The Shadow Catcher

Which is to say that life with her was, by turns, life with Vivien Leigh playing Scarlett O’Hara and Vivien Leigh as Clytemnestra.

Landscape shaped her: the farther north my mother went, the more Scarlett she seemed; the farther south, the Greek-er.

She would get into the backseat of the car in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, go to sleep and emerge six or seven hours later in Hopewell, Virginia, a different version of herself. Maybe that’s what going back to the place of your birth always does to someone, but I used to think that sleeping all the way through Maryland must have exacted an effect on her — she must have traded Marys there, one Mary for another, in that land of all those Marys.

The journey her parents made in their migratory flight from Greece seemed to have depleted their travel genes because they neither one went back to Greece, nor did Mary, nor did she tolerate any kind of journey well. The road put her right out. Ten minutes into a road trip, Mary was snoring — loud and full of drama, even in her sleep. If we stopped at a traffic light or a stop sign, the halt would never interrupt her rhythm, but every time we made a left-hand turn, her snoring stopped abruptly, then picked up again after a minute. Through a city, through Baltimore or Washington, for example, John could keep her quiet for a full ten or fifteen minutes by executing a series of sinistrally directed detours, but eventually we’d hit a stretch of open road and the snoring would start up again. If it got too loud, John would hum or start to whistle, sometimes sing, and the breathing from the backseat, though still heavy and deep, would be peaceful.

The drive had all these syncopations, then — the percussion of the asphalt road, the alternating rhythms of the landscape braiding, like convergent channels of a river, through divergent threads of time, history into the present moment; and the sounds of Mary snoring. Repetition was a rhythm, too: the more we traveled this same road, the more memories we had of ourselves in this landscape. We were doubling, multiplying as we went — especially John and Mary, going back and forth along a road they’d traveled for years, ever since they were married. Maybe that’s why Mary slept — so her past would stay, as new. So she wouldn’t have to see it all, again; watch it change, before her eyes — see the changes in the landscape. But John searched as he drove — I learned that from him, a kind of leaning forward at the wheel, trying to imagine whatever was out there, trying to inhabit what he could or could not see out in the distance. It was the future he was searching — that’s the mechanics of the road: the horizon line awaits, a destination, where you’re going. It’s the line of possibility. For John, driving south from Pennsylvania meant driving toward his own remembered past and the pasts of others in his family; transacting with his ghosts. It was a journey through both now, and then. The North, the South. All the Johns, and all the Marys (in and out of Maryland). Only Mary and Joseph surpass the coupled names of John and Mary as clichés in American Christendom. They’re the Dick and Jane of married couples. John and Mary. See Spot run. Run, John. And marry Mary.