Earthquake I.D.

Chapter Seven

120 EarthquakE I.D. Chapter Seven The days that followed, the days and the nights, had Barbara thinking often of her childhood visits to Manhattan. Bedtime had felt different over at her mother’s cousins’ place off Lafayette. That branch of the family lived with another world of night noise. Little Barba-bella had come across the East River before her mother ran away, but it was after the disappearance that Barb had spent the nights that now came back to her with the greatest intensity. On those nights she’d been hustled over to the old Little Italy because there’d been word of a lead, a possibility. And in the second-story front space of the cousins’ brownstone, formerly her Mama’s bedroom, the traffic spoke to the visiting girl. Barbara would notice the heart-of-the-borough rumble when she was left alone to slip into her nightshirt, that tender cotton, and her eyes would follow the pattern of the headlights coming through the blinds, a yellow surf across ceiling and wall. She’d pick up the noise in the morning too, before her cousin poked her head into the room and began to wheedle, like the soothing fussbudget she was, about getting dressed for Sunday Mass. During the night, in the streets towards Roosevelt Park, the machinery sometimes offered a bit that she could identify. There might be a horn going off, a truck gearing up, or the squawk and clomp of a dented door. But Barba-bella could hear that sort of thing over in Carroll Gardens. Around her mother’s former home, rather, the night growled through risings and fallings that the daughter couldn’t understand, and she loved the sound precisely for that, because she could never get her mind around it all, because it contained the ignition, transmission, and brake of too, too many others to know. In that motor noise beyond the narrow brick-framed windows, there resided possibilities so wild that her preteen self could no more limit them to particular car parts than she could tuck her fertile visitor’s dreams into neat stories over 121 John Domini the morning orange juice. Rather the whole overnight sequence, the horsepower coil that wheeled her into sleep and the sapphire glints left behind when she woke—all this she could only give the shape of hope itself. In the city she heard so much energy at work, at large, that she had to believe some part of it would complete its trek. Some part of that mumbling runaround always made it the entire long way out wherever it had to go and then back again; it returned to the girl, to the pillow-space beside her, chuckling in an accent and smelling faintly of cheese and olives. The Manhattan traffic had done more for her than any other night-time soundtrack, including that of the good Bridgeport neighborhood where she’d lived as a five-star Mom. She had to admit, too, that the intervening years had hardly felt devoid of happiness. She’d even taken the same fractious reassurance in the stories at the Samaritan Center, the uproar of guilts and resentments that always somewhere revealed, improbably, and if only they could see it, fulfillment for the people involved. Also there were evenings when Barbara found the same comfort in Naples. The Vomero wasn’t so bourgeois that you didn’t get people driving at night. Even after the uproar at Castel dell’Ovo, and even with the chatter of the troops beneath her balcony, she had sleepy moments carried along within the infinite circumnavigations of a vast motor-driven flock, the same as had cradled her ear and spirit years ago in Lower Manhattan. Buildings and people. Downtown palaver without end, forever making the rounds. Not that, now as they came up on three weeks in the city, the mother could forget the trouble she’d seen the first time she looked at a map. Whatever good she might get from the night traffic, in daylight Barbara was barely coping. Five days after dell’Ovo, her counterespionage, she found herself once more trailing behind the Lieutenant-Major. She’d discovered his secret, his and Jay’s and yet nearly a week had gone by with her doing next to nothing about it. This morning again, she followed the NATO plan. And her children too. The family, minus Jay and plus Kahlberg, were all getting their photograph taken on the...