​The Shadowbox, by K. J. McNamara

Untitled (Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall, by Joseph Cornell (USA) 1945

​The Shadowbox

Cornell sat in an Adirondack chair under the shade of the quince tree in his backyard. The chair was gray and weathered, much like himself, but it was comfortable in the way old wooden objects often were: firm, reassuring, present in the moment. For someone whose work was rooted in the past, this chair was an anchor in the now, although the idea of “now,” he found, was often a slippery proposition.
            
What did he know for sure? He knew it was hot and that the date was July of 1967. He could hear the movement of traffic from the boulevard and the song of robins in the tree and a droning lawnmower or two. He was reasonably certain it was around three in the afternoon and that he was not in the slightest bit hungry, although the last thing he had had to eat was at seven that morning, a slight meal consisting of a thin piece of chocolate cake and a glass of milk. The grass behind his house probably needed to be mowed. He was unconcerned by this. A few gnats gently teased his face. He crossed his legs at the knee. He wore an off-white, button-down, short-sleeved shirt, brown trousers, and brown lace-up Florsheim’s. 
            
Sleep pulled at his eyelids. He’d been in his basement working for most of the day. He was the last of his family. His mother had passed the previous fall, and his poor wheelchair-bound brother the year before. His assistant had the day off.
            
What else did he know? Death was approaching. His clothes, always a size too big, ballooned around him as if he were made of nothing more than wooden sticks. He was fading. Dissolving. His body was a living act of mummification. He was constantly startled by the sight of his ancient hands.
            
A robin split the air and glided onto a sunny spot of grass, cocked its head, and listened. He stared at it. Its eyes were infinitely deep black holes. The unblinking character of birds had always fascinated him. He was unsure whether their serene staring was merely a biological act of vigilance against predators or something else, possibly other-worldly. Surely, he thought, a bird could daydream. Could it relive its raptor ancestry in eternal self-examination? It certainly saw what there was to see: the trees, grass, power-lines, other birds, feral cats, the infinite city. A bird could not function without this ability; otherwise, it’d be a mere blind bat. What intrigued him was the possibility of overlay, of its bird-sight mapped onto some secret matrix of birdness that was at once seeing and an interpretation. In short, a whole other world. To blink was to lose this double-image, to lose, in fact, the world beyond the world. It seemed to Cornell that this world was obviously precious to them, these watchers.
            
            
Of course, birds could travel. They could see the world beyond the boundaries of Utopia Parkway, beyond Queens. They could see the past overlaid by the growing city, the trees that were never felled, the undulations of land and river. It was safe to assume they could see things one cannot. 
He often imagined that birds were somehow inhabited by the spirits of the recently deceased, perhaps enraptured within those tiny bird skulls as they swooped and soared unblinkingly above the curve of the Earth, pure joyful flight of souls now unencumbered by the petty worries of tick-tock time, gravity, and death itself.
            
And when the bird met its own inevitable end? What of the soul inside? Was it transferred to another bird for further amazing adventures in the sky, more delectable meals of worm and moth and berry? Or was the soul, after this sojourn in an avian way-station, sent on its merry way down the line to the next stop of the ineffable?
            
When he used wooden parrots in his art, they all had one eye directed at the viewer.
An image of a train now came to him. There was no logical connection of a train with a bird, so there must be something illogical and deeper linking the two. Or so he liked to think. 
            
He did not particularly like trains, although he had ridden them most of his life. They were convenient to get into and out of Manhattan. In and of themselves, they were fine and functional. They held no magic for him, as they seemed to do for others; Magritte, for example. The steam-engine bursting from the fireplace, one he had used in a construction, bore the frisson of superposition, like the first bite of cake on a stale tongue or the sight of a beautiful woman amid a crowd of otherwise quite ordinary humanity. 

However, his constructions had become a bit tedious to him. Too much work, too much repetition. It was expected that he make boxes. He wanted the unexpected. He wanted to fall in love.  
            
The bird was gone, the shadows crept deeper into the yard, and all the lawnmowers and traffic and jets far above, and even distant trains, roared as if making noise were their prime concern. 
            
He sat up in the chair and wiped a thin rivulet of drool from his chin. A blue and white ball suddenly came bouncing into his yard via his empty driveway and settled into the tall grass near where the robin had landed oh-so-long ago. The ball was interesting. It was plastic and bright. He thought it might do something for him.
            
He could hear footsteps coming nearer, then slowing and tentatively shuffling.
            
A girl appeared in his yard. Her hair was brown and long, her face tanned by the summer sun, her knees scabbed by concrete experience. She wore a halter top bearing the image of a winking cat’s face, a pair of red shorts, and dirty sandals on her equally dirty feet. He could see from clear across the yard (and perhaps time) that her eyes were wide and brilliant.
            
“Mr. Cornell?”
            
“Hello, Rosie.” She was a child from across the street. He knew most of his neighbors. He’d been here for decades.
            
“Joey threw my ball over here. Can I get it?”
            
Cornell set his scrawny arms under him and pushed, standing. “Oh, certainly,” he said, the yard wobbling slightly as his blood pressure swooped and dipped for a moment. “It’s right over here, actually.” He pointed a thin finger and shuffled in the ball’s direction.
            
A voice called from behind and beyond Rosie, who turned and bellowed, “Shut up already, I’m getting it!” and then turned back to resume her affable, adult demeanor. She was ten. She stepped further into the yard.
            
“I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Cornell.” Her mother had told her that he was some crazy old artist, polite in his way. What he was doing living out here, instead of glamorous Manhattan, was anyone’s guess. 
            
“Oh, not at all, not at all,” said Cornell. Their vectors met at the intersection of the ball but neither picked it up. Rosie looked around the yard, analyzing. This was the yard of an artist? It looked like every other yard she’d ever seen. There was a tree, a couple of old chairs, grass, a fence, and a brick apartment building just beyond. 
            
Cornell studied her eyes. A moment of dizzying recognition stirred him.
            
He was sure. They were exactly the same. He was amazed that he’d never noticed it before.
            
“Did anyone ever tell you,” he said, placing his hands on his knees and bending down, “that your eyes are identical to Lauren Bacall’s?”
            
“Who?”
            
“She was an actress. Is, still, I believe. A very, very beautiful woman.”
            
Rosie stared at the tip of Cornell’s nose. “Oh. Thank you. You don’t look like no one.” Her eyes shifted to study his forehead. “Maybe a praying mantis.”
            
Cornell thought he did indeed look like a praying mantis. He thought he should feel delighted by this correlation of a personal observation. However, he felt his face flush and drew his shoulders in as he uncurved his spine. Once, at the 42nd Street library, a passing woman had pointed out to him that he had a stain on his necktie. In horror, he looked down and saw a longish streak that at first sight very much resembled an errant bird-dropping, but on later reflection was probably some pistachio ice cream from lunch. An audible “Oooo” escaped his lips, an “Oh” that had morphed into a note of despair when he raised the tie between two delicately pincering fingers as if lifting a dead mouse.
            
“That’ll come out with a little club soda, I bet,” said the unhelpful woman in the lobby of the library known (and depended on by Cornell) for its sombre air of dignified learning.
            
He could only mumble a “thank you” and flee to the nearest men’s room, where he quickly removed the befouled tie from beneath his bright red face and stuffed it into his jacket pocket. He stood at the sink and stared at his reflection until he thought that the woman had gone from the lobby.
            
He now pointed indifferently at the ball at his feet. “There it is,” he said and turned back to his chair. The sun had just gone behind the apartment house, bathing the square backyard in shadow.
            
Rosie said, “Are you mad at me?”
            
“Not at all,” he said over his shoulder, resisting the urge to stuff his hands in his pockets and slink away as he had on so many other embarrassing occasions when dealing with women.
            
“You could show me her picture,” said Rosie.
            
Cornell paused, a foot from his chair. He looked back. Rosie had the ball in her hands. She appeared to be genuinely worried that she had offended him. 
            
“I have some photographs of her inside, if you’d like.”
            
Rosie dropped the ball at her feet. “OK. I like going in other people’s houses.”
            
“Do you?” said Cornell, somewhat mystified. “Why is that?”
            
She shrugged. “I’m nosy. You need to cut your grass, you know.”
            
“Hmm.” He began his shuffle to the backdoor, Rosie following just behind him idly humming the notes to a song.
            
“Rosie!” A slightly younger and male version of Rosie poked his head around the corner of the house. “Whaddayadoin?” At the site of ancient Cornell, the boy’s eyes widened as they always did, as if surprised to see a corpse walking around. He chirped, “Hiya, Mr. C.”
            
“Hello, Joey.”
            
“We’re going in to look at some pictures of a famous actress. You wanna come?” said Rosie.
            
“Where’s the ball?”
            
Rosie pointed and Joey ran to grab it. “Is it OK I don’t come in, Mr. C?”
            
“Certainement, Monsieur,” said Cornell with a smile that did nothing to improve the cadaverous features of his face.
            
“Huh?”
            
“That’s FRENCH, moron,” spat Rosie. 
            
“I thought he was like us,” said Joey, frowning at Cornell. “Ain’t you American?”
            
Cornell said, “As apple pie.”
            
Could these two have been his children? Could he have been a father? He could think so, but the image that came to his mind was remote, flat, and false, like the buildings of Manhattan glimpsed from a moving train some miles away, potentially real yet existing somehow only over there, like stars light-years from Earth, unreachable. 
            
The kitchen was dark and cool, like walking into a cave. Rosie was instructed to sit at the metal table while Cornell disappeared down the basement stairs. Two cake boxes sat on the cluttered counter. The refrigerator, which looked as old as Cornell, wheezed in the corner. The house did not have an odor. She found this odd. In all the homes of friends and relatives she had entered in her short life, every one of them offered some sort of smell. Mr. Cornell’s house was absent any odor, except perhaps a faint trace of paper or wood. That was all. 
            
As quietly as she could, she tiptoed over to the refrigerator and pulled the curved handle, revealing a bottle of milk, some bottles of soda-pop, and pats of restaurant butter in a bowl. No wonder the guy was so thin, she thought. The stove looked unused. She peeked inside the oven door and blinked in wonder at the bird nests clustered on the wire racks. She counted four. The sink was full of very clean glassware. The white Masonite counter with the cake boxes also held bags of peanuts, little toys from the five and dime, bottle caps, postcards from somewhere not America, marbles. The curtain over the sink was drawn and the cupboards contained plates and dry-goods that looked like they had been put there in 1940 and not touched since.
            
She sat once more at the table piled with papers and drawings and magazines, some of which she idly flipped through, looking at the pictures, wondering what was taking the old man so long.
            
At some point, as the kitchen darkened and her stomach rumbled, she put down a hand-drawn picture of an elephant balancing on a ball (Robert Cornell was signed at the bottom) and wondered what time it was and how long she had been sitting here in the quiet, when music began to seep up through the kitchen linoleum from the basement below. Rosie decided to investigate.

At the bottom of the cellar staircase, she found Cornell standing completely still before a workbench, staring at the floor joists above his head, surrounded by shelves stuffed with shoeboxes bearing hand-written descriptions of their contents: buttons, twigs, balls. A record was playing on an old wind-up player in the corner. 

Rosie did not want to disturb him, he looked so happy. Instead, she allowed her curiosity to lead her around the basement, and ran her fingers over boxes with glass lids that held all sorts of wonders. She had no idea what all this stuff meant or why it was down here. 
            
Soon, Cornell noticed her. He said in a voice even more ethereal than his usual, “Let me show you this.”
            
Rosie stepped over to him, where the light was brighter. The smell of dust tickled her nose. Cornell moved aside to reveal, on the bench next to the record player, the picture of a woman with shoulder length hair and an intense yet alluring stare, directed not at the viewer but somewhere off to her left.
            
“Who’s that?”
            
“That is Lauren Bacall. The film actress I was telling you about. Your eyes and her eyes are remarkably similar. Do you see?”  
            
She bent closer. The woman had eyes, all right, but she didn’t see any resemblance to hers. Then again, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d really looked at her own eyes. 

Rosie then considered Cornell, bent over her shoulder. He smelled like nothing, like his house. His thin lips were compressed into something similar to a smile, a small intensity of pleasure.
            
She said, “Yeah, look at that. Pretty neat.” 
            
“Rosie,” Cornell said softly. “Do you know how delighted I would be to meet this woman?”
            
For a moment, Rosie felt the unfamiliar impulse to run away. It suddenly occurred to her that she was in the basement of a strange house, alone with a man who may not be (in the words of her hard-bitten grandfather) “right in the head.”
            
And then his eyes focused on hers and it was like staring into the eyes of an infant or a baby bird. Her brother had eyes like that when he was little, eyes that were fascinated and sad at the same time. Perhaps Cornell’s were sadder than most. 
            
She said, “Are you lonely?”
            
His faint smile did not disappear. He straightened up and drew his arm around the room, gathering into this gesture the many boxes and cups and treasures and weird glass boxes that contained birds and dolls and glass cups and the stars. 

“How could I ever be lonely with all of this?” he said. 

Reaching up one skeletal arm, he withdrew from the rows of objects a rectangular wooden box, fronted with glass, and said, “I would like you to have this.”

The interior of the box held a blue, imprecisely painted wooden grid. There were twelve squares in all and pictures of Lauren Bacall at various ages were in four of them, taken from old magazines and pasted onto the back of the box. The rest of the squares contained a menagerie of small but eye-catching objects: a chartreuse glass ball, a wooden block etched with a cockatoo in profile, a tangle of copper wire, a worn wooden bobbin, a simple nickel ring hanging from a white painted dowel, a sealed glass jar containing a broken. The square at the lower right was empty. 

Rosie took the box, struck with wonder. She had heard that Cornell made such things, but it seemed that the box was ancient, like something he had dug up. The wooden sides were chipped and discolored; the joinery imprecise. It felt like holding history.

He said, “This is an early attempt with Ms. Bacall. My later constructions were much more…resonant, I believe.”

“And I can have it?”

“Certainly.”

“Okay. Thanks.” 

Rosie didn’t tell her family about the box. She managed to sneak it into her house across the street and up into her bedroom without being seen; her brother was down the block roughhousing with some kids from Crocheron Avenue, her mother in the kitchen working on supper. She slid her treasure under her bed as far as it could go, almost to the wall but not so far that she couldn’t reach it. 

She knew, instinctively, that what Cornell had given her was precious, even though the box itself was kind of a wreck. She did not want to share it with anyone, not even her own family. It wasn’t that she was worried that her mother might insist she give it back, or that her brother might destroy it (although there was always that possibility). What she’d discovered was that her eyes did indeed look very much like Bacall’s. She’d gone into the bathroom soon after shoving the box under her bed, and stood on the stool she used when brushing her hair, peering into her eyes in the toothpaste flecked mirror over the sink for so long her mother knocked on the door asking her if she had fallen in. Staring back at her were the same eyes that Lauren Bacall had in the pictures in the box. 

From then on, once a day, she would slide the box out from beneath her bed and study the oddly soothing collection of contents, study the pictures of Bacall, then study her reflection in the mirror. She happened to catch Key Largo while she was flipping through the channels one rainy Saturday afternoon and sat mesmerized as she watched her own eyes squint through cigarette smoke at tough, skinny hero Frank, or drip hatred at the bad guy Johnny Rocco. Joey tried to change the TV to the Three Stooges when she went into the kitchen for a snack during a commercial and she slapped his hand so hard her mother sent her to her room until supper.

Rosie’s fascination with Bacall’s eyes slowly dimmed, as the vicissitudes of life brought new concerns and interests to the foreground.

Cornell’s box sat neglected, and ultimately forgotten, under the far corner of her bed. Cornell himself died in his sleep a few years later but Rosie, in high school by then and deeply enmeshed in the day-to-day dramas of boyfriends and school-work, barely noticed his passing, or the fact that his house across the street was soon up for sale.

After graduating, she got a job as a receptionist for an internist and eventually moved out of Queens and into an apartment in Midtown with a friend who had a job with an advertising firm on Madison Avenue. She took her clothes, her makeup, her books and her records, but she completely forgot about Cornell’s box under her bed. Years later, on her second marriage and fourth kid in Hackensack, she came across a newspaper advertisement for a retrospective exhibit of the works of Joseph Cornell at the Museum of Modern Art. She thought briefly about taking her youngest (who liked to draw) into the city to see it, but she never got around to it. 

Every once in a while, though, when things were tough, when the children from her first marriage pretended that she didn’t exist, or the scare she endured after finding a lump in her breast after her fortieth birthday, she would retreat to the bathroom and lock the door and stare at her eyes until she could see Lauren Bacall’s again.

Her mother, alone in an apartment too big for her (Joey had left soon after Rosie), decided that it would be nice to be closer to her sister in Union City, so one day in the summer of 1984 she packed up everything she wanted to take and set everything else out on the curb. When she pulled out Cornell’s dust-covered box from under Rosie’s childhood bed, she had no idea what it was supposed to be. She knew, of course, that there had been a famous artist who used to live across the street, but as she had little interest in the arcane world of art, and had always been somewhat repelled by the sight of pallid Cornell, she had never investigated his work. She assumed that the box was some long-forgotten school project of Rosie’s and promptly took it down to the curb and chucked it atop the old suitcase with the broken hasp, the toaster that only toasted one slice of bread, wads of clothing from early in her failed marriage, and all the unwanted remnants of a life lived for over twenty years on Utopia Parkway.

A cardinal alighted on an overhanging branch of a near-by oak tree. After assessing the situation for a few moments, carefully studying the passing traffic, listening to the roar of the train on 39th Avenue and the steady thwock thwock thwock of a tennis ball being thrown by a child against a brick wall somewhere, the cardinal summed up its observations with a squirt of shit that fell precisely onto the glass lid of the box, partly obscuring Lauren Bacall’s face and her piercing, knowing eyes. Then it flew away.
 
K. J. McNamara

K. J. McNamara is a former chemist and science teacher living in Binghamton, NY. His stories have appeared in Coneflower Café and Apricity Magazine.