All the Lives We Ever Lived

by Katharine Smyth

  The look of love on her face was humbling—in all this time, I hadn’t once thought of my father’s experience. Nor of my mother’s own, for that matter. “You know, it’s been so long,” she said later, “thirteen years of this, that sometimes I feel like I’m going to die first.” The words surprised me. But the day my father was diagnosed with cancer in his lungs was the day she turned sixty—of course she must ponder her mortality along with his.

  “But to go on with their story,” Lily thinks of Paul and Minta Rayley toward the end of To the Lighthouse, “they had got through the dangerous stage by now.” She recalls how Paul has taken up with a mistress—a solemn woman with braided hair whom Minta describes with admiration—and how, from the friendliness and pragmatism with which Minta handed Paul his tools when their car broke down, it was clear that everything would be okay. “Far from breaking up the marriage, that alliance had righted it. They were excellent friends, obviously.” The anecdote gives Lily a sense of triumph over Mrs. Ramsay and her antiquated notions—“It has all gone against your wishes,” she imagines telling her. “They’re happy like that; I’m happy like this”—and yet the story also makes a case for the plasticity of marriage, for its capacity to continually evolve. The Rayleys’ union could be considered the foil to the Ramsays’ own, but I think it’s more imaginative to view those two relationships not as “good” or “bad,” but as differing examples, out of a countless number of examples, of the idiosyncratic, often unwieldy bonds we forge in wedlock, and as yet another reminder that, in marriage as in life, nothing is simply one thing.

  When Lily sees the Ramsays walking on the lawn, her impulse is to turn an alliance of boundless complexity into a symbol: “So that is marriage,” she thinks, “a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball.” This moment, in which Mrs. Ramsay, sensing her husband’s wish to protect her, shakes herself from solitude to join him, is my favorite that the couple shares. They engage in easy conversation—“Pray Heaven he won’t fall in love with Prue,” she says of the odious Charles Tansley, to which Mr. Ramsay replies that he’d disinherit her if she wedded him—but they brave, too, a painful episode in which Mrs. Ramsay cannot confide her private thoughts: “He did not like to see her look so sad, he said. Only wool gathering, she protested, flushing a little….No, they could not share that; they could not say that.” But though “the inadequacy of human relationships”—Mrs. Ramsay’s phrase—runs deep here, it doesn’t diminish the couple’s intimacy. Later in the walk, she guesses that her husband is thinking of the books he might have written had he never married. But he “was not complaining, he said….And he seized her hand and raised it to his lips and kissed it with an intensity that brought the tears to her eyes, and quickly he dropped it.”

  Following on the heels of Mrs. Ramsay’s self-protectiveness, this gesture shows us what we can share, what we can say; it’s a testament to the glory of love and the glory of marriage, inadequate though both may be. And while the exchange is likely based upon the Stephens’ marriage, one that instilled in Virginia that “tremendous, absurd, ideal of marriage” with which she began life, I expect she took inspiration from her own as well. Marriage to Leonard may at times have felt like servitude, but it could also be an overwhelming source of joy. “I was overcome with happiness,” she wrote when, in 1937, he implored her not to leave him for the weekend. “Then we walked round the square love making—after 25 years cant bear to be separate…it is an enormous pleasure, being wanted: a wife. And our marriage so complete.”

  My parents had been married for over twenty-eight years on the day my mother stood at my father’s bedside, smoothing his hair and worrying about his comfort. Maybe they would have been better off apart, maybe each would have had a greater shot at fulfillment had they found the force of will to separate. But the fact is that they didn’t separate; that for nearly half their lives they were as entangled as it’s possible for two human beings to be; and that, though I used to feel inclined to scorn their marriage, to do so was as mistaken as to simplify the Ramsays’ own. My parents’ connection was infinitely more complex than I gave it credit for; it was a living thing that sometimes shrank and sometimes grew. It was tender, it was vicious; it adapted itself to the facts on the ground. It held majesty in addition to its heartache, and its most vile moments could not negate its best.

  * * *

  I WENT TO the hospital every day that August, and every day I stayed for eight hours. I worried sometimes that the nurses would think me naive, for my father, still sedated, would remember nothing of it. But, I thought later, lying in bed in Rhode Island, listening to the whisper of the waves outside and finally approaching sleep myself, the reason I spent so much time at the hospital was not that I thought it would soothe my father. I went to the hospital because I liked it. I liked stacking my cafeteria tray with prepackaged salads and cups of tea, and the soft rainbow of scrubs worn by nurses, and the way these scrubs draped over brown and black clogs. I liked the barren beauty of words such as cannula and catheter, so at odds with the drama requiring their use, and the brisk foreign language spoken by doctors who swept so quickly through the halls that they seemed to leave a wake. And I liked the hospital’s efficiency, its sterility, its impersonality, and I liked, most of all, the illusion that I was an integral part of that enormous, well-oiled mechanism that was keeping my father and so many others alive.

  Sometimes he opened his eyes. Sometimes he even smiled. Once he opened his eyes and looked at me questioningly. “Cancer?” he whispered. “Yes, Dad, you have cancer,” I said, and he started to cry. “But you’re fine,” I said. “You’ll be fine.” By now all four of his limbs were restrained; the head nurse, Jim, said he had been trying to climb out of bed in the middle of the night. Every few minutes he asked for a pair of scissors, and the words returned me each time to the nightmarish precision of his request years earlier—Get me a short, sharp knife. “Get me out of here,” he whispered now, and “Take me away, take me away, take me away.” I stood by his bedside, and the machines—sixteen in total—beeped and flashed: his guts, spilled from his body and made anew, from metal and from plastic. Was the body merely an appliance, indifferent and supplantable? Or was it something else entirely? The days passed and the monitors were switched off, one by one, until at last he was deemed stable enough to move to a regular hospital room, though even there he was in shackles half the time.

  The final connection was a catheter that ran from his neobladder to the Foley attached to the bed; for days its contents had been a bloody light pink, the flesh of a grapefruit, but eventually the tube ran clear and a urologist ordered its removal. “Your urine looks absolutely beautiful,” he told my father. “You could drink it.” Soon we would drive to Rhode Island, where the specter of a hurricane was passing through, where I would catch my father smoking on the hammock, and where, later, lying in bed, I would consider the weeks lost to the hospital—their small horrors and small triumphs. I knew the sense of accomplishment I felt at our having survived them was misguided: this ordeal had been merely a digression, the trials that mattered yet to come. But it was still an extraordinary place, the hospital; a rare, incomparable place. And perhaps my father was thinking something similar, for on the morning he was to leave it I found him sitting in a chair, looking out the window. The catheter had been removed; he was unfettered once again. Beyond the glass was the low swell of Beacon Hill, and behind it, the higher swell of downtown, and then, just visible behind another building, the silhouette of the pink granite skyscraper where I had, some twenty years before, ascended thirty-four stories to meet my father—a dark-haired young man in a dark suit who swung me into his arms, took me with him to the cocktail lounge, ordered me a glass of bright red maraschino cherries. His defiance was gone now, so too his raw sorrow—he was himself. “It’s amazing they’ve even kept me going this long,” he said.

  19

  When I think of the changes we witnessed in just twenty year
s of waterfront living, I am reminded of the summer I began crossing paths with a certain mallard duck. The first time I saw her, I was reading on the front porch. A red pickup truck came to a sudden stop in the middle of the street, and the driver laughed as he watched her lead eight ducklings toward the water. She quacked, and pretended to ignore him; the ducklings, some still emerging from the tall yellow grass that lines the hill opposite, struggled to keep up. The next morning I was still in bed when I heard the sound again. Throwing off the covers, I went to the window and watched as one by one the ducklings, now returning to their nest, slipped between the pale stalks. From then on I was attuned to her call, which, though quiet, was so distinctive and persistent that once it even carried over the blare of the radio as I was driving home. I slowed when I heard it and then I saw a solitary duckling, brown, downy, no larger than an apple, bobbing down the road before me. I stepped out of the car and waved him toward the beach; like a windup toy he spun in a circle and carried off in the direction I had sent him. Then I spotted his mother, watching us uneasily from beside an overturned dinghy.

  I saw her for the last time one evening, when, sitting down to dinner, I heard her song rising from the beach below. Leaving my own food, I grabbed some stale bread and walked a little ways down the dock. The sun had already set behind the houses and a line of peach light fading to blue ran along the treetops. To the south, a slow-moving slab of cloud blazed a brilliant hot pink. The water was mirror-smooth, and in its surface, broken only by the silhouettes of sailboats, was reflected this line of peach, this faded blue, this blazing hot pink wall of cloud. I tore off pieces of bread and threw them in the water. The mother duck swam toward me. Her ducklings had been resting on the shore—in the twilight, with their legs tucked beneath them, they’d looked no different from the stones of the beach—and now they hurried to the water, happily braving the miniature waves. That night, I saw with a shock, there were only two.

  I thought I was alone, but then I heard someone on the next dock say hello. It was John, our neighbor, returning from a swim. I felt embarrassed at being discovered. “Just feeding the ducks,” I said, and he said, “Oh!” He hadn’t seen them until now.

  “Do you remember,” he asked, “when we used to have big birds? The swans that would come in the morning?”

  “Yes,” I said, “and there were those seven geese that swam in a line up and down the basin.”

  “That was ages ago, wasn’t it?”

  I nodded. “I’m worried,” I said then, of the ducklings, “because there were at least eight of them a few days ago.”

  “They do disappear,” he said.

  Later I poured myself a glass of wine and sat outside on the deck. The cloud to the south was gray now, and ordinary, and the salmon light over the treetops shrinking and intensifying as the sky grew dim. A few mature ducks were floating near the dock, their bodies black against the blackening water, and as I watched they were joined by more ducks and still more. By the time the sky had darkened completely, there were several dozen of them, a navy protecting the seashore, and their low, relentless call—the same call I had grown accustomed to hearing from the mother duck, now multiplied by fifty—made a chorus that was amplified by the water. I looked hard for any miniature shapes that might signify a duckling, but saw none.

  I had never seen so many ducks in the basin, nor had I seen them gather in this way. But the waterfront is perpetually evolving. The year we arrived, hermit crabs furrowed the sand, and petite, haughty-looking sea horses could be found darting and hovering in the shadows beneath the docks. A large oyster bed grew in the mud, and our neighbor, a young clam fisherman, helped to cultivate it with his children by gathering stray oysters and adding them to the pile. A seagull we named Sally liked to walk the length of the seawall, and to seize the clothing we had left out to dry. She would take a sock in her beak, carry it with her as she rose, and drop it on the beach as other seagulls will drop crabs. Sally’s greatest trick was knowing when someone was taking a bath upstairs; then she would land on the sloping roof above the dining room, peer through the window that is eye level with the tub, and tap her yellow beak upon the glass.

  I don’t remember when I realized that the oyster bed was gone; that I had seen neither a sea horse nor a hermit crab in several summers; that Sally had not returned. I would say it takes time to become aware of an absence, but then again, the year the clam fisherman killed himself and his family moved away, that loss was immediate and engulfing. The geese I’d mentioned to John disappeared over ten years ago, and I haven’t seen one since, but last summer, walking up the dock, I saw beneath me the remains of a dead goose drifting downstream. Its plump body was still afloat, but its long, thin neck hung straight down in the water, occasionally dragging along the basin floor.

  One summer we had great blue herons, and another summer we had lion’s mane jellyfish, tangled, reddish fiends up to a foot in diameter whose sting is like a terrible sunburn. I rarely swam that year, too fearful to enjoy myself, but my father did, and kept on hand a jar of meat tenderizer to neutralize the venom. Horseshoe crabs have come and gone, and egrets, and the summer my father ended up in the ICU we had more starfish than ever before. If a starfish is left in the sun too long, it will ossify to a crispy brown and die, and I got in the habit of climbing down the seawall ladder at low tide and tossing into the water those creatures left behind. There would be over a hundred baking slowly in the heat, and I liked the work of picking them up by their dense, scratchy, dark-pinked limbs and skipping them, like stones, into the sea. The task reminded me of a story I had read as a child, about a woman who walks along a vast beach throwing stranded starfish out into the waves. “Why bother?” a stranger asks her. “You’ll never be able to save them all.” The woman pauses, picks up a single starfish, and casts it into the ocean. “Yes,” she says, “but I just saved that one.” I had always hated that story, had always felt irritated by its cloying sentimentality, and it bothered me, as I tossed star after star back into the basin, that I could not banish from my mind that vacuous phrase—I just saved that one.

  PART TWO

  1

  It was the day after Christmas, a winter morning that began as mornings often did: waking, walking downstairs, seeing my father bent over the newspaper through the doorway to the family room; his hearing me in the hall and saying to my mother, “Do I hear the pitter-patter of little feet?” As I made tea they read aloud small pieces of news that pleased or provoked them and then we talked vaguely about going to Rhode Island. A pale day pressed against the windowpanes—Rhode Island would be cold—but we decided that we would go, after all, and my mother rose to pack some food.

  My father rose too, to pour himself another cup of coffee, but he stumbled and fell against a chair. He held up a hand to calm us, yet his face was tight with fear. “I can’t breathe,” he whispered. He began to pace, staring down at the carpet and inhaling raggedly. “I can’t breathe,” he said again, more to himself than to us.

  “Katharine, take him to the clinic,” my mother said. She went to page Erika.

  I led my father through the hall and into the brightness of the street. He was gasping, clutching my arm, but ignoring me completely. In the family room I had assumed the fit would pass, but now—the remoteness of his mind was startling—I had the feeling we had crossed into new territory, a wilderness terrible and undefined.

  At the clinic, the nurses gave him oxygen and fixed wires to his chest and arms; his oxygen absorption, even with assistance, was just 70 percent. For some minutes he continued to gasp, concentrating on the floor, but then he returned to himself and was even able to protest when the doctor insisted he go to the emergency room. “Not again,” he moaned. “I couldn’t face it.” Soon afterward, he was carried on a stretcher into the back of an ambulance.

  At the hospital, they wheeled him into a long queue; a mask was strapped to his face, and he had lost color, but he smi
led when he saw me and held out his hand. We were still waiting to be admitted when Erika sprinted down the ER hallway—not to offer assistance, but to confirm his living will. “Geoffrey, I know we’ve talked about this,” she said, “but I need to make sure. Should the need arise, you don’t want any heroic measures, right?”

  “No, absolutely not,” he said. He could hardly speak.

  I didn’t understand then what heroic measures were. I would never have expected my father to agree to life support, but the phrase seemed to suggest something different—a challenging operation, perhaps. And because everything was happening so quickly (an hour ago we were packing for Rhode Island), I reacted with the panic of a child.

  “Dad, why not?” I cried. He didn’t say anything, but Erika looked at me sadly. “It wouldn’t be appropriate,” she said.

  Nurses came and went, doctors came and went. The hours elapsed. It was already nighttime when an unfamiliar doctor appeared; he was handsome and officious. My father in turn was a veteran patient, one whose alternating charm and mordancy either pleased or affronted his doctors. In this case, neither seemed enamored of the other.

  “When did this all start?” the doctor asked, flipping through his chart.

  “Forty years ago, when I started smoking.”