Trompe l'Oeil

by Nancy Reisman

  “Sooner or later,” he said, “you have to return to the world.”

  Assuming a cocktail party was the world, Nora thought, and for a moment there was the flickering sensation of another room—a blue glass lamp, a white teacup, profuse leaves beyond a window filtering the light through square panes—she recognized as Lydia’s in Cambridge, that wafer of time before Italy. But now Nora’s mind also had hallways and doors.

  Returning to the world without Molly: in some way Nora remained the holdout, lingering beyond the starched order of business and school days. Still waiting. Knowing better, yet watching for signs. She could see in Theo and Katy the grain of disbelief that Italy had ever occurred, the momentary slip into dream logic. Often, before Italy, they had found Molly in surprising corners of the Blue Rock house. Once again, the house was immediate and real, Rome unreal. You waited for a sign until you forgot that you were waiting, now and then remembering yes still waiting, if more secretively. Eventually the waiting diminished. This had been the case after her parents’ deaths, yet once or twice a year she’d still inadvertently dip into a blurry, suspended disbelief.

  Eventually, she told James yes. She bought new dresses, new pumps, new lipstick, made an appointment at the hairdresser’s, as if she were still the sprightly Nora. She hired a good-natured, slightly hippie-ish teenager to babysit, a girl Theo and Katy both claimed to like. Yet the nights Nora and James went out, Theo would not wish them good-bye, and Katy would refuse to sleep anywhere but the couch.

  Receptions at upscale restaurants; cocktail parties in lavish homes. James’s colleagues were not unkind, but they didn’t seem quite solid to Nora, as if perhaps they were made of lacquered sponge foam (but who was she to demand ballast?). She wore little black dresses and pearls. The women clustered and dispersed, weaving around and through the clusters of men, chatting about vacation spots and Junior League events, the men tossing statistics as they speculated about ball teams and venues, mall sites, business zones. There were the expected sexual jokes, mild in mixed company—allusions to prowess and voluptuous girls, innuendos tossed at the wives—the women’s cheerful remonstrations, James laughing (her James, his laugh) with the others. Nora stepped back and pretended to sip her drink, watching the proceedings over the top of her glass the way Katy might, or Molly, gazing back and forth between an effervescing drink and the party crowd.

  She found herself pretending to like whimsical photos of cats.

  At the Lowrys’, olives sank into cocktails. Nora drank a martini, and that night accepted a cigarette, though she hadn’t smoked around company people before. It was soothing, the martini; after the martini she too was smiling (she’d done this before, she could do this), and that appeared to be all anyone expected now, all James expected. He nursed his drink and complimented the women and elicited men’s opinions of the Bruins’ bench. They were happy talkers, the Lowrys and the Lowrys’ seventy-five guests. Nora was drawn instead to the furniture: the living room sofa was upholstered in black fabric covered with small white and red tulips, green leaves and curving stems framing the profusion of flowers. It occurred to her that she had seen the fabric somewhere else. Where? Or was it simply the pattern, reminiscent of Morris, an echo of a month she’d once spent paging through catalogs and drawing vines and leaves in a little sketchbook? An Arts and Crafts exhibit somewhere? She wanted to take off her shoes. She wanted to curl into a corner of the sofa and smoke a cigarette, or two cigarettes, and have another martini.

  “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?

  Yes and no. Katy would not hesitate to hand the baby over to Nora, but after a few months resisted giving the baby to James, or to Theo. One night, then another, the scenes repeated themselves: she’d walk the baby into another room, humming, ignoring James though he’d just arrived home, retreating when Theo greeted Sara. As if they were not to be trusted. And who was holding Molly’s hand? James thought and tried to unthink.

  When he confronted her, Katy said, “She’s my sister.”

  “And Theo’s sister,” James said. “And my daughter.”

  Katy sulkily handed the baby to James and observed him for several minutes, as if he might drop her, then vanished up the stairs.

  In the ensuing months, other hard moments accrued: Katy would ignore his instructions to turn off the television, or finish homework, or please help sweep the deck. More often, he’d be sharp. He did not want to be sharp; or, rather, he knew sharpness was no use. He tried to be more attentive, greeting Katy first when he arrived home, sitting with her over math. Waiting. She’d grow quiet, observing him, eventually becoming merely skittish.

  “Katy’s fine,” Nora told him. “She’s doing fine.”

  “Really?” James said.

  “What do you suggest?” Nora said. “She hardly sees you.”

  “I’m just saying,” James said. “She isn’t fine.”

  And who was, Nora thought. Last week, she’d caught Theo with a beer in his bedroom, trying to drink, coughing, spitting beer onto the floor. Theo was mortified. Later, James only shrugged, as if sneaking beer at twelve were de rigueur.

  Most days, Katy attended to her homework. And though she stuck close to Nora and Sara, that year she’d made a few friends, wary odd-duck girls who played board games and tape-recorded fake commercials, girls with strained laughs—girls who, like Katy, relaxed around Sara. They loved small animals, competed to pet the neighbors’ puppy; they called to wandering cats and scooped them up. They were shy girls who eventually burst out with stories of family dogs and younger siblings. They visited the house after school, took turns holding the baby, at times confiding in Sara ab
out slights or private disappointments, as if she were a plump little Buddha. In their presence, Nora recalled school years when her own life had seemed awash in girls, her sister Meg a daily companion. And if the thought of Newton or Lydia or Cambridge also arose, she’d refocus on the baby, or turn the radio to a pop station. Timid at first, the girls would sing along.

  A DAY AT THE PARK

  On a May Sunday, he took Theo to Fenway Park and discovered that Fenway Park remained itself. As it appeared in televised games, yes, but from those images who could make the imaginative leap to such scale and immersion? It seemed that after all, he and Theo could reenter Fenway as ordinary fans: that he could take a place in Fenway as he had for years. Here were their tickets; here were their seats. A sunny warm day, no sign of rain, a game against the Royals. Theo brought a transistor radio he held to his ear. He rattled off statistics with an intensity James recalled in himself.

  When the game began, the day telescoped, pinned itself to the fortunes of the Red Sox, one pitch at a time. The first two Royals out, the third. The Sox began with a single; after a double play, Yastrzemski came to bat and singled. Yastrzemski, whom James had followed for more than a decade. Now, at Fenway, one could focus on Yaz at first base, and the Royals pitcher readying for the rookie batter, the dramatic moment when Yaz made his move to steal second and found himself caught out. It was, at least, early. The Royals scored a run at the top of the third; the Sox responded with a three-run homer from Bernie Carbo, James and Theo shouting with the crowd. By then the world beyond the ballpark had dropped away: the world was the game, the crowd, the family beside them, the Little Leaguers in the next row, the man in front of them cheerfully insulting the umpire. One batter then the next settled into his stance; the pitcher wound up and threw, the ball flying into the dust or out toward the field, infielders shifting, outfielders in motion, catching and throwing almost faster than the eye could track, the umpire’s emphatic gestures. And from the crowd the uncensored shouts, flashes of outrage, drawn-out resignation, flashes of joy. Here James and Theo were one more father, one more son, awaiting the next hit, the next swift realignment of the men on the field after the bat connected. A pure if temporary belonging. In the fourth a Royals home run, the Sox hitless. Theo and James drank cold sodas, watched for a sign. Then in the fifth another Carbo home run, another collective burst, Theo rising up, thrilled—as if, yes, thrill were again possible. Then the innings rolled forward, the rookie Lynn hitting a double in the sixth, the third out coming too soon. The Royals changed pitchers; the Sox held on, Rick Wise pitching the full nine.