Trompe l'Oeil

by Nancy Reisman

  Let’s pray. She did say that, on the bed. Though of course they’d just been to a church, at least she, Katy, and Molly had, and she’d crossed herself, some vestigial response from childhood. They’d walked the inner circumference, gazing at paintings and sculptures, a stone sarcophagus she’d hurried the girls past, and then they left, because Molly was so restless she’d pinched Nora’s arm. Praying was something they did not often do. On the bed, she and Katy and Theo closed their eyes and held hands, but later, when they knew the praying hadn’t worked, she imagined the first of several pacts had begun: her children would not believe in her answers, only in her need to explain. They’d indulge her. About the failed prayers they’d say nothing.

  She tried calling the hospital, dialed the number on the card the medic had given her, speaking her bad Italian, and over the line the questions came rapid-fire in an Italian she couldn’t make out. Inglese? Inglese? Please. She hung up and called the concierge. Yes, he said, this is not a problem, I can help you.

  The concierge appeared carrying a tray of tea and bread and jam, and at first she thought he’d misunderstood, but then he motioned to the telephone, made the call, speaking quickly. His shoes had been shined: his shoes caught the light, and his hands moved fluidly as he spoke. “Signora y Signore Murphy,” he said, and then, to Nora, “They do not give me the information, they find someone to speak English for you,” and when he handed her back the phone it was a woman, who said Signore Murphy was with his daughter, she was very very sorry, they would want to contact the consulate. Katy and Theo watched Nora’s face. “So we will have more information from Mr. Murphy?” she said. And the woman said, “Of course, yes.”

  “Stay a minute?” Nora asked the concierge. She traveled as far as the next room, the children’s room, not looking at Molly’s suitcase or at Molly’s scattered nightclothes, picking up Theo’s and Katy’s bags and carrying them back to her own room, where the concierge was coaxing Katy to eat bread and jam.

  It was almost evening when James returned to the hotel and found them all on the bed not sleeping, very quiet, and he could not tell from Theo’s or Katy’s expressions if Nora had told them Molly was gone. They gazed up at him and then seemed to focus behind him briefly, before refocusing on him. The apparent calm was temporary. Theo closed his eyes, and Katy, pale, began sobbing. There was a faint fetid smell—someone had been sick, and someone had tried to clean up—and pieces of orange rind littered the table, beside a tray awash in bread crumbs. He was not wearing his own clothes; he was wearing hospital clothes, and in the hallway outside the room he left a bag containing his things and Molly’s. He told them Molly loved them. Katy scooted closer to the center of the bed, and the four of them stayed there. After a while Katy and Theo fell asleep. James didn’t know whether or not he wanted to fall asleep, whether or not he was ready for the shock of waking again. For now there was a quiet numbing. He had stepped into the ambulance with his already-dead daughter, pretending she was not, because you needed to have that little stretch of hope, you needed time to adjust. Whether he’d pretended for Nora or himself he didn’t know. Someone had to stay lucid, and because someone had to stay lucid he had not screamed or thrown himself on the ground, though the outcome would have been no different, his other children no less traumatized. Maybe they all should have thrown themselves on the ground, he and the family and the piazza full of witnesses, weeping and shaking until the day vanished, or until they themselves lost consciousness and slept on the stone road awaiting some other resolution, say, the erasure of time.

  In the ambulance he’d held her hand and stroked her bloody forehead, as though she were still occupying her body. The paramedics again tried to revive her, perhaps out of sympathy for him. In the ambulance he was weeping, though for a time he did not know it; there was only the feeling of illness, what he later understood to be shock, as if he had swallowed a balloon that was now expanding, pressing and cutting off his airway. No recourse. It required effort to breathe and to interact with the Italians, who might judge from his face and voice that he was a man choking.

  At the hospital, he’d refused to leave her, refused to stop holding her hand even as they began to take her to the hospital morgue. This he objected to—he could not explain in Italian, he could hardly speak at all, clumsily repeating, No no, un’altra stanza, per favore, another room, please, until they let him stay with her in an empty exam room. This he did not tell Nora.

  The paperwork he could do. There would always be more paperwork.

  “We’re here,” Nora had said on the phone. “We’re at the hotel, we’re here,” and for a blurry half instant he’d envisioned the usual “we,” including Molly, back at the hotel. He’d said, “It’s just me.” He had said, had made himself say, “Molly’s gone,” but it was difficult to breathe, and Nora repeated, “At the hotel, we’re here.” And Molly’s gone seemed to him untrue, because Molly was still at the hospital, not entirely gone, but there and dead, and he did not want to leave her alone. That was the worst moment, leaving her at the hospital. The second worst moment.

  When he woke up, Katy was holding out a glass of water.

  In the morning they moved, all of them, to a pair of adjoining rooms on another floor, the hotel staff transferring their bags, Katy and Theo never reentering the room they’d shared with Molly. One of the maids helped Nora pack Molly’s things, most of which smelled of Molly, that still-milky scent she had, the soap fragrance of her clean clothes, her soiled ones stained with fruit and gelato. A few stuffed animals, a small suitcase. The maid’s name was Anna. They did not hide the suitcase; it stood in plain view in Nora and James’s room. Later, a few pieces of clothing migrated to Katy’s suitcase, and one of the animals to Theo’s.

  Nora knew from the calendar that days passed before they flew out from Rome: blank attenuated hours, a conversation in the hotel lobby with somber-faced police, slow card games at the hotel with Katy and Theo, the murmur of string quartets and symphonies from the radio in her room. James calling from the embassy to say the staff had helped arrange to bring her home—meaning Molly, at first not saying Molly’s name—his cousin Patrick making arrangements in Boston. To meet the casket, James said, to meet Molly. Nora had insisted Theo and Katy eat—whatever they chose, as long as they ate—though she herself could not and only pretended. She felt bound to James, merged in a way only briefly sustainable, as they shepherded Theo and Katy home, through the city, at the airport, not letting either child out of their sight. It seemed for a time they would never leave the half-life of airports and the long flight to Boston.

  Katy had taken to carrying Molly’s dolls with her. The stuffed koala was in Theo’s bed each morning; on the plane he kept it beside him, half-hidden. Like the children, Nora took Dramamine, a nasty yellow liquid, the taste of it enough to bring on nausea, the too-warm feeling like a premonition. Time became an opaque block. On the flight she would forget and look for Molly, and Katy would forget and look for Molly: you could see Katy glancing about, then suddenly down into her lap, one beat too late.

  At Logan Airport, Nora’s sister, Meg, appeared in a blue-green summer dress and a woven sun hat, like a slender plant, a thistle—the thought came to her Meg is a thistle—but then Meg held her, and Meg’s sweet bookish husband Louis took her arm and guided her and James toward the baggage claim, while Meg walked between Katy and Theo, holding their hands. No one spoke, and it seemed at first as if they were miming a family return, as faster-moving travelers streamed around them, rushing into gleeful hugging reunions or onward into taxis. They would go directly to Blue Rock. It was difficult to imagine the present moment. It was difficult to imagine anything else.

  After a few moments, in a keen imitation of himself, James inquired about skycaps.

  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 l
ike 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 l
inger 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.