The Afterlife: A Memoir

by Donald Antrim

  In spirit, the kimono reflects its maker’s predicament. My mother’s entire relationship to fashion was one of passionate ambivalence. Her mother had pushed her into vocational home economics in both high school and college, and she later envied my father, a teacher of literature, his exalted access to higher things. She never wore the French and Italian designs that she showed her students in pictures during those years when she had an academic job. She liked to drive to the Neiman Marcus store in Bal Harbour, but she rarely, if ever, bought anything. She said that she could not afford Chanel and Dior, but I suspect that the truth was more complex. The coats and hats and dresses she most admired represented for her, I think, a world beyond her compass. In the sixties, when she and my father were beginning their first divorce, she led a group of fashion students on a European tour, and later she took a few trips overseas and to New York, but these places remained faraway lands. In the seventies, after remarrying my father, she got her Ph.D. from the College of Home Economics at Florida State University — her dissertation was titled “Exploratory Study of Quality Control Problems and Procedures in the Manufacture of Junior and Misses Fashion Apparel in Dade County, Florida”—but she never felt that this achievement was appreciated by her family or her colleagues. It would be only a short time before she’d turn her back on teaching. In the late eighties and the nineties, her Peace Goods years, she began exploring popular alternative philosophies, most of which were formed, it seemed to me, from blends of astrology, Jungian psychology, Native American mythology, and various recovered-memory and past-life regression theories and therapies — the ad hoc religions of the New Age. These philosophies essentially gave my mother permission to imagine the world as a place of her own making. She never, I sometimes think, stopped being a child.

  The world depicted on the kimono is the world inhabited by that child, a world full of storybook animals waiting to accompany the heroine on her journey to forever. To see her wearing it, however — and I recall that I did, one day at her house in North Carolina, though I wonder, sometimes, whether I only imagined this — was to experience its power. My mother was tall and sedentary, and in her later years she ate poorly. Drinking and smoking had broken her down. Her face looked worn and, as my father had always said, tired. That day in Black Mountain, she put on the robe, drew it close around her, and stooped beneath the low ceiling in her living room, the room partly taken up with the worktable she’d carted north from her shop in Miami.

  The kimono fell on my mother to a place between her hips and knees. The butterfly’s antennae rose in the air behind her head, and drew attention to her hair, which looked brushed to appear as if it had not been brushed at all, then hurriedly sprayed in place. She had on glasses; their frames were big and buglike; combined with the antennae and the wings, the effect was almost comical. Because I knew that I had no choice other than to approve, I told her that the kimono was amazing, and she asked me if I truly thought so, and I said, “Yes, yes, absolutely.”

  I imagine her turning, showing me the back, like a lover displaying a dress that delivers a frank promise of sex. And it occurs to me that the butterfly was a parasite — that its wings were too small to lift and carry both her and all the things attached to the robe, the sachets and the man in the moon and the feathers and jewels hanging from ribbons and strings. When I see her this way, in memory, with the indigo and blue sashes dangling beneath her arms, and the cat like a badge over her heart, and her antennae sticking up behind her head, I become grateful to her father, who, however he may have failed her when she was a little girl, protected her and insured her a home in the last years of her life.

  In the seventies, my mother made a suit for my father. We were living in Coconut Grove at the time, in a house that had formerly been inhabited by a CIA agent. The suit was handmade in the traditional manner, with recurrent fittings leading to the drawing and redrawing of patterns, and the painstaking construction of a paper-and-muslin facsimile. In proper tailoring, enormous labor is expended before the valuable fabric — in this case, a dark-brown wool herringbone from a Scottish mill — is ever cut. The tailor observes the posture, mannerisms, and physical idiosyncrasies of the man who will wear the finished garment. Subtle information about social standing, power, and ambition is communicated through the wearer’s bearing, and through choices in material and style: pinstripes or plaids; notched lapels or peaked; side vents or center; and so on. The tailor indeed takes the measure of the man, who begins to feel the pride that comes with wearing clothes cut and sewn specifically for his body, clothes intended to carry him into the world as a confident and vital participant in society.

  The suit my mother made for my father was impeccable. He told me that he wore it until he wore it out. My mother’s skill as a tailor is evident in all the clothes she ever made. Yet when it comes to the apparel she championed as wearable works of art — and tried without success to market as her Peace Goods line — there remains the problem of power. The power of my mother’s robe is the power that was strongest in her at the end of her life. This was her power to force away the people she loved. There is beauty in the robe, as there was beauty in my mother, who, when young, was lively and playful and striking to look at, and who even in her worst sickness never lost her ability to laugh. But it is likely, for a person newly confronted with her kimono, that the naked innocence it reveals will defy empathy. When this happens, the conversation among the maker, the wearer, and the viewer of clothes, the conversation open to all of us, simply through living in a world where people get dressed, will be interrupted.

  That my mother knew so thoroughly her craft and the traditions of fashion, and that she went on to make, in her final decade, such declamatory yet incomprehensible clothes, such odd things to wear, gives — in light of her scornful retreat from people and the public world — a supreme, unexpected dignity to her creations. I realize now, as I did not before she died, that, however violent or delusional she may have been when I was growing up, she was, after all, working. She was smoking and drinking herself into her grave, yet she was managing, in her classrooms at the college, and in her shop near the river, and in her house at the bottom of the road, to carry on and endure. “Death? Or life?” the kimono seems to ask. Because the appliqued symbols that form these questions are so appropriate to the idea of ceremony and pageantry, and yet so childlike and puzzling, the viewer looks away from the garment and considers the wearer. But my mother in her robe is nowhere to be found. Her inner life has been transferred to the surface of the kimono.

  My mother lived her life inviting death. When her cancer was diagnosed, and she was summarily ordered by her doctors to quit smoking, she did so in a matter of days, and seemed afterward rarely to think of smoking, or to regret that she ever had. Smoking had got her to the one place where the major competing strains in her consciousness of herself — as a visionary child and as a brokenhearted woman — came together, and made her whole, and left her to die in peace.

  Years after her death, my worry over her persists. Worry may be what I am trying to overcome when I talk to my dead mother, as I did that evening in the stairwell at the New York Public Library. I was brooding over some problem that had existed between us, and sharing with her, out loud (though not too loudly), my thoughts. On the first-floor landing, I briefly imagined her floating near the ceiling. Stitched onto her silk kimono were provisions and companions for her winged journey into eternity. “Mom!” I said, and, as I called out to her, I did not glance over my shoulder, and I did not, in that passing instant, dare to see, at a modest height above the ground — my mother, not there.

  PART V

  I have often wondered what might have happened to my mother after she finally stopped drinking, in 1983, had it not been for her father, who, I suspect, worried over his daughter every day of his life as a parent, and who, in the years leading up to his death at the age of ninety, energetically sought reassurance, typically from me, though also from my sister, that his daughter would one da
y overcome her anger and make a place for herself in the world.

  “Don, what do you think of your mother’s prospects?” he would ask me whenever I visited him and my grandmother in North Carolina. “Do you think she’s doing all right?”

  All right? I never knew quite what to say. Should I speak the truth and risk upsetting him? Sometimes I said nothing. I remember sitting on the sofa in the house on McCoy Cove Road, feeling helpless, looking out the living-room window at the low gray mountains nearby.

  My grandparents’ house was neither beautiful nor remarkable — not like many Black Mountain residences, some of which had been built as vacation bungalows in the Arts and Crafts style — but it was a good house, and my grandparents, while in their seventies and eighties, had done painstaking work on it and on the narrow, sloping yard that was given over, out back, to shade trees overhanging a picnic table, and to my grandfather’s vegetable garden and my grandmother’s flower beds. There was a garage out back, too, at the end of the driveway that passed the house as it climbed the grade from the road. Sometimes when he was in a storytelling mood, my grandfather might slip away through the kitchen and across the patio and up the driveway to his workroom at the back of the garage. A moment later, steady on his feet, and chewing a toothpick or a stick of Dentyne, he would come inside the house, lower himself into his chair, and begin volubly speaking. Often, my grandmother got up and left the room, because she did not approve of his drinking.

  My favorites of his stories took place in the mountains. My grandparents had graduated — she in 1926, he a year later — from Tusculum College in Greenville, Tennessee. At around the time they were there, I remember him telling me, a scholarship was endowed by a widow who lived in, of all places, Miami, Florida. It was the widow’s desire, as I recall my grandfather’s understanding of things, that part of her money be used to educate students from the poorer reaches of the western Appalachias. She had herself been a child of the mountains, I remember from the story, and, through education, had found her way into the modern world. Because the pupils brought to Tusculum under her scholarship were largely unschooled, the college committed itself to their comprehensive education. In return, the matriculated men and women — who might go on to train in medicine or law or engineering, but who, I gathered, often quit with teaching degrees — promised to return to their home communities, where they would live and work for a set term of years.

  Neither of my grandparents was a recipient of the scholarship. But for a time after he graduated, my grandfather recruited for it. He told of driving a Model A Ford along dirt trails and over hilltops and through narrow mountain hollows; sometimes, he said, he drove up creek beds. When he came across a house or a small subsistence farm, he would get out of the car and ask whether the inhabitants knew of any young people who might want to go to college. Were there any around, he would ask, who showed signs of being school material?

  One of my grandfather’s tales had him driving a rocky creek bed that led toward a mountain hamlet. As my grandfather neared the hamlet, he heard rifle fire echoing from the darkness behind the trees. When he got close enough to see buildings, the firing let up. My grandfather drove into a clearing surrounded with old structures that featured cluttered porches on which, I seem to recall him saying, dogs and children sat eyeing him. It was a poor place, like most all the places he visited in that job, a place that I picture as a scene in a photograph taken by Walker Evans or one of the other photographers who worked for the Works Progress Administration during the Depression. That day, men with guns pointed toward the ground came out into the open — they came from here and there, not in a group — and gathered in a circle around my grandfather’s car, where they politely discussed his business with him. When that was done, my grandfather got back in his Model A and drove on. I can imagine one of the men saying to him, “Go on up that way and you’ll find a boy,” then waving a hand in the air. The mountain men retreated into the forest from which they’d come, and, after my grandfather had got a short distance away, their firing resumed. It is not clear to me whether my grandfather knew with certainty, or believed with conviction, that the men had been taking aim at each other. But I remember that he sometimes talked about the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys, which took place in the West Virginia and Kentucky mountains not terribly far north of the Tennessee farm country where he and my grandmother had been raised. The Hatfield-McCoy feud involved deliberate assassinations and a love affair, though it did not, contrary to folklore, carry on for scores of years. It lasted from 1878 until 1890, and exerted a tremendous hold on the imaginations of people living in that part of the world in the years during and immediately after its heyday as news.

  According to my grandfather, one of the students who came to Tusculum under the widow’s scholarship had been born into a feud. O., a Kentucky boy, arrived at the college wearing a sidearm beneath his coat. O.’s father had killed a man and gone into hiding — not so much from the law as from the victim’s kin — and O. had vowed, in the event his father was killed by the man’s relatives, to avenge the death. For this reason, O.’s revolver never left his side. Did O. carry the gun to class? I might ask my grandfather, interrupting the narrative. Did he hide it in his pants at a Saturday-night dance? Did he keep it loaded beside the books on his desk? My grandfather thought he might have done these things. O. was ready at a moment’s notice to abandon school and hunt for revenge.

  Until that time, he studied literature. It was customary in those days, the story went, for Tusculum students to produce a play at commencement, and in his senior year O. was encouraged by his teachers to write the play. My grandfather claimed to have seen the production, and described the work as a loving portrayal of O.’s family, and as an unromantic though somewhat comical depiction of backwoods poverty, stern religion, and alcoholism. It was, I suppose — and if I correctly understood my grandfather’s remarks about it — a work of American naturalism, possibly an accidental work of naturalism, and, I suspect, in keeping with styles taking hold on the American stage during the years between the world wars. This style could be seen in the works of Eugene O’Neill and others who had studied under George Pierce Baker, whose drama seminars at Harvard placed the literature of the theater in an active and responsive rather than a purely academic and literary context. Great plays are authentic, living stories of a civilization, and, in Baker’s view, the plays then being written for the American stage required, in order that our society could find itself mirrored in its contemporary theater, a milieu in which practical training in professional stagecraft might bring into existence a class of artists able to conceive and perfect what amounted to a new American art form. Baker’s famous classes became a foundation for the Yale School of Drama, founded in 1925. According to my grandfather, the commencement speaker for O.’s graduating class at Tusculum was a colleague of Baker’s who had gone to teach at the Drama School in New Haven. At the performance of O.’s play, which received rousing applause when the curtain came down, this guest speaker, startled to his feet by O.’s unexpected talent, promised him, before God and the Tusculum community, a place at Yale.

  “What happened?” I sometimes asked my grandfather at this point in the story. It was our call and response.

  He chewed his toothpick. “If I have it right, he went up to New Haven, and was there a year or two. I believe he might even have had a play produced in New York.”

  “Did he carry his pistol?”

  “Yes, he must have. He wanted to be ready to get up and go if he needed. He didn’t want to stop and so much as pack his bags. He wanted to catch the first train home. Well, one day he got word that his father had been shot. It was what he’d been waiting for. He folded the telegram and put it in his pocket and walked to the station and was never seen at Yale again.”

  “He went to the mountains.”

  “Yes. For years he tracked his father’s killer, but he never found the man.”

  “Never.”

  “Some year
s ago I was in Kentucky, Don, and I looked him up. He told me that after leaving Yale he dedicated himself to finding the killer. But eventually he realized that he simply would not find him. There was too much territory to cover. Don, you can walk twenty feet into those woods and lose your sense of direction and never come out. So he gave up. He became a teacher. By the time I found him, he was long retired.”

  “Did he keep writing?”

  “That’s a good question. I don’t know. I don’t believe he did, Don. I don’t think he did. Too much time had passed.”

  But getting to the story at hand:

  In 1994, my grandparents, too old to maintain their house, moved into a nearby assisted-living community, where they occupied a small apartment with a tiny yard planted with flowers. Several times I visited them there — an insomniac man in his mid-thirties, walking the long corridors of a rural home for the aged. I remember from those trips that the men and women of the place, who seemed ancient to me when I first arrived, began, as the days passed, to appear younger and more beautiful. The women in particular, in their laughter and their smiles, and in the way they might quickly glance away when aware of being looked at, showed evidence of themselves in their youth. I felt charmed by the ladies in my grandparents’ circle, and learned to understand that a woman near the end of her life has not given up her powers of seduction. While stopping after lunch to say hello, I might look into the eyes of a great-grandmother from Richmond or Atlanta and see, or imagine seeing, the girl who did not yet realize that everything and everyone ahead of her — the husband who would pass away, her children, and their children, since moved to distant cities — could come and go so quickly.