Guesswork

by Martha Cooley

  She’s awaiting a new pair of aids, but my father isn’t optimistic they’ll help with phone calls. Her hearing’s better in person, he told me recently. Lousy, but better. You still have to yell at her, though, he added. When are you coming home, anyway—I’ve lost track of your schedule, my memory’s shot, I can’t keep anything straight . . .

  Now I resume talking, loudly, into the phone. Mom, I say, can you hear me, Mom? How are you, and how’s Dad?

  I can’t hear you, she says. Her tone has edged toward but doesn’t tip into plaintive, because my mother doesn’t do plaintive. Sounding like that offends her sense of self.

  I say something else, yelling now. My mother still can’t hear. She makes a slight chuffing sound into the receiver, like someone out of breath. I can sense her distress; it’s water behind a dam, a lot of weight and pressure wanting to break through, but what good does a dam-break do? It just makes a mess.

  I can’t hear you, she says after a few more moments.

  I stop yelling, because what good does yelling do? It, too, makes a mess. There’s silence for a moment, as though we were two boxers in the ring, exhausted by a tough round. Then my mother speaks.

  I can’t hear you, so you should just hang up, she says quietly. Her tone is now poised between resignation and frustration—balanced there with such essential dignity, her refusal of bitterness or self-pity so adamant, that I cannot let my heart strangle itself (as it wishes to do, to put itself out of its misery) but instead try to chivvy it into standing straight and tall. Get up, I tell my heart, get up!

  Oh, Mom . . . I can say nothing but this. Then I go silent.

  My mother has, of course, not heard what I’ve said. But she speaks.

  So what can I tell you, she says, affecting a breezy tone of voice. Well, let’s see . . . I can tell you that your father’s gone for the mail. I can tell you that I’m fine, and I can tell you . . . that I love you. That’s all, you should get off the phone now, just hang up, okay? Because I can’t hear you.

  Never in my mother’s life has she uttered to me the phrase I can tell you that I love you. On occasion she’s told me she loves me, yes, but never like this—as though reporting on the weather, or offering the latest update from the assisted-living community. Behind her blitheness lies what she wants—needs—to convey, even though she’s speaking into a void. Poking a stick in the eye of silence.

  You’d better not blow it, I warn myself.

  Inwardly I get down on my knees, knowing I must accept not just Mom’s deafness, her blindness, her wheelchair-boundness, but also—most of all—her death. Though there’s no actual reason to believe it’s around the corner. Mom’s a survivor, after all, and for the past twelve months she’s been her usual wry self.

  The phone line hums slightly; I wait a few beats. In telling me to hang up, it’s as if my mother has just said I’m leaving instead of you go now. As though the usual directionality of things—I, her oldest, am the one who’s supposed to go away, to spend a year in an Italian village while she stays on the geezer farm, as my father calls it—is now being reversed, and I must stay put while she readies to depart.

  Yes, I think, of course. This reversal is what we’ve come to; why be startled by it?

  The receiver feels clammy in my hand. It strikes me as absurd that, closing in on sixty years, I must still be learning all this, and that she, nearing ninety, must be crafty in communicating it—like the mother of a squalling toddler who gets the kid to behave without having to raise her voice . . . So careful not to complicate things, or burden me with her sorrows. And yet, needless to say, she has failed in her effort to protect me, as mothers everywhere do. Or to protect herself: did I not leave her, long ago?

  Needless to say.

  And so, phone receiver and its void still at my ear, I don’t do as my mother has just done—speak the words I can tell you that I love you, hoping she’ll hear them—for the simple reason that I know she won’t. I do as I’m told, and hang up.

  16. Coda

  April 2014 in Brooklyn, windy, brisk.

  The cruelest month? Perhaps, yet magnolia blossoms splash pink-purple-white against an azure sky, oblivious to the chill.

  Four weeks ago, in mid-March, the forsythia began flowering in Castiglione del Terziere. Closing my eyes, I can see the moss softening on the castle garden’s walls, its springtime sponginess . . . Can see crocuses in bloom, little white tassels in the grass. The rooster in la colla noisy once more, after winter’s long silence.

  Here, there: qui, lá. Without planning or intending to be, I find myself split. Perhaps this sensation, exhilarating and discomfiting, is simply a reflection of a deeper conundrum. Our lives are Swiss— / So still, so cool, wrote Emily Dickinson. Till, some odd afternoon, / The Alps neglect their curtains, / And we look farther on . . .

  Now and then a glimpse, a longer view.

  And this, from another of her poems: Ourself, behind ourself concealed, / Should startle most . . .

  Eight months it’s been since Antonio and I returned to Brooklyn after our caesura. Eight months!

  A long time; no time at all.

  Shortly before leaving Castiglione at the end of last August, we did something altogether unplanned: we bought a house in the village. It sits across from the church, on the piazzetta below the castle. Forlorn and neglected, its roof a leaky mess, the house was put on the market by the local Catholic diocese, which had used it as the canonica. No priest had lived in it for years. The diocese wished to sell the house quickly—and was willing to do so quite cheaply—in order to repair the bell tower and the church’s interior. So we took the plunge.

  Our neighbor Daniel, mastermind of the Madonna’s renovation, offered to serve as our contractor. He introduced us to an architect, Stefano, who several years earlier had managed the restoration of L’Annunziata, the lovely inn up the hill, and who now agreed to oversee our project. After we left, Daniel and two other men got to work. They took down walls, installed anti-earthquake beams, rebuilt the top floor and terrace, and put up a new terra-cotta roof. Astonished, we opened our computers every few weeks to find photos from Daniel: here the roof, there the walls; here the earthquake beams, there the window frames. In mid-December, we were able to move in. Small things remained to be done, but the upper part of the house was essentially finished.

  We passed the holidays in our new home, then went back to Brooklyn in early January to resettle into our American lives. But not for long: in March we returned to Castiglione for a few weeks, to check on the renovation of two studios on the ground floor—the canonica’s former donkey stables. Dark, dank, and filthy when we first saw them, these spaces were being transformed by Daniel and his two colleagues into cheerful studios.

  During that March fortnight, I watched the forsythia come into bloom. Tristana materialized, letting us know she knew where we lived now, and expected to be fed. Big Boy was down in la colla, an infrequent but still-living presence. And I realized I’d learned to inhabit two states at once, which was how my grandmother Nell used to put it, gazing across the way at the lush trees on the Pennsylvania side of the river: I live in two states. But I know which I’m in when I’m in it.

  My mother died in October 2013, around the time the new roof went up.

  That fall, even while gazing at Daniel’s photos of a house more than halfway through its renovation, I was plunging daily down the ravine of loss and crumpling into a fetal ball at the bottom. I’d told myself I had prepared for this, or at least tried to, yet I found myself paralyzed by unreadiness. Naturally I coped, if that’s the right word; I’m my mother’s daughter, she taught me to carry on. I did what had to be done, what would save me: my work. But there lay my heart in the deepest of ditches.

  Up, I sometimes heard Mom saying. Get up.

  I wondered if what my mother must have felt while pregnant, awaiting my and my siblings’ arrivals—at once prepared and completely unready for us—was an emotion as intense as
mine now, only in a totally different register, in another language. Perhaps both intensities are insusceptible to speech, and must be lived through in silence.

  Her death from pneumonia wasn’t quick or easy. Though she’d have said it could’ve been worse.

  It happened in a fortnight. At first she was able to keep speaking, but then she was taken to the hospital, gasping for air, and her hearing aids were removed in the ambulance. It wasn’t possible to replace and adjust them for her: she lacked the strength to explain their proper placement. I think she was simply finished with talking. Lying on her side in a hospital bed, pale and exhausted, she seemed impatient in the way I imagine a fetus is, for the arduous, inevitable passage to be over with.

  I touched her face, stroking her forehead, hoping my hands would speak for me. When I was very young, she’d sometimes stroked the skin between my eyebrows as I lay with my head in her lap. Using her thumb, gently. You remember this even now, don’t you, I begged her silently as I stroked that same spot on her face. You remember all you did, all you’ve done for me?

  The overtakelessness of those / Who have accomplished Death: those opening lines of another Dickinson poem, brief and peculiar, come to me now.

  To be overtakeless—what does that mean? It means you cannot be caught up with or surpassed.

  Dickinson called it majestic, this quality. More so than any of Earth’s other majesties.

  Sitting at my mother’s bedside hours before her death, listening to the rasp of her breathing, I recalled how, a few days before falling ill in September, she’d told me she wanted to visit Castiglione.

  I’ll come without your father, she’d said. He hates flying, you know. But that’s all right, I can be in a wheelchair and you can travel with me. Or you could just meet me at the airport in Milan . . . I can’t travel in winter, your father would worry too much. But once it’s warmer—next spring—I’ll visit, I’ll come stay in the village. Just for a few days. I want to see it.

  And here we are: April, springtime.

  I’m once again back in Brooklyn—this home, not that one. And my mother’s visiting Castiglione. In my mind I’ve brought her there.

  I imagine her reactions. By now it’s mild; she won’t need her red wool coat. She’s made her way up the hill, under the arch, past the ramp to the castle, down to the piazzetta. Has she seen the roses on the cistern behind our new house, or met Tristana yet? She’ll find the key to the front door in the electric-meter box, and enter. What’ll she think of the living-room bookshelves? Her gold necklace: will she open the top drawer of my bureau and see I’ve left it there?

  I can only guess.

  Acknowledgments

  This memoir in essays started out as a journal for myself. Thanks go to Sheridan Hay for urging me to meander without purpose. For an early, abbreviated draft of the book, I received helpful editorial feedback from Barbara Graham.

  Versions of several essays herein appeared in the following literary magazines: “Go Tell Your Father,” AGNI (2012); “The Island and the Boat,” A Public Space (2013); and “What a Circus!,” The Southampton Review (2014). I undertook an online exchange of essays with Jennifer Acker, editor of The Common, in 2012–13, and elements of my contributo found their way into this book.

  The final version would not have come to pass without the exceptional insight and astute editing of Leigh Newman. I am indebted to her, and grateful to the entire Catapult team for their enthusiastic support, professionalism, and kindness.

  To my neighbors in Castiglione del Terziere, in particular la famiglia Muntean and Raffaella Paoletti, grazie di cuore.

  And above all to Antonio Romani, my beloved, sine qua non.

  Valeria Genzini, Richard Gilman, Lucy Grealy, David Markson, Andrea Massey, Nuala O’Faolain, Liam Rector, and Jason Shinder: I was and am blessed by these friends’ inestimable gifts of themselves. This offering is in their memory.

  About the Author

  Martha Cooley is the author of the national bestseller The Archivist, a New York Times Notable Book and New and Noteworthy paperback, and Thirty-Three Swoons. Her first novel was published in a dozen foreign markets. Cooley’s short fiction and essays have appeared in A Public Space, AGNI, The Southampton Review, The Common, PEN America, Washington Square, and elsewhere. She has served as a contributing editor at The Writer’s Chronicle and is currently a contributing editor at A Public Space. Her co-translations of Italian fiction and poetry include Antonio Tabucchi’s story collection Time Ages in a Hurry and a selection of contemporary poetry in Those Who from Afar Look Like Flies: The Novecento, Part 3 (forthcoming from University of Toronto Press). A professor of English at Adelphi University, Cooley taught for fifteen years in the Bennington Writing Seminars. She divides her time between Queens, New York, and Castiglione del Terziere, Italy. She is married to the writer and translator Antonio Romani. Their American cat, Zora, is named after one of the cities in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and their Italian cat, Tristana, is named after the medieval knight.

  Other Remarkable Books from Catapult

  Cries for Help, Various by Padgett Powell

  “Moving, funny, and maddening.” —Kevin Wilson, The New York Times Book Review

  Mrs. Engels by Gavin McCrea

  “Gavin McCrea is triumphant in his exuberant debut in creating Lizzie′s voice; she is dazzlingly convincing.” —Antonia Senior, The Times (London)

  Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton

  “A strikingly smart and daringly feminist novel with modern insights into love, marriage, and the siren call of ambition.” —Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation

  Vexation Lullaby by Justin Tussing

  “Vexation Lullaby is a major literary stunner and pure raw pleasure from start to finish." —Lily King, author of Euphoria

  Springtime by Michelle de Kretser

  “A dark gem of a book.” —Andrew Wilson, The Independent

  Watchlist edited by Bryan Hurt

  “A boldly imaginative, diverse collection of 32 surveillance-themed stories from an international coterie of writers.” —Publishers Weekly

  Nine Island by Jane Alison

  “Full of sideways humor that devastates and illuminates all at once.”—Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies

  Flying Couch by Amy Kurzweil

  “Beautiful and Strong”—Miriam Katin, author of Letting it Go

  Am I Alone Here? by Peter Orner

  “This book, thank god, defies any category.”—Dave Eggers

  http://catapult.co