Trompe l'Oeil (9 page)

“What is it?” Claire Lowry, leaning in.

“Wonderful fabric,” Nora said. “So intricate.”

Claire Lowry smiled and lightly touched Nora's hand. “Can we get you another drink?” She scanned the room for her waiter. “Tell George, dear, what you'd like.”

So a second martini appeared. She was not drunk, though she perceived a pocket of space between her body and the room. The Lowrys' anniversary cake, a white baroque tower ringed with sugar roses, apparently belonged to an alternate universe, something Alice-like, transforming while you switched from martinis to champagne. Alluring, sweet, belying the frantic scrambling and concussive days, and she found herself slipping behind a kind of scrim in the mind, as if only a silhouette Nora remained at the party. She asked the waiter George where she might find another cigarette.

On the drive home James's face settled into contentment, lips slightly upturned. He patted her arm before they pulled
onto the highway, the streetlights sliding past the window, the air tinted deep greenish blue. The radio broadcast a harmonized jingle for a car dealership, the Bruins' play-by-play. In Blue Rock, the sky was soft black, layered clouds revealing stars only toward the northwest, the moon hidden, the wind picking up, and when she stepped out of the car, all sounds seemed to give way to the slap of waves against the seawall and their sloshing ebb, and the gusting wind in which she felt encased. She followed James up the wooden stairs to the deck and through the door into the dark kitchen; as soon as she was inside, the wind fell away, the waves now a murmur conversing with the murmur of TV. For an instant James became the silhouette, receding as he approached the bright living room and the television and now-speaking babysitter. Then he stepped out of view. Nora stood in the kitchen without turning on the light, and the feeling of the scrim returned to her, and she imagined smoking the extra cigarette she'd tucked in her coat pocket; imagined the room's shadow and the murmurs covering her. Diving into the moment the way seals dive into the sea, resurfacing elsewhere. But the TV murmuring stopped, and Nora left her pumps off at the door, the cold floorboards startling her back.

REPRODUCTIONS

The Magdalen with Two Flames
(c.1638–43)

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame
(c.1640)

LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART

The Repentent Magdalen
(c.1635–40)

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART

Georges de la Tour

Maybe La Tour was right: one view of her is not enough. Repeatedly, he painted her, always in candlelight. A young woman, her long dark hair falling over her shoulder and down her back, into shadow. She is beautiful; she is always beautiful, and always alone, seated beside a table, sideways to the viewer, always partly hidden. She wears a white blouse, a red skirt. Near her again and again in varied arrangement: a book, a skull too large to be a child's, a single candle. In
The Magdalen with Two Flames
, an ornate mirror reflects and doubles the candlelight; in other views, a cross lies on the table.

The Magdalen with Two Flames
is perhaps the most elegant: she sits straight-backed, her white blouse covering her shoulders (though her pale neck and upper chest are visible), the skirt covering her legs to the floor. In her lap, the skull, on which her hands lie folded together. Her head is turned away—her gaze, like ours, apparently drawn to the flame reflected in the tabletop mirror.

La Tour's most tender version:
The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame
. Here her posture—like the Fetti Magdalen's—suggests her private grief. The right side of her face is revealed in candlelight, her gaze directed at the flame. The blouse here is off the shoulder, her skin pale, her dark hair falling and falling into shadow. Light glazes her left forearm and her left hand, on which she rests her chin and cheek. It's that hand against her cheek, and the details of her face—the dark iris touched by light, the curve of her lip (red enough to echo the ruby skirt) that reveal her vulnerability. Bare feet, bare calves; a ball of light spills onto her left knee. In her lap, the skull gapes toward you, although her right hand rests on its crown, gently, almost comfortingly. In her solitude, a delicate melancholy; a sudden sound, or a shift in light, would break the mood. If she knows we are hovering in the shadows beyond, she's managed to claim privacy—as if only our invisibility keeps the moment aloft.

Shadow almost fills the final
Repentant Magdalen
, the candle's flame obscured, silhouetting a skull on top of the book. The woman has moved to the right of the table and now she's in profile, leaning on her right hand, her left hand resting on the skull. She contemplates a second skull set in a frame not unlike a mirror's. The shadows seem to mute even the darkness
of her hair, and only her upper body is visible. Light settles on her blouse, on the billow of sleeve around her planted right elbow, so that her arm and the sleeve form the shape of a tulip bulb, or of a lowered trumpet horn. Her mouth is covered by her hand and the falling shadows. A palpable gravity; a palpable tenderness. She has receded even farther from the viewing eye and, in the story, from the world; and so you move closer, peering through the shadow. The paradox of capturing privacy: perhaps La Tour wished to shield her entirely, yet could not resist the image.

Wait long enough and your eyes might adjust to the darkness.

SARA

As if Nora herself were an egg, or a water balloon; as if her body were rigged for disaster, her family grew rabidly solicitous. Had James—or anyone—treated her this way during past pregnancies? Maybe her father, maybe with Theo? It seemed not: if she remembered correctly, if memory had not blunted and discolored, James had been fearless. Unworried, at least about the pregnancy itself, and Nora's capacity to carry, confident of the beautiful normalcy of new cells and the beautiful normalcy of their development. As if by not imagining what might go awry, one dodged the possibility. Or as if his certainty also reflected a belief in Nora herself, that her intelligence and good character—whatever he loved in her—would ensure healthy gestation. And Nora? She must have had faith in his faith.

A hopeful season, yet a house of cards, the family's anxiety skewed in a new direction. At least domestic tasks lightened, as Theo and Katy dutifully attended to chores, and James caught up on repairs, cooked weekend suppers. But there were extreme, near-comical moments, say when she poured herself tea from an ordinary teapot, and James insisted on pouring instead, as if
tea
might overwhelm her.

So perhaps the mode of Molly's death had begun to blur, suspicion shifting to Nora's body itself; the failure to keep one child safe shadowing the task of properly carrying another. Or perhaps the reappearance of June, and the echo of departure for Rome and the first anniversary of Molly's death, had them all silently spinning. James and Katy and Theo would swarm around her, then vanish into their separate retreats, occasionally eyeing her from doorways and the peripheries of magazines. When Katy climbed the stairs to her room, she was reluctant; in an hour she'd return and again follow Nora.

For the first months of the pregnancy, Nora felt, if anything, solid and capable, but later she wanted more sleep, and her distraction deepened. The chores she began, she sometimes left unfinished. Perhaps, she thought, her family's well-meaning mistrust had undermined her. In the last months, she often found herself alone in their company, in a private elsewhere sometimes shared and frequently disturbed by this forming kicking child who would leave her body in its own good time.

They would not have said—no one would have said—they were trying to replace Molly. A moving forward, another child, the family reshaped, though of course the imprint of a third child—the echoing third girl—remained. In their minds, say the baby became not-Molly, a blank space beside that imprint, an easy elision. And if the child was a boy? Even a quiet, shy boy—how quickly Molly/not-Molly might be swept aside for a new paradigm.

And for all that, the baby herself, once in the world, seemed the weight of a handkerchief, the weight of a spoon. You could imagine her levitating from the crib, even from your arms,
guided by sound; her eyes still a milky gray-blue, gradually focusing. A sleepy, almost gossamer presence; a wisp, taking up the merest space, a corner of the space that had been Molly's. Sara, a name that sounded weightless, blending into Nora, toward whose voice she would bend.

And once Sara was born, how quickly the dynamic changed: how quickly Nora returned to being an ordinary Nora, no longer suspect, no longer a curiosity, as all of them focused on the baby. And although Nora felt in ways returned to a familiar shared life, it also seemed as if she had come ashore farther east, as if the pregnancy and the glare of family scrutiny had subtly and permanently set her apart. The bleary first months were a kind of plateau, a flat expanse of present tense, of managing days and nights, the recent past having dropped behind a curtain. But there were still lost moments when Nora would be brought back suddenly by Sara's cry and wonder if it was the first cry or the sixth; occasional frantic dreams from which she would wake to find Sara sleeping or just waking, and Katy stretched out on the nursery floor.

During the late evenings, after Katy and Theo had gone to bed, James would carry Sara to the living room and hold her sleeping against him as he read a report. He tracked their separate breathing, at times imagined a tether between them preventing
her from floating off. In those hours, the sense-memory of holding the others as infants resurfaced, differentiated not by the child but by the feeling of space: muted bands of streetlight against the Cambridge living room wall, a shadowy, pile-carpeted den in Newton. And what would it mean to begin here, to first learn the world at the shore? Sara had not witnessed anything, in Rome or elsewhere, and therefore seemed free. Say one could sift out what resided both in the others and between them,
that
June and its consequences, the half-buried thoughts: would Sara then encounter the clearest silences, unencumbered by absence, by the past? Say James believed this. Say he was partly right: she would first learn the world at the shore, begin oblivious. The past gave way to the future. Yet Rome, their Rome, also held its place, intangible, but dense with gravity. One could face elsewhere, resisting its tug, yet Rome and all that followed still silently whirled. Abstracted, like Molly herself—the space that had been Molly, or what, within each of the once-vacationing Murphys, had become of her.

Katy guarded the baby. Walked her, soothed her, slept in the nursery rocker or on the floor beside the crib, despite admonitions to stay in her own room. Natural, wasn't it? Weren't they all protective?