Bonaventure
He was besieged, he was invaded, by his mother’s account of the day he was conceived; and his father confirmed her version of history, telling him why. He had never been able to fling in their faces “Why did you have me?” for they told him before he could reason, before he was ready to think. He was their marvel. Not only had he kept them together, he was a musical genius, the most gifted child any two people ever had, the most deserving of love. He began to doubt their legend when he discovered the casualness of sex, and understood that anyone who was not detached (which he believed his own talent would oblige him to be) could easily turn into parent and slave. He was not like his own father, who, as a parent, seemed a man who had been dying and all at once found himself in possession of a total life. His father never said this or anything like it, though he once committed himself dangerously in a letter. The father was more reticent than the mother; perhaps more Canadian. He could say what he thought, but not always what he felt. His memories, like the mother’s, were silent, flickering areas of light, surrounded by buildings that no longer exist.
The son could not place himself in their epic story. They talked, but until the son became an eyewitness their lives were imaginary. Before he was — Douglas Ramsay — the world was covered with mist, palm fronds, and vegetarian reptiles. He said to his father, “The trouble is there are still too many people alive who remember all that.” “All what?” “Oh, everything. The last war.” He was trying to show the distance between them, yet he would have died for either one — perhaps the father first. That made him more violent toward them, and sometimes more indifferent. A year ago, when he was nineteen, he was awarded a fellowship that permitted him to study in Europe. He seldom wrote. Sometimes he forgot all about them. Their existence was pale, their adventure niggling, compared to his own. Family feeling had never dominated his actions; never would. Nevertheless, he discovered this: when he was confused, misunderstood, or insufficiently appreciated, a picture of his father stood upright in his mind. His father’s face, stoic and watchful, transferred from a wartime photograph taken before true history began, appeared when Ramsay’s emotions were dispersed, and his intellect, on which he depended, reduced to water.
He was in Switzerland, it was a June day, he was recently twenty, and he had to get rid of chocolate wrappers. He had spent the morning in Montreux, and in the short train journey between Montreux and the stop nearest the chalet where he was a guest for the summer, Ramsay had eaten three quarter-pound bars of the sweet, mild chocolate only women are said to like. He could not abandon the wrappers on the impeccable train; he was suddenly daunted by Swiss neatness and the eyes of strangers. Hobbling up the path from the station, he concealed the papers under ferns and stones.
The chalet, set up on its shelf of lawn, seemed to be watching. It was like an animal, a bison, or a bear, hairy with vines and dark because of its balconies. Once he had got rid of the evidence, he stared boldly back. Parts of his body were unhinged; he was clamped together by invisible hooks that tore the fabric. His knees, his shoulders, his neck were wrenched loose, like the punishment of Judas in an engraving Katharine Moser had put in his room. He had been in a car accident two years before, and would never mend entirely. “Neither will my father,” he said to himself. Their suffering — his own and his father’s — burned the day black. The shrieking of birds, which Katharine Moser thought he ought to like because he was a musician, sank and lodged in every bone. He shut his eyes and stood still, and waited for the seizure to pass, for the muscles to unlock; then he opened his eyes and looked at the lawn. It had not been wrecked by a war or by a woman in temper but by something ordinary — a country storm. The grass was bestrewn with branches, bark, leaves, peony petals, chairs knocked sideways, a child’s watercolors, a strand of dripping vine. A branch shivered and the drops that fell were colder than any water he had ever touched. He imagined Katharine Moser standing here and saying to Heaven, “How dare you do this to my lawn?” As he thought this, the sun came on in a burst of fire, and his face and hands were riddled by stinging light. He saw the mountains, whose names he was daily told and at once forgot, and he saw the burning color of houses that were miles away. This was the landscape that had belonged to Adrien Moser, the great conductor; it had no other reason to command his gaze.
The prospects Ramsay had known until this summer were of cities — Montreal, and then Berlin. They were the same to him, whether their ruins were dark and soft, abandoned to pigeons and wavy pieces of sky, or created and destroyed by one process, like the machine that consumes itself. The air he had breathed was filled with particles of brick dust. He accepted faces, not one of which he would put a name to, and knew the smell and touch of wet raincoats worn by people he would never meet. In the streets of one place, Berlin, he walked on the dead, but both cities were built over annihilated walls scarcely anyone could remember. He knew that a lake is a lake — that is, a place to swim — and that parks and trees are good for children, but he had never known the name of a leaf or a tree until Moser’s widow began telling him, comparing one wild grass with another, picking a flower, showing its picture in a book. In the morning, standing beside him in the ravine on the far side of the house, she pointed to fields of white anemones that seemed covered with frost, and she gathered forget-me-nots, wild geranium, mauve and violet and pink, and valerian like lace, and mare’s-tails with fronds of green string. “The first plant life on earth,” said Katharine, bending down. For a reason he could not immediately interpret, the words, and the sight of the plant in Katharine’s hand, rushed him back to his mother screaming, and the wartime photograph of his father, which, of course, was mute.