Elizabeth didn’t write about her semester in Florence so much as she drew it, page after page of art and architecture, parks with sculptural trees, Florentine bustle with commentary in the margins. She’d drawn the Duomo, reworking its bell towers from many angles. She sketched the commercial curve of the Ponte Vecchio, and the statues and fountains of the Boboli Gardens. An entire section of one notebook was dedicated to Michelangelo’s David. To Kate’s untrained eye, the drawings were the work of a gifted hand, realistic sketches on one page and offbeat departures from them on the next. She couldn’t imagine being this talented at anything, then simply giving it up.
In Florence, Elizabeth lived in a small pension near the Pitti Palace with a handful of students in her program, and appeared to spend a good amount of time with the house’s patrona and her three young children. There were domestic sketches, a square-faced woman chopping at the counter, a young boy feeding cats, curls unruly over his collar. Recipes written in the margin for carbonara and chestnut cake, the best starter for two-day bread.
When the semester ended Elizabeth decided to stay longer, and her adviser agreed to freeze her student status. Her mother visited her then, and it was clear to Elizabeth that the agenda was to convince her to return to school. She showed her true wacky colors: It’s about finishing something, she said, seeing it through. It’s bad karma to leave your life out of balance. Elizabeth stayed through the fall, took a night job at a trattoria and spent several days a week working for an art instructor in Santo Spirito, cleaning brushes and handling registrations in exchange for work space in his studio.
Kate flipped through the pages as if she were viewing a travelogue. She’d been to exotic places with Chris and had done a few foreign locations for her cooking program, but had never been to Italy. In fact, she’d never been out of the U.S. for more than a week at a time, never long enough to participate in the culture of a place as more than a spectator. The times she’d talked with Elizabeth about how she envied Chris his trips, Elizabeth had listened with her attentive smile, but had only mentioned passingly her semester abroad.
In Florence, Elizabeth sounded happier than Kate had ever read in her journals. It was not just a matter of pleasure or confidence, though they both played a part. There was an optimism to the way she wrote about her circumstances and her future; there was no sense of longing to be anywhere other than where she was. Yet it was still not the friend she had known. Kate struggled to put her finger on the difference: It was a matter of vitality, and of candor. Not the tranquil observer she’d become.
September 17, 1984
It’s unnerving how I don’t have a constant take on my own work. I’ll roll along for a week loving it, then walk into the studio one day and think it’s crap, all derivative clichéd garbage, the light all wrong and about as original as a Hallmark card. I’ll get desperate over it for hours, certain I’m wasting my time, a caricature of a kid playacting and I should go home and finish my degree. Then I’ll work at the trattoria and wait a few days, and when I go back to the studio it doesn’t look so bad. A new day, a new light.
November 29, 1984
Dad called last night, rang the house phone at Signora P’s, which he’s never done before. Made small talk, which is not his thing, asking when I was coming home. What is it, Dad, just say it.
Your mother is sick, he said. She shouldn’t be living by herself anymore.
She downplayed it of course when I called, and was mad that Dad had told me. But she sounded awful and didn’t fight me when I lied and said that I’d already booked my ticket home. I can’t get a straight answer beyond the fact that it’s not a surprise to her, she’s apparently been sick for a while.
Tomorrow I’ll put my paintings in a shipping container and collect my pay at the trattoria to cover my rent to Sra P. When I told her I was leaving, she was washing dishes. I sat on the stool in the corner, the cracked wooden one that always seems just about to break, and rubbed the cat’s head with my knuckles. I said I had to fly home in a few days, told her my mother was sick, or at least best I could in my limited Italian. She stopped, hands dripping above the sink, asked what it was. I didn’t know the word for cancer so I patted my chest. She thought I meant heart—mal di cuore?—and I struggled for something other than what the men on the street say about women. Mammella. The cat battered his head against my legs like a baby goat and I leaned down to pretend to be interested in him, but Sra P knew better.
Cara mia, she said, and walked over and hugged me, leaving wet marks on my back.
NINE
THE BIKE PATH RAN along the northernmost stretch of Great Rock, a five-mile loop that extended to the lobster-boat docks, passing through conservation land and the meadow of a llama farm known for its hand-dyed wool. It was too far for Piper to ride and she had paired off with Chris, fishing. They claimed responsibility for dinner, if not by rods then by way of the fish shop by the docks.
Five miles of biking was a reasonable goal for James. Back home, Kate had taken him on a three-mile ride early one Saturday morning in the spring. A residue of sunrise had still stained the sky as they’d ridden past the monuments and around the tidal basin, cherry blossoms dusting the trees like a late-season snowstorm. They tried to see the White House, but some latest terrorist threat had scrambled security forces into defensive positions. So they peered from behind tall barricades trying to catch a glimpse of the famous white pillars. As they stood staring, the presidential helicopter had flown above and away, chuck-chuck-chucking in a sky trailing pink. Watching it grow small in the distance Kate had felt extraordinarily earthbound, tethered in every way.
For years, traveling as a family had been something undertaken with determination, their agility weighed by bulky gear and days defined by naps, meals, moods. It had seemed as if those years would last forever, though a small part of her wished they would. Memories of even the difficult times—children crying themselves to exhaustion in cars, planes, hotels—were beginning to take on the cast of nostalgia. She had watched them fall asleep at last, puffy mouths gone slack, with equal parts relief and heartbreak. They would never, she’d thought, be as fully hers as they were at that moment of surrender. The dawn of traveling freedom shimmered ahead. But Kate suspected this, like other things that surprised her, would come with a wistfulness for what had passed too quickly.
The paved path ran parallel to Harvest Road, wide enough for two bikers to ride abreast or to pass in opposite directions. Between the path and the road was a low split-rail fence that trellised in some sections with unkempt wild roses, in others with poison ivy. The fields to their right grew with black huckleberry and sweet fern and rolled hill upon creasing hill down to the tidal pond. Plover Neck Sanctuary was Kate’s favorite place to ride. Elsewhere on the island swaths of fields and marshes were being clear-cut for development, but the sanctuary had been secured. The land was following its natural ebb and flow, the fields in slow transition to woodland. Uphill from the tidal pond, white spruce and Scotch pine grew in stealth, a silent guerrilla movement encroaching on the meadow.
A line of riders approached from the other direction, and Kate could see James teeter, rattled by the pressure of keeping his bike to the side. The greater his concentration to avoid them, the more his bike followed the magnetic pull of suggestion. Resistance stiffened his small earnest back.
“James, just keep on looking straight ahead. You’re doing great,” Kate called to him. The riders passed one by one, giving him wide berth. The last one, a woman about ten years older than Kate, gave her a knowing smile. So sweet, it said. And Passes so fast.
After they’d gone by, he pressed the pedals backward and slowed with a small skid. “Stopping,” he called back to her. “I’m stopping for a water break.”
That was his pattern: press himself to do the thing, then stop immediately once he was in the clear. Angst, achievement, relax. He was tense about taking risks, always had been. But lately he’d begun trying to pretend otherwise, blasé when he was
successful and feigning indifference when he was not. It was like watching a documentary on developmental psychology playing out before her eyes, the emerging skills shaped with the attributes of each parent—Chris’s natural aptitudes, Kate’s intense focus. Subtle, but so much change in him in such a short time. It reminded her of a sign in the hospital where she’d delivered both kids, lettered in Crayola colors and hung over the door of the nursery. “If You Look Closely Enough You Can See Us Growing!”
Of course change didn’t happen in tangible bursts, but if she went back to work it would seem as if it did. She would come home one night to hear from the nanny that James’s bike was missing. When she prodded, he’d admit he left it in the front bushes the day before, which she wouldn’t have noticed when she drove in late at night. Press further, and she’d hear that he had been teased by older boys who could pop wheelies when he couldn’t, and that he didn’t want to ride his bike anymore, and wanted to take up something tough, like karate. And she wouldn’t know any of it until the bike had gone missing, 80 percent of the way through the drama.
Elizabeth had been the first to know about almost everything, because almost everything had taken place at her house. She’d never worked outside the home once her children were born. There’d once been a career in advertising, some department assistant position, but it was hard to say because she rarely talked about her old career, or much of anything about her life before children. She’d treated her singlehood as if those years were uninteresting to her, details of a forgettable novel read long ago. Yet the episodes of her life in Florence reminded Kate of the rich travelogues of writers who’d lived abroad, people who had discovered themselves through their fascination with another culture and their pleasure at finding themselves embraced by it as well. Since reading the Florentine journals, Kate’s sense of loss when she thought of Elizabeth had changed. It had become tinged with a bitterness of having been denied something she’d not been given, not quite, but under different circumstances might have.
Kate and James sat in the grass at the edge of the llama farm with their water bottles. She unwrapped a granola bar, split it in two, and passed him half. “You’re getting good on the bike. Does it feel very different to ride a two-wheeler on a bike path?”
“Not really, just more fun.”
Kate looked across the meadow at the llamas, moving with their distinctive fussy walk and leading with their lips, as if they had something they couldn’t wait to tell the others.
“Once a long time ago before I met your dad, I went to a country called Peru—”
“I know about Peru, Mom,” he said, impatient.
“Okay. Well, I heard about a farm where they made beautiful sweaters from the wool of their own llamas. There was a field like this full of them, and I drove around and around trying to find the farmhouse. But I got lost and the road only led to the top of a cliff, so I had to turn around and leave without ever finding the farm. It was the strangest thing, like the llamas lived all by themselves on a farm in the middle of Peru, taking care of themselves.”
He peeled back the paper and scrutinized the bite he was about to take, sizing up the bits of cranberry and sunflower seeds and considering whether they should be taken off, like vegetables from pizza.
“How does a mom get lost?”
“Get lost?” Kate paused, uncertain. Was he looking for truth, or reassurance that she wouldn’t?
“Well, just like anybody else. I need maps and stuff, and sometimes I take a wrong turn. But I’ve been on this trail lots of times.”
He fanned a fly trying to land on his snack bar. “That’s not what I mean. How did Mrs. Martin lose her mom?”
Ah, that kind of lost. Kate stopped chewing, tried to register what he knew and how he knew it. The journal on her bed the other night. Not the sitter, but James.
As far as she knew, he’d never even been up to the loft alone before. And though she’d told the kids about the trunk of notebooks in the most cursory way, he hadn’t seemed interested. It boggled the mind, thinking of her son as old enough to read someone’s journals and absorb even this much. Her baby who’d slept all day and fussed all night, missing the cues for night and day, now mulling hints of adult grief. How does a mom get lost. From now on, she would keep the trunk locked.
“Did you read about that in the notebook? Did you go up into my trunk, the one from the Martins’?”
“No,” he said, suddenly breezy. “It’s just something I thought up in my head.”
She’d spoken too quickly, and chased away whatever confidence might have been coming. “James.”
“Really. I was just wondering. About people getting lost.”
She paused. Getting information from a child was like feeding a skittish animal. “I’m not mad that you read it, even though you really shouldn’t have. I’m just surprised that you would have wanted to.”
He took another bite of his granola bar and bent to scratch a mosquito bite. She tried again.
“When I was a girl, I loved to hide away with things, just like you. Our house didn’t have a cool room up high like this one does, but my grandma had a big closet with a window inside it. I used to like to sit in the closet under her dresses and look at her old photo albums.”
She leaned back on her palms, and did not look at him. She looked instead at the nearest llama, walking toward them with small lilting movements of its head, chin high.
“It’s sort of like a tree house up there,” James said. “When Piper was coloring I asked the babysitter if I could bring my book up and read like you do.”
Kate continued to look at the llamas. “But then you saw all these notebooks with cool covers.” He nodded.
This was one of those opportunities that the school called a teachable moment, and Kate weighed which parenting path to take. The respecting-private-things route, or what-it-meant-to-lose-someone. Losing won.
“Do you know what those books are, James?”
“Yeah. They’re Mrs. Martin’s stories.”
“Sort of. She wrote about her life, for herself, the things that made her happy and sad.”
He considered it, then put it in the context of what he knew about books. Libraries, stories. Things written for other people. “Why did she write them?”
Kate had been wondering that herself. Maybe Elizabeth felt a need to synthesize things as they were happening, especially if she didn’t confide in others. Or maybe it was to leave an imprint behind, a record that these things had once happened, and had mattered.
“Some people like to write down the things that happen to them and the things they think about so they can remember them later, when they’re older.”
“Maybe they do it so other people can remember them when they’re gone.”
“Maybe.”
He folded the empty granola wrapper and scooped a ladybug from the grass. “Do you write books like that?” he asked.
“No.” She shook her head.
The ladybug plodded along the yellow logo toward his thumb, and she wondered whether he’d drop the wrapper when it touched him or let the bug crawl up his hand. Drop it, probably.
“Well maybe you should,” he said, “so we can remember you when you’re gone, too.”
Kate’s chest constricted. In the past year there had been some questions about death—almost entirely from James, Piper was too young—but not as many as she’d expected, and she had kept the answers simple. Mrs. Martin was gone, her plane had crashed because of an accident. Sometimes terrible things like that happened, a sad accident. And sometimes bad people made bad things happen, like the other big crashes afterward, but not often at all, almost never. James seemed satisfied with this version of events, but occasionally asked for more. Whenever he cracked open that door she tried to show there was nothing too scary on the other side, or at least to make it seem that way.
“That’s probably not going to happen for a very long, long time,” she said. He was blowing on the ladybug. Kate had lost his inte
rest. She put her hand on his leg and leaned forward. “It’s okay to feel sad about people dying, and it’s normal to sometimes think about losing the people that we love. But it really doesn’t happen very often, and usually not until people are very old.” Liar, she thought.
James continued to play with the wrapper, inverting it and watching the bug soldier on even as its world went upside down. “Is that what happened to her baby, too?”
“Whose baby?”
“Mrs. Martin’s baby, how it got lost.”
Kate sat a moment, confused. Lose a baby? That’s not how Elizabeth had written about the abortion. Then she rubbed her temples at the realization of what was to come. Oh, Elizabeth.
“I don’t know about that. But sometimes babies aren’t growing healthily when they’re inside their moms. Sometimes they aren’t growing well even after they’re born.”
He looked back at his bike, and could have been trying to make sense of the rules that applied to living and dying; sometimes you’re old, sometimes you’re sick, and sometimes you’re neither. Or he could have been thinking about the Lego robot he planned to build back at the house.
“That’s sad,” he said.
“Yes, it is.”
They sat together facing the herd, and bits of trivia came back to Kate from her knitting days, back when the kids were babies. Llamas have no upper teeth, but adult males grow large, sharp lower canines for fighting; humming is a common manner of communication among llamas, and they do it both when they’re feeling content and when they’re aggressive.
How hard to be a llama, she thought, when the same sound could mean happiness or danger.
TEN
KATE SAT IN THE chaise in the loft, lit only by dim sconces on the wall. In the journals, Elizabeth was packing to leave Florence. She visited her favorite places one last time—the leather vendors at the San Lorenzo market, the food stalls at Mercato Centrale, the wild boar statue at Mercato del Porcellino, where like everyone following the superstition, she rubbed its nose for good luck. She didn’t know if she’d be returning. She did not know whether she was going home to help her mother recover, or to bear witness if she would not.
The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D Page 8