All the Lives We Ever Lived

by Katharine Smyth

  In the ruined room, picnickers would have lit their kettles; lovers sought shelter there, lying on the bare boards; and the shepherd stored his dinner on the bricks, and the tramp slept with his coat round him to ward off the cold. Then the roof would have fallen; briars and hemlocks would have blotted out path, step, and window; would have grown, unequally but lustily over the mound, until some trespasser, losing his way, could have told only by a red-hot poker among the nettles, or a scrap of china in the hemlock that here once some one had lived; there had been a house.

  Woolf’s pastoral vision of the future could just as easily be a vision of the past; the prickly, poisonous foliage restores the land to wilderness, while the figures she chooses to populate the scene—lovers, tramps, and shepherds—are eternal. But as I gazed up at Talland House, at its labyrinthine staircases and additions, at the nearby flats and cranes (for a rising apartment block will soon obstruct Talland’s lighthouse view), I felt a twinge of nostalgia for that more elemental prophecy. The reabsorption of the Stephens’ home into the earth, so that it lived on in language for trespassers like me and not as some grotesque distortion of itself, seemed infinitely preferable to this current portrait of time’s passage.

  I was halfway down the drive when the gardener ran toward me with a garbage bag—“To carry the pictures,” he explained. We slid them in together and he handed me a folded piece of paper. “My CV,” he said, “in case you ever need a gardener in the States.” He admitted that after twelve years he was being let go—apparently the landlord had decided that Talland House no longer needed full-time upkeep. I thought of Mrs. Ramsay as she joins her husband on the lawn, lamenting the fifty pounds that it will cost to mend the greenhouse. Even so, she says, the gardener’s beauty is so great that she couldn’t possibly dismiss him.

  We said good-bye again, and as I walked down the hill to the beach, it occurred to me, for the first time in all my years of reading and rereading To the Lighthouse, that Mrs. Ramsay’s refusal to fire the gardener is in fact another iteration of her power to protect against entropy; and that, conversely, the dismissal of Andrew Shaw—for that was the name on the CV—may well have been the first step toward Woolf’s vision of a timeless, sylvan future. Perhaps the garden will grow wild after all.

  * * *

  TWENTY YEARS AFTER my parents bought and renovated the Rhode Island house, I found my father on the hammock, looking out over the water and smoking a cigarette. We had driven that morning from the hospital, where he had spent the past month in intensive care following complications from chemotherapy and radiation. He seemed calm, and though his face and frame were thin, he held himself easily beneath his navy-blue sweater, always able, even on that night, to command the space around him. I was sorry to have caught him smoking, but I still admonished him gently. “It might not matter,” he said. “I’m still waiting to hear my prognosis.”

  He patted the ropy spot beside him, and I sat down. The ghost of a hurricane was passing through; the sky over the basin was soft and heavy with black fog. Ropes strummed against the metal masts of sailboats, and the lights of the faraway houses sent shocks of white across the water. The grass, neglected these few weeks, had already grown calf-high. When I commented on how pretty it was, he said, “Yes, but not too pretty.”

  By morning, the hurricane had scoured the sky and left in its place a beautiful fall weekend. I was sitting on the front porch beneath a rising sun, drinking tea and nestled in one of the white Adirondack chairs. Things were ending, a faint melancholy drifting. But that was true of all Septembers.

  Later, the sun swung round to the west, I stood at the end of the dock, wearing an old bathing suit and staring down into water made bottle green by my shadow. The house was drenched in light, the dock too, light thinner than that of midsummer, it was like wheat, and the air was laced with cold. (“The sun seems to give less heat,” says Lily Briscoe, a young, unmarried painter and the Ramsays’ houseguest, of September in the Hebrides, looking round her at the grass and flowers.) My father was returning Solent, our new sailboat, to the mooring; I could see him from where I stood, a slight figure across the water, now reaching for the mooring wand, now disappearing down below. There had been a mix-up with the engine, and though he was supposed to rest, he had spent his day flushing diesel from the bilges. I wouldn’t wait for him to swim—he hadn’t been swimming all summer. (“I’m hopeless, Petal.”) So I dove.

  I followed the sun across the water, and back again, and then, pausing breathless at the ladder, thought how this year the basin seemed to hold more life than usual. I could feel the bump bump of comb jellies against me, could see starfish heaped in messy piles on the bottom. Could see, too, schools of flashing minnows—they steered clear of my moving body, but when I held still, they pressed my arms and legs with their mouths. Before going inside I took the last outdoor shower of the season. It was here, lamenting the end of summer a few years earlier, that I had consoled myself with fancy, with the idea that I could return to this place and this peace for as long as I lived. Even if my parents are gone, I thought, even if I have a family of my own, even if the roof leaks and the weeds grow rampant, even if I must learn how to prune the roses and pressure-wash the deck, even then this house and its happiness will remain. This ever-shifting view, I thought, this water, this feeling: These are steadfast. These are constant.

  Upstairs my mother was dooming three restless lobsters to a pot of boiling water, and my father sitting along the deck rail, listening to Haydn. One hand grasped the edge of the roof and the other held a cigarette. A glass of red wine sat on the table beside him. When I think of him on that evening, and on other evenings like it, he is wearing his sea-colored down vest, and with large eyes that are also the color of the sea, he is studying the water. “Communing with nature,” he called it facetiously, but then again, I’ve never known anyone to sit for so many hours at a time with just a cigarette, a drink, and a view that is always different and always the same.

  I like the look of a lobster dinner: white flesh, yellow butter, reddened shells collecting in a black pot. When we had finished eating, I carried the remains to the end of the dock. The night air was bracing, the water polished onyx; the silence of the basin was enormous, and the sky was sharp with stars. I overturned the pot, and the scarlet skins, their undersides a pallid white, sank. In the morning they would make a dash of color on the silty brown sea floor, but at night they simply disappeared and the surface resealed.

  I didn’t go back immediately. I could see the white lights of the yacht club dock, and beyond it, the shadowy bulk of the old railway bridge. The raised oval of the island to the south, and the silhouette of land across the way. I could see, too, through the bare windows of our own home, my parents moving from room to room like dolls—my father returning to the deck, my mother retiring downstairs. (Oh, the curiosity that arises, Woolf writes, when “we linger in front of a house where the lights are lit and the blinds not yet drawn, and each floor of the house shows us a different section of human life in being.” Who are these people, she asks, what are they, and what are their thoughts and adventures?)

  I drew a breath.

  2

  From the basin to the river to the bay to the sea: At the edge of the Atlantic, we lost sight of land, so that the world seemed naught but sky and water, and we the center, always the center. The waves then were large and swollen, as if the ocean were a giant eiderdown someone was plumping—our friends Frank and Carol became seasick, and my mother fell about the galley as she cooked. My father stood astride the tiller, squinting at the bluish void, and I whispered kind things to my pet caterpillars, foraged that morning from the garden, lest they too were ailing and unhappy. But then the sea began to settle, the sun to set, and—this was my first overnight passage—we were still alone on the ocean as I fell asleep in my bow cabin, lulled by the slip-slop of lesser waves against the hull and the bravery of my father, who had taken the night watch.


  It was still dark when I heard him whispering my name. He put his finger to his lips and beckoned me to follow; he was animated, but I could see on his face that he would not yet tell me why. I tiptoed through the cabin after him. The sea and sky were flat and leaden, though there was a spray of light on the horizon; I was chilly in my nightgown, and he wrapped me in foul weather gear that came almost to my knees. I demanded answers. He bid me to be patient. Then, suddenly, he pointed east toward the light: “There!” I turned to see a sleek, inky thing slide through the water; it disappeared and then rose the unmistakable V of a tail—a whale! She was a massive, noble creature, so close that we could see the scars and notches on her hide; every so often she exhaled magnificently, sending up a watery plume. There were others, too, farther away, their bodies solid and glistening as they threaded the water’s surface like yarn on a loom. My father squeezed my hand. “Aren’t they fantastic,” he breathed. For at least fifteen minutes, the herd followed us north; beneath us lay the others in their bunks, so distant that they may as well have lain on the ocean floor.

  I once asked my grandmother if she was closer to her mother or her father growing up. “You know how sometimes in childhood one has these sorts of daydreams,” she said, “asking oneself, If I had to choose between my parents, which one would I choose?” I nodded. “Well, I never could make a decision, so I suppose that I was fond of them both equally.” I nodded again. I could see how such a thing was possible. But not for me: I was the daughter of a god.

  3

  “That was the source of her everlasting attraction for him, perhaps; she was a person to whom one could say what came into one’s head.”

  “Yes, of course, if it’s fine to-morrow,” says Mrs. Ramsay to James, her six-year-old son, in the opening lines of To the Lighthouse. “But you’ll have to be up with the lark.” Her promise—a voyage to the lighthouse!—fills the boy with overwhelming happiness; his world grows radiant and colorful, and even the refrigerator he is cutting from the pages of an Army and Navy catalogue takes on a glow. We might think of this as the Mrs. Ramsay filter—the special scrim with which she overlays experience, so that in her presence all is rimmed with gold as if it were the magic hour. But when Mr. Ramsay pauses at the drawing-room window to triumphantly announce that it will rain, the child’s joy curdles into fury: “Had there been an axe handy, or a poker, any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it.” Mr. Ramsay’s interruption is intolerable to his son, as is the satisfaction he takes in disabusing his wife and child of their illusions. Compared to his father, James thinks, his mother is “ten thousand times better in every way.”

  Virginia felt a similar reverence for her own mother, the presence of whom “obsessed” her until she sought to describe Julia and her effect in To the Lighthouse some thirty years after her death. When she imagines her, it is always as being at the heart of life—Julia was “the whole thing,” she was “in the very centre of that great Cathedral space which was childhood.” (She was also diffuse, wafting through the family places: “Talland House was full of her; Hyde Park Gate was full of her.”) But her mother’s centrality made her hard to see. Virginia’s first memory was “of red and purple flowers on a black ground—my mother’s dress; and she was sitting either in a train or in an omnibus, and I was on her lap. I therefore saw the flowers she was wearing very close.” It’s a fitting metaphor for her mother’s outsized presence: the figure of Julia Stephen, extending nearly to the edge of Virginia’s peripheral vision, becomes her world’s defining landscape. Yet the memory also anticipates the difficulty that she will later face in seeking to describe a parent who filled so much of her domain. “I suspect the word ‘central,’ ” she writes, “gets closest to the general feeling I had of living so completely in her atmosphere that one never got far enough away from her to see her as a person.”

  Such moments of intimacy between mother and daughter seem to have been scarce—that may be why the memory embedded itself so deeply. Virginia’s recollections of Julia are usually of her in company, of her conducting whatever muddled, vibrant orchestra it was that held the room. In the rare instances her mother is unburdened, able to turn her attention to her youngest daughter, whispering to her to remove a crumb from her father’s beard or laughing at one of her stories, the daughter flushes with pleasure.

  * * *

  AS AN ONLY child, I read To the Lighthouse with a sense of envy—what I would give, I thought, for the hustle and bustle of the Ramsay household, for the gift of Mrs. Ramsay’s matriarchy and the happy chaos of having seven siblings. I thought of my parents’ wide, elegant townhouse in Boston, of its sparse rooms and drifting dust motes, of its dusky silence like that of an empty church. I remember being struck by its stillness as early as seven or eight, when family friends had blown in from England like a wind and then departed, leaving nothing. For all my father’s extroversion, my parents were private people. And I was private too, entertaining myself with books and paints and garden pets (caterpillars, yes, but also salamanders, baby birds, and ladybugs), forming alliances with rhododendron bushes and nicely shaped stones, making of that house a wonderland, and yet feeling—as perhaps we all do; I’m not sure—an intermittent nostalgia for a different kind of life, one in which my parents threw Christmas parties and I had to shout to be heard.

  But there was always play. In England, my father and I gathered fallen conker chestnuts, attached them to pieces of string, and staged battles in my grandmother’s garden. At other times he morphed into a plodding monster: “Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman!” he intoned as I ran shrieking through the halls. Later he told me always to be on the lookout for good Y-shaped branches, and when I finally found one, he cut it down, smoothed off the bark, and nailed to it a thick rubber band. I stood with him in the boiler room as he sanded, the hot, dry smell of sawdust blending with the lingering paint and epoxy. “Every girl should have her own slingshot,” he said.

  Despite these games, though, it had never occurred to me that my father at seven or eight was as complete a person as I was at that age—that he had vast tracts of experience, only a fraction of which had anything to do with me. I stumbled into this realization one evening when, consoling me for some unfairness that befalls the very young, he welcomed me into his own childhood, offering up its muddy creeks and makeshift forts. It was a formative moment from which I drew the least formative of lessons, for as he continued to reminisce—about cycling to the village hardware store to buy the pieces for his model airplanes; about gray kneesocks and family picnics by the river Thames—my main response was regret that this particular child, my father, would never know of my existence. What I didn’t consider, and what seems even more striking now that I understand what half a lifetime of experience actually feels like, were the limitations of knowledge his past necessarily implied. The boy he was would never know me, certainly, but more to the point, I would never know him.

  * * *

  HERE’S WHAT I did know: My father was taut and self-contained, neither short nor tall, a dark-haired man of forty or so with hooded blue eyes, my eyes, who was remarkably at ease in his own skin. He seemed to vibrate; I see him beavering away, at what? Sanding the hull of the boat in winter, fine flecks of crimson antifouling carpeting the asphalt, or varnishing the teak of the cockpit—my devoirs, he called these endless tasks. His weekend clothes were spattered with paint, the kitchen sink always full of brushes. I never knew anyone to sweat so much; he mopped his brow with a white cotton handkerchief he carried in his pocket. But he always smelled clean, faintly of shaving cream, and in fact I think of him as neat and dry, and of his clothes as soft; one was always wanting to burrow into his shoulder. When my mother was driving, and he in the passenger seat and I behind him in the back, he would slip his hand around the seat for me to hold, wordlessly and for just a few minutes, until I felt a light squeeze and h
e pulled back his arm. I never felt safer than when he smoothed my hair when I was upset or falling asleep. His palm was firm against my head; he would repeat the same motion, over and over, and say the same thing, over and over: “There, there. There, there.”

  So he was physically affectionate, and capable and vigorous; what else? Very, very funny—I couldn’t stop giggling when I was with him. He liked tall tales and silly games, like the threat of draconian hiccup cures or the sudden disappearance of my dessert; his was a theatrical, good-natured kind of humor, and I loved showing him off to my friends, for he made them laugh as well. He had a sense of solemnity, too; he understood, for instance, the gentleness with which one should be woken. And he could be stern; he disliked childishness. He raised his voice less often than my mother, but when he did it was more frightening.

  He taught me how to build a fire, how to tie knots, how to play tennis, darts, and snooker; he found me a child-sized cue; he called the red balls “pinks.” I see him crouching on the floor, his face level with the billiard table, and telling me to aim for his nose—“Just kiss it,” he would say. He taught me how to sail; I remember the first time we left the basin in the Laser; the wind was strong, we hiked out over the water, and suddenly the boat shot forward, its bow lifting clear of the waves. “We’re planing, Katharine!” he cried. “We’re planing!” and I couldn’t stop laughing because he was so happy. We built snowmen; we danced, my feet on his, to the American Graffiti soundtrack; we skated on a pond in the woods, the same pond into which we released my tadpoles when they sprouted little legs, and he told stories about what they were getting up to beneath the ice.