All the Lives We Ever Lived

by Katharine Smyth

  But one of the things I love about Lily is her willingness to utter such meaningless questions, her hope that splashing around the edges of the unfathomable depths they represent may one day yield a truth that will persist. She seeks nothing less than the meaning of life itself, she admits at one point, with an earnestness that is almost embarrassing. And I sometimes feel that To the Lighthouse, with all of its thrashing and mumbling, all of its false starts and pedestrian insights, all of its saying things poorly and waving in the general direction of truth, has actually nailed it. To grieve is to be floored, again and again, by a series of epiphanies that, put to paper, sound painfully banal. To grieve is likewise to be plagued by questions that can only gesture toward the clarity we seek and occasionally even find—these are the shorthand by which we must stumble through an experience too vast and too disorienting to express in its totality.

  * * *

  IN MEXICO I slept in a state of half lucidity. The louvered bungalow let in moonlight and the howling of dogs; I felt outraged every time their snarling woke me from a dream. I had dreams to spare, though—a dozen befell me each night, nearly all of them about my father. Sometimes he was sick and soon to perish; sometimes he had been granted a reprieve. It came to feel as though he had returned then, as though he were actually with me, concrete, corporeal, not just some shimmer I’d created. Virginia also marveled at the realism of dreams about the dead; the nighttime appearance of Katherine Mansfield evoked “so much more emotion, than thinking,” she wrote, that it was “almost as if she came back in person & was outside one, actively making one feel.” I screamed in my dreams; my whole body convulsed with the agony of understanding. Then, gradually, I woke to that porous room in Mexico, to the bars of light falling across the bed and the low hum of the fan, to birdcalls, and to the realization, Oh, my father is dead. I felt so punctured then, and so jealous of the dream self, who had not yet awoken to the hard, unpleasant day-fact: what’s left is this.

  Sometimes I called my mother from a pay phone installed in the dirt at the foot of the hill. It was a hundred degrees and very humid. Dogs like wolves loped down the street. I wanted a mother, but found instead a woman angry with a friend in Australia who had e-mailed only three times since my father’s death. “People just don’t get it,” she said, and wondered aloud if she should send the friend a chapter from her current favorite book, a self-help guide for grieving widows. She had already mailed a photocopy to my father’s business partner and me. I agreed that the friend’s behavior was callous, but thought nervously of the growing number of people whom my mother had dismissed since January, for not responding well or not responding at all. We argued a little, then I apologized and tried to clarify: the reason I did not like her widow book, I said, was that it seemed to suggest that widows were the only ones who suffered. Children, hardly at all.

  One day I walked several miles to Zipolite, a beach that according to the guidebook drowned several swimmers a year. I lay sweating on the sand; I started Blood Meridian, wondering whether to abandon it in favor of a friendlier book. A little ways down shore I saw an object being buffeted about the heaving, sucking waves. I went to investigate—it was a turtle. The animal, dead, was about four feet in diameter; his head, legs, and arms flopped on the waterline, and his salted, mauve intestines spilled through a crack in his stomach armor. I would have coveted the shell, in spite of myself, but it was broken. Later I saw a man burying him in the sand, and for that I was grateful: the creature’s limp somersaults had wrecked me.

  8

  “She watched a procession go, drawn on by some stress of common feeling which made it, faltering and flagging as it was, a little company bound together.”

  As the Ramsays’ boat draws nearer the lighthouse, Cam—sitting alone in the bow, trailing her fingers through the water—feels a change come over her. No longer tormented by her father’s despotism or her brother’s judgment, she experiences a rush of happiness that calls to mind her late mother’s ecstasy; she can hardly believe “that she should be alive, that she should be there.” It’s alongside this joy that the version of her father she despises begins to recede, giving way instead to an endearing old man who sits in his study, and, catching sight of her as she borrows a book, inquires gently—so gently!—if there is anything she needs. In case this is wrong, in case hers is a fantasy, she turns to Mr. Ramsay in the cockpit, where he is reading a slim volume with yellowed pages and a mottled cover like a bird’s egg. “No; it was right,” she thinks, relieved. “Look at him now, she wanted to say aloud to James.”

  James is more stubborn. Despite a growing understanding that he and his father “alone knew each other”—that they are bound by a loneliness that they both see as the truth about life—it’s not until Mr. Ramsay compliments his son on his steering that the siblings’ great compact is finally dissolved. The unexpected praise fills the boy with quiet euphoria; you can practically feel him trying not to smile. “He was so pleased that he would not look at her or at his father or at any one….He was so pleased that he was not going to let anybody share a grain of his pleasure.” Sometimes I think it’s Woolf’s mastery of moments like these—moments that hold up a mirror to our private tumult while also revealing how much we as humans share—that most draws me to her. I have been that sulky teenager, feigning indifference at my father frothing up the jellyfish; I have felt the disproportionate pride that followed from his praise (“Gosh, you’re good, Katharine,” he told me in the hospital, and I thought that I would burst). Haven’t we all felt those things? And is not the sight of ourselves laid bare on the page—endlessly complex, and yet not singular at all—one of reading’s humblest, most delightful rewards?

  Moved by their father’s dignity and stoicism, Cam and James now wish more than anything that they could give him what he needs. “What do you want? they both wanted to ask. They both wanted to say, Ask us anything and we will give it you.” But Mr. Ramsay, who has for years besieged them with his emotional demands, is silent: “He sat and looked at the island and he might be thinking, We perished, each alone, or he might be thinking, I have reached it. I have found it, but he said nothing.” As Lily realized earlier that morning, her own anger at his histrionics transformed into a flood of sympathy, “There was no helping Mr. Ramsay on the journey he was going.”

  * * *

  I SPENT MOST of that first summer in Rhode Island. Six months had passed since my father’s death, and in those six months I had lived a largely peripatetic life. My sadness had not been especially extreme, and I had the feeling I had been moving from one diversion to the next. Enough, I thought. It’s time to get down to the business of mourning.

  During those weeks my mother and I rarely argued; at nightly meals we were cautious and polite. I was unaccustomed to the lightness of living in a house where there was neither violence nor the threat of violence, and where the specter of imminent death had already come and gone. This was the flip side of the unbelievable boredom my father’s death had spawned—I had the sense of having been allowed to exhale after years of holding my breath. My mother had avoided alcohol when he was alive, but she now developed a taste for gin and tonics, which I fixed with lemon peel and which we drank on the deck together as the sun set. I think we enjoyed the mildness of each other’s company. Women are so often the ones left behind, and the feminine space they afterward inhabit—which reminds me of the drained, oddly calm feeling one has after sobbing—was a useful place for my mother and me, and, by definition, not one to which we’d had access while my father was still living.

  I remember one evening in particular. I was heading down to the end of the dock for a swim when I thought to ask if she would join me. I knew she would say no—she never swam—and was unsurprised when she looked up apologetically: “Maybe in a little while?” But a few minutes later she emerged onto the lawn wearing a bathing suit and T-shirt.

  I watched her walk down the dock; every so often she paused to
inspect some detail—the frayed rope handrail, the bronze sundial nailed to the top of a piling—as if to suggest that they were the subject of her thoughts. How much she loves me, I thought, and how uneventful it is to be loved by her, a person whose very existence was so dependable that I rarely, if ever, considered it. It was such a different experience from loving and being loved by my father, the thrills and devastations of which I could not help remembering now with a hint of exhaustion.

  “How’s the water?” she asked when she reached the float.

  “I don’t know,” I said, putting down my book. “I haven’t felt it yet.” She approached the wooden ladder my father had built years before and examined its top rung. One end had come loose. “I know,” I said. “It’s falling apart.”

  “No, that’ll be easy to fix,” she said. “Just remind me.”

  She climbed down the ladder, and I dove from the float. It was one of those late summer evenings when a big low sun turns the surface white and blinding, flimsy somehow. We swam a few strokes and floated, looking back at the house. The wooden shingles and walls of windows, the concrete seawall and green-white porcelain vine; the deck, the hammock, and the trellis, sagging beneath the weight of the wisteria—all was vivid in the evening light. It was a sight so familiar to me, but one my mother rarely saw. “It really is lovely here, isn’t it?” she said.

  * * *

  MY MOTHER IS nothing like Mr. Ramsay, our relationship nothing like his relationship with his children. We do not share a common truth, like he and James; I often think that we don’t know each other very well. And if at his best he gives Cam a feeling of security—“I shan’t fall over a precipice or be drowned, for there he is, keeping his eye on me,” she thinks—it sometimes feels, to me at least, as though my father’s death transformed me, my mother’s only child, from her daughter to her parent overnight. There is no one more capable of arousing my fury; there is no one more capable of summoning my pity and protectiveness. “I never did enough for him all those years,” Virginia wrote to Violet Dickinson a few days after Leslie’s death, putting to words the kind of guilt and remorse that our parents alone can elicit. “He was so lonely often, and I never helped him as I might have done.” I feel something similar about my mother nearly every time she leaves the room.

  But for all the differences between their story and our own, the pathos of Mr. Ramsay’s clumsy relationship with Cam and James after his wife’s passing has helped me to see our bond more warmly, while also giving me a better sense of her experience, and of the unexpected depth of her reserves. Of course my father’s disappearance from our tiny family would wholly alter our relations—his death stripped us of our central source of worry, joy, and competition, which, coupled with her move to Sydney, has made our lives much simpler. But what I wasn’t expecting was for my quest to better understand my father to also challenge and enlarge my vision of her. All the while I was growing up, I saw my mother as instantly and inherently graspable; in contrast to my father’s multiplicity and brilliance, I thought, were the transparency of her emotions, the predictability of her ideas. That’s why it wasn’t until well after his death that I finally took the time to ask for her memories, to listen to her own account of grief. She surprised me—with her candor and deliberation, her self-awareness and humor, her willingness to acknowledge the most base and human of impulses. “There were times I almost wished that Dad would die,” she admitted, reflecting on the darkest moments in their marriage and weirdly charming me. “This was before he was so sick again—I thought, This is all just unbearable. He probably wished I would as well, I don’t know.” The longer she talked, the more tangled and compelling her past appeared, the more whole she began to seem.

  I feel closer to my mother today than at any other time in our lives. I find myself liking the woman who set off alone for the Venice fish market so as to present her lover with a living squid; liking the woman who on her honeymoon stood beside a vase of hyacinths in the tower room of a crumbling castle, looking out over the fields and fairly thrumming with happiness. And as I’ve watched her reconstruct her life of late—renovating a house in Australia, taking up aqua aerobics, reuniting with old friends from architecture school (though never, ever dating)—I have come to believe that, for all her apparent fragility, she is nevertheless possessed of a certain self-sufficiency and toughness; that she draws deep from that well of privacy I’ve mentioned; and that she has ultimately borne the unique miseries of widowhood, a condition to which I probably still haven’t given adequate consideration, with estimable resilience.

  In our final image of Mr. Ramsay, he continues to refuse his children’s tenderness and pity, instead vaulting toward the lighthouse on his own. “He rose and stood in the bow of the boat, very straight and tall, for all the world, James thought, as if he were saying, ‘There is no God,’ and Cam thought, as if he were leaping into space, and they both rose to follow him as he sprang, lightly like a young man, holding his parcel, on to the rock.” This revision of the moment when Mrs. Ramsay decided to marry him—when, stretching out his hand, he “raised her from a boat” and “she stepped slowly, quietly on shore”—communicates all that Mr. Ramsay has lost; as Lily must finish her painting without the inspiration of her muse, so must he complete his journey without his wife’s protection (which, paradoxically, is always earned by his protecting her). But it’s a testament to his courage that he does not also stretch out a hand to his children, who would so gladly allow him to help; like Mrs. Ramsay before him, he has come to accept that it’s a lonely, godless world we live in, and one that we must navigate alone. But it’s also one deserving of our heroism, and though the book concludes before he can reach the lighthouse—it closes “as” he springs onto the island—we may trust that in our absence, as in his wife’s absence, he will always continue that voyage to the light.

  9

  Some months after my father’s death, feeling a twinge of regret at the prospect of bidding good-bye to my childhood home, I made my mother nervous by asking her why, again, we were selling the house in Charlestown. But at the end of the summer, returned to Boston for the removal of my wisdom teeth, I spent a groggy evening after the surgery walking around the place where I had grown up. I passed the Bunker Hill Monument, silhouetted against an orange-purple sky; the USS Constitution and the fountain in the Navy Yard where I had played as a girl.

  And on that night—one of the last that I would spend in Boston—I was amazed at how insubstantial was my connection to the city and even the home in which I had been raised. Thirty years before, as a student at Harvard, my father had taken the first steps toward putting down roots here; when I was a child, and even a teenager, it was impossible to tell that these had not taken. But they had not and they did not, and it is still stunning to me how easily expunged was the metaphysical framework that held the three of us for all that time. The house was sold nearly ten years ago, to a couple with young children who made a line of cocktail mixers and planned on filming infomercials in the kitchen; I have not been to Boston since. It is almost as if this framework never existed—certainly the world would be no different had it not.

  10

  “To want and not to have—to want and want—how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!”

  In April 1924, when Virginia’s niece Angelica was struck down by a motor car, she accompanied her sister to Middlesex Hospital, where the child lay motionless behind a screen; for a short while, Vanessa believed that her daughter was dead. Virginia saw then on her sister’s face an “extraordinary look of anguish, dumb, not complaining,” notable not only for its visceral power but also for its contrast to her own lack of emotion, her sense of being separate from events. “My feeling was ‘a pane of glass shelters me,’ ” she wrote in her diary afterward. “ ‘I’m only allowed to look on at this.’ at which I was half envious, half grieved….What I felt was, not sorrow or pity for Angelica.” As it turned out, Angelica wo
uld emerge unscathed—“it was only a joke this time”—and yet the episode remained another iteration of Virginia’s anxiety at “not feeling enough,” another iteration of the capriciousness of grief.

  By the time I sequestered myself in Rhode Island that summer, courting the kind of pain that had felled that well-dressed woman on the street—my own version of Vanessa’s look of anguish—I had become obsessed by the idea I was not grieving properly. Where was my abyss of sorrow, I wondered, where were my hysteria and tears? It wasn’t that I felt guilty, exactly; perhaps confused would be a better word. Hysteria and tears seemed the only response commensurate with what I’d lost; the only response, too, in keeping with the emotional collapse that our culture of grief worship had led me to expect. Instead my days were vague and muffled; instead I just felt tired. I longed for moments of breakdown, of which there were only a handful; I coveted their intensity, their sheer, deranged despair. Virginia describes a similar appreciation of pain in “Reminiscences,” a letter-essay of sorts to her nephew Julian. “We were quite naturally unhappy,” she writes, reflecting on the family’s period of mourning his grandmother, “feeling a definite need, unbearably keen at moments, which was never to be satisfied.” And yet the appearance of such acute sadness was preferable to the cloudiness of daily experience: “that was recognizable pain, and the sharp pang grew to be almost welcome in the midst of the sultry and opaque life which was not felt, had nothing real in it, and yet swam about us, and choked us and blinded us.” Still in Rhode Island, still in thrall to my own opaque and sultry life, I chalked up my muted feelings to shock or denial, confident that in a week or two or six I would finally unravel.