Her first house: the triple-decker in Somerville. She and Meg and their parents lived on the ground floor, the postage-stamp yard abutting all the other postage-stamp yards; in good weather the yards seemed like a strange harbor, drying sheets and work pants and dresses flapping in the wind or hanging flatly in the treeless light. In front of the house stood one skinny beech near a flower bed where her father tended the string of rosebushes that would blossom scarlet in the heat, just as everything else seemed to be wilting. He’d whistle bits of popular songs—in her mind the whistling and the roses weaving together—and when he finished, he and Nora would eat ice. Fans whirred in windows up and down the street, the neighbors’ sounds inseparable from their own. Only a few yards lay between the houses, doors and screens open to infants’ cries and family arguments and intimate pleasures. Kids outside called and jeered, lingered on front stoops shooting marbles, or jumped ropes, or blocked off the street to throw baseballs. In winter the shut windows and curtains and snow muted outdoor noise, which carried fewer voices and more work sounds; the chipping of ice and the hard crunch of shovels cutting snow would sometimes drift up onto the porch. The third-floor neighbors thudded up and down the stairs, the Cahill boys yelling, Mrs. Cahill yelling after, “Stop your noise.” The Reillys on the second floor were quieter and sadder and more decorous. Nora’s mother said the quiet was lucky, though lucky sounded troubling. From the Reillys’ apartment Nora mainly heard footsteps and water pipes and the murmurs of broadcast baseball games. At Nora’s there was at least music: the stack of swing records, her father’s whistling, the radio pop, their mother singing while sewing dress alterations. She’d make the girls puppets, impromptu sets for their plays. Most days, the household mood stayed light.
By Nora’s high school years they’d moved to a larger flat that Nora preferred. More trees shaded the neighborhood, and around the corner a baker sold shortbread and the Italian loaves Nora would buy for the house on her way home from school. For a time, Meg tumbled into more fervent Catholicism and became tedious—even their mother said so. Meg would bring home small art prints and cards: Madonnas and Annunciations, mostly stylized and generic, a few with the detailed faces of individual women. The sad horrific Crucifixions Meg agreed to keep in a drawer. For a time, the household seemed content, but in Nora’s senior year, their mother began to thin, and in colder weather she coughed and slept more—the first intimations of later troubles.
For most of college, Nora lived in a women’s dormitory, brick and utilitarian, but her closest friends lived in neighboring rooms, and she spent much of her time in the painting studio and in a lecture hall where faculty projected slides of masterworks to enormous scale. Her second year, she met James at a friend’s engagement party. He studied business; about art, he knew nothing. On their first date, he took her to the Fogg Museum. To Nora and to the paintings she admired, he paid serious attention; behind the security guard’s back, he pulled faces. Later they visited other museums—very fine and too solemn, they agreed—and went to unsolemn ball games, and took leisurely walks, stopping for coffee or beer. Not long after graduation, they married and moved into a small Cambridge apartment.
The second Cambridge place, her favorite, was a spacious two-bedroom they rented shortly before Theo’s birth: a white-and-yellow kitchen, oak floors, a yard with redbrick pathways, lilacs, a bed of daylilies. By then James had landed in finance, and with his uncle he’d worked out the arrangement to buy the Shore Road house. Fleeting peaceful years, during which she took Theo on walks through Cambridge and saw her parents often. During her second pregnancy, they moved to the house in Newton, a good house, near good schools. Later, when past events sifted and rearranged themselves, Nora would wonder if the move to Newton had been a mistake. As if it had caused not only displacement but also the sharpening of James’s ambitions, her mother’s death while Katy was an infant, her father’s death less than two years later.
Her parents made regular cameo appearances in dreams, stepping through doorways, noticing the weather, crossing into the visible frame of a front porch or a kitchen and again out of view. Yet there was Lydia, the visits back to Cambridge. At times, Blue Rock became Nora’s refuge: even when Molly was only weeks old, Nora retreated there, feeding, washing, and diapering Molly; building kites and making picnics for Katy and Theo while Molly napped. Often the beach was empty but for a few people walking, picking up stones, their figures altered by the syrupy yellow, clear white, or lavender light, the evening and early morning reds brimming along the horizons. Now and then she might sense something larger, or something lost and momentarily returned, traveling through the upper atmosphere, or closer, skimming over the tidal ebb.