Say you contemplate this world as she contemplates the world. Does the long view, the parallel act, bring you closer to her? Here is her arm—slender, white—her hand holding open the book. Here a foot, poking out beneath the hem of her dress as she sits on the ground. Tiny, in the corner. But the lines of the dress echo those of the hills and valley—and send you back to the expansive landscape, away from her single small corner. Again you study the print while she studies the printed text. In solitude, here outside the living world.
JAMES BY THE SEA
Spring. At least you could say that about the day: the North Shore crab-apple trees a frothy pink, lilacs in pale and deep violet blooming along the roadsides, the unfurling leaves a rare pale green. Thicker petals of ornamental magnolia, magenta and white, would bloom for one spectacular week, then scatter in the grass. On the weekends, James had turned ground for a small garden, vegetables and sunflowers. Only in recent years had he become a gardener, since the move to Beverly with Josie. Last summer when Sara and Delia visited, they seemed amused by his efforts, but they’d happily picked the cherry tomatoes, happily eaten the green beans. Sometimes while he gardened, they played soccer with Josie; sometimes they helped.
So he could anticipate, at least, a summer garden, more visits. Today he would have, on his way home, a wash of sunlight, time to walk along a North Shore beach—the thought like a distant plane approaching, still a speck, only a speck, as he drove north out of the city, not to Beverly but beyond it, toward Manchester-by-the-Sea. School buses now clogged the secondary roads, crossing guards in bright orange and black, like huge caterpillars, stopping him with a raised hand, small towns busy with daytime routines of marketing and bakeries and dog walking, kids on Rollerblades and skateboards, kids on bikes, and at the playground, on swing sets swinging. The crossing guards waved him on.
More roadside deciduous trees, tall old-growth oaks and maples and high banks of shrubs, more pastel bursts fronting the lawns of grand houses on the route to Singing Beach. There, toddlers played in the sand, ringed by young mothers and nannies: at the far end, a gaggle of teenagers leaned together and smoked. James’s first thought had been Blue Rock, even now—the far beach as he’d known it with his father. But he liked Singing Beach, the intimate scale of it, the blooming, well-to-do town, in which, as a stranger passing through, one could forget the outside world. Residents commuted to Boston just as they did from Beverly, men not unlike himself, executives, attorneys—but today he was not himself. Today he was a man in a car, and at Singing Beach he was a man on a bench watching the navy-blue sea, the lace edges of the fallen waves, the small whipped peaks in the distance. From the town came the muted whistle of a local train approaching the crossroads station. The shoreline had reconfigured since the last time he was there, the shoreline he remembered—one curving sweep of sand, a broad uninterrupted pie slice—now appeared as sand lobes riven by receding seawater, as if sliced by fine branching rope.
An emptying. He had not called Josie. He would tell her tonight. Her sister Liz was visiting: he would arrive home at the regular time and tell her after dinner, after they’d said good night to Liz. In this marriage, in this way, he was different. Do not squander routine contentment, he told himself; do not squander Josie’s. She was for him an anchor.
Down the beach, the clump of teenagers broke apart, some of them running kites: an electric-orange shield, a rainbow-tailed dragon. The kites he’d once built were simple, white paper diamonds, the frames raw flat wood, the string cheap brown stuff that scratched and cut his hands. In Blue Rock one summer he flew colorful fabric kites with Theo and the girls (Katy. Also Molly? Later, Sara and Delia), kites with better line and flexible frames.
It was better to be a man thinking about kites than it was to be the man he was today in Boston, the man he had not planned to be, in Boston or anywhere, ever. Parker took him to lunch—not anomalous, lunch with Parker, but not routine. This was how it was done. A good restaurant—in fact, a very good restaurant, Parker liked him, and Parker liked restaurants, and at least there would be a good meal, if you could eat the good meal. “I want to tell you,” Parker said, “I couldn’t be happier with your performance,” and James’s quick flush of pleasure—even now—cut short by the news of reorganization. “We don’t have much choice here,” Parker said, though it wasn’t clear whom he meant by we.
“I’ve been doing what I can.” Parker leaned forward, lowered his voice. “It’s a decent severance. And you know I’ll back you up. You tell anyone to call me.”
Parker appeared to be the same Parker he’d been when they entered the restaurant: when had the change occurred? Once there had been a different Parker: time, Parker announced, for a different James, not divisional VP but a kicked-out James, and a hot-faced, tumbling James, held together by his suit and by the heavy furniture and deep grooves of dining-club mores.
“Give yourself some time,” Parker said. “It’s a lot to take in.”
“I wasn’t aware,” James said, “our division was involved.”
“This wasn’t my decision,” Parker said. “They’re going after senior people.”
“What about you?”
Theatrical and stung, Parker’s laugh. “Could be. I’d bet a year.”
Something stilled in James, and he could see himself as from outside, an executive at lunch: he had done this before. The performing James, receding from the moment as he kept up the public face. And so he managed the dessert Parker insisted they order—a hand lifting a forkful of cake to the mouth, a mechanical chewing and swallowing—and the top-shelf cognac, more heat in his throat and face, as if it were a celebratory meal.
And as they returned to the building—Parker actually saying, “I think the world of you, James”—Parker keeping close, for an instant James wondered if the lunch had occurred at all, if in waking life he’d had the lunch he thought he’d had (nothing about the city confirmed the transformation, the tumbling, the sudden sham of his Italian suit, silk tie, the sham of his body, it seemed). Then Parker placed a hand on his upper arm as he opened the building door, and gently steered him not to the elevators but toward the approaching building guard, Ken. Ken, ex-Navy, a Red Sox devotee with whom James had swapped baseball and sailing anecdotes for a decade.
“Mr. Murphy,” Ken said. “This way,” and waved at the corridor to the delivery entrance. Parker shook James’s hand and hurried—only then, clearly hurrying—to the elevators.
In the storage room off the delivery entrance, a set of boxes, stacked and labeled Murphy. “It’s how they do this,” Ken said. “Don’t think it’s personal. Sorry, James.”
When he’d left for lunch, his secretary, Maureen, had been told to clean out his office—desk, closet, rows of cabinets—and box his personal things. With one of the senior officers observing, she’d copied personal files from his computer onto a disk (a letter to a realtor, ongoing letters to Nora’s attorney, a hopeful note he’d sent to Josie when he’d first met her). In the box she’d left a handwritten note: she’d found whatever personal files she could and deleted after copying, the scrawled P.S. They told me just before lunch. We’ll miss you.
The breeze at Singing Beach kept the kites aloft, though they dipped and swung back on an updraft as the kids tugged strings and ran along the flattened sand below the high-tide line. No help to wonder how long ago Parker began the paperwork. It was difficult, at first, to leave the bench, this smallest of way stations, and to leave the lulling crash of incoming waves, the ebbing, the next set. And then he did leave; here was his car. In the town center he lucked into parking and at the restaurant closest to the train stop, ordered coffee at the bar. A man passing through, drinking coffee. The after-work crowd was just beginning to trickle in, and it was comforting to hold the coffee mug while the bartender told him business had been better since Easter. You made the real money during the summer; but year-round the bar did okay. Much better than the last place he’d worked.
That morning, he’d stil
l been a man for whom success had come to seem innate—as if the foregone conclusion of early struggles. Even after Molly, Rome, divorce, the notion had held fast. Because he was James. And yes, because he had worked tirelessly; because it had seemed that through sheer effort he’d escaped his mother’s apartment; landed the Harvard scholarship; it had seemed that through sheer effort, he’d risen beyond. How easy to forget the raw luck, his uncle’s phone calls, Nora charming the cocktail party crowds, Nora herself. To downplay the advantage of Boston Irish networks, Boston Irish clout. He’d resisted the notion that he might be a cog (everyone, Nora would say, is a cog); buried the suspicion that a sham—his—would eventually be discovered, the now and forever true James revealed as a grief-stunned adolescent whose mother lives on a couch. After years of money, position, praise—long since arrived, long established—why imagine they would stop? Love, yes. But not this.
The Beverly house appeared as he’d left it, Josie and her sister now at the kitchen table drinking white wine. Josie was still in her suit, no shoes, kissing him hello, saying, “Maybe James will make lemon chicken?” then kissing him again—“Lemon chicken, James?”
“Sure,” he said. “Give me just a minute.”
Later, the jumble of consequences. Later the odd realignment of his social world, and the piles of resumes and series of fruitless lunches, headhunters repeating that everyone is downsizing; later the lucky days gardening with Josie and bright days in borrowed sailboats; cross-country-ski days with Sara and Delia; and arguments with Josie and apologies to Josie; later, when the severance waned (a good one, true enough), more weekly polite notes on dime-store notepaper arrived from Nora, and then on pricey letterhead from her attorney, requesting checks.
Tonight he found the little anchors, the soap and washcloth, the peppermint toothpaste, the chest of drawers in which he kept his T-shirts. Old khakis in the closet. The body took charge, though the house had an odd lucidity—in the kitchen the kettle almost announcing itself as kettle, the paper shell of the garlic feathery against his skin, tart slices of lemon brilliant on the counter. Steamed broccoli turned emerald. How odd that the world did not instead recede, that Josie and her sister did not instead recede. A normal family dinner, a good family dinner, with the usual social chat, and Josie musing about the weekend. He was listening. Mostly he was listening.
ROMAN CONVERSATIONS
The taxi driver Lorenzo, thirtysomething, sleeps with the windows open at night, hopes for a breeze from the sea. He says this as he dodges in and out of traffic, almost scraping a red Fiat, the wheel rim of a truck. Churches? Only to find peace does he visit, so he avoids the famous ones. If Murphys were here, he’d never know.
A waiter named Giuseppe says he understands Americans; he lived in New York with his boyfriend for years. Tourists don’t comprehend cities; cities do not remember them. Who can count all the tourists? He blows air across his palm.
In the business district, a body on the sidewalk curls into itself: apparently a woman, apparently alive—full-length skirt, long-sleeved blouse, head scarf—a coin bowl beside her. Her hand darts out to take the coins; the hand retreats. People step around her; in an hour, she’s gone.
“Oh,” Giuseppe says, “she will be back. You worry she has no name? She has a name, and a bad story.” He shrugs. “How many bad stories can I keep?”
“In New York,” Giuseppe says, “I knew a Murphy once. Very handsome, a man called Sean.”
CHURCH PANTRY
Nora waits in the South Shore church, her mind now in Canada, Cape Breton Island, where the coast is rockier, the sea wilder than anything she’s known. In the 1920s, ’30s, later, the place offers nothing for young men beyond the body-breaking mines or the treacherous northern seas: some families fish, others work the mines. A gorgeous, rough place, the light often transcendent, but who can live on light? Death litters the towns, each village isolated from the next, the nearest city days away. There is no money. The father: a lovely man, a sorrow-filled life. On Cape Breton, for the son, there is the father and the light. Stay or go? A kind of death to stay; another to leave. How blue the sea; how white the gulls wheeling over the wet black rocks.
“My wife, she reads. She reads all the time.”
She blinks, marks the page with her thumb. The man behind her is fortyish, thin, a pale man in a light gray jacket, jeans, work boots. He’s holding a paper coffee cup from a donut shop. Jittery: the cup trembles. Dark hair thinned as if to emphasize the furrowed brow.
Nora glances around. They’re halfway through the line, ten people still ahead. A few small groups—women, mostly, one with a small boy—near the squared-off entry hunch together and talk. Threads of conversation about a hair salon and a ruined party swim past her.
“Oh,” Nora says. “Good. I think that’s a good thing.”
“Yeah,” he says. Right leg jiggling. He leans in but doesn’t look her in the eye. She glances back at the description of the wheeling gulls.
“This isn’t my church,” he says.
“No?” Nora says. The gulls fall away. “It isn’t mine either.”
“I go to church though,” the man says. “I’ve been going.” He addresses her knees, her feet.
“People seem to,” she says.
“Yeah,” he says. “I do that. I do that but my wife, you know, she won’t talk to me.”
They find her, these men, the lost ones. At the post office, the DMV. And women—but more of the women seem benign. “I’m sorry,” Nora says.
“Thanks, yeah,” he says. “I’m staying with my mother. Now. She wants me to go,” he says. He’s on to his wife’s story, her hospitalization, a psych ward for weeks—and she’s better, she’s better now, but now that she is better she won’t see him, won’t talk to him, and so he prays, and he visits the priest, and he tells his mother who doesn’t want him there he’s going to church, and these bags of food are for his mother, he says, well, his mother and him, but he’s trying, you know? He’s making an effort, he says. It’s as if the coffee cup is all that’s keeping him from flying apart. He’s shivering, shifting from one foot to another. Opening and closing his free hand.
Sometimes the smallest things can keep you from snapping: a tabby sunning herself on the steps, a whiff of chocolate, a neighborhood kid waving hello. Or a stranger in line willing to listen, someone who does not wish, as you might, that you were dead. Nora knows this. Still, she thinks, Disappear. Please please disappear.
Then he says he’s got a boy, a boy and a girl, they live with his wife’s sister now, he’s going to see the boy in a week (so no, mustn’t disappear, there’s the boy, the girl). She’s not a bad person, the sister, he knows that, she’s taken the kids, but she doesn’t like him, he knows she doesn’t like him. Nora does not ask him why.
He’s nice to the sister, he says, he’s always tried to be nice, but these are bad days. Some bad bad days. “I pray,” he says. “I talk to Father Thomas. I pray.”
“He must be kind,” she says.
“Father Thomas? Yeah. Yeah,” he says. “But I need a place to stay. I’m staying with my mother now.”
“You said,” Nora says.
“Only she doesn’t want me there,” he says. “Bad days.”
She does not ask why the mother wants him out; or why his wife won’t see him; or what he did, or what he didn’t do, or if his kids are okay; if he knows what can happen to kids in a minute; or how much it takes to keep them well; and if they are well, if he knows to thank, forever, the sister-in-law. After all, they’re in a church. Now it seems that she is the calm thing that keeps his chaos from spilling out further. She does not want to be the calm thing, but here she is.
They’re almost through the line, and when she picks up her bags and tells the man behind her “Good luck,” he says, “Yeah,” and then “Wait.” But she does not want to wait: she rushes ahead, arms full, out to the parking lot. She’s setting the bags in the backseat, and he’s there, in the parking lot, behind her. His arms are
full of groceries; there’s nothing threatening about him, except his drowning. Maybe he is hoping for a ride. He’s looking at her now, catching her eye. She is perfectly still. She wants to push him; to shove him hard, away, send him reeling back to his mother’s house. For a second, his eyes widen, as if he’s seen it, he’s recognized how easily she could be cruel. Maybe he’s not so oblivious. Or maybe he’s now realized that she is a stranger, that he’s latched on to her as if she were his wife or his mother or a sympathetic friend, but she’s out of sympathy and he doesn’t know her at all, the confusion shaming him.
“Good luck,” she says again. It’s flat and unlucky, the way she says it, and he steps back, shambling, gazing at the ground again. And then she’s in the car, and she pulls out onto the road, and when she is a few miles out, stops to light a cigarette. It’s as if she’s caught his tremble. And on the drive back to Blue Rock, to the house beside the sea—who ever wants to leave the sea? Or Nova Scotia, that light? A father. How terrible to leave her own father—burying him had seemed just that, although he had gone—yes, terrible to leave her father, who loved her. In this life, how does anyone sustain kindness? And the island now so very far away.
HOUSE VI
Because of the money, Nora had said yes. At least, that’s what Sara and Delia believed. Because Nora was scraping to cover the basics, and otherwise, why would she agree? It seemed shaming to ask; they didn’t pose the question aloud. That summer, their father had begun consulting, but what did consulting mean? They were working, always, Sara and Delia, babysitting for several families; on Wednesdays, Sara helped at a garden center. In the early mornings, she swam at the high school pool. Almost no time in the house, almost no time on the beach. And with Nora at work, most days the house stood empty. Maybe the unoccupied rooms surprised Katy: maybe, Sara mused, she took them for an invitation. Because didn’t she and Tim have a place of their own? And in Cambridge, with its theaters and bookstores and cafés.
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