All the Lives We Ever Lived

by Katharine Smyth

  I sat alone at the table; my father’s heaving sobs seemed to shake the walls. I didn’t go to him—I hoped to give him the illusion of privacy—but I couldn’t rid myself of the image of his face, one moment hard and the next crumpled into an expression of despair. How must he see his life? I wondered. He was fifty-one years old, underemployed and an alcoholic. His bladder was strewn with cancerous tumors that needed to be scraped away every three months. His wife was a stranger to him, and he as well to her. My father was not a victim, of course—though unlucky, he must have known that he had largely brought this situation on himself. But I still hated the idea of his isolation, hated that he had tried to communicate his hopefulness and been refused. And I hated too, though it was likely not the subject of his own thoughts, the fact of all his early promise and its mocking contrast to his present.

  But how, then, did one reconcile this sadness with the happiness we sometimes had together? For the previous morning, Christmas, my father had popped open a bottle of champagne and poured it into three glasses half-full of orange juice—we always started holidays and birthdays with Buck’s Fizz—and we carried them into the living room, which was the color of a seashell, with white plaster molding in the shape of small waves breaking along the ceiling and enormous ornate silver mirrors that reflected this beauty back to itself. My parents read the newspaper and I read Pride and Prejudice—my mother had been begging me to read Jane Austen for years and as a Christmas present to her I had finally obliged—and once I finished I was even mature enough to admit to her that I had loved it. Later that afternoon the three of us curled up on the couch and watched four hours of the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice, and when Colin Firth first appeared on screen my parents, independently of each other, began to shriek in mock excitement. “Oh, Darcy!” my mother exclaimed, “Oh, Darcy!” my father exclaimed, and they both fell to their sides as if they had fainted. “Stop it!” I insisted, but I was laughing.

  “So that was the Lighthouse, was it?” James asks as the Ramsays’ boat approaches the rocks, surprised to find that the beacon, which he remembers as silver and hazy-looking, is now stark and straight and ringed in black and white—a harsher view, as if tragedy had exposed him to a new, more brutal realm. But then he corrects himself: “No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing.” Such are the complexities and contradictions of human experience, in which perception is not monolithic, but evanescent, and even an object as steadfast as a lighthouse must wear multiple guises. It was Woolf’s genius to express this richness, to never gloss over intricacy or inconsistency, to communicate through her characters her ongoing struggle to find truth and meaning in a world where both are infinitely shifting. “The mind is full of monstrous, hybrid, unmanageable emotions,” she wrote once. “That the age of the earth is 3,000,000,000 years; that human life lasts but a second; that the capacity of the human mind is nevertheless boundless; that life is infinitely beautiful yet repulsive; that one’s fellow creatures are adorable but disgusting”—such is the “atmosphere of doubt and conflict” in which we find ourselves.

  That happy family, that perfect trinity, that enviable and exclusive club we sometimes formed—that was my family too.

  11

  Claudette’s living room was small, and I rearranged her furniture to accommodate a white screen. We sat in darkness as the projector whirred and clicked. Dust swirled in the expanding ray of light. Then a woman—my grandmother, Claudette’s great friend—appeared before us, and the narrow apartment receded. She kneeled on a blanket beside a rocky stream; her hair was black and wavy, and she was speaking to a fair-haired little boy. Then she was standing, her hair still black but her lips red, before a diaphanous orange sheet through which shone the sun. It had the weightlessness of a silk parachute. She waved too quickly at someone beyond the frame and a different little boy ran too quickly to her—an effect of early film. He disappeared into her skirts, but then turned back to face the camera, and I could tell from the way his eyes wrinkled at the corners that it was my father, stripped of years.

  Then whiteness—the projector whirred and clicked—and the ocean rose up and rolled over. Three older boys ran in; they dove beneath the waves, they shouted soundlessly to those on shore. Then whiteness, and the collision of croquet balls on a green lawn, then whiteness, and a teenager reading in tortoiseshell glasses, then whiteness, and a black silhouette on a mountaintop, then whiteness, and finally a young man. He wore tight-fitting trousers that widened at the knee; he was showing off a bright red caravan he had built in a field ringed with trees. The colors were bleached and textured, like watercolors on a windowpane. He held a cigarette in one hand, a tool of some kind in the other, and his nostrils flared slightly as he turned once more to face the camera. He was a serious, imposing figure, but then he was proud, and then he was excited, and then he smiled, and in that instant his face relaxed and his eyes filled up with light.

  I went to sleep that night in Claudette’s guest room, a tiny, old-fashioned bedroom with a dressmaker’s dummy in the corner. The space was too dark—the wooden shutters fit too neatly across the panes of glass—and the uneasiness borne by the films gathered and intensified until it was a crushing grief. I don’t know him well enough, I thought, panicking. I should have spent more time trying to know him. I turned on the light and took out my diary. He is going to die soon. As soon as I wrote it, I longed to take it back.

  12

  “It had flashed upon her that she would move the tree to the middle, and need never marry anybody, and she had felt an enormous exaltation.”

  Shall we check in on Paul and Minta Rayley, that young couple of Mrs. Ramsay’s creation? Neither returns to the Hebrides in the novel’s final section, but we do hear news of them from Lily, who over the years has paid some visits to their cottage north of London, where Paul breeds Belgian hares and Minta, singing, bored, presses her arm upon her husband’s shoulder—a call for his discretion. Last time we saw Minta, she was wearing her golden haze; last time we saw Paul, he was burning and glowing and bound for adventure; it swept over Lily too, seated next to Paul at dinner, “the emotion, the vibration, of love.” But during one visit, the couple’s relations are unbearably tense, and from a single phrase—that Paul plays “chess in coffee-houses”—Lily pieces together a narrative, one in which Minta, “wreathed, tinted, garish,” comes home at three a.m. and stands on the staircase eating a sandwich, while Paul in his pajamas brandishes a poker and shouts “something violent, abusing her…saying she had ruined his life.” Paul with his exquisite profile; golden-reddish, wild Minta—in marriage, he has grown “withered, drawn; she flamboyant, careless. For things had worked loose after the first year or so; the marriage had turned out rather badly.”

  A little while ago, I had lunch with my father’s friend Zette at her home on Water Street beneath the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. Over homemade squash soup, she caught me up on her retirement, and I caught her up on my failed marriage, and perhaps because marriage led to marriage (Zette herself had never married), she asked if I had ever heard about the weeklong sailing trip she had taken with my parents—it had been, she said, like something out of a film. They sailed all around Rhode Island and Connecticut; the weather was perfect; and yet all the while she felt my mother straining to keep things together. She wondered why they had invited her. Then, at the very end, all the cracks opened up. “I was trying not to hear,” she said, “but on a boat you can’t get very far away. And I thought, That’s why I was invited—to keep them apart.” I apologized, lamely, some twenty years later; I could easily imagine such a scene. My father yelling, throwing things about the cabin; my mother begging him to keep his voice down.

  As she stands painting on the lawn, Lily contemplates the story she has drawn up in her mind about the Rayleys. This “is what we call ‘knowing’ people,” she muses, “ ‘thinking’ of them, ‘being fond’ of them! Not a word of it was
true; she had made it up; but it was what she knew them by all the same.” She is reflecting not just on the limits of knowledge but also on the opacity of other people’s marriages; the little scene I just created—my father throwing things; my mother pleading with him to be quiet—is no more real than Lily’s image of Paul as he waves a poker on the stairs. Even Zette, hiding in her cabin and trying not to listen, a single data point that has for decades shaped her understanding of my parents’ union, was in possession of no more than some crude approximation of the truth. A marriage is a secret, an alliance so private that even one’s closest friends are privy only to its contours, to the performance that it becomes in public; no one on the outside could know the precise nature of its dynamics within. And it’s telling that when Zette recounted the sailing trip, I was surprised not that my parents had fought but that I had lost track of a whole week they’d spent at sea; even at thirty-five, I keep forgetting that the bulk of their marriage was invisible to me, and my understanding of those gaps a fiction. In To the Lighthouse, Lily imagines how she would take satisfaction in telling Mrs. Ramsay that Paul and Minta’s marriage was a failure; as a teenager, I would have summed up my parents’ union similarly. And yet coupled with their misery was potent connection, one that bound them to each other—irrevocably, it seemed—and that neither Zette nor I could ever hope to fathom.

  After we had finished our soup, Zette told another sailing story: how many years later, out of the blue, my father called her from the East River to say that he was right outside. She ran up to the roof of her apartment building, the same apartment where we were having lunch, and they waved to each other just as he and Solent were passing beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. They kept waving until the boat was out of sight. It was the last time she saw him.

  * * *

  BY THE TIME I was a senior in high school, my father turned from silly to angry so quickly that I was frightened to be around him after six o’clock. At dinner he did everything too hard: he placed silverware on the table with a bang, he chewed fiercely, he cut violently into slabs of butter. Conversations were strained and dangerous. If we didn’t humor him—sometimes my mother didn’t humor him—his face would grow tight and he would stand up. Grabbing his wineglass, he would open the screen door to the deck and slam it shut behind him. Later, when he had installed a mechanism to stop it on its hinges, the door would bounce back, and slowly, quietly, close itself. It was a silence more sinister than the banging had been.

  I’m sure an onlooker would wonder, as Zette wondered, why my parents didn’t get divorced. They spoke of it often. They announced several times in those years that they would be separating, and it was always said with such finality that I believed it to be true. But I had noticed something about my parents, which is that the older they got, the less full their lives became, and the less individuality they seemed to possess. They had plenty of friends in England and Australia, but in America they rarely socialized. My mother blamed this on my father’s drinking; my father on her “neuroses.” She had quit her job at the architecture firm when he finally found employment, and later took the part-time position of managing his buildings. They both worked from home, from the same office, and on many days they did not leave the house; when they did, it was often to go to the bank, post office, or grocery store. Unlike my friends’ parents, who seemed to lead lives as individuated as my own, my parents’ lives were so inextricably entwined that were they to separate, it would be as two people not quite whole. They were rarely apart for longer than three hours at a time. They shared everything they possessed. Most significant, the life they had created in America was a shared life. They did not belong here as individuals. They had no extended family here and few friends; they had only a daughter and each other.

  Shortly after Paul asks Minta to marry him, he has that vision: of “how they would retreat into solitude together,” of how they would “walk on and on, he always leading her, and she pressing close to his side.” I see my parents in that image, and see too how paradoxically it was their retreat into solitude, their very closeness—the way they clung to each other even as they clawed at each other—that most divided them. Were they whole, my parents could have parted; were they whole, they might not have needed to. Lily is cognizant of such risks; as she watches Paul and Minta at dinner, flinching at the “fangs” of love to which Minta is exposed, she feels grateful that she may still elude their fate: “She need not marry, thank Heaven: she need not undergo that degradation. She was saved from that dilution.” It’s a dark view of marriage, but one that’s not so different, really, from Mrs. Ramsay’s observation that Paul and Minta will say “we” all their lives—both characters are grappling with the ways in which wedlock promises an erosion of the self.

  That spring, as my parents and I were finishing dinner one night, my father stood up and opened the liquor cabinet. Then, without warning, he slammed the cabinet door and struck the table. “Stop playing silly games, Minty!” he yelled.

  He left the room, hurling the door closed behind him. When he was gone, my mother told me she had poured the bottle of brandy down the sink without telling him. We waited. He returned with his shoes; he was going to the liquor store. At first he was silent, his face hardened into an expression of rage, and then he began to yell.

  “Stop playing these fucking games,” he shouted. “You never stop eating yourself stupid—do I throw out your food?” Earlier that day, during a rare moment of intimacy, my mother had told me she’d lost fifteen pounds.

  “You’re such a jerk,” I said quietly. I was almost never the object of my father’s anger, but when I said this, he turned to me furiously and struck me across the neck with his shoe. It didn’t hurt. I had the sense he’d stopped his swing at the last moment.

  “Geoffrey!” my mother screamed, rising from her chair.

  “You mind your own business!” he shouted at me. “You’re a fucking spoiled brat.” He left again, and when he returned he was carrying the heavy-duty, plastic garbage can from the driveway. It barely fit through the door frame. “I’ve never thrown out your food,” he continued to shout at my mother. “Let’s start now.” He carried the garbage can into the kitchen, shoving her out of the way and trapping her behind the fridge door. “What is it? Rice? Potatoes?” He began to grab at bottles, chunks of cheese, chicken breasts, and Tupperware containers, dumping them all into the trash. It was only when he had emptied most of the fridge that he returned the can to the driveway, poured himself some wine, and disappeared outside.

  My mother was tearful, and I went to hug her. I hadn’t hugged her properly in a long time, and her body was simultaneously known and unfamiliar.

  “Mom,” I pleaded. She smiled at me wistfully, and I held her again. Her face was wet.

  “Did you know it was ten years ago today that he was laid off?” she asked. She began to talk and talk—about his alcoholism, how he could only get better when he wanted to—and it occurred to me that she never discussed my father with anyone.

  When I returned to my room, my overwhelming sensation was one of exhaustion and even boredom—I was sick of spending evenings like this. From then on I began to avoid him at night even more deliberately than I had before. I remember an exchange in Rhode Island, at the end of a day spent watching Antonioni films for my art history class. I was brushing my teeth when my father appeared at the bathroom door. He was hunched over, and his own teeth were stained gray from red wine. His hair (I suddenly noticed) had also grayed. He was smiling shyly and holding one of his beloved Patrick O’Brian novels—its cover showed a wooden ship thrashing on enormous waves. “What?” I asked. He’d been drunk at eight o’clock and it was midnight. “How did you like L’Avventura?” he asked. “It was fine,” I said. “I’ll talk to you about it in the morning.” He wanted to talk now—he said something about Monica Vitti. “Good night,” I said. “I’m tired.” He looked hurt, but finally turned around and went downstairs. And yet h
ow much I wanted to talk to him too! How much I wanted to stay up late and hear his thoughts on Antonioni, whom he had loved when he was younger. And how badly it hurt to send him away like that, evening after evening, terrified, terrified, that we didn’t have much time together, that he would soon be gone.

  13

  People sometimes ask me if I’m angry with my father. When I say I’m not, they think I’m lying to myself. I don’t think I am. When I look back on his worst acts, I can remember my wrath and hatred, certainly—so violent, so complete; so inexorable, I thought at times, that I could barely stand to be in my own skin. But I can also remember the way in which, within a week or two, such vehemence had faded to nothing; how that brutish stranger was again and again vanquished by that other, most gentle and lovable being: my father. And the truth is that neither memory—neither the loathing nor the absolution—feels especially familiar now. They feel like stories attached to someone else.

  14

  “A shutter, like the leathern eyelid of a lizard, flickered over the intensity of his gaze and obscured the letter R….He would never reach R. On to R, once more. R—”

  My father’s first assignment at the Architectural Association was called the Primitive Hut Project. The conceit was that one was stranded on a deserted, rocky island in the Hebrides—one much like the Ramsays’ own, perhaps—and needed to build a settlement out of the available resources. But it was a pathetic assignment, my father said later, because if there was nothing on this island but rocks and sod, and maybe a couple of trees, then the only thing you could really build was stone huts. There were a few design issues—you could build huts of different sizes, or a hut for the chieftain, or a communal hut, or a kitchen hut set apart from the residential huts—but that was about it. Nevertheless, the students were given over a month to complete the project, and my father spent weeks constructing a model from layered cork sheet cut in contour and white plaster molded into the shape of parabolic domes. (“For structurally,” he said, interrupting himself, “if you’re building a hut without any mortar, because of the effect of the structural profile, it has to be a parabola.”) “The thing was exquisite,” he said. “There was nothing intrinsically wonderful about the design—there wasn’t any design to be done. But it was absolutely beautiful.”