The Children's House

by Alice Nelson

  Back at the house he made her a cup of camomile tea, with a sliver of lemon on the saucer and a dissolving clod of raw honey. Marina sat at the kitchen table watching the rain mist over the garden. Had this man named Patrick cared for her mother in this way? Had he brought her tea when she was sick or sorrowful? Had Gizela allowed this sort of solicitude? Who had looked after her in her illness? Jacob draped their scarves and gloves over the radiator to dry and the sight of them hanging limply there made Marina dissolve into tears again.

  In the days that followed, a grief more consuming than Marina had ever imagined set in. And something more than grief, something awash with horror and fear. A clawing at her throat. A loss had been lit in her that was too large for anything rational to appeal to. There was no consoling conversation she could have with herself, no way to hope that this grief, like others that had come before it, would someday merge into the past. Her mourning for her mother had slipped past any defences she had.

  In the weeks after Dov died and Gizela disappeared, Marina had imagined her mother dead too. A crumpled heap by the guardrail of some far road, spidery glass in her long hair. Or a shifting darkness beneath the frigid winter river, stones in her pockets like Virginia Woolf. But Gizela was not dead. Her clothes were missing from her shelves, her hairbrush gone from the bathroom. Her leaving was deliberate and planned. Marina had been waiting for it her entire life, she realised on that first night alone in the apartment. Every moment of her childhood and Dov’s had been lived in the shadow of their fear that their mother would not remain with them. In a way it was a relief when it finally happened.

  Two months after Gizela left, an envelope arrived, addressed to Marina in her mother’s slanted handwriting. There was no note and no return address, just the title deed to the apartment, made out into Marina’s name. The envelope was damp when she took it from the mailbox and the postmark had bled so that she could not decipher it. It was the day before her eighteenth birthday.

  It was the only time she ever heard from her mother, and in the years to come it seemed to Marina that Gizela must be dead. That she could not possibly exist out there in the world. Just as she and Dov had never been able to imagine a credible past for their mother, Marina found herself unable to conceive of any life that Gizela could be living after she had disappeared. She did not have the heart for speculation after Dov had died. Gizela seemed to have cast herself adrift in the most irretrievable and complete of ways. She did not want to be found so Marina would not look for her. Yet all along she was living by the ocean just a few hours north of the city.

  They had been to the Cape three summers before. It was for Ben’s former girlfriend Isabel’s eighteenth birthday. Her parents had arranged an extravagant party at their house in Wellfleet, and Marina, Jacob and Ben drove north for the weekend. Marina remembered the clapboard inns and sea captain’s cottages, and the luminous cast of the afternoons. Edward Hopper’s light. They had driven through Truro on the way to a lunch in Provincetown; she remembered seeing the sign for the town and thinking about the ways that in exile we layer the names of the familiar over the new places we find ourselves. We reach for the known, hoping that it will help us to inhabit what seems too large, too strange. Marina suddenly felt seized by a wrenching sort of homesickness. She could have met her mother walking down the main street of the little town with its English name.

  In the mornings she lay in bed with her knees curled to her chest to still the dull churn of her stomach. She could see Jacob moving about in the bathroom, hear the buzz of his shaver and the low hum of the radio as he listened to the early news. She watched him – the familiar lines of his body, the surprising slenderness of his legs as he stepped into the shower. It was one of the purest pleasures of her life, this daily revelation of his body. They kept between them a sweet shyness that was at odds with the live coal of desire that sprang up in bed. When she slid beneath him in the darkness it was all sensation. The weight of his chest, the sound in his throat, her lips at his neck. But in daylight there was a tentativeness with their bodies, a closed bathroom door, a towel around the waist. It was one of the spaces they left each other. And so this morning ritual, this secret glimpsing of his body, became even more laden. Her eyes half-closed, the pretence of sleep, Jacob’s unconcerned gaze at himself in the bathroom mirror.

  Now there was no desire left in her. She didn’t want anything. When Jacob came to sit beside her on the edge of the bed, she rested her head against his shoulder and he stroked her hair as if he were soothing a small child. He had always comforted her like this, the wise, kind weight of him propping her up, his hand against her shoulder on a sleepless night. It was something she had to learn to give in to, a yielding she had never allowed herself with anyone before him except for Dov. But something in her had gone awry now. Everything felt like false consolation. The wide rooms of all the books she might have read; Ben’s clutch of flowers from the nursery; Jacob lying down for a moment beside her in the morning before work, her face against his suit jacket. No weeping after that first day, just an inward dissembling. She didn’t even feel capable of seeing Gabriel. She would dissolve if she held the little boy in her arms. It would not be fair to let this kind of grief come near him; he had enough sorrow in his life. She had asked Ben to walk to the projects and tell Constance that she was unwell; not to bring Gabriel to the house.

  Jacob sat on the edge of the bed beside her, wearing a shirt they had bought together years before in Paris, a film of rain on the window behind him. The fine linen of his shirt was the watery blue of airmail paper. She remembered unbuttoning that shirt in a hotel room in St Germain, the faint click of the small horn buttons as it fell to the marble floor. A tight knot formed in her throat as he picked up her hand.

  ‘I’ll book a table at Balthazar tonight. Come down and meet me after work.’

  She tried to imagine it. The long judder of the subway, the jostle of umbrellas on the street corners downtown, the swerve of cabs in against the sidewalk, the crowded restaurant, the sure-footedness of it all.

  ‘I can’t.’

  Marina could feel the sigh in Jacob, the slight pulse at his temple. She felt suddenly as if she were one of his patients, sitting in the armchair by the window in Chelsea. The benevolence of him, the reasonableness, that considered gaze across the room. But there were no words to contain a sway of elusive meaning, nothing that could be deciphered or reasoned with. A heartsickness, that was the only name for it. A sickness, yes.

  Later that morning she pulled back the curtain and watched Jacob walk down the street towards the subway station. He was slightly bewildered, she knew, by the extremity of her grief. When his father died Jacob’s sadness had been a sweeping but manageable thing, an anguish that could be spoken to, and turned eventually into something else. How many times had she listened to Jacob speak about the father he adored, narrating the long curve of a known history. Max at six scratching his lessons on a slate in the coal-heated schoolrooms of his Polish childhood. His parents’ escape to America before the war. The unlikely jobs they found as caretakers of a sprawling Victorian guesthouse in the seaside town of Cape May in New Jersey, all the rooms and suites named for members of the English Royal Family. Ten-year-old Max and his younger brother hiding under carved four-poster beds; learning English by reading adventure novels; playing cowboys and Indians in the guesthouse gardens. The tiny muslin sacks just big enough for one clove of garlic that his superstitious mother had sewn and hung around her children’s necks; fragrant necklaces that were supposed to ward off sickness. All the trips to the Museum of Natural History that Jacob and Leah had taken with their father, the afternoons at the library, the holidays to Cape May.

  Marina had no narrative like this to unspool, no consoling memories. What could she have said about Gizela, had she been given the chance to speak at her grave? She did not own even one thing that had belonged to her mother. She was like a miserable bird, locked into experimental darkness by scientists and turning wretchedly
towards some lost north when the seasons shifted. So many years, and Gizela’s power to wound her was undiminished. She imagined her mother walking by the edge of the sea, her head down, her long braid between her shoulders. Dawn had been her favourite time of day, the man who wrote the letter said. Marina had not known this. Gizela had never communicated any preference for anything; it stunned Marina to know that her mother had any feeling for what time of day it was, what season. She had always seemed so impervious to the world around her.

  More than anything Marina wanted to go to Cape Cod, the slim stretch of land where Gizela had lived for close to two decades. ‘The outermost shore’, someone had called it in a poem, the distant edge of America. Such a small spread of space between them all those years. Suddenly it was the only place she wanted to be.

  Several days after Marina received the letter, she dialled the telephone number at the bottom of the page. ‘Oh, yes,’ said the man who picked up the phone, as if he had been expecting her call. There was an unusual lilt to his voice, an accent that she couldn’t quite place. No, he had not scattered the ashes yet, Patrick told her. He had not been able to bring himself to do it.

  ‘I thought I might come and spend some time in Truro,’ she said. There was a long pause. ‘I’d like to see where she lived.’ Marina could hardly bear to speak her mother’s name to this stranger. ‘It had been so long since I last saw her. Twenty years. You know this, perhaps.’ She was not sure what this man had been to Gizela, how much of her story he knew.

  ‘You should come,’ Patrick said. ‘You can stay in Gizela’s house. I can order a load of wood for you.’

  It gave her some consolation, to think of a fire burning against the great night.

  Jacob sat quietly across from her at the kitchen table when she told him that she needed to go to Truro. He had just come in from work and he looked very tired, his hair silvered by the soft afternoon light. He picked up her hand and stared at her palm as if there were something he could decipher there, some secret and important clue.

  ‘If you need to go …’ If you need to go. It was the same thing he said to her all the times she had struck out and away from him. To the writers’ colony in France for those quiet weeks of work, a conference in Lisbon, a research trip to London. These small, necessary departures made her feel the weight of her love for him all the more, as if her life made more sense when she looked at it from the outside. It was a kind of punishment she inflicted on herself too, sick with longing for him after three days sleeping alone in a hotel bed. Their conversations trailing into the night, across the country, across the Atlantic, the days counted before she turned around and came home to him.

  But this was different. What she wanted was not a clean sallying out into the world, a circumscribed journey. This was like a sad trick she needed to play: stepping away from all of them and turning herself into someone who did not belong anywhere.

  The evening before she left for the Cape she and Jacob took a long walk through Central Park. The rain that engulfed the city for days had stopped at last and the world had a damp, gauzy feel. Marina was packing her suitcase when Jacob came and took her hand and led her out of the house. The night was cold and still, not even the tiniest rip of wind in the trees. They sat together on a bench near the top end of the park, their shoulders touching. Marina slipped her hands under Jacob’s sweater. There were so many intuitive gestures between them, such a vast bodily knowledge. Her eyes were full of tears. That knot again in her throat, like the beginning of illness.

  ‘I’m worried about leaving Constance and Gabriel,’ she whispered. She could feel the sigh move through Jacob’s body. She had not seen them since she had received the letter. It felt to Marina like the cruellest of betrayals, but she did not know how to explain it to the girl. What was her loss against Constance’s? How could she explain that she had been undone by the death of a mother she had not seen for twenty years? And Gabriel. Marina missed the little boy with a longing so forceful that it threatened to overwhelm her. She thought of the way that he would turn and look back towards the house when he was walking home with Constance.

  ‘They’ll survive,’ Jacob said firmly. ‘They did for a long time before you came along.’

  That night they made love, their bodies curved around each other. Marina listened for the catch and gasp in Jacob’s throat as he collapsed against her, then the slowing of his breath as he drifted into sleep.

  Truro, Cape Cod

  December, 1997

  The early winter light in Truro was pale, insufficient. Marina lit the fire in the afternoons, coaxing the twigs into life when she sensed the shadows shifting. On her knees in front of the old wood stove, the flames cast a small diameter of warmth around her. Outside, the dusk was fine and powdery; the next time she glanced up at the windows, night had fallen. She crouched by the light of the fire, listening to the calls of the gulls in the distance as they coasted above the winter beach. At the end of the curve of land the Truro lighthouse could just be made out. She could see the beam of light suspended and secure above the night.

  Gizela’s small cottage stood on the great bay of Cape Cod, perched on a narrow sand spit with meadows and marshland at its back. Along the western side the windows opened emptily to the sea. From outside, the place had the look of a besieged country house, with its peeling shingles and shuttered windows. The wind hissed over the grasses behind the house.

  On her first night in the house by the sea Marina found an old bottle of whisky in a cupboard under the sink, and each evening she poured herself a few fingers in a glass and carried it to the table by the window. It took on the air of a ceremony. Here on the Cape these rituals gave a shape to her days; they were a kind of map. The armfuls of logs carried in from the wood shed, the tending of the fire, the walks along the shore – they all formed a pattern that was comforting to her in its circumscription. Was this how Gizela had lived, tucked away from the world here on this slim promontory? How had she even found this place?

  At night Marina lay awake in the high wooden bed listening to the slow heave of the ocean. Stacked in a small pile on the windowsill behind her bed were the letters Jacob had written her, one for every day of her absence so far, dropped in the mailbox at the end of their street. Sometimes just a poem, or a few lines from an essay scrawled on a sheet of his letterhead. They had always brought each other these gifts from books they had read, lines slipped between them like codes that became part of the private language of their marriage. A vast, secret museum.

  There were no words of consolation or sensible advice in Jacob’s letters. He knew her better than that. He wrote about the shape of his days, the cake a patient had brought him, which he and Ben had devoured in one evening. ‘It’s so good to see him display some appetite again,’ Jacob wrote, his relief almost singing out of the lines. Ben was eating cake, shovelling the sidewalk after an early snowfall, reading botanical textbooks. The two of them sometimes watched the documentary channel together in the evenings. Ben had brought Alma over for dinner one night. The girl was clearly very bright, Jacob wrote, and her situation was so very difficult. Marina wondered how much Ben had told Jacob about Alma. There was no mention of Constance or Gabriel in any of Jacob’s letters. Even if he had seen them in the neighbourhood he would not say anything to her about it. She wanted to write and ask him to check on them, but she did not. Tucked inside one of the novels she had brought with her was a photograph of Gabriel. He was running along the path in the garden, turning back to smile at her. His whole face was illuminated, a pure kind of joy in his expression. He looked like an ordinary child. Like a child who knew love.

  One of Jacob’s envelopes held a sprig of green from the garden. ‘This was rosemary when it left me,’ he wrote. She pressed the dried leaves to her nose; that sharp, sweet smell.

  Marina lay in bed in the mornings watching the light seep into the world. There would only be a handful of hours of daylight before the sky began to empty again and the world returned to darkn
ess. She remembered the Australian writer in France who had wanted to be somewhere the light was always sufficient, where there was no looming dusk. We are always, she thought, trying to ward off the darkness in one way or another.

  Every morning she put on her coat and scarf and walked out along the winter beach, staring down at the stones and the wet kelp. The placid lap of the bay made her think of rivers. Sometimes she saw a single line of footsteps. The sand was criss-crossed with the light tracks of gulls. Birds and their brief, physical lives. If she came across gulls or terns nestling on the edge of the shore, they rose up in a half-hearted flapping as she approached, coasting out on to the waves or settling back on the sand as soon as she was safely out of reach. Once, she saw an enormous slick-feathered bird standing on a clump of mossy rocks. A lost osprey, she thought, or perhaps an albatross. She had never known the names of birds.

  Further along the beach the dunes rose up steeply and the cottages at their crests tilted above the long wooden staircases that cut down through the scrub to the sand. All the houses were closed up for winter, boards nailed neatly and firmly across the windows. There was a care in this that she found strangely touching. It was hard for her to think of these houses in any other season, open and unshuttered, full of people, canoes and deckchairs dragged down to the water’s edge. In the warm months the whole place must take on a completely different cast: summer lavender and wild ducks, the mild golden light of the afternoons. Marina imagined bringing Gabriel here in the summertime, teaching him to swim. She could see the little boy crouched by the water, collecting shells. They could walk to the lighthouse together. Nowhere in her imaginings, she realised, was Constance.