I think it is hungry, my father says at last.
My mother awakens then and is cross. Her nipples are red and sore. It’s biting me something awful, the beast.
At last she feeds me, briefly, before laying me back down and returning to bed herself.
• • •
As is true of all things distant and desirable, the farther away she moves, the more we want her back. We are in the bedroom, my father and I, amid the chaos of disheveled sheets and squandered pillows, sunlight and rose vines knitting a shadow trellis up the wall—my father is at the window, looking out—a silhouette against the windowpane. Where is she? Where can she have gone? Another day: I am in my pram, she has tucked me in herself, her hands gentle but uninterested, her curls tickling my face, her perfume my nose; she parks me on the cobblestones in the yard, just outside the back door, and then she recedes, hands and curls and perfume disappearing into the periphery of my swaddled vision, which has no real periphery, no side to side or back, only an above, straight above. I gaze up into the sky. Her figure receding, receding, gone.
A seagull passes.
Another.
Another.
Many in succession.
Eventually Leo emerges from his shed, sees his baby left alone in the pram in the center of the yard, and wheels her back into the kitchen.
• • •
A hot day in August. Roses wilting on the vines.
• • •
Clotilde, later, is petulant, grows vague when scolded.
I’ve been to Mr. Kiersta’s. Nothing fits me anymore.
But you left baby in the yard.
Did I? Did I do that?
Blinking rapidly, in confusion, her delicate blond lashes.
I’m sure I wouldn’t, Leo. I wouldn’t do that.
• • •
She did do it; but we forgive her. Like a planet, distant and revered, she has moved away from us for a while; her orbit has taken her away; this is only to be expected; now she has returned. Supplicants that we are, we dare demand no more. Indeed, we are grateful. My father subsides in his scolding; my mother takes me up into her cool, noncommittal hands, loosens my wrapper just enough to see that I am not sunburned, then puts me back down. Turns away. Turns her back.
And is forgiven.
• • •
Where will she go, my mother, in the new dress of yellow lace that Lars Kiersta is going to make her? Where is she going, her bootheels ringing on the cobblestones, as she retreats up Bridge Street, away from us, toward the town?
• • •
It’s a mystery. Throughout my childhood it will remain so. What I remember is a constant game of hide-and-seek, seek and find; even now, when I think about her, she retreats before me, memory itself is rendered unstable, is itself a thing sought and not found. In memory I pursue my mother through the three small pentagonal rooms that comprise my world, searching her out among the remains of my grandfather’s collection, which, increasingly, migrate out of the shed and into the house. My mother is always hiding: receding behind a stack of specimen trays, or the tawny ocelot with its fierce eyes of yellow glass, or else she is sifting with her pale, elegant fingers through a tray of ancient Persian amulets in semiprecious stone, or arranging on our dining table, as if she thinks she can reassemble them, shards of Roman terra-cotta decorated with a fish, an octopus, a lion, a goat. She is caressing the remains of her father’s world, willing them into coherence with gentle feather-strokes of her cold, elegant fingers. Like me, she is trying to reassemble the past. But the pieces don’t fit, won’t cohere. She lives among them in my memory as if in a museum, surrounding herself, as closely as she can, with the artifacts of her father’s world, as if these things, beautiful and cold as she is herself, can compensate her for her double loss—the loss of her father, and the loss of her hopes of leaving Whitby in search of him.