Deep Vellum Publishing
3000 Commerce St., Dallas, Texas 75226
deepvellum.org • @deepvellum
Deep Vellum is a 501c3 nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 2013 with the mission to bring the world into conversation through literature.
Copyright © 2018 Mathilde Walter Clark and JP/Politikens Hus A/S
in agreement with Politiken Literary Agency
Translation copyright © 2021 by Martin Aitken and K. E. Semmel
Originally published in Danish by Politikens Forlag, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2018
first edition, 2021
All rights reserved.
Support for this publication has been provided in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Danish Arts Foundation.
The author worked on final drafts of this novel and was introduced to the publisher while a resident at 100 West – Corsicana Artist and Writer Residency in Corsicana, Texas.
ISBN: 978-1-64605-063-5 (paperback) | 978-1-64605-064-2 (ebook)
library of congress control number: 2021938839
Cover Design by Justin Childress | justinchildress.co
Interior by KGT
Printed in the United States of America
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
To my father and my mother
Contents
I. Memory Book
II. Travel Book
I
Memory Book
It is, as she said, difficult to describe someone since memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows.
marilynne robinson, Housekeeping
Can I mourn people who are still alive?
linn ullmann, Unquiet
my dad is the astronaut who returns home at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. He sees himself sitting up in a big bed, one minute he’s a child, the next an old man. His face behind the visor of his space helmet says: What happened to all that time?
My dad saw the movie with my mother before I was born, in the movie theater on Lindell Boulevard. It was when they were living in St. Louis, and even though he was only in his early thirties at the time he knew right away that the figure he saw on the screen was him, that he was all three of them, the child, the old man, the astronaut, and that the scene would haunt him for the rest of his life. Even before Kubrick made his movie, my dad had seen the same images in his mind. They held a dreadful realization, that we are powerless against time. No amount of scientific discovery, not even the sum of all the knowledge in the world can change that. Not even if he and all the other physicists climbed onto the shoulders of all the physicists who had gone before them would they be able to do a thing about it. In the blink of an eye it is all over.
Time is the great mystery, he said to me once, maybe the only mystery. If only we could understand time, we could understand it all.
I was only a teenager, unable to feel it yet. But it would come, he promised. 2001 is really the story of life, he said. If I stepped backwards and narrowed my eyes, I might sense them: eons of time, washing over us.
the last time i saw my dad was when I visited him in the house his wife had bought on a whim in Belgium. It was in August last year in a small town without anything in particular to recommend it, no places of interest, nothing to look at, nowhere to go.
My dad’s wife had turned several of the rooms into bathrooms, and the living room made me think of the kind of museums where they rope off the furniture. As in St. Louis, she had furnished the place in such a way that there was nowhere to sit down together, the only thing close was the nook in the sunroom where we had our meals and where three low wicker chairs stood around a high glass-topped table with a thick basketwork base that meant you couldn’t get your legs in properly.
Artificial flowers, draped curtains that spilled onto the floor. A fridge with food items past their use-by dates. Everywhere the same sickly sweet, dusty air I remember from the house in St. Louis.
After they picked me up from the railway station and we arrived at the house, my dad asked if I wanted to go for a walk with him and their little white Maltese dog, Molly. We hadn’t seen each other for a year, but his wife immediately got her jacket to go with us. We walked down the street toward the canal, and as we passed an area of shrubs and trees enclosed by a low wall, my dad’s wife looked at me and announced in her heavy Dutch accent that it was the cemetery. And then, as if it were some peculiar custom she had just discovered practiced by the locals in this Belgian backwater, she told me that people came there every day to visit their dead relatives.
They cöme and they park all over the street. She gesticulated to indicate the street as she spoke.
To visit dead people! And they bring flovers too.
To the dead people!
Can you believe that?
And then, as if on further reflection, she told me I could go there myself and visit her grave after she died.
That, more than anything, unsettled me. What did she imagine? That she would be buried here, far from my dad and their children and grandchildren in St. Louis, in a town where she knew no one? And did she think I would come and visit her grave? Did she think I’d come here to see her?
At any rate, in the week I was there it was hard to find a moment alone with my dad. Every morning she would ask restlessly: What do you vant to do today? And neither of us had the guts to say we just wanted to spend some time on our own together. To hang out in front of the computer, maybe find a used bookstore with some muggy boxes we could rummage in. But instead she arranged excursions, the purpose of which evaded us. She dragged us around the streets of outlying villages and asked us what we wanted to see now that we were here. Neither of us knew what to say, having no inclination whatsoever to trudge about in such dull and empty places, it was she who had taken us there, we had simply followed.
You mean, we came all this way for nöthing?
She was seething. We’d painted ourselves into a corner.
So now you just vant to go beck?
If you want, my dad replied nervously.
No matter what we did, we painted ourselves into corners.
The rest of the time we spent at the computer in his room, a converted garage where he had his bed and his desk. We visited dead relatives on Google. My dad had reached the age where the past, even the past he had never personally known, had come alive. In recent years he had taken an interest in genealogy.
We went on Google Maps and found Ruby Ranch, not far from the place in Texas where my dad grew up. It was there, on Ruby Ranch, that he and my mother once visited a wealthy relative. My mother has told me about it many times, how my dad’s Uncle Cecil had sat at the end of the dining table, a true Texas patriarch, a wrathful, inebriated highway king used to having his own way, how everyone else had sat there silent and submissive, his wife and children, servants cowering in the background. Outside the windows his property stretched out into infinity, it took a ride in an off-roader to even get to the house from the entrance gate. He insisted my mother drink whiskey with her meal, and my mother refused. She was pregnant with me. His hysteria spiraled. At one point he was so desperate he took out his wallet and offered her money. From where my mother was seated she could see the servants, a Black married couple, the man a kind of butler, his wife the cook, standing watching from the kitchen, their faces twisted with shame at the way the master of the house was behaving so he could have things his way. But my mother won. It was not a question
of money, not even a question of having it her way, but of keeping sound judgment in the face of madness.
Later, they would refer to it as the Tennessee Williams Night. Now, many years on, the son, my dad’s deceased cousin, has turned his part of the estate into something they call the Ruby Ranch neighborhood, an entire residential area of smaller ranches on private roads. We Google-Mapped about there for a while. The roads are named after the family: Walter Circle, Humphrey’s Drive, Clark Cove …
I looked at my dad’s hands at the keyboard. It’s not just that I’ve been waiting for something from those hands all my life, waiting or hoping, there’s something else too. It’s as if they hold some kind of an answer. The way they move, the pronounced joints. I’ve always spent time looking at my dad’s hands. They were busy digging in the past, but it seemed to me there was still a lot of life hidden in those hands, many stories still to be told, and I hoped that some of them involved me.
One evening, when all three of us were seated around the glass-topped table in the sunroom, conducting the nervy kind of dinner conversation that occurs when the field of discussion is littered with all manner of mines and traps, my dad’s wife found out that my stepfather back home in Denmark was ill. I could not have envisaged what this information would prompt her to exclaim: Then your möther and father can get back together!
I was so astounded that I was unable to speak. My dad said nothing either. She continued her meal regardless of the state of shock into which my dad and I had been thrown. A more reasonable reaction would have been to address the sad reality my mother and stepfather now found themselves in. But her thoughts jumped ahead in time, leap-frogging the death she imagined to be the natural outcome. And they went further still, into a fantasy in which my dad, in the forty-odd years in which he had been married to her, had merely been waiting for the chance to marry my mother again. And that my mother likewise had been waiting and would now soon be ready. That the continents would thereby glue together and everything that once was would now be restored, cemented together and made intact, with me in the middle, the happiest pea in the pod.
Neither of us mentioned it afterward.
We said our goodbyes the evening before I went home. My dad and his wife are late sleepers, and my train left before they were in the habit of waking. I got up in good time, my dad’s wife had forbidden me to use the hot water, but I took a hot shower anyway, in one of the many bathrooms, the same one my dad used. I had no idea if I would ever return to the house, or when I would see my dad again.
My dad had ordered a taxi from a company they’d used before. It was a dismal morning, foggy and cold. I dragged my little wheelie suitcase out into it, and the driver took me to the station without a word.
eight months later, in april, my stepfather died at Frederiksberg Hospital. He had been sitting in his chair and had suddenly felt ill, and a few hours later he could no longer get out of bed on his own. It was a Friday and my mother didn’t know if they could get through the weekend on their own, so she had him admitted to the medical ward in the belief that things would be all right again by Monday. The next afternoon, the Saturday, a Swedish doctor informed my mother and me that he would not be coming home again. We sat on a pair of swivel chairs in what had recently been a ward and was now a makeshift office. They were going to take him off his drip, the doctor said. He talked about dragging it out: Otherwise they would only be dragging it out, he said. By ‘otherwise’ he meant: giving him liquid.
The drip was dismantled and he stayed in room seven. My mother sat by his bed, the days and nights accumulating in her face. And yet it came as a shock. We had seen the fear in his eyes, and still it was a shock when room seven went quiet.
We sat on either side of his bed and could no longer hear him breathing.
Five days and nights like a single nightmare. Two weeks before he was admitted we’d had lunch together in one of the small garden restaurants in Frederiksberg, celebrating his birthday early. He got to his feet and showed off his new pants, front and back, new thick-ribbed corduroys.
A week later he bought steak from Lund’s the butchers. We spoke on the phone, it was the day he turned sixty-three. He told me the steaks, two whopping great ‘tornadoes,’ were so impressive that the butcher had held them up for the other customers to see before he wrapped them up.
Then he was admitted to the hospital. I’d brought yellow tulips from a flower seller’s on Kongens Nytorv. They’d been standing in a bucket there, and since he always loved yellow flowers, I bought a bunch and carried them down with me into the metro.
Five days later and he’s lying underneath them.
One of the nurses says, about the flowers: They were so fresh. She stands with us for a moment, then looks at me and says: You look like your dad.
That same night I wake up with my heart racing. I have the feeling someone is standing on my chest. It’s not my own fear of death that wakes me, not a realization that I too am to die one day, that I am the next in line or anything like what I’ve heard people talk about in similar situations.
I have only one thought in my head: my dad can die.
I assume he’s back in St. Louis, but actually I have no idea where he is. It’s not unusual for there to be months between our emails. I lie and wonder if he might be dead. I haven’t heard from him since February.
It has never before occurred to me that my dad can die. Not in any way other than the abstract possibility. As in, we must all of us die one day. Something very remote, in a far-off future, and therefore of concern only to someone who is not me. But now it’s here. Corporeal and unavoidable. As in: one day you’re standing at the butcher’s, the next you’re lying under a bunch of yellow tulips.
The following nights the same thing happens, exactly the same. I wake up with difficulty breathing, in a cold sweat, after which I lie awake for a long time and think about the telephone. The way a father’s death always involves a telephone. Someone calls, a nurse for instance, and says: Your mother thinks you should come. The importance of that phone call cannot be overestimated. In the case of my stepfather I got there in time to be at his bedside, in time to hear him stop breathing. But even so, the phone call is crucial.
I would even go so far as to say that the phone call is necessary to what follows. Maybe that’s why all the books that have been written about losing a father begin with that phone call. It divides life up into a before and an after. It holds a message of obvious importance. But more than that. The phone call says: you belong. It says that there is someone at the other end, someone who acknowledges that your father’s death is a matter for your concern. It says: you are not alone.
Because what is the alternative? The alternative is not being told. Your father dies somewhere, someone takes care of the burial. That’s that. You don’t know, maybe you don’t find out for a long time, and then only by chance: he is dead.
Without the phone call there is no story.
Without the phone call there is only unimportance.
Your father is dead, but no one thought it concerned you.
In my nightmarish nightly scenario, the message comes in the form of an auto-reply from his email account. To whom it may concern. A cold fact, not addressed to me specifically, but to the world at large. He has died on his continent without me knowing on mine. There is no longer anyone at the other end. It’s as if he never lived.
In the courtyard outside our kitchen window there stands a cherry tree. I’ve been watching it, it’s the season in which, briefly, it transforms, revealing itself in its true nature. Its branches are heavy with buds. Often I’m away in April or May, but this morning those buds unfold as I watch, dreamlike. White blossom, thick with the spring.
The tree is not a metaphor for life going on. Life does not go on, life becomes something else, and the tree is just a tree. It emerges as if from another world, a moment, a week, three weeks. And then it is gone.
It’s all about being there when it happens.
; I send my dad an email: Is there a plan? Who’s going to call if anything happens to him?
He writes back: Don’t worry, nothing will happen to me. He’s busy at the university and despite his seventy-seven years he feels fit and full of energy.
He’s not going to die. That’s the message. No plan is needed.
But if something does happen to me, he writes, Sabrina will surely contact you.
Sabrina, the youngest of my three sisters. I know she lives somewhere in St. Louis, but I don’t know her address, and as far as I’m aware, she doesn’t know mine.
It’s six years since I saw her last. I stopped off in St. Louis, driving into the city with my boyfriend and staying a night at a hotel where they had a stuffed bear standing in the lobby. She was a housewife, mother of two, husband working for Whole Foods in another state. He wasn’t home. That was normal, she said, her husband worked his butt off out of state and she stayed home and looked after the kids.
I remember going to a supermarket to buy something, not a Whole Foods but the Kroger we used to go to when we were kids. I have no idea how many hours we spent in its aisles back then, her mother pushing the heavy shopping cart, but now here was my sister in front of me, a handbag over her arm, clutching a fat purse and asking: Do you want anything? Her gesture, a sweeping hand taking in the whole store. Afterward, I couldn’t let go of the picture of her in my mind the way I remembered her when she was ten and my dad could make the tips of his fingers meet around her waist as easy as anything. She reminded me then of a trembling bird, a sparrow, and now here she was dragging me along behind her through the supermarket like I was a child.
Little Sabrina had grown up. But would the thought occur to her to go to our dad’s place and search through his papers for my phone number? If anything did happen to him? Would she even remember I existed?
Lone Star Page 1