In the next room of the gallery, Marlise stood amidst the “Meat Locker Torsos (1968–1970),” paintings that Silas had shown her once on slides, sitting beside her on the floor in the hallway at the Institute. Silas’s words were there, on the wall, too, “an attempt to make visible manifestations of the soul, or lack thereof,” and a critic or curator had written that they were “a prescient interpretation and indictment of their times.” Here were John Mitchell and his bombs, James Lovell floating in space. There was one of Jimi Hendrix she’d not remembered seeing, a red house-cavity filled with little broken wings and crumbling, Dali-like sand-castles that reminded her of some of her own early prints. She could see now what an influence Silas had been for her in her own printmaking. And here was Tolkien, her idea if she remembered right, one big Sauronian eye taking up all the space between collarbone and waist. And the thin ribcage of Emily Brontë, a blood-soaked heath across which two star-crossed lovers held their posthumous hands.
Maddie was calling to her from the doorway to yet another room. She and Elle hadn’t gotten beyond the first painting. “Come here, you have to see this.”
Somehow Marlise crossed the gleaming concrete floor and stepped across the threshold of the last room of the show, the one holding Silas’s late, last work, the paintings he’d done in the year before he killed himself. Standing between Maddie and Elle, she stared into a face. “Mom, it’s you! Except as, well, as a man. Okay, an older man than you are. But the resemblance is amazing. This person could be your father!”
It was like looking into a mirror. The same large gray eyes, the downturned mouth. Heart-shaped face. The large hands, folded into the lap of a blue smock. The sign on the wall above said, “Neglected Shades: Paintings from Paradise.”
*
Elle was crouching down now beside Marlise where she leaned back against the gallery wall, legs straight out on the floor before her in black tights. “Please don’t worry,” Marlise said. “I just found myself feeling a little panicky for some reason. I felt I had to sit down. It’s been a busy day, a full day. I’m just hungry, light-headed. I’m fine.”
Now Maddie was beside her, too, patting her scalp, her shoulders, squeezing her hands, trying to make light of her mother’s anxiety, but also clearly concerned. “Just do your Lamaze breathing,” she was saying. “You know, like whenever you have to go to a Department meeting.”
Marlise obliged. In through the nose to the count of three, out through the mouth to the count of six. “We’ll get our drink,” Maddie said. “We’ll do that, get a cocktail, and a snack, something to eat to tide us over. Or we could go right back to the hotel. Or call a doctor? That would be fine, too. Whatever you want.”
“I’m okay, I really am,” said Marlise, rising without the help of the two young women, brushing down her sweater, her skirt. “It’s been, I’ve, these are just very moving pieces. To me. It’s been a very moving kind of day.”
“Are you sure you’re okay,” Maddie said. “Because if you’re sure you are, I have one more thing I have to show you before we go.”
The room spun like a camera obscura as Maddie, holding Marlise’s elbow, why did Maddie always feel she, Marlise, needed direction, and Marlise feared it was the frail fact that she was getting older. She didn’t feel old. In fact, she suddenly felt quite young.
Maddie steered her through walls that pulsed around them, hung with window-like canvases of what looked like exotic, abstracted grids, fabrics, sewing scissors, paper lanterns, umbrellas. And then, well, it was amazing, yet there they were, gathered on one canvas, Marlise (“Look this really is you, just as you are now—the long white hair, the empty birdcage in your lap, with the open door, it’s exactly like your tattoo! And those prints you used to make!”) and also Silas himself, gray-haired but still alive and holding a palette and brush, and again the old man with the kind ice-blue/gray eyes seated in a chair in a blue smock, a woman beside him with one hand on his shoulder, the other clutching an opened crimson parasol, so like the one in Marlise’s one photograph of her mother Beatrice (“cochineal” she’d lied to Dr. Lance, so long ago; and where was that photo? Tucked in a book, she thought, so she must have shown that photo to Silas at some point—she must have shown him Bea). And of course the reference to “Paradise”—Silas knew well the name of her family’s farm. All those letters from him, so long ago, finding their way to her there. Ah, the letters. Where were they?
Stepping closer, looking harder at the older man in the painting, she recalled the other photograph, the one stuck for years behind the photo she had of her mother. The naked man with the kindled eyes. Friend of her mother’s apparently. This was that man.
“It’s uncanny,” Elle was murmuring, “the resemblance to you, Mrs. Miles. Truly. Of course, these were familial ‘shades,’ as he called them, apparently symbolic shadows of who knows what mythic ‘origin’ figures Silas Newman was conjuring after his shock therapies and his return to his parents’ home on the Continent. You can see the flat surfaces, the subtle destabilizing elements of Fairfield Porter’s domestic portraits, a bit of Kahlo with the symbolism, don’t you think? Still, how surprising.”
Miracle, is what Marlise thought, and then she laughed aloud. Maddie glanced at her, worried, but she laughed, too. Even Elle smiled. Then Marlise was crying, and the girls, the young women, were comforting her, leading her back out through the galleries to a proper chair.
They were solicitous and kind; surely they thought, it’s because she is Maddie’s mother and the city and all the winter walking have tired her. But Marlise felt far from weary. Another missive from Silas! A message to her, lo these many years. Had he imagined her finding this painting one day, decades into the future? He’d had the faith, she marveled, to imagine her old. Alive. I see you in all your ages, he had said. Daughter, mother, lover. It was his most eloquent gift, better even than the bristling, talismanic envelopes full of rant and fear and love he’d sent to her when she’d been banished to Paradise Close. This was his offering, generous and visionary. He’d created for her, for himself, for them, a family to come from.
How he had made the painting, where he’d made it, how he’d known about her mother’s photo (again, hadn’t it been tucked inside a book? How had he found it? And if he’d found it, where? when?), the umbrella, and whoever the old man was, with the gray and grateful, melancholy eyes—the man from the other photo—of course she wondered.
Somehow none of that mattered. Sitting in the semi-darkness, sipping tap water drawn into a plastic cup by Eleanor from the gallery bathroom, exhaust hum and cinder seeping in from the street, the fragrance of broiled chops and sherry from the restaurants below the High Line, the lacquer odor of the gallery desk, its pile of catalogs, Silas’s paintings all around them, Marlise acknowledged and forgave herself at last for her many secrets, and for the way she knew she would continue to keep them. She forgave herself her blind spots, her Leviathan denial, her repression—and also all that she could never discern, all that she had striven and strove to hide or protect. She forgave herself her great good fortune, the luck of living and of having been loved by a precocious, paranoid boy and an ardent poet. And especially the luck of bearing and knowing and loving this beautiful daughter now propping open the gallery door with her sketchbook to let in the fresh cold evening and give her tired, usually reserved, now emotionally overcome mother some air.
And that was the thing about the self, Marlise continued to think (was she actually thinking? Forming thoughts? Silas, Tee, Maddie, perhaps they’d all laugh at her for doubting that she could). The child self, the emerging self, the aging self, any self—is always imperiled. Yet if it is glass-like in its break-ability, its fragility, it is also glass-like in its tensility. Its obscurity, its clarity. Both. Its view out, its mirror in. Again, both. Why do some get to live, to survive and thrive, and some do not? Why are some brought into the light, some blighted by shadow, history, circumstance? Some rescued? Some left behind, forgotten? Why are some saved, and saved and saved again, only to be lost forever? Why are some utterly and for so long lost, only to be graciously, profoundly found?
Silas was not lost, especially not to Marlise, not now. Nor had he lost sight of her. Though time had stopped him, or he’d tried to stop time, even he must have known that a part of each person belongs to the not-Time; it is what is in us before and beyond the whatever that we’re born into and expire out of, eluding time’s reach. The way Marlise loved that . . . prism, sky . . . whatever one wants to call it—in Maddie before she was born, and how Maddie would love and know it in her after she, Marlise, had died. This is how Beatrice and her father must have loved her, Marlise, though they hardly knew one another at all.
And this, of course, was how she’d also loved and continued to love both Silas and Tee despite the ways in which they had been forced to abandon one another. Gathering herself, Marlise recalled something she’d seen framed at the Dickinson exhibit earlier in the day, a fragment—a draft?—Dickinson had written on a scrap of rough wrapping paper. Marlise had copied it out on the back of her program, observing Dickinson’s line breaks with slashes. Poems will be letters, letters poems, someone said. Paintings, too, she thought. Paintings will be letters. She recalled the Dickinson passage now, something to do with how we need to read our lives in reverse because trying to understand them forwards is incomprehensible, overwhelming (later, she’d find the exact text as she’d recorded it, “Did you ever / read one of / her Poems back— / ward, because / the plunge from / the front over— / turned you? / I sometimes / often have / many times have— / A something overtakes the / Mind”).
Dickinson had been talking about poems, not life. Whose poems did Dickinson mean, though? Browning maybe. Or Brontë. She’d have to look that up. But, really, what poem? Whose self? Whose story? Her own?
At that very moment, a middle-aged couple who had fallen in love at work were sitting at a table in the juniper-paneled tasting room of the Winery de Paradise Clos in southern New Jersey, raising a glass to their surprised and grateful belief in second chances. As they did so, a blue heron 500 yards away lifted from the splatter-docks along the icy Rancocas. An ancient, three-legged turtle stirred in its muddy winter sleep near an abandoned marina along the brackish shore. Down the creek and across the Delaware, in the last ingot of the day’s winter sun over Philadelphia, a young woman who worked as a medical claims adjustor in an insurance office in what once been the psychiatric wing of a progressive adolescent mental hospital, gathered her headscarf against the cold and headed for the parking lot, thinking about how glad she was that it was Friday. In the building that had housed Uncle Fritz’s bakery until the early 20th-century, a baby took its first steps across the floor of a subsidized housing loft. Back in Trenton, Zeno Mastrogiovanni, an aged lifer at the New Jersey State Prison, sat in an overheated corner of the cafeteria, his mind ravaged by dementia. On a Virginia lumber road deep in the wilds of Orphan Mountain, the rusted chassis of a car that once crashed, suicidally, into a tree in the midst of a wild autumn storm now bristled with squirrel nests in a shroud of kudzu. Behind a small grocery store, W.C. Caperton and his wife were tinkering among vats of offal in a refrigerated shed, dreaming of a cure for the cancer that had killed their infant son. In the English basement of a large estate, an aging, lonely man with a gray ponytail and thick glasses sat at the kitchen table and allowed a woman, a very real woman who had forgotten that she once wanted to die, a woman now sitting beside him, to fasten around his wrist a bracelet made of threaded wire and the needle hands and notched face plates of old watches. Throughout the world, the ashes of Silas Newman, long ago dissolved into Lake Geneva, flooded into and out of the luscious, first cause of the cosmos. Back in Manhattan, a graphic artist named Asa, still at her desk, checked her phone to see if her girlfriend had texted to confirm their dinner reservation. And stepping out into the street with Maddie’s arm around her, Marlise felt as though she’d emerged from the great, unlooked for charity of reading her own life backwards. A journey that, for one moment, over-turned and overtook time.