Even a voyage to the lighthouse has had the fun sucked out of it. Furious with their father for conceiving and inflicting upon them a sentimentality they do not share, Cam and James forge a “great compact”—an unspoken agreement to oppose him, to deny him any semblance of affection or excitement. Their anger springs from separate sources; though no one compels her more than her father, though she is capable of thinking him brave and lovable and wise, Cam—like Virginia with her own father—cannot overlook the cruelty of his demands. James’s hostility is more visceral; imagining the inevitable moment at which his father will criticize his helming of the sailboat, he thinks how he will “take a knife and strike him to the heart,” much like that enraged, impotent six-year-old who once longed to gash his father’s breast.
Mr. Ramsay’s behavior has always been tyrannical, of course, but Mrs. Ramsay’s death has robbed his children of the one person who could protect them from it. And that’s what the third section of To the Lighthouse evokes so well for me—not just the pain of losing a parent but also the loneliness of the diminished family life that we must lead in the wake of that loss. I see in James and Cam’s great compact the insult and indignity of being abandoned to the lesser parent—the parent who never understood or said the right thing, the parent against whom one has always raged. I see the ferocious privacy that a child in mourning erects around her grief, her refusal to expose even a fraction of the misery that roils her; and her contempt for the conventionality of the lesser parent’s sorrow, her unwillingness to condone or share in that sorrow, though they both mourn the same death. And yet I see, too, the impossible position of the parent, who has also been abandoned, who could never hope to replicate the fun gone missing, and whose efforts to do so only serve to drive the wedge still deeper.
* * *
IN THE EARLY days of our bereavement, when my mother and I faced together the unfamiliar emptiness of the house, navigated together the new behaviors required of a grieving wife and daughter, I felt with her a comforting solidarity. At the memorial party I was proud of her; at other times I was protective. But it was not long before our experiences diverged.
In the weeks before his death, my mother had concentrated on my father—or rather, on all that was peripheral to him—with blinkered intensity. Her life revolved around visits to the hospital, trying to track down certain doctors, and supervision of his meals and medication. She was obsessed with planning for a future that must have seemed hypothetical until the very moment it arrived; she still carries in her wallet her notes from the evenings on which they outlined all there was to do when he was gone. Then he died. It felt, she said, as if she had been fired from her job. For months she wandered in a fog. One morning she forgot how to drive out of Charlestown, where we had lived for twenty-five years; another time she neglected to empty the car of trash bags and returned one week later to find maggots writhing on the backseat and a nauseating odor so bad she had to sell the vehicle.
She also grew increasingly reclusive—which my father’s friends made easy. I thought she expected an unrealistic degree of solicitude, but I, too, was surprised by the number of people who, having sent a card or flowers, simply disappeared. Some fell away with an alarming swiftness. One weekend she drove to Rhode Island and spent three days cleaning out the boat, asking a sailing friend—a man who’d spoken at my father’s party the week before—if he would help her carry home the contents. They agreed that she would call him on Sunday; when she called, he didn’t answer. She made three trips between the marina and the house. She never heard from him again.
Nor did it help that my father’s death coincided with an almost comically relentless streak of bad luck. Some things would have been unremarkable had they not been coupled with my mother’s general misery—a failed freezer, a failed boiler; a dispute over an encroaching maple tree; a minor car accident. But other incidents were more core-shaking. She fought with our next-door neighbors, for instance, worried that the two-story garage they were building without permission would foil her plans to sell our house and move back to Sydney. She had already sent a battery of angry letters to the city council when the garage burned to the ground one night, and might have even borne the brunt of the suspicion had not the fire also taken with it our fence, garden shed, and garden, including the dogwood my parents had planted to mark their ten-year anniversary.
My mother is shy, and she is not a businesswoman; had my father been alive, all this would have been within his purview. When I imagine now the helplessness she must have felt during those months, I’m overcome with pity. At the time, however, I was back in New York, and my distance from Boston shielded me from the force of these events. Sympathy, boredom, irritation at her martyred tone—that was my reaction to the catalogue of suffering that met me daily on the phone. I was frustrated by her resentment toward most people, as well as by her self-preoccupation.
I remember one phone conversation in which I finally bridled at her descriptions of the countless trials that she faced: she had not once asked how I was doing. “It’s hard for me too,” I said. “I lost someone too.” She started to sob, so hysterically that she could hardly breathe. “It’s not as hard for you, Katharine!” she screamed. “It’s not as hard for you! You may be sad, you may be upset, Dad might have even loved you more than he loved me. But your life isn’t different the way that mine is different. It just isn’t.”
She was right, of course. Her day-to-day had been utterly transformed, while on the surface mine looked more or less the same. But I was incapable of mining my recognition of that fact for the compassion that she sought from me; I was incapable of even meeting her halfway. Disconcerted by his daughter’s distance on the sailboat, Mr. Ramsay resolves that he will make Cam smile at him and begins to pepper her with questions about their new puppy. Who was looking after it? What would they name it? He himself had had a childhood dog, he adds, whom they had called Frisk. James looks on angrily, anticipating his sister’s surrender, but in the end she surprises him by saying nothing, and Mr. Ramsay picks up his book: it’s he who will surrender. Within Cam, though, is a jumble of conflicting emotions, her allegiance to the great compact bumping up against the paternal adoration that she also feels. Despite appearing impassive, she wishes, “passionately, to move some obstacle that lay upon her tongue.”
I felt similarly paralyzed that whole year. Driving through Connecticut one morning, I saw my mother’s eyes fill with tears. “It’s just that we sailed here,” she said and then, “If only Dad were here.” I looked out the window at a sailboat passing beneath one of those anonymous Connecticut bridges—I too remembered that sailing trip. I had driven alone from Boston to Old Saybrook and met my parents at the marina; we left for Long Island the next day, and to my father’s embarrassment ran aground at the entrance to Sag Harbor. For an instant the memory brought tears to my own eyes, and with it that strange, uncertain revelation: it didn’t have to be this way. But it is this way, I reminded myself, angered anew by my mother’s feeble fantasies, by her need to share them, by the performative nature of her grief. And rather than confiding the deep emotion her recollection had aroused in me—we might have laughed at the thought of my father’s mortification; we might even have acknowledged the hatchet that had been taken to our family—I was silent, stone-faced, and she, tears still running down her face, was none the wiser. Frankly, I must have seemed a little monstrous.
* * *
MY FATHER WAS cavalier about what would happen to him after his death. He did not want a funeral. Of his ashes, he said, “Just put me in a plastic baggie.” He later considered more seriously. “Perhaps you can sprinkle some in Rhode Island, and some near my mother’s house, and some in Sydney Harbour. You can have little parties in each place.”
Three months after he died, my mother and I met at Heathrow Airport; she had flown from Boston, and when the woman at the check-in counter asked the purpose of her visit, she said, “I’m delivering my husba
nd’s ashes,” and started weeping. They bumped her up to first class. We shared a car to my aunt and uncle’s house, and as we passed Marylebone Town Hall, she cried again: “We were married there,” she said. Andrew and Corinne served us a late dinner. I remember studying Andrew’s face, searching for something of my father. He was rounder, larger, but they had the same coloring—the same reddish complexion and yellow-gray hair. Eyes that same blue. If I looked just at the place where his jaw met his neck, the skin slack and smooth, I could pretend it was my father’s face.
A few days later we drove to Seafield, my grandmother’s house, arriving to a spring day unseasonably warm and fair. It was the first time I had seen my grandmother since her visit to the Boston hospital; we ate lunch in the conservatory and listened to her muse, not for the first time, about the fox living in her garden.
“I had a man come to look at the dishwasher,” she said, “and when I asked him what was wrong with it, he said, ‘You have a fox on your lawn.’ ”
“We’re not on the bloody fox again!” Andrew exclaimed.
“I said, ‘I know I have a fox on my lawn’ ”—my grandmother ignored him—“ ‘but what about the dishwasher?’ ” She paused. “He’s rather a nice fox. He comes in the morning and curls up for a few hours in the shrubbery.”
“Are you sure you’re not thinking of Robert?” Andrew interrupted, and Corinne snorted. We could see my other uncle through the glass. Halfway through the meal he had excused himself and was now lying recumbent on a woolen blanket in the garden. There was nothing unusual about his abrupt departure, but this habit of sleeping on the grass was new.
“Les thinks my fox is ill,” my grandmother said, still ignoring Andrew, and Corinne laughed. “How can he tell?” she asked.
“He says he looks thin,” my grandmother said.
“Christ almighty,” said Andrew.
After we had finished eating, my grandmother led us without speaking to the edge of the garden, where she bent to pick a flower, pink. Her face was expressionless, and if at lunch she had seemed foolish, now she was formidable. We were leaving to scatter the ashes soon, and I realized I was scared to watch her, scared of what her sorrow in particular might look like. It was as much for her as for my father that we all picked flowers too.
The harbor that day was sleek and green. There were windsurfers tacking back and forth, and dinghies, some with orange sails and others white. Andrew led us to an empty pontoon; at our back was the millpond, full of swans, and farther down the promenade, the sailing club. “Go on, darling,” my mother said, and I took the box of ashes from my bag. My father’s name was stamped across the top, and beneath it, the name of the crematorium. Inside was a clear plastic pouch with a red tie. The ashes looked like ground oyster shells. They were heavy as stones. I kneeled down—the water beneath my shadow darkened—and shook the ashes free. They carried with the shaking, and once beneath the surface, spread and swirled like smoke. My grandmother threw in her flower, we all threw in our flowers (mine a yellow tulip streaked with red); there was silence. At dinner, Mrs. Ramsay imagines her husband’s words of poetry to be like flowers floating on the ocean, unfurled, autonomous, “as if no one had said them, but they had come into existence of themselves.” Held up to our sacrifice, that dreamlike image at last clicked into place. Then my grandmother said she hoped the sea was not too cold for him. “Oh no,” my mother said. “Geoffrey swam in Maine.”
The flowers sank. Andrew took my grandmother’s arm and led her up the ramp, and Corinne and Robert followed, leaving my mother and me behind. With the others, my mother had been polite, had busied herself taking pictures of the garden in the sea. Now she sat down next to me and rolled up her trousers, baring her dry, white legs to the sun. All day her self-possession had surprised me. She squeezed my hand and smiled; she was lost, but also strong, and also girlish, as if the years between us no longer added up. She did not cry. We sat there a while, saying little, then walked home along the millpond. At the stone jetty we passed some swans asleep, their beaks tucked as if for warmth into the feathers of their backs. My mother told the story of how, before I was born, she and my father had arrived at one of my grandmother’s garden parties in galoshes and by boat, bringing the inflatable dinghy up the millpond as far as it could go. At the main road they had pulled the boat from the water, carried it fifty yards down the street, and dropped it on the lawn among the guests. I could put them, the young couple, into the distance, carrying the boat between them.
The others were not at home. “I expect they’re having a drink at the sailing club,” my mother said, unfolding Robert’s blanket and lying down on the grass like Robert and the fox before her. Half an hour later, their car pulled into the driveway. “Mother needed a drink,” Andrew confirmed, “and come to think of it, I did too.”
That evening, after dinner, I had a very specific vision of my father. He was a small, energetic ghost, bound first for the Solent and next the Atlantic. He floated above the waves on something that looked like a log, but leaned forward as if he were galloping a horse; he was determined and cheerful, and all was blue and black and echoing—the sea and sky made an enormous half globe through which he passed—and his translucent form and pieces of the ocean glittered white beneath the stars.
5
During that same England trip, Andrew and Corinne threw a party in my father’s memory. It was a buffet dinner at the Agra, the Indian restaurant where he had been a regular in his twenties; they’d invited forty people, mainly his friends from architecture school, and I knew almost no one. The pink room was hot and crowded, and I watched as the guests, many of whom hadn’t seen one another in years, hugged and laughed, exclaiming over the pictures of my father we had tacked to the wall. Then there were murmurs: a famous architect had arrived, wearing a black-and-white houndstooth coat, clear plastic glasses, and a white cashmere scarf. We stared, we ate and drank. One woman called out that she had been having a curry at the Agra when she went into labor; another that she remembered the days when my father had lived on New Cavendish Street and Andrew on Warren. She herself had lived on Little Titchfield.
These were the young, glamorous people from my father’s pictures. That thin, bearded man was John, with whom my father had painted huge Coca-Cola bottles onto stage flats in the sixth form. That short, plump woman was Caroline, creator of those silver ties and the girl my father dated at nineteen. “Darling,” my mother called, beckoning me to her. “Have you met Vivien?” Vivien! The striking girl from the photograph (tight green T-shirt, white-blond hair smooth and sleek like a helmet). My old girlfriend, my father had said. She’s pretty, Dad, I said, and he had shrugged. She was still striking—her long honey-blond hair hung past her shoulders, but it was rougher now, and her tanned face lined and severe. She smiled at me, not unkindly but not warmly either, and her eyes were deep brown and intimidating. With her was Tom, the man (I’d heard) for whom she left my father.
Vivien had slept with my father. So had Caroline. Who else? All the lives that hadn’t been, I thought. Caroline tapped me on the shoulder. “I’d heard that Geoffrey was a father,” she said, “and I never could picture it. But now, looking at that photograph”—one of him and me in the cockpit when I was two years old, he adjusting my life jacket—“I understand what a wonderful one he would have been.” There was something I didn’t like about Caroline. I felt traitorous for opening up to her. Still: “He was an extraordinary father,” I said, and my voice cracked. “No one here knows it, but he was an extraordinary father.”
“Peter’s going to give a speech,” my uncle called above the voices and the heat, and we quieted, making room for my father’s old friend. Peter said some things about Clip-Kit; some things too about how my father was a good writer. “He passed that on to his daughter, Katharine,” he said, recalling the summer when I’d worked for him in London. Everyone turned to look at me—Oh, so that’s who that is. When Pet
er finished, he asked if anyone else would like to speak. A few people did, and then with small commotion and much encouragement, the famous architect stepped forward. He brushed a lock of long white hair from his forehead and smiled at the room. “Geoffrey was our first employee,” he began, “when we were just a four-person firm. And—” he said. He paused, suddenly puzzled. “Why did he leave?” he asked. “I can’t remember—I think he went off to New York.”
“No!” everyone yelled. “He went to start his own practice!”
“Oh, did he?” said the architect.
“It was Andrew who went to New York,” my mother muttered.
There was silence, then Caroline cried out: “I will never be able to eat a tuna mayo sandwich without thinking of Geoffrey!”
But my father hadn’t liked tuna fish.
“I’ll never eat a Peppermint Pattie without thinking of Geoffrey!” someone else cried to loud laughter. Things were growing absurd.
I was hot and drunk, irritated and wistful. Angry with the famous architect for thinking he was doing my father a favor by speaking at his party; angry with my aunt for saying later, saying twice, how good it was of him to attend (“He must be very busy”). Angry with myself for caring that he had attended. Angry, most of all, that this is what comes of a life. (Peppermint Patties, tuna mayo sandwiches!) Sad too. And yet my father would have loved this party at the Agra. He would have had a fantastic time. He would have mingled and reminisced and laughed and had too much to drink, and later he would have called it a great bash.
All the Lives We Ever Lived Page 18