Trompe l'Oeil (5 page)

NORA'S PLACES

Her first house: the triple-decker in Somerville. She and Meg and their parents lived on the ground floor, the postage-stamp yard abutting all the other postage-stamp yards; in good weather the yards seemed like a strange harbor, drying sheets and work pants and dresses flapping in the wind or hanging flatly in the treeless light. In front of the house stood one skinny beech near a flower bed where her father tended the string of rosebushes that would blossom scarlet in the heat, just as everything else seemed to be wilting. He'd whistle bits of popular songs—in her mind the whistling and the roses weaving together—and when he finished, he and Nora would eat ice. Fans whirred in windows up and down the street, the neighbors' sounds inseparable from their own. Only a few yards lay between the houses, doors and screens open to infants' cries and family arguments and intimate pleasures. Kids outside called and jeered, lingered on front stoops shooting marbles, or jumped ropes, or blocked off the street to throw baseballs. In winter the shut windows and curtains and snow muted outdoor noise, which carried fewer voices and more work sounds; the chipping of ice and the hard crunch of shovels cutting snow would sometimes drift up onto
the porch. The third-floor neighbors thudded up and down the stairs, the Cahill boys yelling, Mrs. Cahill yelling after, “Stop your noise.” The Reillys on the second floor were quieter and sadder and more decorous. Nora's mother said the quiet was lucky, though
lucky
sounded troubling. From the Reillys' apartment Nora mainly heard footsteps and water pipes and the murmurs of broadcast baseball games. At Nora's there was at least music: the stack of swing records, her father's whistling, the radio pop, their mother singing while sewing dress alterations. She'd make the girls puppets, impromptu sets for their plays. Most days, the household mood stayed light.

By Nora's high school years they'd moved to a larger flat that Nora preferred. More trees shaded the neighborhood, and around the corner a baker sold shortbread and the Italian loaves Nora would buy for the house on her way home from school. For a time, Meg tumbled into more fervent Catholicism and became tedious—even their mother said so. Meg would bring home small art prints and cards: Madonnas and Annunciations, mostly stylized and generic, a few with the detailed faces of individual women. The sad horrific Crucifixions Meg agreed to keep in a drawer. For a time, the household seemed content, but in Nora's senior year, their mother began to thin, and in colder weather she coughed and slept more—the first intimations of later troubles.

For most of college, Nora lived in a women's dormitory, brick and utilitarian, but her closest friends lived in neighboring rooms, and she spent much of her time in the painting studio and in a lecture hall where faculty projected slides of masterworks to enormous scale. Her second year, she met
James at a friend's engagement party. He studied business; about art, he knew nothing. On their first date, he took her to the Fogg Museum. To Nora and to the paintings she admired, he paid serious attention; behind the security guard's back, he pulled faces. Later they visited other museums—very fine and too solemn, they agreed—and went to unsolemn ball games, and took leisurely walks, stopping for coffee or beer. Not long after graduation, they married and moved into a small Cambridge apartment.

The second Cambridge place, her favorite, was a spacious two-bedroom they rented shortly before Theo's birth: a white-and-yellow kitchen, oak floors, a yard with redbrick pathways, lilacs, a bed of daylilies. By then James had landed in finance, and with his uncle he'd worked out the arrangement to buy the Shore Road house. Fleeting peaceful years, during which she took Theo on walks through Cambridge and saw her parents often. During her second pregnancy, they moved to the house in Newton, a good house, near good schools. Later, when past events sifted and rearranged themselves, Nora would wonder if the move to Newton had been a mistake. As if it had caused not only displacement but also the sharpening of James's ambitions, her mother's death while Katy was an infant, her father's death less than two years later.

Her parents made regular cameo appearances in dreams, stepping through doorways, noticing the weather, crossing into the visible frame of a front porch or a kitchen and again out of view. Yet there was Lydia, the visits back to Cambridge. At times, Blue Rock became Nora's refuge: even when Molly was only weeks old, Nora retreated there, feeding, washing, and
diapering Molly; building kites and making picnics for Katy and Theo while Molly napped. Often the beach was empty but for a few people walking, picking up stones, their figures altered by the syrupy yellow, clear white, or lavender light, the evening and early morning reds brimming along the horizons. Now and then she might sense something larger, or something lost and momentarily returned, traveling through the upper atmosphere, or closer, skimming over the tidal ebb.

JAMES

If death separated James from his mother, it was not his mother's death: the early death of his father seemed to break her. He was twelve. For the first month he stayed with the Murphy cousins, while she lay on the sofa at her sister's apartment. His cousin Patrick worked weekends at a country club and helped James get a job as a caddy, pretending James was older.

The Murphy cousins saved him. After he returned to his family's apartment, he visited the cousins every week. With Patrick, he took up running (a ready excuse to go out). His mother resumed her job at Filene's, though it was not full-time, and she remained adrift and forgetful; often he'd find her at home on their sofa, sleeping or listening to the radio, incapable not only of daily chores but also of tenderness, the room filmy with dust. Once a week, Patrick's father came over to see if she'd been paying the bills.
A shame
, Uncle Paul would say.
She's had a rough go of it, your mother
.

A queasy pitching sensation on his boyhood walks home, intimations of dread as he approached the apartment door. His mother could not rouse herself to offer even small gestures of affection. He associated her state with his father's death, yet
there were earlier moments, too, before he was twelve, when she was distant and lost-seeming and there was no coaxing her back. She'd been beautiful, his mother, but
Life can be too much for her
, his father would say. The family murmured about miscarriages but she never spoke of them. She'd loved another man before his father, that much he knew. His father—a charismatic talker, happy in crowds—fell into shambling silence in the face of her moods. Until his father's death, James could sometimes still charm her into a smile, an occasional kiss on his brow, but a coolness might descend nonetheless, and after his father died the coolness remained, and only certain mornings in church would she warm and seem at all maternal.

During those boyhood summers in Blue Rock, he never worried about his mother, who seemed content during family visits; after his father's death, she did not return. The house belonged to Uncle Paul then—its foundation solid, its interior walls thin, the rooms furnished with cast-off pieces. Paul and Brenda had lined the bedroom floors with mattresses, so it became an indoor campground on the weekends, full of cousins. The boys slept on the floor of the living room, the bedrooms taken by the parents or the families with babies or the girls.

In his memory: bleached sky, bleached air, bleached dreaming on the slanted oak floor, Patrick kicking in his sleep. In the night, he'd tiptoe over to the narrow windows on the side of the house to watch the sea, or to the unshuttered living room windows, picking his way past sleeping boys. As a teenager he
would be the last one up, outside on the concrete patio or down on the beach smoking a cigarette. In the late quiet nights he'd read his uncle's war novels and local histories by flashlight. The place was full of sand: every day his aunt Brenda swept sand. For two weeks each season, gnats from the pond congregated wherever the wind lulled, moving as a cloud into the kitchen, or over the dining table, so small and fine you needed cloth to stop them. His aunt would sometimes turn on the fan and hope, though the gnats persisted until they'd run their course and dropped like seedpods to the floor.

Drafts, always, the house porous. After the season, the families would have one last weekend. Cool, early October. They'd clean the place, shutter and board it up, and turn off the water until spring, emptying glass jars of tea and sugar and flour and oats. They'd cover furniture with sheets and the mattresses with plastic, recheck the roof. On those days he always wanted to linger and would leave the others for a last run on the beach. In the early years, his father, and later Patrick or Uncle Paul, would finally call and call his name,
Jimmy
, and when the irritation became pronounced,
James
. But the irritation was tempered by indulgence, because the family all knew, didn't they? They didn't want to leave this place either. At times a ragged surging seemed as much within James as beyond, a reverberation he could not articulate. He'd run as the autumn sky grew dense, the gray muscled clouds now edged in white, squeezing stretches of blue or breaking them into puzzle pieces, curiously curved, blue patches that became their own temporary alphabet. The sea still held the light and patterning of that alphabet.

Then the wind reshaped the white clouds and the light went gold and faded; the sky flooded with pink and orange, the blue patches more indigo and quickly black. Too fast, the sky was a mottled onyx, starless, the wind pushing more clouds into a single sheet. The chill he might have felt all along was suddenly palpable, a kind of warning, and with it the recognition that yes, against his will the day had left him. He ought to be more sheltered. The day had left behind what seemed a universal loneliness: there would be clouds and wind but no stars; or if there were stars, even brilliant stars, the cold would sharpen. Still, one could listen to the sea—that music did not stop—and beyond the sea he might hear a voice, after a time his own name called, though sometimes the loneliness would wash through him until he felt empty of anything else. This was how years of final weekends ended, with his family calling his name, though often they knew just where he was, and often they would leave him alone until the cars were ready to go. Either a cousin would fetch him, or the landscape would close itself away from him so forcefully and with such ringing despair he'd answer
Here
to the voices and follow their trail to the waiting car. If it was an especially cold day, there'd be a thermos of tea or hot chocolate.

It was more than an hour back to the city, and for the first few minutes no one in the car spoke. Once they'd rounded the harbor—which was still alive, the local restaurants and pubs open, year-round houses lit from within—the shore's hold would loosen, and in those first years his father would say his name again, this time as if ushering James through a door, and begin to talk; later his uncle would turn on the radio and the
car would fill with bits of news and football scores about which James might speculate with his cousins. The gray awareness of school would gather weight as the car neared the city, and after his father's death, the leaden substance of his home life would reassert itself in spite of the time at the shore (the sea, the orange clouds), finally eclipsing it as the car reached his street, and he approached the door of the South Boston flat.

ROME

Maddalena penitente

Domenico Fetti (early 17th century)

GALLERIA DORIA PAMPHILJ

Here in Rome, a painting of a woman—young, a girl really—her eyelids lowered, her face half in light and half in shadow. She's seated, her right elbow propped on a pale gold book, head leaning against her right hand. A blue scarf drapes her head and shoulders, the blues picked up in her white sleeve, gold stitching echoing the book, the book's edges soft, fluidly painted. In her left hand—rose-copper thumb, rose-copper fingers—a coffee-colored human skull, the rose copper again picked up in her cheeks. Look just above and behind her head: her halo almost melts into air, three-quarters of a copper ring, like the thin spill of light from an eclipse. She's illuminated from the right—an unseen window?

Maddalena penitente
, yet her state seems like a meditative grief. In solitude: she pays no attention to the viewer. She is beautiful, this girl, the artist's model. Say that she did contemplate death while she sat for the painting. Perhaps she allowed
herself to forget Fetti, forget the contents of the book, forget even the symbolic skull—confronted, that day, by more private loss.

FUNERAL DAY

Molly, a girl in a box, a wax doll—starched pink dress, full skirt, long sleeves, high neck, so that to Katy the casket seemed more dress than girl, the face an imitation of Molly's. The casket was propped at the front of the chapel; and when Aunt Meg ushered Katy to a car, it seemed possible that this boxed-up Molly might stay at the chapel. But the casket reappeared, closed, at the cemetery, and you were supposed to believe that Molly was in it, now a girl in a box in the ground.