And even if he hadn’t been able to make it, if I were somehow able to tell him about it, even then he would be pleased. He would understand my indignation, he would think it sweet. “Oh, Katharine,” he would say, laughing. “What do you expect? People are snobs.” But they are also old friends, and they hold memories dear—perhaps he did like tuna mayo sandwiches, at one point—and they came together on a London night because long ago they knew and maybe loved my father, and long ago he knew and maybe loved them too, and if I can accept that people die, then I will admit that the party at the Agra was, indeed, a great bash.
In pairs and groups, the guests began to leave. They said good-bye and promised to keep in touch; on that evening, I thought we might. By midnight, only my family remained. We pushed the chairs back into place and unstuck pictures from the wall—one of my father wearing a denim jumpsuit and leaning against a motorcycle; one of him and me on the roof of the Rhode Island studio. Then we left as well, and with our departure, as with the departure of each last guest before us, my father died a little more fully, belonged more firmly to the past.
6
“Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at the moment of intimacy, This is knowledge?”
The last time I saw Zette, my father’s friend, she asked if I had been in touch with his Harvard girlfriend. “The beautiful one,” she said, “the glamorous one. What was her name?” I must have looked puzzled—I wasn’t aware of any Harvard girlfriend.
“I know she existed,” she said. “He brought her down to Westport once. This must have been ’78 or ’79. We had a Memorial Day softball game on this big beautiful field, and I remember them being there. Ahh, what was her name?”
I was doing frantic calculations—by Memorial Day of ’78 my parents would have been engaged.
“I really liked her,” Zette said. “Black hair, very pretty. It seemed intense; I remember thinking that she was a little too much for him, that he was somehow out of his depth.” She paused. “Denise? I keep thinking Denise.”
At home I turned to the Internet, and within minutes I had found a possible match. A dark, attractive older woman who lived in Paris, this Denise was a graduate of Smith and Harvard Business School and had recently been awarded the Legion of Honour. I took a screenshot and sent it to Zette. “It’s certainly possible that she is the one I remember, and liked,” she wrote. “I suppose the only thing to do is ask her!”
In the months after my father’s death, I couldn’t rid my mind of Vanessa Bell’s response to To the Lighthouse—Vanessa wrote that her sister, in inventing the character of Mrs. Ramsay, had “given a portrait of mother which is more like her to me than anything I could ever have conceived of as possible. It is almost painful to have her so raised from the dead. You have made one feel the extraordinary beauty of her character, which must be the most difficult thing in the world to do.” For years it was this goal that governed my writing—to paint a perfect portrait of my father, to maybe even raise him from the dead. But I didn’t pay close enough attention to Vanessa’s words. I didn’t grasp that perfection, no less than resurrection, would be the most difficult thing in the world to do.
* * *
“WHAT CAN ONE know even of the people one lives with every day?” asks Sally Seton in the final pages of Mrs. Dalloway. For Virginia Woolf fans, the question is indelibly familiar—some version of it is always haunting her life and work. “I sometimes feel that no one ever has or ever can share something,” she wrote in that remarkable letter to Leonard about their courtship. “Its the thing that makes you call me like a hill, or a rock.” Years later, while writing To the Lighthouse, she expressed something similar to Vita: “I’m so orderly am I? I wish you could live in my brain for a week. It is washed with the most violent waves of emotion….Do we then know nobody?—only our own versions of them, which, as likely as not, are emanations from ourselves.”
In To the Lighthouse, it’s Lily who wrestles most vigorously with these questions, offering up dozens of tentative, often clashing reflections upon the experience of knowing (and appraising) our fellow human beings. “How then did it work out, all this?” she wonders, weighing the abominations and delights of Mr. Ramsay’s character. “How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking one felt, or disliking?” Of Charles Tansley—a man she would almost certainly dislike, were it not “impossible to dislike any one if one looked at them”—she concludes, “She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that.” But when she later considers the shallowness of her interactions with the enigmatic Mr. Carmichael, she concedes that knowledge, far from a fixed entity, wears innumerable guises. “This was one way of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not the detail….She knew him in that way.”
Nowhere are Lily’s struggles with the limitations of intimacy more pronounced than in her study of Mrs. Ramsay; in one sense, the whole book is about her relentless efforts to pin the older woman down—to get inside her, to become her, even—and in so doing, to know her absolutely. “How did she differ?” she asks herself again and again of her friend’s fascination for her. “What was the spirit in her, the essential thing?” When she returns to her picture years later, concentrating on the empty steps where Mrs. Ramsay used to sit, her painterly journey parallels that quest to capture her friend’s character. “She must try to get hold of something that evaded her. It evaded her when she thought of Mrs. Ramsay; it evaded her now when she thought of her picture.” Try as she might to summon her, though—to revive her in her thoughts as on her canvas—Mrs. Ramsay’s ghost is as elusive as the flesh and blood had been: “Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with.”
Virginia might have said something similar of Julia Stephen. “I’m in a terrible state of pleasure that you should think Mrs Ramsay so like mother,” she wrote in response to her sister’s letter, even as she went on to enumerate the challenges she faced with the portrait, among them the temptations of hagiography (“one would have suspected that one had made up a sham—an ideal”). So too in “A Sketch of the Past,” in which—gathering all the different memories, juggling all the disparate facts—she seeks to piece together a likeness of the woman who has forever slipped from her grasp. Though in imagining a garden party in 1860, she can easily conjure up a plate of strawberries or picture her uncle Thoby as he recites the Persian poets, her mother, then fourteen, remains opaque. “How difficult it is to single her out as she really was,” Virginia writes, “to imagine what she was thinking, to put a single sentence into her mouth!” It’s no accident that we never learn Mrs. Ramsay’s first name.
* * *
I HAD FOUND the right Denise. She was twenty-four when she arrived at Harvard, hardworking, straightedge, a bit naive: not the hardheaded siren Zette remembers. She met my father in the early fall—he was already wearing his eye patch—and they started dating almost immediately. She thought him intuitive, enjoyable, empathetic; she felt he could learn anything, that he had a way of cutting into the thick of any question. He was also fidgety and nervous, always fiddling with his collar or looking around him in a restaurant. If a fly landed on the next table, he would get up and shoo it.
They went rowing and played squash; sometimes he cooked for them at his place. They spent a winter weekend at her friend’s parents’ house, and they visited Zette on the coast—sitting on lobster traps, eating sandwiches out of brown paper bags, visiting the Breakers in Newport. In the spring he taught her how to drive a stick shift, in preparation for her summer in Europe, and though they didn’t talk about the future, it was her understanding that they would be together, that one day they might even wed. The following fall, when they returned to Cambridge, he told her he had gotten married. She never spoke to him again.
I learned all this over the phone, in one of the strangest conversations of my life. To my surprise, D
enise herself had answered when I dialed the number of her company in Paris; after some flustered explaining on my end, we agreed to talk later that day. She seemed wary when we reconnected, but also energized, a woman hungry to tunnel deep into the past. “Your call was extremely positive for me,” she said at once.
For weeks I had doubted Zette’s version of events, chalking it up to the pitfalls of middle-aged memory. It wasn’t that I believed my father, or any man, incapable of cheating—though there was an asexual quality I’d sensed in him that made the prospect feel unlikely to me. Nor did my resistance spring from some morality or principle, some yearning to preserve my father’s virtue. The question of whether his deeds were “right” or “wrong” seemed very much beside the point. No, my skepticism lay rather in the fact that to lead two such different lives—to bring one woman away for the weekend even as you are engaged to another—requires a deceitfulness, and perhaps also a callowness and capacity for casuistry, that I simply couldn’t reconcile with my father’s character. The tape he sent my mother in January 1978, a good four months into his liaison, is full of seemingly casual asides about his failure to take advantage of what appears to have been an open relationship. “I haven’t made a habit of going out with any girls while I’ve been here,” he says, “and haven’t had the opportunity or the time.” And again, “It’s been so long since I’ve gone out with anyone but you.” I wouldn’t have thought my father interested in such fluid, brazen lies. The recklessness with which he treated Denise was even harder for me to resolve.
Which is why I continued to distrust in their relationship even as I was on the phone with her, as if she had called me and not the other way around. My first inkling of their closeness was when, describing the appeal of dating a thirty-year-old, she said, “I think the most common age at business school was twenty-four, and he was born in ’47, right?” Yes, I said, startled by her effortless recollection of his birth year. Later she started going through old photographs, sometimes getting lost within them—“It’s hard to imagine,” she said, “that this was real, that we were there.” Eventually she e-mailed me some and we looked at them together as we talked. One was of a group of students picnicking on a quad; my father wore shorts and no shirt, his hands clasped around his knees, and next to him, in much the same pose, a petite, dark-haired woman in a black tank top. She looked like my mother at that age. Another was of my father alone, submerged in a glossy, tree-lined lake, hanging from the prow of a rowboat and wearing an expression of such astonishing happiness that I felt cold inside.
Denise had known my father was dead—she’d read it in the alumni magazine—but she didn’t know any of the details, and the disclosure he had been an alcoholic appeared to give her some satisfaction, as if she’d dodged a bullet. The same was true of my allusion to turbulence within my parents’ marriage; it seemed to play into a story she had told herself about that year, one that managed to preserve the integrity both of their relationship and of my father himself. In her rendition, his decision to marry my mother was not a romantic vow but an ethical choice, a resolution to honor the promises he’d made to the woman who had gotten there first.
I liked Denise a lot—her thoughtfulness, her honesty. I found myself wishing that he had chosen her instead, wondering what that life might have looked like. I also had the spooky sense that I was talking to my real mother, the woman who should have been my mother, as if this were a homecoming. Was Denise right about my father’s motives? Probably not. As Lily remarks in To the Lighthouse, “Half one’s notions of other people were, after all, grotesque. They served private purposes of one’s own.” But Denise was also wise enough to understand that hers was just a theory, after all. “Everybody is a mystery,” she said before we hung up. “We are all a bunch of contradictions. He seemed to have such a good time, he seemed to really enjoy us, and yet he did something else.”
* * *
IT’S BEEN NEARLY four years since I first tracked her down. In that time, we’ve forged an odd kind of friendship, exchanging photographs and occasional e-mails. We met in person for the first time when she flew to New York to visit family. I still like her very much, but time has eroded her flawlessness; she has become more human. I no longer think, as I did when we first spoke, that my father made the wrong decision.
On the day he died, I believed I knew my father, believed that I saw clearly to his core; today, after over a decade of trying to explain him to the world and exposure to secrets like this one, he is more of a stranger to me than he has ever been. The more I learn about him, the more distant he becomes. You might think there’d be reward in this—that even dead he has the chance to grow, the power to astound and challenge—and yet I find his certain silence painful in the face of such discovery; it’s yet another testament to the finality of death. And to realize, moreover, that the stories I grew up with were fabrications, or incomplete at best; that even sober he was capable of such unkindness; that there must be so much more about him I don’t know—these revelations cause the entire edifice of his character to crumble, as if there were nothing that I could hold up to the light and say with confidence: This was him. This was my father.
Such is the cost of striving to see one’s parent through the eyes of an adult, the same task that Virginia set for herself in her memoir, putting aside the rage and love her father aroused and instead looking to capture him “as I think he must have been, not to me, but to the world at large.” How did it not occur to me that these two men were not one and the same, that in seeking to raise my father from the dead, seeking to raise all of him, the minor god whom I knew would only continue to recede?
I think often of that photograph of the rowboat—of how happy my father looked, how totally himself. It still unmoors me to see him so contented in a life I didn’t know existed. And like Virginia, trying and failing to imagine her mother on a summer afternoon, I struggle to picture such a day beyond the frame. What was he thinking? When Denise put down her camera, what did they say and do? The gaps give rise to fantasies about what might have been, and to fantasies, too, about the costs of relinquishing that future—was the loss of Denise the reason why my father was the way he was? Love stories hold a power all their own, and they encourage all kinds of received ideas; that’s why Lily, speculating about Mrs. Ramsay’s depths, can’t help but wonder whether the key to understanding her lies in some past love affair: “What was there behind it—her beauty and splendour? Had he blown his brains out…some other, earlier lover, of whom rumours reached one? Or was there nothing?” I have since seen other pictures of my father and Denise—Zette unearthed some of that Memorial Day weekend. They sit on lawn chairs beside a bowl of apples; they stand abreast before the Breakers’ great façade. In almost all of them, my father is unsmiling and inscrutable. Pictures tell us nothing.
He will remain unknowable to me, of course, as we all remain unknowable to others. (Perhaps even to ourselves: it “explains why people say the things they do,” Virginia complained of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, “which is always a mystery even to the speaker.”) But I don’t regret the pursuit, and the truth is that returning to it day after day, wrestling with my father’s portrait as Lily wrestles with her painting, is a kind of resurrection—or at least a standing appointment with his memory. To the Lighthouse is a ghost story; consider that queer moment toward the end at which, just for an instant, Lily does succeed at grabbing hold of what evades her and raising her idol from the dead. “Mrs. Ramsay—it was part of her perfect goodness—sat there quite simply, in the chair, flicked her needles to and fro, knitted her reddish-brown stocking, cast her shadow on the step. There she sat.”
My father was my father; I knew him in that way.
7
“What does it mean then, what can it all mean?”
I traveled incessantly in the months following my father’s death. I went to Florida, to California, to an empty fishing village in Mexico, where hot-pink boug
ainvillea dripped from the trees, and leathery, blinking iguanas ran across the terra-cotta rooftops. For months I led a wholly unserious life, drifting from experience to experience, skimming the surface of each one; while the old, familiar refrain continued to sound—my father is dead—it was not very often that I dove down, that I was able to dive down, into the roiling waters beneath.
“What does it mean then, what can it all mean?” asks Lily in the opening lines of “The Lighthouse.” Hers is a hollow, ineffectual question, we are supposed to understand—a byword that fits “her thought loosely,” a phrase intended to “cover the blankness of her mind.” Death confounds language, brings to light its limitations; there are no words to properly convey the brain’s frustrated, confused, hopeless, determined scrambling to comprehend what it means that its favorite person has simply vanished; nor to convey its little, concomitant bursts of understanding, for it sometimes feels as if we could have all the answers if only we knew how to say them. “I had a notion that I could describe the tremendous feeling at R.’s funeral,” Virginia wrote of the death of Roger Fry—the painter to whom she would have dedicated To the Lighthouse had she not thought it “so bad”—“but of course I cant. I mean the universal feeling: how we all fought with our brains loves & so on; & must be vanquished. Then the vanquisher, this outer force became so clear; the indifferent. & we so small fine delicate.” Lily endures a similar maelstrom of syntax and emotion, striving and failing to communicate her own universal feeling to Mr. Carmichael—she wants “to say not one thing, but everything…‘About life, about death; about Mrs. Ramsay,’ ” but at once finds herself thwarted and her discovery fleeting: “Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again.”
All the Lives We Ever Lived Page 19