Trompe l'Oeil (30 page)

With her sisters, she frequently commiserated.

There was a comfort in shared commiseration, one thing, at least, she had in common with both sisters. Exchanges about James were more fraught: Katy brooded, Delia sighed, but Sara was not unhappy. She spoke with James several times a week, brief friendly calls she did not mention to her sisters. Nor did she disclose that after her move, she and James began to take Saturday walks while Josie visited her sister Liz. James did not mention the walks either; nor did he take walks alone with Katy or Delia. The walks seemed a delicate if ordinary thing; she did not want them ruined.

First they walked on the North Shore beaches, in September, when the weather was still mild and the clarity of the light had increased, even as the days began to shorten, the cold mornings giving way to warm days that chilled fast at dusk. The brightest afternoons the coastal sea turned cerulean or royal blue, deepening with violet or green when the clouds arrived; the beaches were mostly empty but for walkers in their jeans and sweatshirts.
At times Sara imagined Nora preceding or trailing them, a kind of shadow; at times simultaneously walking beaches miles south. Once Nora and James had walked alone together. Did anything of those walks echo in Sara's walks with James? As the leaves turned, she and James chose inland parks, followed wooded paths, visited Walden Pond and nearby conservation land. Invariably relaxed, those days. James knew local history, the sites of shipwrecks, the names of birds. On rainy days they picked historic towns and window-shopped, chose good restaurants, or strolled with umbrellas near the Beverly house and drank tea. By late fall they developed conversational shorthand, the habit of exchanging small gifts: mint from the yard, a waterproof compass, a chocolate bar, an archaic map. A strange happiness came upon her in anticipation of seeing him and when she heard his voice, and when she caught sight of him.

For months, they did not talk about love. Not about her failed relationships or his divorce from Nora, or even his happiness with Josie. In careful language, they spoke of her siblings' lives, simultaneously transparent and opaque to her. At times, James reminisced about his uncle Paul, who knew the South Shore beaches and the salt marshes, the birds and constellations and the shipwrecks offshore. Occasionally he mentioned his own early life, navigating his teenage years by walking the city of Boston when he did not want to go home, and taking beach walks in Blue Rock, until the walking instilled a kind of surety in him and his despair dropped away. As if the repeated steps asserted that there was solid earth and he would not fall off; that by walking your body learned the place, and your mind had the chance to catch up.

On the first mild Saturday in April, when they walked on Crane Beach, Sara and James noted seasonal shifts in the coastline: they talked about maps; they talked about latitude. They were just north of the forty-second parallel. The beach curved, it seemed, beyond the horizon. A few other walkers passed. Fat gulls approached and flew off; whitecaps appeared and melted into approaching waves. In Rome, James told her, once the
EMT
s had stopped trying to revive Molly, he'd felt a slight weight on his shoulder, as if her death were pressing down. Only when the ambulance arrived at the hospital did he realize it was the hand of the EMT, steadying him.

She did not tell Delia of this conversation, though for years she and Delia had shared information about Molly. With regard to James, Sara remained evasive. When she found herself in the larger family company, the easy rapport between her and James drew quick glances from Delia, lingering ones from Katy. As if it were a kind of affair, transparent to Josie but partly veiled from everyone else. Sara could see that Katy's version of James differed from Delia's and of course from Nora's, but she didn't always recognize those other versions. Who were her sisters thinking of? This James, the present walking James, was not a man she remembered from childhood. Maybe this James had something of the James Nora married, the hopeful one. Or now that he'd aged, more of his uncle Paul. Or maybe he was like the wandering James, the one who found solace at the shore, the one who knew, too young, what it meant to miss a father.

AFTER II

Often, Nora dreamed of her own mother as she appeared in the apartment in Somerville—without lipstick or jewelry, hair loosely clipped back, singing—what was she singing? She opened and restitched seams, let out a waistline, shortened a hem. In the living room a woman on a step stool held still, while Nora's mother pinned her dress. Another day, a coffee shop, Nora's mother in a corner booth leaning over a table to hear news—lipstick now, but also concern. The images were fast clips, not the elaborate stories Nora sometimes dreamed. Her mother crossed a city park. There was rain. Or there was no rain, but she'd disappeared into a crowd. She was in a movie theater, waiting for the lights to dim. Places she had appeared in life; places she had not. As she'd been in her forties, vivid, in her knee-length dresses with delicate prints, her brown eyes limpid; chatting or singing; and as she'd been in her fifties, in pink-framed glasses, still chatting but pale. There were spools of thread to sort; spools rolled from the table onto the kitchen floor. She was in her pearl-buttoned green cardigan; she needed hot tea; she needed a blanket.

In waking hours, Nora found herself addressing her mother,
What do you think?
a quick, habitual glance upward. Posing
the question as if her mother were alive, or now Meg, or some alternate version of Nora herself; glancing as if the sky listened.

Late middle age. Perhaps her mother too had felt herself becoming more singular, marriage or no marriage—she must have, but at what point did she recognize her inherent separateness, its existential certainty? During her illness or before? Nora's own life now seemed distinct from her children—and more completely hers—in ways both stark and unforeseen. She felt, if anything, condensed, possessed of a clean practicality untempered by marriage or youth. After the girls had left for college, she'd cultivated both solitude and social worlds apart from the family. When she could, she studied art. She walked, always, as she had in Blue Rock, but now in other preserves, on other beaches, sometimes with friends who carried pocket sketchbooks, reference guides, binoculars. She carried her own. The naturalists knew her first as a Nora of favorite haunts and walking habits, with a gift for botanical illustration; a Nora independent of any other Murphy, or Connor, or neighborhood history. As she preferred.

Her girls wanted more of her. She visited, she helped them, but in their voices she still detected the mixed note of longing and dismay. Perhaps they wanted childhood, or a different childhood; or that she shape her life around theirs, even now. She could not say. Theo's expectations—from California or elsewhere—were usually minimal, though he claimed full attention during visits. Every week, she spent time with the family: Tuesday dinners and weekend visits with Katy's kids, or Delia's, and Katy and Delia themselves, the sons-in-law; dinners with Sara. The grandkids seemed to view her lovingly,
ignoring the sharp boundaries she recognized in herself. She doted on them, then retreated. She had more time now, and less. She tired more easily; with effort, she saved the better hours for herself. She trusted her children to be the adults they were. Sometimes she'd take a weekend away in Maine, or Vermont, or the Cape. She might remember to tell Delia or Sara how to reach her; she might forget, and they'd leave messages until she remembered to check voice mail, eventually returning their calls.

So often Nora wished to speak with her living mother. However implausibly, the world had spun for decades without her, without Nora's father, without Molly. And for a time, their deaths defined the vast realm she recognized as
death
, news of other losses drifting at a remove, strangely hollow and peripheral. Yet now, again, illness riddled the nearer landscapes. Friends. The world as one knows it is only the world of a moment, isn't it? Then there is another moment, another world. Though you could be lulled—and repeatedly—into thinking otherwise, or imagining that a moment sustained in happiness was in fact the singular authentic world—the world compared to which all others seem false. Maybe the life in which you strolled through Cambridge with an infant boy; or a June predawn hour when you made love with your husband; or an afternoon tea with your middle-aged mother; a bakery trip with your young whistling father. Or, later, an evening with your friends on their deck, by the sea. Say each bond is composed of moments compressed into words. So the hours on the deck and the wine disappear, but these new words exist—and the years of words accumulate, and the language steadies you, and
then your friend dies, and you are the lone speaker of that language. Over time, you remain the lone speaker of how many languages? It happened to everyone. How to prepare? Or for one's own disappearance?

What had Nora's mother done?
What do you think?
When Nora's mother began to confront these moments, Nora had been in high school, then college, busy falling in love with James, busy with a baby. Toward the end her mother was weary, the liveliness sapped, Nora determined to cheer her up. Offering visits with a tiny Theo, delivering flowers, telling jokes. Vital small pleasures, but had Nora listened enough? It seemed she had not.
What do you think
—about any of it? Nora hardly asked. She'd tried desperately to entertain. And how could she go back now—this late—to listen? Who ever caught up with the past? How necessary. Yet
back
was only in the mind:
now
was what she had.

HOUSE VII

For all of the Murphys, the house's shifting manifestations would blur, stray details and perceptions surfacing without context, others forgotten. The last photos, some of which captured the house, had disappeared with the house itself, though older ones survived in James's file box and in albums owned by the Murphy cousins—black-and-whites, square white-bordered snapshots in colors faded or skewed yellow. A few objects had survived with James or Theo: the clock that had belonged to James's father, cereal bowls and mugs Nora had given to Theo; two of Nora's small paintings and a handful of her sketches, which Theo had taken west.

Proportions would slip. For Sara and Delia,
home
had first and always meant the shoreline, the odd birdhouse silhouette, the wind, the radically altering sky, and at times their memories of the house seemed tied to language, to apprehending the world itself.
Banister
would first bring to mind the sealed wood along the stairs rising to the deck, and the polished, nicked one inside—the foundation of every other reference to banisters.

And too, Sara would remember the house at night, the way the dark transformed the spaces. Rooms melted into the air
beyond windows, furniture into walls. In the deepest dark she rarely stumbled, her bare feet against the brushed carpet, the cool linoleum and smooth wood floors, the pinpricks of sand. Later, in other houses, she might close her eyes and walk barefoot across similar floors, and for an instant the night house might flicker.

In Katy's memory the rooms seemed larger than their true dimensions, an expansiveness she could not explain; her later views of the house seemed plucked from summers when she first dated Tim. She tended to forget the tensions with her sisters, or the atmosphere toward the end of her parents' marriage. Nor would she contemplate what becomes of an atmosphere held within a house—the precisely charged air—when the house is gone; if the atmosphere might remain at the houseless site; or move, intact, to an unrelated place; or dispel. Still, before the new owners built on the site, she too had returned, walked the perimeter, studied the seawall, the remaining foundation. There had been for her a flat emptiness. She too had searched without success for familiar objects, something tamped beneath clotted silt or wedged in the nearby rocks. Most of the debris had been swept out to sea or down the road toward the pond; the town and local contractors had combed the property. A tablespoon, a bracelet might have been swept into the murky pond, but it was easier to find a duplicate at a flea market. Yet what she wanted wasn't the spoon; rather the house reconstructed around the spoon. A house reconstructed to match surviving keys. Still, after a year, when Katy and Tim moved into the redbrick, she fixed her attention on its interiors, which gradually supplanted Blue Rock's.

When the Murphys were together, conversation about the house retained a surface lightness, as if it had always been a summer holiday retreat; or as if the winter storms had been comic adventures recounted over cocoa, the wind a character from a children's book. Rarely did they mention the failing structure or deferred repairs, except to joke about Nora's improvisations—the white fisherman's rope along the outer stairs by which Sara and Delia identified their house to arriving visitors; a yellow bucket briefly hung from the leaking bedroom ceiling, like an art installation or a sloshing bell. Theo tended to talk about his running routes, which did not involve the house at all, or his shelves of books, most of which left with him, or moments with Sara and Delia when they were infants. Like Sara, he recalled in detail the art that Nora hung, and the photographs, the postcards taped to the refrigerator. If he dreamed of the house, he didn't say; just as he rarely spoke of Newton or of any early memory of Cambridge, or of Italy. Perhaps California had supplanted them all; perhaps they were sealed into a geologically separate past.

For Nora the house remained nearly present; the feeling of the house returning to her often, like a scent, or the dreams of her dead parents and of Molly, images blown into the current moment like confetti. For her too, the house would shape-shift but never beyond recognition. Normal, now, to carry so vivid a sense of the place, she might travel there, if not for a weak prohibiting memory of its demise. More often the worlds she carried in her mind lacked physical analogs, or survived as artifacts. If she met old acquaintances or strangers who shared drifting bits of the past, she felt surprising kinship. With Meg
or Somerville families who'd known her parents, she expected such moments. So too when she encountered a girlhood friend of Katy's, or a host from a long-ago party, or a neighbor from Newton who'd known Molly: the past sparked brightly for an instant. She could not explain this fleeting return or the subsequent longing any more than the undeniable attritions. She missed the house and yet something persisted; she was relieved for the solitude of later apartments, preferred to walk beaches elsewhere. She imagined Blue Rock, or what Blue Rock implied, as a kind of true north as she traveled in other directions.