We shared the creamy layer atop the yogurt, the jelly on pâté, the wishbone when my mother pulled apart a chicken. I wished for a swimming pool; I don’t know what he wished for, nor would he have told me, not just because wishes were secrets but because he was private in that way. On special occasions, he poured red wine into my water: “It’s what all the little French children drink,” he said.
He seemed to me impossibly wise—he knew all about the Etruscans, and how to lay a carpet, and the lyrics to The Pirates of Penzance. He read books on the Industrial Revolution and British canals; he read the Russians, trying to keep the characters straight upon a napkin. Fiercely liberal, adamantly irreligious, a devout consumer of the newspaper, an amenable tourist: I see him strolling about the sites my mother found (the Vimy Memorial appears, with its tunnels and its sea of graves), reading plaques with his arms folded behind his back and exclaiming, “Isn’t that interesting!” or “Isn’t that sad!” And he was full of sayings and bits and pieces of poetry, puffing up his chest for delivery of Wilde or Shakespeare or Shaw. But he was not an intellectual, and I see now that there was a superficiality to his wealth of knowledge, as if it were a lake both infinitely wide and finger-deep.
I feel I could go on forever; the memories spill forth like silver mesh, linked above all by the deference he showed me and my vision, his willingness to absorb that vision and make it his own. It’s a talent shared by Mrs. Ramsay, who, shortly after her husband dashes James’s hopes, tries to soothe her child by finding in the Army and Navy catalogue the most complicated of shapes to extract, one that “would need the greatest skill and care in cutting out.” Her response suggests an implicit understanding of James and his perspective; far from condescending, she knows that the successful removal of a rake or mowing-machine at six is just as important as penning a masterpiece at fifty.
And yet there lurks among the Ramsay children a certain anxiety about their mother, a longing for the kind of relentless care that a woman in her place could never give them. Prue Ramsay, already a young woman, vows that she will never grow up and leave her mother; James knows that her attention will waver the instant his father demands it. Jasper, in possession of her focus for the first time all evening, feels it slip away again at a clatter in the hall. Is it any wonder that these children are the creation of a writer who couldn’t remember being alone with her mother for more than a few minutes without someone interrupting—a writer who, at the age of thirteen, relinquished her to the greatest interruption of all? For all my envy of the Ramsays and the fluster of their circus home, I’m grateful not just that my father was a parent in the mold of Mrs. Ramsay but also that I had him largely to myself.
Long after his mother’s death, James—now sixteen—remembers following her through the house, watching from afar as she asks a servant about a certain blue platter. “She alone spoke the truth,” he thinks, “to her alone could he speak it.” Was my father’s appeal for me as a child as simple as that—feeling seen by him, feeling understood and respected? Or was it rather a gift more ephemeral? For it’s telling that what James calls “the truth” is no more than an exchange about table settings; his mother’s power is such that the most banal of utterances becomes sacred, the most ordinary of paths divine. So, too, with my father, so too with all great parents, I think, who need only to exist in the world, asking a question of a shopkeeper or frowning as they turn the page, to overpower us with love.
4
“She knew from the effort, the rise in his voice to surmount a difficult word that it was the first time he had said ‘we.’ ”
“How did father ask you to marry him?” Virginia Woolf once asked her mother, their arms linked as they descended the stairs to the dining room. Julia was startled: “She gave her little laugh, half surprised, half shocked. She did not answer.” Somehow Virginia learned the story: “He asked her in a letter; and she refused him. Then one night when he had given up all thought of it, and had been dining with her, and asking her advice about a governess for Laura, she followed him to the door and said ‘I will try to be a good wife to you.’ ”
I recognize this tale—its simplicity and its suggestiveness; the sparseness of its detail and the omissions it contains. I have asked the same question of my own mother, and of my father too, and I have been met, if not by shock, by a mix of bashfulness, stubborn privacy, and forgetfulness; so that the narrative I have pieced together of my parents’ courtship also hangs upon phrases that probably count for too much and unfolds in rooms like stage sets, shadowy and unfinished. The story is true and yet not true; we must fill in the blanks as best we can. “Perhaps there was pity in her love,” Virginia ventures of her mother’s motives. “Certainly there was devout admiration for his mind.”
My father, Geoffrey Smyth, was twenty-five when he first met my mother in 1972. An architect who ran his own firm out of the spare room of his flat on New Cavendish Street, he had lived in the West End of London for years, ever since studying at the Architectural Association in nearby Bedford Square. (These were Virginia’s stomping grounds as well; Gordon and Fitzroy Squares, where she lived with her siblings after their father’s death, were a few blocks away, as was Tavistock Square, her home with Leonard and the birthplace of To the Lighthouse.) My father then was extroverted and handsome, with dark hair and long sideburns; he was energetic and lean, one of those people who is so comfortable in his body that he seems to forget that he has one. There was also something raw about his looks (strangers on the street used to ask if he was Malcolm McDowell, of A Clockwork Orange). He drove a cherry-red BMW.
Several years earlier, the Evening Standard had named him one of London’s most eligible bachelors, but he’d since started dating an Australian architect named Vivien—she was talented, aloof, and very beautiful, with big brown eyes, a wardrobe full of Marimekko, and white-blond hair she wore in a long braid down her back. Most evenings my father and his friends would stop in one of the neighborhood pubs for a pint before heading to Schmidt’s for knödel or the Agra for a curry. On one such night, Vivien introduced him to a couple she had known in Sydney. My mother, Minty, was twenty-six, another Australian architect who lived in a nearby studio apartment. She and her boyfriend, John, who was older, had recently moved to London by way of Indonesia. My mother was skinny, with short, curly hair that she dyed red with henna. She was shy and easily impressed—a very different kind of woman from Vivien. My father bought them a round of drinks, his loud voice cutting through the crowd. “God, he’s overwhelming,” said John as they were walking home. “I think he’s nice,” my mother said.
They met him again a few months later, when they followed a big group from the pub back to his flat—he was always inviting people over, and he never wanted anyone to leave. The flat had been completely empty when he first moved in; he installed a shower and a cooker, bright yellow kitchen cabinets and a window box for red geraniums. An Egg chair hung from the living room ceiling, and the bedroom he painted dark brown. My mother remembers Vivien standing in the kitchen in a towel that night, upset because she had wanted a shower and a quiet evening in.
Months passed. My mother and John broke up, reconciled, broke up again; they had the kind of relationship in which someone was always storming out at midnight. One day she bumped into Vivien on the street; she mentioned she was looking to work for a smaller firm, and Vivien, who had left my father for another man, mentioned he was looking for a new employee. That’s how my mother found herself at an Italian restaurant on my father’s twenty-sixth birthday, interviewing for a position to design a new branch of the Bank of Cyprus. By the end of lunch he had offered her a job. He asked her to suggest a salary, and she named an amount. “Is that too much?” she asked. “Nothing’s too much if you earn it,” he said—which can only mean she asked for not nearly enough.
The following weekend he invited her to the house he shared with his mother on Hayling Island, off the south coast
. It was a warm spring day and they drove with the windows down, listening to Motown; that night, they cooked a roast and slept in separate beds. Another evening he took her to a private casino in Belgravia with his most charming and dissolute friends—his hand brushed hers during a game of blackjack, and it felt to her like an electric shock. She had worked with him for just over a fortnight when he invited her on an office outing to Venice, where he’d rented an apartment overlooking the Grand Canal. She accepted, wondering all the while what he was thinking. They were leaving for Italy in less than a week when he finally kissed her at a party. “Can I come up?” he asked as they were driving home. She said no. They went to his place instead.
It rained every day in Venice, as it did for Leonard and Virginia when they stopped there on their honeymoon in 1912. (Virginia thought Venice a “detestable” place.) My parents went out to dinner and discussed Le Corbusier, trying to impress each other with their vast reserves of architectural knowledge; they never spoke like that again. My mother visited the fish market, which she had read that one must do in Venice, and she came home with a gigantic squid she didn’t know how to butcher; it squirmed from her arms and crawled across the kitchen floor. They spent, I believe, a great deal of time in bed. Their last stop was Siena, its medieval streets rain-slick and deserted. The hotel proprietor offered them a room without a bathroom. “I’ve got to have a bathroom,” my father said, and my mother felt incredibly irritated with him, a mood that lasted several weeks. (My father, for his part, thought the Venice trip a smashing holiday—that was his phrase, “a smashing holiday”—so much so that when we returned to Italy as a family some years later, he refused to visit Venice for fear of corrupting his memories.)
My mother quit her new job within the month, but their relationship continued. They took two weeks at Christmas to ski and two weeks in summer to sail; on Fridays they had a curry dinner in the West End and then, on empty roads free of speed limits, raced down through darkness to the house on Hayling Island. Weekends were spent sailing with friends; on returning to London at midnight, they stopped in Chinatown for roast duck and Singapore noodles. My mother’s early irritation was soon replaced by insecurity—she couldn’t stop comparing herself to Vivien, whose departure, my father’s friends said, had shattered him. She worried she had won him on the rebound; she couldn’t believe he really wanted her, even after they were married. But this disquiet was most often made up for by the excitement of his world, she swept up in his slipstream.
I once asked my father to describe my mother as she was during those years. Very petite, he said, and very pretty, and bright-eyed and competent and conscientious and hardworking and just fine. Above all, game for things: he pictured her thrashing around on the foredeck in thirty knots of wind in the waters of the Solent, changing headsails on a twenty-nine-footer. A woman so eagerly subsumed might have been a relief after Vivien and her resistance.
When John proposed to my mother on her return from Venice, she refused him. My father’s life was more interesting, and it was already becoming her own.
* * *
TOWARD THE END of “The Window,” the first section of To the Lighthouse, Paul Rayley, another Ramsay houseguest, fulfills Mrs. Ramsay’s intentions for him by proposing to Minta Doyle on the beach. Soon afterward, Minta realizes she has lost her grandmother’s brooch, and the party climbs down the cliff to look for it. Paul throws himself into the hunt, assuring Minta that he excels at finding things; when the tide rises too high, he vows to wake at sunrise to continue his search in secret. As they walk back to the house, the lights of the town appear below “like things that were going to happen to him—his marriage, his children, his house,” and he thinks how he and Minta “would retreat into solitude together, and walk on and on,” and “what an appalling experience he had been through,” and how “it took his breath away to think what he had been and done.” Indeed: “It had been far and away the worst moment of his life when he asked Minta to marry him.” As for Minta, Nancy Ramsay has the feeling as she watches her weep that “it might be true that she minded losing her brooch, but she wasn’t crying only for that. She was crying for something else.”
When I describe my parents’ early relationship, I have to fight the urge to sentimentalize, to highlight all that was sweet between them while smoothing out all that was discordant. Not because I’m invested in the narrative of some spotless union, I don’t think, because they are my parents, but because one likes to believe that courtship is sweet—wasn’t an expectation of sweetness at least in part behind Virginia’s wish to know the story of her father’s proposal? But To the Lighthouse—its marrow the tender, thorny, and ultimately triumphant marriage of the Ramsays—reveals the terrors that surround such sweetness, reminds us that to bind oneself to another human being is to take a leap of faith not just sublime but monstrous, and that anyone who does so without some sliver of terror shot through the joy is not thinking hard enough. Mrs. Ramsay shares what Leslie Stephen called his wife’s “exalted views of love and marriage”; her insistence upon matrimony and children for all is so central to her character that when Lily thinks of her later, she appears “at the end of the corridor of years saying, of all incongruous things, ‘Marry, marry!’ ” Yet even Mrs. Ramsay is aware of a tension at work in her impulse to celebrate Paul and Minta’s engagement. “What could be more serious than the love of man for woman,” she thinks, “what more commanding, more impressive, bearing in its bosom the seeds of death; at the same time these lovers, these people entering into illusion glittering eyed, must be danced round with mockery, decorated with garlands.”
Love bears in its bosom the seeds of death—is that what Paul senses as he sees the events of his life marching before him, fixed now without further surprise? Or as he envisions walking on with Minta, their paths not only determined but forever intertwined? At dinner, Mrs. Ramsay is struck when he struggles to say “we”: “ ‘We did this, we did that.’ They’ll say that all their lives, she thought.” It’s a moving observation, one that highlights the extent to which the very concept of marriage is dependent upon death: “Till death do us part”—that hopeful, fearsome phrase—is what gives matrimony meaning. But just as frightening as seeing one’s life laid out before one, stripped in an instant of large chunks of possibility (“his marriage, his children, his house”), are the unknowns at work in merging with another person.
Earlier, Mrs. Ramsay feels uneasy as she considers whether she has put too much pressure on Minta to marry. Despite her vague sense that children and wedlock offer an escape from life’s hostility, she also knows that good marriages require certain ineffable qualities. “The thing she had with her husband,” she thinks. “Had they that?” But that’s not a question that Paul and Minta can answer in the affirmative, that any couple can answer in the affirmative, without taking a chance that may well prove the opposite is true. (“God, I see the risk in marrying anyone,” Leonard acknowledged to Virginia the day after he proposed.)
When I was thirty, I married a man I’d dated for five years; four years later, he left in the middle of the night, and I never saw him again. What on earth did I make, before this experience, of Paul’s conviction that asking Minta to marry him had been the worst moment of his life? How could such a claim have held any meaning at all? The truth is that I likely missed it altogether; one of the wonders of Woolf’s novel is its seemingly endless capacity to meet you wherever you happen to be, as if, while you were off getting married and divorced, it had been quietly shifting its shape on the bookshelf. It was only after my own rupture that I discovered, embedded in Mrs. Ramsay’s reflection that Paul and Minta will say “we” all their lives, what is to me the most resonant of the book’s observations about coupling: Marriage precipitates what may well be a splendid new entity, but its price is the supplantation of “I.”
In 1938, Virginia wrote to Vanessa bewailing “the complete failure” of her own nuptials; she is unable to vi
sit her sister in France, she says, because she and Leonard are “so unhappy apart that I cant come. Thats the worst failure imaginable—that marriage, as I suddenly for the first time realised walking in the Square, reduces one to damnable servility.” To the Lighthouse is hardly an antimarriage novel; its portrait of the Ramsays reveals the heights of human connection, imperfect though it may well be. But it also recognizes that marriage is a loss, a sacrifice of self and its expression, and that, contrary to Mrs. Ramsay’s beliefs—among them that “an unmarried woman has missed the best of life”—solitude can be an act of preservation. “She liked to be alone,” Lily insists, pleading her exemption from that universal law. “She liked to be herself; she was not made for that.”
* * *
IN THE SUMMER of 1974, in the midst of a worldwide recession, Turkey invaded Cyprus, and my father, who had designed three branches for that island nation’s bank, lost his largest client. All of a sudden, there was very little work. At twenty-nine, after two relatively barren years, he decided to shutter his practice and take one of two paths: going to business school or sailing around the world. He was accepted at Harvard, and so put off the sailing.
He arrived in Cambridge in the fall of 1977, carrying two small suitcases and a pair of skis; twenty-four hours later, energized by a day’s worth of impressions, he sat down at the window of his dorm room to write my mother a letter. It was a hot, humid day, and he wrote with his feet dangling out beyond the windowsill, every so often looking up at the ivy-covered courtyard and watching the other students arrive. “I may have missed Oxbridge,” he wrote, “but what with their usual combination of panache + gaucheness the Yanks have done a pretty good job imitating at least part of the concept.” He’d spent the previous evening at the business school pub, where he’d met an Australian (“a super guy”), a Nigerian (“I begin to see what it’s all about. Imagine being pally with him when he’s running his country”), and an American (his stated “raison d’être for being here…was to make ‘oodles of loot.’ It was dropped so unassumingly it sounded lovely”). He found the United States much changed since his first and only visit in 1966, and he was impatient to get a feel for its “heart beat.” Before signing off, he drew my mother a floor plan of his room, complete with a sketch of the skis propped “ostentatiously” in the corner. In the following weeks she would send him the Fiorucci prints that later hung in our house in Boston—huge, semipornographic photographs of women wearing silver sequins and the word “Fiorucci” on their bare behinds—but until then he made do with a copy of SAIL Magazine, from which he cut two orange stickers for his door and mailbox. “If anyone asks what they represent, the answer is a rising or setting sun—and I’ll let them know which in due course.” This last was a reference to his concern about how he would fare there—he had been relieved to hear, in the pub the night before, that only a few students actually failed.
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