Pages for Her

by Sylvia Brownrigg

  Anne moved into a high-ceilinged living room that seemed to list slightly. She recognized the simple furnishings from the stamp-sized photograph she had seen online. It was the same as Internet dating, Anne guessed: you imagined yourself in the photograph on your screen, then met the actual place, or person, and judged for yourself how much truth the photographs had spoken, or how deceptively flattering the angles had been.

  This one did not disappoint. A camel-colored sofa with a few textured orange pillows, a rectangular glass coffee table scattered with magazines, and simple prints on the wall — the dome of Santa Maria della Salute, a bowl of apples, a low boat in a timeless mist. On the warped wooden floors a pleated cotton rug, also orange. Anne recalled Jasper telling her about the palette Turner had created for his Venetian paintings: swatches of salmon, terracotta, clementine, as well as shades of the city’s many watery blues.

  Anne breathed in sharply, a lungful of the city’s distinctive scent of salt and sewage. It permeated the apartment in spite of the eighteenth-century building’s effort to shield its inhabitants from the atmosphere. She made herself a cup of fragrant chamomile tea.

  What you lose with all the rest is the person who knew the cast of your personal drama. The death of the evil queen. If Anne were in contact with Jasper now, she would have told him, of course, about her mother. How would he have reacted? He had known Irène Arden less as a person than as an imprint on Anne — or perhaps more of a negative space around her. A negative space, now absent. Would Jasper have called that paradox a positive? Even if Anne believed she was not mourning, she felt that Jasper would have helped her understand, and not just logically, the shape of her loss.

  Be patient with your sister, Anne could imagine him saying. She may be grieving more than you are. Don’t presume to know.

  Anne reached for her book. She had a sudden, keen appetite — not for food or rest, but for reading. Sometimes, if it had been too long since she had settled into a book, she started to feel faint and hollow. Stretched out on the camel sofa with her book and a cup of tea, her mind and body finally relaxed. It was Wharton’s The Children, the novel she had mentioned in her talk. She came across a good line — ‘He loved Palace Hotels; but he loathed the mere thought of the people who frequented them.’ It made her think of her friend Cynthia, who taught a class called ‘Money Can’t Buy You Love: The Wretched Rich in American Fiction’.

  One symptom of Anne’s current nameless condition was how much more distractible she was than usual. The Internet invaded. It was relentless as a sea, breaking wave after wave on the shores of her vulnerable mind. A solid shoal of concentration was broken over months and days into something granular, endless tiny pieces of attention, as the mind’s solidity slowly dissolved. Anne was, it seemed, helpless against it.

  She put down her book across one of the orange cushions, and reached for her laptop. She wrote a quick note to Cynthia with the line from Wharton, then saw another new note in from Margaret.

  Bellissima! Brief one here — to say thanks for the suggestion, we’ve a note out to Flannery Jansen. But in yours you artfully dodged the central problematic: will Prof Arden herself preside? Sorry to bug you . . .

  Can you let me know? M xo

  Anne closed her eyes. It would be better to resolve this now.

  Ciao Margaret,

  They had a note out to Flannery. That did not mean she would be there, though, and Anne’s participation could not depend on it. Still, she owed Margaret thanks for getting her on that Voyage Around the Adriatic. She would not have been in Venice, now, without her.

  Si, certo! I’ll do it.

  Sorry I didn’t make that clear before. Let’s chat details when I’m back . . .

  Axx

  PS Sorry to be brief — my sister’s arriving shortly, and I’m still getting used to solid ground. And as you know, Venice is anyway none too stable . . .

  Anne folded shut her laptop. She picked up her book again, but found that her mind now seemed to be traveling elsewhere.

  14

  ‘I can’t believe they call themselves an airline.’

  Such was the exasperated greeting that met Anne on her opening the outer door of the apartment building. There stood her sister: eyes slightly bloodshot, her hair damp from sweat and heat and the stale exhalations of other passengers on the overnight flight. ‘Delays, incompetence, rudeness — I should have just come by cruise ship, like you did.’

  Had Tricia rehearsed that opening, knowing the refer to Anne’s more pampered existence would immediately wrong-foot her? The younger sister stooped slightly to allow Anne’s embrace, a moment of touch that returned them both to that fundamental animal closeness of family.

  Tricia’s familiar features had not quite fallen into focus, as if they had not caught up with a body that had traveled too far, too fast. ‘They lost my luggage,’ she said, though her intonation was defensive, as if someone were about to suggest this was her fault. Tricia often spoke this way, fending off imagined criticism. A different aspect of the Irène legacy. ‘They’re delivering it here this afternoon. Supposedly.’

  ‘How annoying. Well, come in. Shake the plane off.’ At work Anne was known as fair, though given to a cool impatience when others made mistakes, but with her irascible younger sister she took the role of the calmer-downer, the soother. ‘It’s a nice apartment,’ she said as she walked up the broad marble steps that were beveled in the center by a couple of centuries of climbing boots. ‘If a bit overly orange. There’s a nice little balcony. I let you have the larger room.’

  ‘Hunh,’ came from Tricia as she climbed, a sound pitched between a grunt of exertion and a note of thanks. ‘But I’ll have to stay in these gross sweaty clothes until the suitcase gets here. Nothing of yours would fit me.’

  ‘You can cool down, anyway. I’ll get you some sparkling water, and lemon.’

  Siblings, unless they are graced with that rare gift, an even-handed upbringing, always end up owing each other something. There are lacks that must be made up for; unfairnesses that cannot be erased or forgotten. If Irène had managed a brusque, condescending affection with Patricia, she had forever withheld from Anne her maternal love, or even liking. Then again, from early years their mother made it clear she considered her younger daughter homely, and not thin. The French–Polish cocktail of Irène and Frank Arden had not blended as successfully in the second child, so though Patricia’s face was broad too, she did not have the high cheekbones that defined it; Tricia’s eyes were a flat shade of gray, not green, and tilted at a slight angle. Her chin had an elfin point, like a character in a children’s story.

  Anne, for her startling beauty, had been punished, at times viciously, by their mother, for whom Anne’s appearance was a deliberate act of defiance. She behaved as though her daughter was threatening and disloyal — which, of course, allowed the bright and feisty girl to become both. Their fights were fierce sparrings that sometimes ended in a sour slap on those broad, pale cheeks. In this later era, Anne had reflected, her mother would be considered abusive; in the time and place where Anne grew up it was just called being mean.

  Their mother’s favoring of Tricia, and her resentment of Anne, were naked and unignorable. Their father Frank, a quiet, industrious engineer and a subdued member of a mother-dominated household, gave his sympathy in silence, and by showing a fairer hand with his affections. Anne was rewarded in the wider world, as her mother was furiously sure she would be, with the love and attention of men, and propelled by that favor and Irène’s disdain, Anne left as soon as she could for the far East Coast — for university, adventure, and an exile that felt more like the discovery of a world in which she properly belonged.

  Tricia stayed in Michigan. She was educated and employed, married and divorced, all within a hundred miles of where the girls grew up. Their parents supported her, in the mildest sense, witnessing Tricia’s marriage and its unpleasant d
issolution, accepting visits from her with their grandson Mitchell, faintly congratulatory when she started work at the Detroit Institute of Arts. They also relied on Tricia increasingly for assistance advice, and as the person to whom they could complain about her older sister, who hardly ever returned. It was Patricia who helped make the two mismatched Ardens as comfortable as possible in their fading years — as decent, stay-behind daughters do. She visited their father regularly at the assisted living facility, until the stroke that kindly took him some years before, and she nursed Irène during her last illness, and navigated the move to hospice.

  Anne had sympathy and appreciation for her sister’s dedication. But she stayed resistant to guilt; raised as she had been, the guilt could have flattened her, if she let it. That, of course, was the other major debt that Anne owed her sister: emotional reimbursement for her own success at escape, and Tricia’s decision to stay in Detroit with Frank and Irène. Though — did either have a choice, really?

  They had last seen each other at their mother’s funeral in May, a poorly attended occasion at a church associated with the hospice center rather than the one familiar from their childhood. This was a relief to Anne, to travel to a suburban church outside of Detroit that had no family association, though it was unnerving to listen to a priest speak rote redemptive words about a woman he had never known. Still, she shed no tears for Irène Arden. That day, or since.

  15

  ‘Oh, Pellegrino. Perfect.’

  Tricia had been sober for several years now, having by her own account turned into one of those ‘weepy winos’ during her first post-divorce stretch of single motherhood and precarious finances. Her work and home life had settled since, and if Tricia was too proselytizing about AA for Anne’s taste, clearly it had helped stabilize her, and would prevent the alcoholic viciousness that had sometimes soured the sisters’ time together in the past. It also meant Anne would be drinking alone, a melancholy prospect.

  ‘At least I had a clean T-shirt in my carry-on, so I feel like a human being,’ Tricia said, and, showered and refreshed, she did look more herself. ‘Honestly, I haven’t traveled in a while, I’m out of practice.’

  They settled on two cast-iron chairs that occupied nearly the entirety of the bathmat-sized balcony, from which they had their view of Venice: a murky green lapping diagonal of their nearest canal, below a collage of taupe and terracotta rooftops and variously sized sky-shaded domes.

  ‘I’ve counted eleven different churches here named for Santa Maria.’ Anne sipped an Aperol, her free hand resting on the guidebook she had been reading. ‘Her mercy, her rosary, her visitation. Her health.’

  ‘Dad’s favorite lady.’ Tricia sighed. ‘She was his great comfort.’

  ‘More than our mother was.’

  ‘That’s for sure.’

  Santa Maria had without doubt helped Frank Arden to tolerate, or at least endure, over five decades of marriage to a bitterly dutiful wife who yearned to return to France, and possibly someone she had known there.

  ‘That wooden Virgin he kept in his room . . .’ The couple had not shared a bed for as long as either sister could remember, though for years Frank continued to refer to where he slept as ‘the spare room’. ‘He prayed to her daily.’

  ‘I remember her,’ Anne said. The Madonna had been modeled after the figure in Lourdes, a subdued saint, her head down and her hands pressed together in symmetry. ‘I helped drive her over when we moved him to the facility.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Tricia confirmed. ‘Mary, clothes, a few books — that was pretty much it.’

  ‘And the Chopin sheet music. Though I doubt he played.’

  It was one of the coinages of families, economical means of summarizing previous arguments. I tried to be there for our father. It was only our mother’s care that I left up to you. I couldn’t be part of that. ‘He traveled light, when he left their house.’

  ‘Can’t blame him. He left Chère Irène to deal with all the boxes of photographs and letters. Not that she ever did. We’ll have to sort through them.’

  ‘Chère Irène! God. I’d almost forgotten about that.’ Anne shook her head.

  ‘Really?’ Tricia’s gray eyes had a cool skepticism much like Anne’s own. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Well,’ Anne said, truthfully, ‘I have tried to bury most of those occasions when’ — she searched for the right euphemism — ‘our mother had a heavy hand.’

  They were children at the time — Tricia was eight and Anne twelve — and up in the cluttered attic they rummaged like squirrels, making a nest amongst the boxes. Tricia was busy physically building the nest from musty old coats and blankets, while Anne started looking through letters. For what, she was never afterwards sure, though she knew it when she found it. In one old shoebox, a set of old blue air letters, in French, addressed to Chère Irène. ‘Come on,’ Tricia said to her, bored. ‘Let’s play.’ But Anne could not stop herself reading, as well as she could, a foreign hand and a language she was more proficient in to speak than read — but words that she knew, with shame and growing excitement, were speaking of love. They were not from Frank. The letters were signed ton amour dévoté, Edouard and Anne was too fascinated by the import of what she had found to register the danger in the discovery, or the sound of her mother’s steps up the attic stairs. ‘Démon!’ was all she hissed at her daughter before pulling her by the wrist down the attic stairs to issue a beating to her, out of little Tricia’s sight though not her hearing.

  ‘That was one of the worst times.’ It had been her face, a hard slap, followed by a twisting of Anne’s ear. She would not cry, but it stung for days.

  ‘Yeah.’ They both allowed the silent equation to move through their minds: I was the one she slapped. All right, well I’m the one who changed her bedpan.

  The Venetian air hung between them for a moment.

  ‘I’m going to one of these churches this afternoon.’ Anne gestured at her guidebook. ‘The Santa Maria dei Miracoli. It’s near here. “A gem.” Do you want to come?’

  ‘You go,’ Tricia said. ‘I’m not really in shape for the Virgin today. I’m going to call Mitchell to let him know I got here. Maybe take a nap. Hope the airline shows up with my bag.’

  ‘I’ll send Santa Maria your regards.’

  ‘Yeah. Do that.’ Tricia drained her glass. ‘Tell her to keep going with the miracles. God knows, the world needs them.’

  16

  You did not have to be religious to find solace in churches. Whether God lived in them — or only human dreams about God — along with errant sparrows, patterned windows, and cold, stone saints, the lofty heights of those consecrated spaces gave room for the spirit to breathe. Anne would not have said any of this to her no-nonsense sister. But it was why she had come.

  Anne approached the five-hundred-year-old building in an ochre afternoon light, and inhaled like a child at the sight of it. No density of tourists outside clicking their phones or cameras could lessen Anne’s sensuous pleasure at the facade’s inlaid gray-veined gold marble, its intricate slate and yellow roses, the burgundy cross above the Virgin and her infant. Anne entered a chiesa built to celebrate Mary’s miracles, with its own stone-wrought miracles that were purely human. Lombardo had carved beauty from stone — Francis and Clare, the angel Gabriel and the Virgin — and it must make a man feel something like a god, to be able to do that. Anne sat down on a pew and dipped her head, a few rows behind two women, one older than her and one younger, who sat together, praying.

  It was just as well, probably, that Tricia had not joined her. Anne would have felt more constrained. The last time the sisters had sat in a church together, at their mother’s funeral, Tricia had allowed herself a brief whispered sarcasm about the bishop’s hypocrisy (though that didn’t stop them both from taking communion, out of respect for Irène). Their long-ago hours spent at Detroit’s Saint Aloysius, being instructed in all the ways
people could stain themselves with sin, gave Tricia the native’s right to chafe at Vatican pronouncements; though for Anne those Sunday hours had at least provided respite from the caustic unhappiness at home. Mass had still been in Latin then, and the language stirred Anne; it fed, like a distant, concealed spring, her present-day Italian, and French. She did not have faith, almost definitely. Yet her lips moved along with some words in her mind, possibly something resembling prayer.

  Behind her, a dozen Germans started singing softly, a Teutonic hymn. A nougat-shaded light suffused the air about Anne and she tilted her head back to catch the consoling sound of human voices in harmony.

  Were they singing, in particular, to the Virgin? Expressing gratitude, or requesting mercy? Did their verse run anywhere near the thoughts moving through Anne’s own mind? Please, allow me to find peace. Allow me to accept.

  On the last, painful occasion of a conversation between Anne and Jasper about unrequited love, Jasper came at it from a desperate new angle. The desperation, Anne knew, came from not being able to tolerate hurting her.

  ‘There is always love,’ he insisted, though his characteristic confidence was undermined slightly by the rasp in his voice, ‘the other, deep, groundwater kind — whether you feel it in every instant or not.’ It seemed that this was the facing side of his earlier conviction. If passionate love could only exist as a two-person system, then this other essential love could keep two people bonded always, whether they saw each other or not, whether one of them died or not. Jazz had sketched this idea for Anne one night in their apartment, after he had delivered the darker, awful part of the picture, that he had fallen in love with someone else. Jazz’s mind had always been of endless interest to Anne, its intellectual and especially its moral capaciousness, but this contradictory cosmology struck her as weak, born, of course, out of apology. ‘You know I’ll always love you . . .’ Even as he left her? How did his words have any coherence?