All the Lives We Ever Lived

by Katharine Smyth

  * * *

  BY THE TIME I was a teenager, my father was drunk more than he was not. When we sat down to dinner, his eyes were bloodshot and glazed, and his voice deliberate, occasionally slurred. Sometimes he was playful. “Isn’t this delicious?” he would ask about a meal he had cooked; he would ask it once, twice, three, four times. If my mother and I indulged him he remained playful, but if we didn’t he grew angry—his mood typically shifted from cheerful to silly to sullen to angry to depressed. He would begin to mutter under his breath, my mother would say “What?” too loudly, and he would look at her with hatred for the rest of the meal. If my mother was irritable herself, she would say, “Yes, Geoffrey, the prawns are delicious, but can we please talk about something else?” and his face would twist at what he perceived as her joylessness. Sometimes he was truculent from the beginning, and we ate quickly and silently, trying not to provoke him. And sometimes he was simply stupid, and too sluggish to recognize the condescension with which, after dinner, I rejected his eager, clumsy attempts at conversation. One of the qualities I most admired about my father was his competence, and I found it distasteful to be with him when he was in such a pathetic, insensible state.

  When I left for boarding school at fifteen, I considered my father one of my best friends. By the end of that year, I was as distant from him as I had ever been. He did not like talking on the phone in those days, and during the weekends I spent at home—quite a few of them, as I was miserable—we barely interacted. I had already learned how to gauge his moods and, if necessary, harden myself against them. As the months passed, I needed to calcify more and more. I think the most difficult aspect of loving my father then, as any child of an alcoholic could attest, was the way in which nearly every evening the person I adored simply disappeared. The man who sat down to dinner was not my father. His eyes were empty and flat, and looking into them yielded no sign of recognition or intelligence. Even were I to shake him, to yell and to scream, I would still see the same eyes staring coldly back. Before I’d gone away, we’d had a tradition of sitting on the deck after dinner; we would stay up late, talking and looking out at the view of downtown Boston through the trees. Now I made myself scarce; I shut the door to my room and talked on the phone with friends or watched movies.

  My mother also disappeared, playing solitaire on the computer upstairs or reading in bed. I rarely went to her. You would think my father’s behavior might have brought us together; in fact, it drove us apart. She bore the brunt of my unhappiness, fielding my phone calls from school as often as six or seven times a day (a curious compulsion on my part, for I refused to tell her anything personal, and our conversations were short and unsatisfying). But she was also envious—envious of my relationship with my father, and of his relationship with me. His conduct sustained a kind of unspoken competition between us, one I should never have won but often did. (Indeed, although it arouses James’s fury, it’s entirely appropriate that Mr. Ramsay will forever win the battle for Mrs. Ramsay’s attention; the alternative is more disturbing.) Not only did my father turn on my mother more frequently than on me, but he seemed to seek my company more often than he sought her own: it was with me that he sailed and swam, with me that he watched movies and stayed up late at night. I must acknowledge here the pleasure of feeling chosen by him, and the faint insolence toward my mother his actions encouraged. He often impressed on me how terrific she was—how much she doted on me, how lucky I was to have her—but his behavior provided the stronger example. In retrospect, my mother must have found my allegiance to him so unfair: she did everything right, he did everything wrong, and yet it was he who every morning earned my devotion anew. But she must also have understood the excitement of being included in my father’s world. The qualities that had originally drawn him to her—loyalty, conscientiousness, a deep capacity to love—stayed with my mother in force. They were her greatest qualities. But they were not qualities that inspired reverence, and my father, for all his tremendous failings, was more commanding and beguiling.

  Every so often, moreover, there were stretches of time in which he became the man he’d been before. These were not a result of his drinking less, I don’t think, but of periods of external calm—weeks when my mother and he were getting along, or when his work was going well. (He had finally found some success, with a partner, in buying and renovating a commercial building nearby; they were hoping to buy and renovate another soon.) My summer vacation at home was one of these times. Dinners went smoothly night after night, and it wasn’t long before I began joining him on the deck again. He would make coffee and take it outside with a glass of brandy while I cleaned up the kitchen; when I had finished, I would make a cup of tea and go outside myself. He was content to sit alone with his drink and a cigarette, but equally happy to have company: my father was never covetous of solitude.

  I told him nearly everything that happened in my life—about my friendships and antagonisms; about the parties I had gone to and the trips I had taken. He loved to hear my stories, and with him alone I became a good storyteller. I could make him laugh in a way I couldn’t make anyone else laugh, and when I finished he’d say, “Katharine, you must write this stuff down!” If he was feeling expansive, he would misquote Longfellow instead, slowly and with feeling: “Life is real, life is earnest, but the grave is not the goal.” He was similarly open with me; we talked about his childhood, his friends, his relationship with my mother, and his work. I often grew bored when he talked about business (though he himself grew animated), but the rest of the time his conversation thrilled me as much as it had thrilled me at thirteen. I was so impressed by the darkness of his worldview. He continued to refer to himself as a nihilist, instructing me to tell anyone who asked that I was a secular humanist, and said again and again, at the age of fifty, how terrible it was to grow old. Sometimes he frightened me with the indifference with which he spoke of death. He didn’t care if he lived or died, he said, and seemed never to consider that I might care myself.

  On the weekends that summer we went to Rhode Island. In the mornings I lay on the dock in my bathing suit until I was summoned to the deck for lunch, and in the afternoons, when the wind was picking up, I took out the Laser. I wasn’t an especially strong sailor, and usually tacked back and forth across the basin, but sometimes I worked up the courage to head out beyond the ruins of the old stone bridge for Gould Island, the uninhabited lozenge of land in the middle of the river. When I was a child, I suspected that the island hid old, weatherworn chests of buried treasure; a thick forest had grown to its shores, and one day my father took me there in the rubber ducky—our name for the orange inflatable dinghy. We landed on a narrow stretch of beach, dragged the boat onto the rocks, and spent the afternoon clambering around its craggy perimeter and unsuccessfully searching for gold. “Don’t worry, Poppet,” my father said when we were once again bouncing above the waves and headed for home. “We’ll find it next time.”

  By now all that remained of the thick forest on Gould Island were the skeletal boughs of dead trees, and on those boughs, black hard-angled shapes that looked like hand towels hung out to dry: flocks of cormorants airing their water-logged wings. I could see them as I neared the island, their small, sleek heads gleaming in the sunlight. Deep-diving cormorants are one of the few species of waterbird whose feathers are not waterproof; they often kept me company while I sunbathed, standing on the pilings of the dock and holding up their outstretched wings as effortlessly as if invisible strings were pulling them skyward. The harbormaster told us it was they who were responsible for the island’s degradation—apparently the accumulation of cormorant guano beneath cormorant nests eventually kills the very trees in which those nests are built. Every time I circled the island I thought of this, of the fact that one day soon the boughs would fall and the cormorants would move away. I supposed that when this happened the guano would leach into the bay and the forest grow again, and I supposed, too, that then the cormorants would return and the cy
cle would begin anew. Though perhaps not, I thought, tacking and turning back, in my lifetime.

  My father took the Laser on my return. He always left the basin, and sometimes I would stand on the float, still in my life jacket, watching the white sail grow fainter and fainter. (“So much depends,” thinks Lily, watching from the lawn as the dull speck that is the Ramsays’ sailboat recedes into the bay, “upon distance”; so much depends upon “whether people are near us or far from us.”) I knew how exhilarating it was to gather speed as one left the old stone bridge behind, and I often tried to imagine what it was my father saw and felt and thought at that very moment; how funny that he had access to that, while all I had were feet firmly planted and the sight of a tiny white triangle beyond the bridge. But then he would turn back, draw nearer; the sail would grow in size, and with one final tack he would bring the boat alongside the dock and our worlds were once again in line. We went for a swim before it grew dark, diving into water with a surface like tinsel—depending on the tide, it could be emerald green, inky black, dull slate gray, or glistening blue. My father was a neat and capable swimmer. He would stand at the edge of the float, his scarred, knobbly stomach poking out over the top of his bathing suit—his “corporation,” he called it, and gave it a pat—and seemed less to dive than to throw himself in all at once. He liked the sidestroke and I liked the breaststroke; we swam to the boat and back, sometimes climbing aboard for gin and tonics, or else the basin offered up a current so strong that we simply swam in place. By the time we mounted the ladder, the sun was low in the sky, and all it touched was riven by gold.

  At the end of that summer I discovered a box of old photographs. The pictures were small, with rounded edges, and their colors strong and saturated. The first showed my parents, in their late twenties, sailing in the Solent. My father was laughing, and my mother looking shyly at the camera; her hair, dyed a vivid red, burned against the bright blue sky. In another, taken at a boatyard in Sydney, she was crouching with a paintbrush, stenciling letters onto the transom of a dinghy. And in yet another, black-and-white, she was young and smiling in a field of tall grass—in the brilliant sunlight, the ragged stalks appeared ablaze. I was shocked by her loveliness, by her high cheekbones and the light in her blue eyes—I had never seen my mother so happy. It occurs to me now, thinking back to the flesh on display in those pictures, that my mother’s body was a book, that my father’s body was a book, that written on their skin, and within their skin, was the story of my parents’ lives; and that Virginia Woolf, that most incorporeal writer, that writer whose characters drift about like plankton in a soup of consciousness (never, ever fucking), is in this respect a pretty useless tour guide. Better someone like John Updike, whose books I flipped through as a kid, looking for sex scenes that would send a flaming arrow up my core, and to whom I returned in an ICU waiting room at twenty-four, reading my way through the Rabbit novels as my father lay comatose next door. Every time I looked up at the real world after being immersed in those pages, at its textures and shadows and patterns of light, it seemed a more physical, more immediate place; an unpleasant place, yes—grimy, grainy, grubby, tactile—and yet in keeping with the simple fact that we are each of us circumscribed within a body, the shape of which, the scars on which, the holes within which, tell our tale if you care to read it.

  That evening I showed the pictures to my father. He thumbed through them; he seemed interested but detached. He paused on one of himself at work, sitting near a striking girl with long white-blond hair and a tight green T-shirt. “My old girlfriend,” he said. Vivien. When he saw the one of my mother painting, he paused again. “God, she was skinny,” he said. “I remember meeting her at the airport after we were married. I gave her a hug and my arms went right round her. It was ‘Where are you,’ slipping through my arms.” He paused one last time, at a photograph taken at their wedding. My mother was wearing the pink cotton skirt I had found in her closet—too tight for me, even at sixteen—and her curls were tied with ribbons. “Oh yes, that’s right,” he said. “She had her hair done in this funny style. She went off to the hairdresser’s and turned up two hours later with all these stringy things on her head.” He reached the bottom of the pile and sniffed. “Right. What’s next?”

  A few days later I woke to learn that Princess Diana had been killed. The television was blaring news of her death, my mother was emotional, and perhaps my irritation showed, for she angrily accused my friends, who had visited the day before, of using all the newly washed beach towels. We fought. But though my father usually stepped in to take my mother’s side, sometimes because he agreed with her and sometimes because it was the politic thing to do, on this day he defended me: “Stop it, Minty—you’re being irrational.”

  She burst into tears. “Stop both of you attacking me,” she sobbed. “Stop attacking me!”

  “I don’t know what the matter is with you,” my father yelled. “Maybe it’s those drugs you’ve been taking, but every day, as soon as you wake up, you’re in a terrible mood—against the world.”

  “How dare you!” she screamed. “I’m not on any drugs!”

  “Maybe that’s the problem then!”

  We were going to a Labor Day picnic, and while my father and I loaded the car with salads, sandwiches, and the Sunday papers, my mother sat in the living room and cried. “How dare you!” she occasionally wailed. “How dare you mention my pills in front of Katharine!” (In fact I’d already known about my mother’s medications—for depression, for anxiety—but only from the pill bottles that lined the bathroom wall.) All the while the television played in the background, barking about Diana and the accident, and when my mother saw my father carrying the newspapers, she screamed again. “You don’t need the papers! You’re going to a social event.”

  “We’re taking the papers.”

  “No, you’re not!”

  “Fine,” he shouted, dumping them on the floor. “Take the papers. I’m sick of your parochial little rules governing your parochial little life. Take the fucking papers.”

  I’d just received my learner’s permit, and was sitting in the driver’s seat adjusting the mirror when my father got in the car. We were about to leave and then my mother came out on the front porch. She was wearing an oversized green nightgown. For the first time she did not scream, but spoke in a low, controlled voice. “If you don’t come back to the house, I’m leaving you,” she said. “I’m serious. You and your alcoholism have driven us to this.” She went inside and shut the door.

  “You better go back.”

  “Yeah,” my father said. His voice was subdued. “I take it we aren’t going to the picnic—unload the car, will you?”

  “Sure,” I said. I sat there a while longer, looking at myself in the mirror. I was wearing too much eyeliner.

  The house was quiet for the rest of the day. And later, when this blowup came to nothing, I realized with surprise that I was disappointed. I had wanted my parents to sever, as one wants storms when sailing.

  10

  “For nothing was simply one thing.”

  Over the next few years, I came home to many such fights, arguments fierce and cruel in which my father yelled and swore, and my mother screamed, cried, and retreated upstairs. A sullen response from her, a harsh tone from him—these were enough to unleash a night’s worth of bitter accusations. A pattern had developed years before: While my father, unable to remember his hostile conduct of the previous evening, would wake feeling positive and well-disposed toward my mother, she would wake feeling angry and resentful, and as a result be prickly all morning. My father used her morning behavior as evidence that she was the root of the problem, and she used his evening behavior as evidence his drinking was. His drinking was the culprit, but I still sided with him more often than with her. Sometimes after their fights I would feel for my mother a surge of love and pity and visit her in the study. “How dare you,” she would hiss, “how dare
you not defend me,” and immediately my feelings of tenderness would vanish.

  Meanwhile, my father’s health was growing worse. Three months after his kidney was removed, he had returned to the doctor for a routine checkup to find that he had a handful of small benign tumors in his bladder. It was Stage I bladder cancer. The tumors were removed, but six months later the doctors found another one. This too was removed, but three months after that they found a couple more, and three months after that, still more. The tumors were not dangerous in themselves, but they would be if they were to one day break through the bladder wall. And after twenty or so of these procedures—and as the tumors grew more numerous—recovering from each new operation became increasingly traumatic. It seemed like my father was in and out of the hospital every few weeks. Finally it was decided that he should try a round of chemical treatments: once a week for six weeks they would inject his bladder with a potent liquid intended to eliminate the tumors altogether. At that time, the late 1990s, there were three different chemicals available.

  It was around the time he tried the first of these that I came home for winter vacation, and, on the day after Christmas, joined my parents for dinner. My father was cheerful; he had been cheerful a lot recently, and I wondered whether it had something to do with the prospect of recovery. But my mother no longer trusted this kind of mirth, and when he tried to engage her in conversation, she flipped through a magazine and ignored him. Gradually his good mood faded—I could see the delight on his face morph into anger—and I steeled myself for yet another argument. He didn’t say anything further, though, and after a silent meal my mother stood and brought her plate to the kitchen. As she rummaged for something in the fridge, I happened to look at my father. At that moment, without his seeing me, his face collapsed and he started to cry. He ran to the half bathroom in the hall, and my mother, who either hadn’t realized he was crying or was determined to take no notice, went upstairs.