of dawn was beginning to filter down through the heavy trees. Jean could see the outline of their limbs under the blankets, a faint seam of light around the window.
    – My botany, my love and interest in everything that grows – at first it was for love of my mother, a way of living with my yearning, and then perhaps an homage, but gradually it became something more, a passion, and I wanted to know everything: who had made the first gardens, how plants had been depicted in history, growing up in the cracks of cultures, in paintings and symbols, how seeds had travelled – crossing oceans in the cuffs of trousers …
    I think we each have only one or two philosophical or political ideas in our life, one or two organizing principles during our whole life, and all the rest falls from there …
    I remember a day in the Hampton Street garden with my mother; we were having a sun-bath together – her warm skin and the sun lotion – I used to push my face into her and smell her like a flower – the fullness of my mother's black hair was held back by a wide white band and she gave me a huge blossom, an Asian lily, and I am reaching up my hands. I'm barely the height of her legs, perhaps I'm four years old …
    Every morning, before my father left for work, he stood with my mother, their foreheads touching. Sometimes I joined in, and sometimes I just watched, finishing my egg or oatmeal with my slippered feet wrapped around the rungs of the chair. Every