The Afterlife: A Memoir

by Donald Antrim

  I remember a girl named Eileen who sat behind me in German class. I used to turn around in my desk frequently, to look at her legs. School in Miami in the 1970s was an erotic ordeal, because the girls came dressed for the beach. Sometimes when the bell rang I was forced by my erection to stay at my desk for a minute or two before staggering off to the next period. I carried my books in front of my dick.

  Anyway, the books. It wasn’t only their interiority that mattered to me. I cared for their materiality. A book of good weight, that opened nicely to reveal clean text on grained paper, functioned satisfyingly as the physical container of its familiar or unfamiliar worlds, making more concrete, more apparently real, the author’s inventions. Many years after the time which concerns me here, after I was grown up, living in New York and publishing books of my own, I visited the Folger Library in Washington, where, in a subterranean vault, I was shown the library’s immense collection of early printed works, including the world’s largest accumulation of first-folio and quarto editions of Shakespeare. For some reason, my guide had no problem with my handling the books, and I walked along the shelves, taking down not only Shakespeare but Chaucer and Sir Philip Sidney I remember opening Sidney’s Arcadia, a massive and dense prose work, a sort of cosmology of Elizabethan love and politics, written for the author’s sister, the Countess of Pembroke. The pages of the volume in my hand showed, in almost stunning relief around each letter, the heavy impressions left by the press. The array of letters shaped into words, words into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs seemed perfect, as if the book’s maker had precisely known the textual disposition most likely to encourage the eye’s movement down the page. Published near the close of the sixteenth century, the Arcadia opens with a dedication to the Countess:

  Here now have you (most deare, and most worthy to be most deare Lady) this idle work of mine: which I fear (like the Spiders webbe) will be thought fitter to be swept away, then worn to any other purpose. For my part, in very trueth (as the cruell fathers among the Greekes, were woont to doo to the babes they would not foster) I could well find in my harte, to cast out in some desert of forgetfulness this child, which I am loath to father. But you desired me to doo it, and your desire, to my hart is an absolute commandment. Now, it is done onelie for you, onely to you: if you keepe it to your selfe, or to such friendes, who will weigh errors in the ballaunce of good will, I hope, for the fathers sake, it will be pardoned, perchance made much of, though in it selfe it have deformities ….

  I was hooked by the words on the page and by the page itself, pliable and tough, stained, deep in the paper’s weave, with flecks of dark color. The binding was limber. I was breathing quickly. I’d been curious to see the Folger’s books, yet had not anticipated their durability and powerful tactile appeal. They’d existed for such a long time. As my guide and I rode the elevator back up to the main reading room, I wondered who I might call on the phone. To whom could I blurt out the excitement of peering into these books? As I remember, I called my father, who listened patiently while I described the sensation of holding the Arcadia and the Shepherd’s Calendar and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. What I am getting at is the idea that books do not in all cases merely convey the content on their pages; in some fundamental respect, books, especially the most beautiful, shelter and accommodate their contents.

  I wanted beautiful books. I wanted to know what my father knew but would not, or could not, standing uncomfortably before the shelves in our sunken living room in Miami, say to me. And so I began to make a library of my own.

  One night, a month before Christmas, 1972, we were sitting at dinner in the house in the jungle, when my father made a proposal. His proposal was not directed toward me in particular, yet it contained an acknowledgment of, if not an answer to, the questions I’d been asking him about literature. He offered a Christmas in which he, my mother, my sister, and I would give and receive books. We’d keep things simple and not overspend. We’d have a book Christmas.

  I remember thinking: Books? Wait a minute! What about all the other stuff? But I understood that I was being invited to put myself forward as a serious person. If books become one’s way of looking at and piecing together society and the world, then exchanging books might be an initiation into authentic membership in the world.

  It was quickly decided. My sister was enthusiastic and so was I. I even knew what books I desired. I’d seen, in a store in South Miami, an imposing two-volume annotated edition — elegantly boxed, naturally; that was all-important — of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. They became the gift to go after, and for several weeks I dropped hints and made a point of declaring my passion for hardcovers.

  Christmas was a time in my family when hopes for happiness got ritualized and, as it were, acted out. The holiday required protection from the discord which ruled our typical existence, and the quieter-than-usual days leading up to it came gradually to seem an end to my parents’ difficulties and the advent of a peaceful era in our lives; and, to that end, actual gifts, particularly my father’s for my mother, had a lot riding on them. My father’s proposal of a book Christmas might have been his attempt to lessen the psychic weight attached to the things placed beneath the tree, though when I think about my mother’s part in such a Christmas, I wonder whether the burden was much reduced. She had many talents, my mother, and, in spite of everything, she had her pleasures, but reading wasn’t at the top of the list. Occasionally I’d see her with something by a writer she and my father knew socially, a university acquaintance with a career as a novelist or poet. However, apart from keeping up with the output of friends from southern academia — and I’m not sure whether she did so more than halfheartedly — she wasn’t what you’d call a reader. She didn’t voice curiosity about whatever might be found in books, and she did not ask questions or make observations relating to books in the world. I never heard her, when I was a teenager, express feelings brought on by something she’d read.

  How lonely for him, I thought from time to time when I was growing up. Then I’d wonder: Why did they get married? And a moment later I’d wonder: Why’d they get married twice? The days when I began exploring myself through reading were also the days when I started analyzing the problems in my home, and I suppose I took my mother’s indifference to books as disdain for the communion, through print, between an author and a reader, that inner experience we take from written words. Did she feel contempt for my father, who nurtured this experience in his students?

  It’s not a bad question. I didn’t want that boxed Sherlock Holmes set for nothing. The powerful detective is a master of the universe. His deductions release us from the anguish of living in an inexplicable world. I couldn’t unravel the logic of my parents’ marriage, but, reading Arthur Conan Doyle, I could briefly master my feelings of helplessness. Mastery was the aim in acquiring books in sets. Sets promised the triumph of completion. It wasn’t sufficient to read a story or two; I wanted totality. The box housed its separate volumes as interdependent parts of an intact world. To conquer the realm of the boxed set was to acquire strong magic — my father’s magic. I could not have known, at that time, that I was stealing from my father, but I was. I was beginning to study and prepare for writing. I don’t recall what I gave my parents or my sister for Christmas in 1972. I do remember that I got the Holmes stories, though in paperback rather than in the edition I’d fantasized about.

  The night before Christmas, my parents fought. My father had violated the provisions of his own proposal, and arranged around the tree a number of elaborately wrapped packages, clearly not books, for my mother. Of course my sister and I didn’t expect him to give her only books. Just the same, seen against our expectation, the abundance was notable.

  It was a long and dark night. My mother got falling-down drunk. She had a practice during her bad spells of stopping at the door to my room. She would teeter in the doorway and bellow at me that I was not participating properly in the life of our family, and that she didn’t care
about whatever I might or might not want to do — I could act any way I wanted when I got to be eighteen, because then I’d be paying rent around here, but until then I didn’t have rights — and I could just go to hell. Or she might isolate a shortcoming, like my poor performance in school, and attack me for it in a manner that suggested I was the root cause of our family’s misery. Invariably I would be divided in my feelings: I was furious with her, yet worried over whether she might fall. It was a sorry predicament. At some point on Christmas Eve she engaged me. I don’t remember what she said, or whether I ran out into the middle of her fight with my father, out and down the little steps into the living room, where the tree stood with its lights on. I remember my sister pleading with them to stop. At about three or four in the morning, there was a crash. Our mother had fallen into the Christmas tree and brought it down on top of herself. I remember her crying out as if she might die. My sister and I ran into the living room, where our father was struggling to raise her. Our cats were hiding beneath chairs. The floor was littered with glass shards and broken ornaments. Water from the tree stand had splashed across everyone’s presents. My mother was claiming to have broken her arm. But she hadn’t. We got her off the floor and, somehow, into bed, and then, I don’t remember, my father swept up the mess and righted the tree, and a while later the sun came up.

  I slept, some. I woke to the sounds made by my sister fixing our parents a special Christmas breakfast. I got up, and Terry was in the kitchen cutting fruit. I doubt we said much to each other.

  It was a long time before our parents came out for Christmas morning. My mother needed coffee and time in bed. She may have bruised herself in her fall, but she did not — I suppose because of the occasion — tell us if she was in pain. It was a forgotten incident. She lay against pillows and picked at her breakfast until around eleven o’clock, then hauled herself to a chair near the tree. It took her a while to arrange her coffee cup, cigarettes, lighter, and ashtray on a table near the chair. Once she was settled, we started opening presents. Everyone was quiet. My sister had done everything she could to save Christmas.

  We took turns with our gifts. I opened the paperback Sherlock Holmes set, and, later, a few other books, and then some non-book things. Clothing, probably. I remember my father inspecting something from my mother and forcing a grateful, affectionate smile — she’d found just the right thing — a smile meant for us as well as her, and for himself, because he, too, wanted to salvage the morning, along with, I guess, his dignity. Mainly I remember my mother as a captive of the gifts he lavished on her. At the time, she had begun a minor collection of Art Nouveau objets d’art — candlesticks, bud vases, copper bowls, serving trays overlaid with silver — and my father, as I remember, gave her a number of such pieces that year. Again and again, my mother was compelled to put down her cigarette, tear open a package, and smile and plastically exclaim at him. It was hard to watch. She had no control over her alcoholism. She didn’t understand this. And neither did we.

  PART VII

  One night when I was ten, in the year before we left town and moved to the farm at the bottom of the mountains, a man carrying a gun knocked on the front door of our house on Lewis Mountain Road, in Charlottesville. My father answered — he’ d been waiting for this visit — and the armed man, a literature professor, my father’s friend and colleague at the university, said hello. My father and mother had until that moment been fighting. It was a bad fight. My father thanked the man for coming and invited him in. The gun, as I remember, was a long-barreled revolver holstered on a coiled western-style gun belt that the man held in one hand. The gun hung at his side, down near his knees. He walked into the house, carrying the gun, and my father closed the door. I watched from above, from the dark landing at the top of the hallway stairs, and could see, looking down between the banister’s white railings, my father and his friend as they crossed the entryway into the living room, where the man said, “Hello, Lou.”

  “Hello,” my mother said to him. He placed the gun belt on the coffee table beside her chair. Did my father mix our guest a cocktail? I had not yet learned to measure, over the course of a night, the predictive correlation, in my parents’ lives, between drinks and fights, though I’d become accustomed, during the years when my mother and father had been divorced — when she, my sister, and I lived in our one-story brick house on Eighth Street, in Tallahassee, Florida — to seeing my mother with her bourbon on the rocks.

  We’d been a family of an incomplete sort, the three of us in that house, the house across the street from the church with its rusting steeple detached and laid on the ground. In my memory, the churchyard grass was patchy and weedy — not brazenly wild in the manner of a yard surrounding a derelict house, but unkempt. Was the church lacking funds for its own upkeep? Was that why the steeple lay abandoned on the ground?

  On the other hand, I can remember that the churchyard was, in fact, tidy and well tended. The borders of the walkway leading from the street to the church doors were, it seems to me now—can seem to me now — neatly trimmed. Maybe weeds and tall grass grew only around the perimeter of the steeple itself, inside the narrow zone that could not safely or easily be reached by lawnmowers and edging tools. On Sunday mornings, a nicely dressed congregation gathered on the church’s mowed front lawn, and later, during the service, their singing could be heard coming from inside the building. It is possible that the weeds in my memory grew not in the pretty churchyard but on the vacant square of land adjacent to it, the roughed-up, improvised neighborhood playground on the other side of the recumbent steeple.

  Then again, wasn’t the church itself as badly in need of paint as its amputated top? What sort of people went to that church, anyway? I was eight years old, then nine, and I climbed on their steeple, ran its length, jumped from it, and tumbled in the weedy, or, possibly, lush grass. The steeple was like the peeling hull of a boat that had years before been dragged inland and stripped of its teak and brass. Nowadays, I expect that I might find it there in the churchyard, were I to visit our old house in Tallahassee. Of course, this is unlikely. Almost forty years have passed since we left that town. I have not returned, and neither has my sister. In the late 1970s, our mother went back as a student, commuting from Miami in order to complete the work required for her doctorate. I do not remember her ever speaking about the house or the church or the steeple. And so, unlike other places where we lived either with or without our father, places which, for one reason or another, I have revisited — Sarasota, Miami, Charlottesville — that place, with its giant trees hung with Spanish moss, its smells of pine, its sand roads near the center of town, and its nearby lakes and slow-moving black rivers, exists for me with the power of a fantasy.

  In this fantasy, a man not my father comes to visit my mother and take her to dinner and a movie. When he arrives for their date, two Chihuahuas leap from the passenger side of his car, tear across the yard, and chase our cat. Who is this man? Why is he here? What about our father in Virginia, to whom I write postcards saying, “Dear Dad, I am fine. How are you?” and which receive replies that read as pleas: Can’t I tell him something about my life? Won’t I tell my father what I am doing?

  What am I doing? I am lying awake at night, sped up on amphetamines, fighting to breathe. I am playing the Beatles’ “Day Tripper” on pretend drums, with my friend John Covington faking guitar. I am trying to get the courage to leap from the high diving board at the Florida State University pool, and I am riding my red bicycle. I practice gymnastics with the Tallahassee Tumbling Tots, though I fail to progress past a cartwheel. I like a blond girl named Susan in my third-grade class, but she moves away. For years I will dream of finding her. Alone in my room, I build model ships and airplanes, impatiently spreading paint across the hulls, guns and fuselages after the models have been built, because I can’t wait to see them finished. I want my chair, my desk, the walls of my room painted orange, but it never happens. A fireman, his wife, and their son live in the house next door to us,
and the son’s band, The Other Side, practices in their garage, and I go over and sit on a speaker. The room smells like burning electrical wiring. One after another, the band’s brothers and friends disappear into Vietnam. I am a Cub Scout. Our black-haired den mother lets us scouts hurl water balloons off the roof of her house at pedestrians walking by on the far side of a tall hedge. She has a son we never see, though we hear him playing a horn in an upstairs room. Down in the yard, we goof off and tackle each other, messing up our blue uniforms. One day, the Cub Scout powers-that-be fire our den mother, and soon I am standing in a treeless, suburban backyard learning slipknots, or sitting at a kitchen table painting candy canes onto a coffee cup for my mother. I know in my heart that something is wrong. I want my father to come back to us for good, instead of once each month. I am a No-Neck Monster in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the university theater. A sign on a bathroom door backstage forbids flushing the toilet during showtime, yet I manage to flush in spite of this, and the sound fills the theater. The following year, when I play Young Macduff, my picture is in the paper, accompanying a notice about the production. In the caption I am “little Donnie Antrim.” The photographer has asked me to scream, but I am too self-conscious to scream for the camera, yet try to fake mortal agony anyway, and so it appears in the newspaper that a freckled boy is laughing the laugh of the insane while a dagger is sunk into his back. Many years later, in New York, I will meet the man who played Macbeth. He is appearing as the monster in a downtown production of Frankenstein. He tells me that Lady Macduff is alive and well and living in Massachusetts.