His next letter to my mother was written at the end of what he called one of the “most depressing weeks” of his life; it describes eighteen-hour days, impenetrable classes, and awful food. “I spend half the time wondering whether to fly straight home,” he wrote. “Got drunk last night—along with everyone else—to cheer myself up. Depressed again this morning. Can’t sleep. Bowels in bad shape.” A few weeks later he was playing squash when his opponent’s racket struck him in the face and smashed his glasses, scratching one eye and driving shards of glass deep into the other. He went to the emergency room alone in an ambulance, believing he would be blind for the rest of his life. He told neither his parents nor my mother, and he stayed in the hospital for two weeks without a single visitor.
This was probably the lowest point in my father’s life so far. His trouble with math had already been making it difficult for him to keep up in certain classes, and he was now several weeks behind and unable to read for longer than a few minutes without his good eye tiring. But he continued to write my mother once a week or so, letters that were affectionate if not romantic, and that, in spite of their gloom, retained a certain wit. “I’m back with my feet out the window dropping you a line,” he wrote in late October. “It’s a beautiful day for a change, and the sports freaks are at it again.” In December, his left eye tried to open on its own. “I’m much more cheerful as a result,” he wrote. “Someone even commented on my humming as I strolled towards Harvard Square.”
Before he left for Cambridge, my father gave my mother a tape recorder so they could exchange spoken letters in addition to writing and occasional phone calls. They hadn’t made any promises about the future, but she felt more committed to him than ever. That Christmas, she visited him in Boston, where she hoped he might propose. They went skiing in Vermont and sightseeing in New York; he introduced her to his friends and took her to see Star Wars in the theater. He was still wearing an eye patch. For Christmas she gave him a homemade sweater he had designed, a crimson wool pullover with the letters HB$ embroidered in navy on the front; he gave her a calculator, one he’d bought for Harvard that turned out to be the wrong model. It had been a good holiday, but she was disappointed by the gift, and again when he dropped her off at Logan Airport. “You don’t want me to wait around until you go, do you?” he asked. “No,” she said, though in fact she would have liked it very much.
A few weeks later, he sent my mother a tape, the sole remaining spoken letter they exchanged. “I’ve just recorded a load of twaddle and subsequently deleted it about you and me,” he says. “The intellectual embarrassment is that I’m supposed to be here as a decision maker, and am so inept at making decisions.” He seems to be working through the question of whether or not to marry her, striking an uneasy compromise by the end. “The art of survival,” he concludes, “which you have practiced far more than I have—you have demonstrated your commitment far more than I have—probably has a lot more significance than some idealized notion of what makes a good relationship and what keeps it going.”
Shortly after he uttered these words, he returned to England on spring vacation, and, over dinner at my mother’s apartment, proposed. They were married that summer in London, in a civil ceremony at Marylebone Town Hall, followed by a garden party at a friend’s house. The thirty or so guests had all received, as invitations, half bottles of champagne with the details of the wedding printed on the label.
* * *
WHEN LEONARD WOOLF asked Virginia Stephen to marry him, in January 1912, she had already turned down a handful of proposals, finding her suitors deficient. If only the “earth would open her womb and let some new creature out,” she complained to her friend, the writer Lytton Strachey, noting that the men she knew had “grown very stale,” and to Clive Bell, Vanessa’s husband, that she could not reconcile them with her vision of “the man to whom I shall say certain things.” (Lytton’s own bungled proposal to Virginia, in 1909, aroused a terror to rival poor Paul’s own: “As I did it,” he wrote to Leonard, “I saw it would be death if she accepted me.”) Virginia’s views on marriage itself were also evolving. “I didn’t mean to make you think I was against marriage,” she wrote to another friend, also in 1912. “Of course I’m not….I began life with a tremendous, absurd, ideal of marriage, then my bird’s eye view of many marriages disgusted me, and I thought I must be asking what was not to be had. But that has passed too.” Her new criterion for accepting a husband? “Now I only ask for someone to make me vehement, and then I’ll marry him!”
Whether or not Leonard made her vehement was still up for debate. She vacillated for months before finally telling him she loved him at the end of May. In the meantime, realizing how painful he found her indecision, she sent him a remarkable letter putting forward her jumbled thoughts. Despite its frankness and occasional savagery, he saw something in it that convinced him to resign his civil service post in Ceylon and remain with her in England. “When I am with you, there is some feeling which is permanent, and growing,” she writes of his increasing appeal to her. “Your caring for me as you do almost overwhelms me. It is so real, and so strange…you have made me very happy too.” And yet her passions pass “from hot to cold in an instant”: “I feel angry sometimes at the strength of your desire. Possibly, your being a Jew comes in also at this point. You seem so foreign.” Equally concerning is what she calls “the sexual side of it”: “As I told you brutally the other day, I feel no physical attraction in you. There are moments—when you kissed me the other day was one—when I feel no more than a rock.”
If one were Leonard, there would be much in this letter from which to recoil—it lays bare Virginia’s volatility, her anti-Semitism, her unresponsiveness to his advances, all challenges their marriage would hold in store. But there is also much to admire, for in its candor, courageousness, and deep reflection, the letter demonstrates her respect for his intelligence and empathy; in Leonard, it seems, the thirty-year-old Virginia had finally found the man to whom she could “say certain things.”
The letter demonstrates, too, through the seriousness with which she treats it, her respect for the ideal of marriage itself—she is like Paul, who one minute reacts with horror to his fate and the next resolves to wake at dawn to prove his love. “We both of us,” she concludes—sliding from “I” into “we” as Paul will do—“want a marriage that is a tremendous living thing, always alive, always hot, not dead and easy in parts as most marriages are. We ask a great deal of life, don’t we? Perhaps we shall get it; then, how splendid!” In August they were married in a small civil ceremony at St Pancras Town Hall, followed by a lunch party at the house in Gordon Square. The service was so informal that Vanessa interrupted midway through to ask how she might officially change her son’s name. “One thing at a time,” the registrar apparently replied.
Many years later my father would joke, of the night they were engaged, that my mother had seduced him with a fantastic bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. When he was in a mood more cynical, he would say that he had married on the rebound from Harvard Business School—that he had been so knocked about by his first year in Cambridge that he had returned home and immediately proposed. The one time I asked him about it seriously, he said, affecting nonchalance, “Minty was very loyal and very conscientious and very loving. I was very fond of her, and that was that.” As for my mother, she told me once that she was lucky—she married exactly the man she wanted to marry. And maybe she did. Unlike Virginia, who implored Leonard to “go on, as before, letting me find my own way,” I think my mother craved the self-sacrifice that Lily so fears. That was the erasure she wanted, that the pact she signed.
5
[They spent their honeymoon with friends, visiting someone’s cousins in a castle near the border of Wales. The castle might have had a hundred rooms, but the cousins lived in only three or four of them; the others were in ruins; you could look up through the fallen ceiling of the billiard room to see blue s
ky. My parents slept in a tower room, where their hosts had left a vase of hyacinths—my mother could still remember the smell of them, she said, even some forty years later, as she stood at the high window looking out across the countryside, with its village and its tenant farms bright green after a rain. What else do you remember? I asked her, but she had disappeared into her memories. Yes, she said, distracted, that was almost one of the happiest times of my life.]
6
Upon graduating from Harvard in 1979, my father took a job at his friend’s startup, advising on the adaptive reuse of old buildings. My mother, who had moved to Boston from London six months earlier to discover that her husband’s disposable income had gone toward flying lessons, was already settled at an architecture firm in Cambridge. By all accounts, it was a happy time. When I was born, my father took a more lucrative position as vice president at a big real estate company, and my parents, who up till then had stashed me in a drawer at night, began to look for a new house.
My mother sometimes tells the story of how my father had called during his lunch break to say he’d found the perfect home—a large, brick townhouse in the then-rundown neighborhood of Charlestown. When she arrived holding me in her arms, the broker looked nervous. “I don’t know if it’s wise to bring a baby in here,” he said. Built in 1860, the house had most recently been a boarding home; empty for the past year, with neither electricity nor heating, it was filthy and freezing. The rooms were filled with trash and old bedding, and a quintet of abandoned refrigerators reeked of decaying food. Shiny chocolate-brown paint peeled from the woodwork like streamers. There had been a fire in what was to become my parents’ bedroom. “Nonsense,” my father said, and escorted us inside. When the group entered the basement, stepping over the bodies of two dead rats, an entire section of wainscoting fell to the ground. My mother looked closer and realized the walls were riddled with rot. Just being there made her feel ill, but my father was ecstatic. As soon as the broker turned his back, he looked at her and grinned. “Don’t let him see how excited you are!” he whispered.
They signed the papers at the beginning of 1982. My father cleared the house of its overturned refrigerators and moldering furniture; he stripped the walls and painted them yellow, taupe, and mayflower red. He laid new front steps—pressing my bare feet into wet concrete to leave an impression that remains today—and he built a deck that faced the city skyline.
Every night, when his work was done and he was cheerfully exhausted, he would return to the living room, which had a pair of marble fireplaces and ceilings twelve feet high; he would sit for hours on the floor with his back to the wall, holding a cigarette and a glass of wine, simply looking. He had sanded the floors and washed the windows, scrubbed the molding and spray-painted the mirror frames above the mantels with silver automotive paint, but the room was still without furniture, and as he looked across the bare, enormous space—as clean and pale now as a piece of driftwood—he was stunned by its brilliance again and again. “What a beautiful room!” he would call every so often to my mother in the kitchen. “What a beautiful room!”
7
“And here she was, she reflected, feeling life rather sinister again.”
“What my mother was like when she was as happy as anyone can be,” Virginia Woolf declared, “I have no notion.” She was referring to the brief period in which Julia Jackson was married to Herbert Duckworth, a handsome, affluent, charming, and “possibly rather dim” young barrister whom Leslie Stephen, who had known Herbert at Cambridge, would later describe as a “thorough gentleman.” Julia—whom as a teenager Virginia suspected of being “aloof,” of shedding “a certain silence round her by her very beauty”—first met Herbert at the age of sixteen, in Venice in 1862. In the following years, she would turn down two marriage proposals (one from a painter, the other from a sculptor), choosing instead the more orthodox Herbert, who had been so taken with Julia in Venice that he followed her to Lake Lucerne. She was “head over ears in love with him, he with her,” and in 1867, when Julia was twenty-one and Herbert thirty-three, they married. They lived in Bryanston Square in London; Julia quickly gave birth to George, followed by Stella; she was eight months pregnant with Gerald, when, in 1870, three years into their marriage and visiting her sister at Upton Castle in Wales, disaster struck: while plucking Julia a fig, stretching skyward to the hanging fruit, Herbert ruptured an abscess and died just hours later.
Virginia believed that this marriage was “the most important thing that ever happened to” her mother, citing as evidence the “complete collapse” that followed: “She was as unhappy as it is possible for anyone to be.” The photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, Julia’s aunt—who photographed her often in those years, capturing her niece’s anguish at close range and with characteristic soft focus—recalled “her sweet large blue eyes growing larger with swimming tears Oh aunt Julia only pray God that I may die soon, that is what I most want.” Stella told Virginia that their mother used to lie on Herbert’s grave at Orchardleigh; for a woman so typically restrained, Virginia thought, this seemed “a superlative expression of her grief.”
But perhaps most startling to Virginia was the fact that, over the next eight years, during which time Julia devoted herself to caring for her children and the poor, she lost her faith. This loss disappointed Julia’s mother, a deeply devout woman, while also convincing Virginia of a capacity for “solitary and independent thinking” that explained how such a woman might next have fallen in love with Leslie Stephen, a very different character from Herbert Duckworth. (It was the religious skepticism that Leslie expressed in his articles, apparently, that first drew Julia to him.) Nevertheless, she declined his first proposal: “I was only 24 when it all seemed a shipwreck,” she explained to him in an undated letter.
As for Virginia herself, she remembered her mother as a woman who “looked very sad when she was not talking,” a woman with “her own sorrow waiting behind her to dip into privately.” That word, “privately”—like Mrs. Ramsay, Julia Stephen almost never discussed her past or the grief she had endured. “I have been as unhappy and as happy as it is possible for a human being to be,” she told her friend Kitty Maxse; the phrase stayed with Kitty, Virginia said, because it was “the only time in all their friendship that she ever spoke of what she had felt for Herbert Duckworth.”
* * *
ALL THE WHILE I was a child, my father wore charcoal-gray suits to work, and colorful ties I selected for him every morning, and black rubber overshoes that on rainy days encased his real shoes like a skin. When he came home at night he would whistle, a piercing, two-tone whistle that was always the same, and as soon as I heard it, I dashed downstairs to meet him. On the days my mother worked late, my school bus dropped me at a pink granite skyscraper in downtown Boston; my father’s office, on the thirty-fourth floor, was at the end of a long corridor, and the wall behind his desk a floor-to-ceiling window with shimmering, far-reaching views of the harbor that dizzied me when I pressed my head against the glass. I sat reading at his feet beneath the desk, and later, when he had finished for the day, we gathered up Jack, Chris, and Frank, and took the elevator one floor down to the Bay Club. The waiter brought the men a round of drinks, and for me he brought a martini glass full of maraschino cherries. “They’ll dye your stomach red,” he always warned.
When I was seven, I answered the phone in my parents’ bedroom in Rhode Island—it was Jack, my father’s friend from work. On bright days this room fills with heat and sunlight, and, on afternoons when the tide is high, the water outside casts a web of light across the ceiling. So too on that afternoon, as I sat on my parents’ bed watching the waves crash above me and waiting for my father to finish his phone call. “Christ,” he said, and again, “Christ.” When he hung up, he tried to explain: His firm was doing badly, and he and Jack and many others had been laid off. He seemed sad but also calm, and in fact I remember the day warmly. My mother was out, and we played a
game of Monopoly. By the time she returned, it had become our news, and he told her I had been a great help.
At first, my father said later, he didn’t worry too much about losing his job—he saw it as an opportunity. In the following months, he founded Geoffrey Smyth Associates, a one-person firm specializing in property consulting, investment, and management. But the collapse of the real estate market and ensuing recession made it difficult to find employment. For the next five years, my mother watched as he woke up early every morning, put on a suit, crossed the hall into the study, and sat there searching for a job; he was so good, she said, always striving, always trying. But while I knew this was a taxing time for my parents, it wasn’t until I found among my father’s papers a document outlining his failed ventures that I truly understood how bleak those years were, and why they produced in him the exhaustion and sourness they did. He lists eighty-four initiatives, alongside increasingly slapdash reasons for their failure: “Banking system crash = no financing available…It never happened…No financing; and it never happened…Left after 8 months; no loans closed!…We know the rest!…They have a relationship with Arthur Andersen!…Got cancer…Not enough leverage available; Not good enough idea.” Taken in full, the document expresses not just my father’s determination but also the scope of his defeat. And while I used to wonder whether some mystery lay at the heart of his long unemployment—Did something happen? If so, what?—I now believe, looking at this list, that he was simply unlucky. He concludes by asking himself two questions: “Do something totally different? Give up trying to do something by myself?”
All the Lives We Ever Lived Page 5