The Underpainter by Jane Urquhart Read Free Book Online Page A

prosperous. The first bank I saw was called The United Empire, and the moving-picture theatre went by the name of The King George. There was often a concert in progress in the band shell in the town park given by what I would later come to know as the Davenport Garrison Artillery Band. Their uniforms looked like a cross between those worn by soldiers during the Boer War and pictures I had seen of English policemen.
    I have lived for years in two large American cities. I have spent winter vacations in French and Italian villages, and fifteensummers on Lake Superior’s north shore, yet few of these places impressed themselves on my visual memory to the extent that Davenport has — a place where I spent only two summers, a place to which I returned less than a dozen times in the years that have followed. If I close my eyes I can see even the most irrelevant details of the summer town: the weeds in the kitchen garden that my father and I neglected. Places in the park — near the band shell or the dance pavilion — where the grass was worn thin. A striped awning shading a shop entrance. Lit windows viewed from the beach at night. But my mother was right about the danger of fixed images. I want none of this. A pebble from a Great Lake shoreline, a coin with a leaf and a king embossed on either side, a shard of porcelain — the smallest thing is capable of driving you mad if you are unable to forget it. I am like an old museum filled with relics no one is able to identify any more. But there it is. George Kearns is a particularly tenacious ghost, and Davenport was George’s home town.
    I went back to Davenport a few years ago, slipped into town like a thief. I hadn’t been there since a brief and, in the end, brutal visit in the winter of 1937. and yet it was the memory of the serene summer of 1913 that afflicted me: a reflexive, backwards glance to the time when I was eighteen and George was twenty, and both of us were innocent.
    Little had changed in the town. No, if I am to be truthful, I must say that everything had changed. The ferry terminal was abandoned. Neither
The Maple Leaf nor
the
Northern Star
travelled the waters back and forth to Rochester: the country where I lived was apparently seeking its playgrounds elsewhere. Kearns’s China Hall had also vacated its premises, and, when I lookedthrough what had been George’s shop window, I saw coils of rope, boxes of nails, cans of paint. Not that it made any difference. Cursed by recall, I could bring to mind every shining piece of precious bone china George had lovingly placed on the shelves of the China Hall during the course of that long-ago summer. That and how my own face and body had looked then, reflected in his window glass.
    The ground floor of my father’s house on the beach was now being used as the office and the dining room for the unattractive modern motel that filled the space where the garden had been. Orange plastic chairs stood in front of sliding-glass entrances. Disgusted by the sight of these, I walked towards the lake, turned my back to the water, and stood for a few minutes on the sand, looking up at the miraculously unaltered verandah, remembering the young man who had brooded there. Then I left the place and walked across the park.
    The dance pavilion had been torn down years before, and I was almost relieved at first to discover that I could not remember where it had been situated. A large expanse of grass where there were no mature trees, however, disclosed its site, and as I walked towards this place I recalled views of the night lake from windows and balconies, the music of The Baltimore Rhythmaires, youthful couples gliding over a hardwood floor. The irretrievable prewar calm.
    We believe that the whole planet rotates at once, but, in fact, it seems to me each entity in it turns on its own private axis, independent of the larger dawns and sunsets. I wondered about this vanished building. How and when it had begun to depart from the