Trompe l'Oeil

by Nancy Reisman

  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.

  That day Theo and Katy were nudged and led about like kindergarteners, like babies, in and out of cars, from Blue Rock to the chapel to the cemetery to Rose Murphy’s house in Arlington, crowded with sweating adults and tables of food. Pearled-pink and cherry polish on the women’s nails; broad link watches circling the men’s wrists, cigarettes between their fingers, the talk a viscous cooing. On a message pad decorated with yellow daisies, Katy and Theo played tic-tac-toe and hangman.

  Finally the rooms began to clear out, and Aunt Meg patted Katy’s shoulder. “Okay, hon?” she said, and “Theo, sweetie?” and let them wait out in the car. Then Uncle Louis drove them to the South Shore, with the windows open and the road breeze coming in, Theo and their father in the front seat, and Aunt Meg and Katy and her mother in the backseat, Katy close against her mother, who smelled of talcum powder and hair spray and sweaty dirt. Once they pulled over so Theo could throw up, and her mother and Meg studied her, as if she might throw up too, though it was her mother who gulped air at the open window. Near Blue Rock you could smell the sea again, and the densest heat lifted. Sun glinted off the harbor and sailboats dotted the bay, too bright, all of it too bright. When they arrived at the house, Katy wanted to run inside, but her mother hesitated on the deck, and then her father nudged them in. They took off their shoes and sat on the couches in their funeral clothes, and Meg lowered the shades, so that the living room seemed a separate, hidden sphere. Katy fell asleep on the sofa, and when she awoke, Theo was sleeping beside her. Her mother had moved to the floor next to the side sofa, where her father sat, bent, their faces tilted down, together, at his knees. One of her mother’s hands held one of her father’s. The other one twitched. A kind of huffing came from her father. After a few minutes the huffing stopped. Katy waited for it to start again, and when it did not, she tiptoed across the living room and through the kitchen—the table covered by wrapped plates from Rose Murphy and by pastel sympathy cards—then continued in her stocking feet out to the deck and down the stairs to the beach. The exposed midtide sand was studded with small and larger multicolored stones, which bit through stockings but which you could hurl at the sea for hours, if you wanted to: there were thousands of stones you could hurl at the sea.

  BLUE ROCK

  A few nights after the funeral Nora and James finally slept together alone, sharing neither a room nor a bed with Katy or Theo or both. A cooling night, the sea breeze carrying the scent of salt and kelp and smoke from a campfire on the beach, black air interrupted only by the night-light in the corner. Half-naked and weeping, they fell into avid, drowning sex, the grief emerging as a raging insistence; as if each might obliterate or immerse the self in the other, alternately banishing the self and shoring it up with the other’s body, avidity somehow evidence that they were alive and also willing to vanish, and in this flux might bring her back as they once brought her. They were thin, both of them, their skin warm in the chill air, his movements abrupt and ungentle. Even as Nora made love to James her muscles seized, and in her belly an animal sickness blurred into the pleasure: it seemed if she kept moving she might move past the pain into a mindless release, or a kind of coma. The tension seemed at once unbearable and insufficient, and the only way beyond was to drive further and further into it, into James, around James. Both of them weeping unaware until they climaxed and the weeping did not subside. They woke again around three and he entered her again and for a while they drifted, dozed with him inside her. For a few nights it was like this, the mixed-up striving for solidity, oblivion, a welling violence streaked with tenderness, and during the day, a blankness.

  For two weeks, they stayed at the house on Shore Road. Daylight sleepwalkers, awakening without thought, thought remaining absent beyond basic routine. For Nora the initial relief in arriving and the safe haven of the house leveled out. She could speak to Theo and Katy and James, but she could not read or answer the telephone; occasionally she observed herself taking it off the hook. She did not call Lydia; elsewhere there had been a friend named Lydia, but Nora was not elsewhere, and here her mind had become a razed field. The days stretched, her body increasingly detached from herself, as if it were a hollow stem or a blade of autumn beachgrass, without will except in her efforts to conceal a recurring breathlessness. There was the steadying presence of the sea, which seemed to both acknowledge and contain all that roiled within her, so she could move through the day without her mind.

  One thing made sense to Nora: to stay in Blue Rock. Even though they had planned to live closer to the city, even though James’s daily commute would leach hours. She’d seen a snapshot of a house James had toured in Wellesley, a large suburban house in a very small photograph. The house could disappear in her hand.

  August. The Murphys so closely resembled a vacationing family that at a glance you would have suspected nothing. Even with a second look—because the scene was orderly, their clothes clean. You’d have had to pay more attention to the body language; you’d have had to look into the faces. Theo and Katy moved in tandem then, staying within arm’s reach of each other. A few steps separated their bedrooms; each evening their parents wished them good night and left doors open, but soon Katy or Theo would move to the other’s room, and together they snuck downstairs and slept on the living room sofas. Together they’d slip into Molly’s room, Theo opening the closet, Katy the drawers. They’d listen at the wall abutting their parents’ bedroom, at the windows, beside the bed. And together they’d rush out, hurry down the stairs and through the kitchen to the windswept deck, then lock away the momen
t.

  Each morning, James ran; late day he’d drink beer from the bottle—one before and one during dinner, although he could have downed a six. If he’d been alone, or just with Nora, he would have. For a few morning hours he’d feel clearer, but by 2:00 PM his agitation would spike. Soon he began to run before dinner as well, the running and beer his linchpins to the day. At odd moments between, some version of Rome replayed itself: here was the sharp green convertible, there Nora and Katy and Molly, emerging from the church across the street. There they are, he’d say, and Theo would wave, he himself would wave. Catch Molly’s eye, catch Katy’s, though not Nora’s: Nora was riffling through her bag. In Blue Rock, he found himself assessing each of them in turn. Often Nora’s crushed expression mirrored his own, though once or twice a strange flintiness had come into her face when they were alone, as if she too were assessing, swimming back and forth between self-recrimination and their silent, mutual accusations (you failed her; you beckoned). Was waving beckoning—had he beckoned? Had Theo? (What could one expect of a ten-year-old? A seven-year-old?) So impetuous, Molly—at times she’d broken away from all of them. But more than once as the scene replayed, Nora’s distraction seemed criminal; more than once, the notion Katy let go popped up before he could quash it. He needed a roadblock, a mental detour. For now, he took the wooden stairs to the gravel drive and the tidal flats, away from the kids, away from Nora. He counted his steps as the beach seemed to slide backward underfoot, paced until the counting sufficiently diffused his agitation and he could return to the house.

  There in Blue Rock, hadn’t he always felt most himself? Yet most raw; he’d have more control, wouldn’t he, when he returned to work? He’d told the office he’d be settling a family matter before starting the new position; he still had banked vacation days. In conversations with the chief financial officer, his sentences had seemed magically coherent, his tone surprisingly bright, as if the pre-Italy James were speaking through him.

  Nothing like the private family conversations, which were fragmented and attenuated and slow, often spanning days. Without preface he’d asked Theo what happened at the end, meaning the end of the ball game they’d watched two days earlier. In the attenuation there seemed a tacit suggestion that they were all still waiting for Molly to reappear. And although he braced himself for his mind’s traumatic replay of Rome, he did not anticipate the way the color of the sky that day echoed in a Blue Rock sky, or a neighbor’s morning glories evoked the vine pattern of the hospital administrator’s dress, or the way bending bars of light and late purple shadows at the hotel reappeared through the living room window. The most prosaic objects—a sugar cube on a plate, an empty soda bottle—held a flaring sadness.

  It was happening to all of them. At dinner, Katy and Theo would chew absently, side by side, apparently observing the reflected light on the bay, the darkening sky, the objects on the table. Nora’s hands kept moving: she’d pass platters and move the salt and arrange the burger and the corn on her plate, picking them up and setting them down, performing but not eating a thing. “Nora,” Meg would say. She’d look directly into Nora’s face, pick up her own burger, and bite it, her gaze fixed on Nora until Nora did the same.

  ROME

  La Maddalena

  Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1594–95)

  GALLERIA DORIA PAMPHILJ

  This time, the woman is crestfallen. She’s seated on a low chair, almost as if kneeling, the hem of her green brocade dress spilling onto the floor. A study in green and dark amber: her long hair coppery, robe deep amber, her skin fair, her face and neck, bare upper shoulder and chest pale, tinted with amber undertones. Almost red, her hands, as if they’re too warm, or cold. Her head tips toward her left shoulder, face downward, eyes cast down, nearly closed. The trim on her bodice, her sleeves, an exaggerated white. Here too the illumination is aslant, but sharp, dramatic—a spotlight from the angle of the viewer. A triangle of light slices the wall above her head, though most of the room remains in shadow. A red sash circles her waist, and on the floor beside her, an amphora of pale amber liquid stands beside scattered jewelry: a string of pearls, pearl earring, gold bracelet, gold chain. Her elbows and forearms rest on her lap, one hand pressed against the other, as if to cradle an invisible infant or a lover’s head.

  She herself is fairer-skinned and older than the Fetti Magdalen, her head uncovered, hair a copper fire mostly in shadow, her clothes those of a Renaissance strumpet. A distinctive face, painted with realist fidelity; her gaze also seems inward, away from the viewer, the painter. But the dramatic light, the angle, this costuming—the painting’s bold theatricality—reveals exhaustion, a wilder sorrow. Also shame? No shred of privacy, not even the privacy of shadow. If she could escape the harsh light, the judging view, might the shame dissolve into more tender melancholy? Beyond the frame and any view—even yours—she might rest.

  NEW SCHOOL

  It was like walking off a plank, the sensation from a pirate’s tale in which you’d been kidnapped, your hands bound, your mouth gagged, the sky a mocking cartoon blue painted out to an empty horizon. Red-orange mustaches, black eye patches, black bandanas on the pirates, the masts of their cartoon ships flying skull-and-crossbones flags, sometimes giant and pristine, sometimes half-burned and pocked with holes through which you could see only that mocking sky and lines of smoke in the distance where the rescue ships have sunk. Maybe your mother was on one of those ships, or on shore, or on an unsunk ship too far away to find you: certainly your father was farther out at sea, searching the wrong region for your kidnappers. Fins cut the otherwise glassy cartoon water. Nothing like the actual sea off Blue Rock.

  No difference, that day, between stepping in and stepping off into a free fall. School buses lined up along the side of the school, each snout almost touching the squared back of the next bus, so they formed a thick yellow chain. Kids poured off the buses, laughing girls, gaggles of boys, strangers. Her mother kissed her cheek, readying to drive away, and Katy’s throat tightened. She willed herself to leave the car, blinked at the building’s flat brick exterior, the windows like dozens of unlidded eyes. She had to work to breathe, even though Theo was with her. Her mother waved. “Okay,” Theo said. He walked her up the school’s front steps, holding her hand, as if she were a little kid, as if she were Molly.

  She’d been inside before, once, the previous day: her mother had brought them, For a dry run, she’d said, the building empty except for teachers and secretaries, Nora a hummingbird flitting from place to place in the waxy-smelling school, pointing out the bathrooms, making Katy return to the front entrance, then find her second-grade classroom, find the bathroom. The sort of thing you’d never admit, mortifying, except that it took great concentration to find these routes, given the identical wooden classroom doors with identical unsmudged windows, hallways splitting off into additional hallways. Wings, her mother said. It was as if, between school years, Katy had become retarded.

  “You know where you’re going?” Theo said. First day: they were at the front entrance. Theo had that sour look as if he might throw up. She would vanish one way, Theo another—to the fifth-grade wing, which Katy had not learned to find.

  “I’m okay,” Katy said. “See you later.” Other kids streamed around them, and she let go of his hand and pretended he was still there as she joined the stream heading along the route she’d taken twice the day before. When she found the classroom, she chose an empty seat a few rows back, along the wall. A miniature island.

  The teacher was a middle-aged lady in a blue-and-green pantsuit and a round poof of brown hair and candy-pink lipstick, like a fruit tree with the trunk obscured by leaves. Roll call. “Kathleen Murphy? Kathleen?” Katy raised her hand but not high enough, not at first, and had to repeat “Here.” She managed to say, “It’s Katy,” before the teacher moved on to the next name.

  Say whatever you want, her mother had told her. Say what you need to say. She meant about Molly. About the summer and Molly and maybe,
or maybe not, about how everything since had been vacuumed flat.

  If they ask about summer vacation, Theo had said, tell them you rode bikes and swam. But no one asked. The older kids had lockers; her grade still had cubbies and a coatroom, so you could put your lunch away, or your notebooks for other subjects. She traveled class to class and collected textbooks, so that by lunch there was a small stack to take home and cover in brown paper. In the cafeteria, she found the line to buy milk and a seat at a table off to the left, where she could eat her sandwich and chips and fruit from home and nobody would bother her.

  Maybe she had become retarded; that could happen, couldn’t it, even if you didn’t start off that way? Because the previous spring she’d talked all the time. Last year, she’d talked from the first day of class; she’d already known everyone.

  She had not called or written to any of her Newton friends. She’d said she would write postcards from Italy and the first day in Rome she did, but her father didn’t mail them and then Molly was dead. She’d wanted to send them out anyway: in Newton, Molly wasn’t dead. No one in Newton had seen the white truck, or Molly on the street, or the hotel room where Theo got sick and their mother rinsed off blood. That was Italy. But Katy still could picture Molly in the kitchen in Newton, wearing pink pajamas, eating buttery toast.