The Theft of Memory

by Jonathan Kozol

  In spite of his apparent stamina, I said, no one could predict how much longer he would live. He might live for several years; but I also knew a single bout of serious infection or problems that might come up in a surgical procedure, if for any reason that should be required, could easily put him in a critical condition from which he would not emerge. Before this happened, as I tried my best to explain this to my mother, I had the strongest yearning—and I told her that I knew it might be unrealistic—to let my father live his final days at home.

  She didn’t let me go on any further with my explanations. “I want him to come home,” she said.

  I insisted upon pressing her about the possibly disruptive changes this would bring into the pattern of her life. My father’s needs, as I reminded her, were greater than her own. How did she feel about the fact that, with my father living here, she would likely not receive as much attention from the people taking care of them as she was receiving now?

  “I want him to come home,” she said again, dispensing with my question. “Your father’s like a child now. He’s been away from home too long. Go and buy a bed for him. Buy whatever else he needs. Tell the lawyer to write me a check.”

  I told her I’d been thinking that I ought to ask the lawyer for advice before proceeding with these plans.

  “Why waste time with him?” she said. “Tell him I’ve made up my mind. I don’t need to ask for his permission. He’s a lawyer—slow as molasses! I’ve made my decision.”

  I asked her, if we were to do this, whether she would want me to put Daddy’s bed—he would need a hospital bed—here beside her in her bedroom or in the other bedroom. Her answer wasn’t sentimental in the least. “Why would I want him in this room? I’d never get a chance to sleep. Put him in the other room. Set up another bed for Julia out there in the living room.”

  I still had questions in my mind, but she didn’t want to hear them. She had thought this through as much as she intended to.

  “Don’t talk about it to me anymore! Go tell Julia that I’d like a cup of tea. We’ll have it in the dining room.”

  So that was the end of our discussion about Daddy. I went out to share the news with Julia. She knew what I’d been thinking. Silvia, whose polite but uncontainable take-over inclinations had already set themselves in motion, had, of course, shared her thoughts with Julia. So the only news that I was giving Julia was the way my mother had reacted and her insistence that I shouldn’t talk about it anymore.

  “She gives you a hard time,” Julia said. “Bless her, that’s your mother!”

  Julia and I took out the box of biscuits that my mother liked and cut up some pieces of Camembert and Emmenthal and brought them to the table. I got out my mother’s favorite teapot and we had our tea, the three of us, as usual, together. My mother’s cranky attitude had disappeared as quickly as it had begun. As soon as we were finished, I got up and kissed her and made my escape before she had a chance to get annoyed with me again.

  The only disapproving comment that she managed to get in was a reference to the slightly shabby-looking sweater I was wearing.

  “Do me a favor. Go and buy yourself a decent sweater. Go next door to Lord and Taylor. Please don’t skimp on something cheap.”

  I didn’t actually need a sweater. I already had two extra sweaters she had given me that I’d never worn. But I promised her I’d do this anyway. I wanted to get out that door and have a chance to do some quiet thinking on the drive back to my home. In spite of the explicit orders she had handed down, it would be a while more before I could arrive at a decision.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Coming Home

  In the months that followed, while I wrestled with my last remaining reservations about giving notice to the nursing home, Silvia and Alejandro and the others who filled in for them continued to spend pleasant afternoons and evenings with my father. As often as I could, I would drive down to be with him in the early evening.

  The weather in the end of June was already summerlike, and there was a period of almost torrid weather in the first weeks of July. In the village where I lived, teenage boys and older men brought their fishing lines and tackle boxes to the edges of a rushing stream that ran right through the center of the town. They’d usually go down there as the heavy branches of the trees were starting to cast shadows on the water and would stay until the sun went down.

  One evening, sitting with my father on the patio, I told him that I’d seen a group of boys that afternoon fishing from a rocky ledge a quarter mile from my home. I told him it reminded me of when he used to take me fishing with him on a lake in Maine when I was a child, maybe eight or ten years old. I lifted my arms and swung a long imaginary rod to imitate a cast and he copied me, swinging his arms together in an arc the way that he had taught me.

  I realized that there may have been no memory involved in this at all. It may have been no more than an automatic imitation of the motion I had made. But his eyes had brightened and, even though he didn’t speak a word that might have indicated any kind of recollection, he made that casting motion several times, looking out beyond the wooden railing of the patio as if to see the spot on which the plug had landed.

  Everything about those fishing trips had been a great adventure for me—the darkness of the deep pine forests, the stillness of the water when we went down to the dock and made our preparations. We’d usually rent a rowboat with an outboard motor so we could cross the wide and open section of the lake. Then we’d turn the motor off and use the oars to get into one of those isolated coves where the fish were feeding in the early morning. We would take turns standing in the bow and trying to cast into a darkened spot as close as possible to shore. As often as not, the lure would get stuck on a piece of wood beneath the surface or a snatch of lily pads and we’d have to move the boat and reach our hands as far down into the water as we could to try to free the lure. If we couldn’t free it, we’d have to cut the line and attach another lure and begin all over.

  My father had all kinds of lures with brightly colored feathered tails, and narrow filaments made from catgut, I believe, to attach them to the fishing line, and a big curved fisherman’s knife, and cans of oily substances with narrow spouts, each in its own small subdivided space within the tackle box. I still had that tackle box and two long rods with beautiful reels, marbled-looking on their sides, stored in my garage. When I had opened the tackle box a month or so before, the odor of oils and the other smells that it released brought back a flood of memories.

  I had thought of bringing it with me someday to the nursing home, wondering if those silver spoons, Hawaiian wigglers, and the other fascinating lures would possibly stir a bit of the same excitement for my father that they did for me. I don’t know why I never did it. Probably I feared that it would have no meaning for him and that I would open up the box and he would look inside, with curiosity perhaps, but mostly with perplexity and blankness. I guess I decided that this was a memory that belonged in the garage and should remain there.

  —

  During that month, and the next, I returned to the apartment to talk more with my mother. I wanted to be certain her decision hadn’t changed. But every time I questioned her, she would cut me off.

  “Don’t keep talking about it,” she would say. “I told you. I’ve made up my mind.”

  One night, after she had gone to sleep, I went out to the living room and spent some hours at my father’s desk looking through more of the documents he’d left in its drawers when he had packaged up the larger body of materials and sent them to my home. In one of the folders that he hadn’t labeled, I came across a copy of Eugene O’Neill’s last will and testament, dated 1948, which Carlotta had apparently given to my father to keep in his office vault, for what reason I don’t know (it would be rewritten twice before the playwright’s death). I also found a number of letters from Carlotta to my father and, to my surprise, another last will and testament that O’Neill had written—this one for his dog!

  I too
k the folder and some other items with me to my house so that I could look at them unhurriedly. The will and testament for the playwright’s dog, a Dalmatian, Silverdene Emblem—“Blemie,” as O’Neill had called him—was a lovely, sweet, and playful piece of writing that few people would have thought to be the product of a writer so bedeviled, grim, tumultuous, and deadly serious in his dark creative work.

  “I, Silverdene Emblem O’Neill…,” Blemie’s will began, “because the burden of my years and infirmities is heavy upon me, and I realize the end of my life is near, do hereby bury my last will and testament in the mind of my Master….Now that I have grown blind and deaf and lame, and even my sense of smell fails me so that a rabbit could be right under my nose and I might not know…, I feel life is taunting me with having over-lingered….It is time I said goodbye….

  “Dogs do not fear death as men do. We accept it as a part of life….What may come after death, who knows?” Blemie then suggested that if his master should decide to have another dog, he could not do better than to have another Dalmatian. “To him I bequeath my collar and leash and my overcoat and raincoat, made to order in 1929 at Hermès in Paris. He can never wear them with the distinction I did, walking around the Place Vendôme, or later along Park Avenue, all eyes fixed on me in admiration; but…I am sure he will do his utmost not to appear a mere gauche provincial dog.”

  In his “last word of farewell,” Blemie left his master with the reassurance that, whenever he and his mistress came to visit at his grave, “no matter how deep my sleep I shall hear you, and not all the power of death can keep my spirit from wagging a grateful tail.”

  In the envelope containing Blemie’s will there was a photograph of Blemie with O’Neill, the two of them resting on a sloping lawn, O’Neill leaning on one of his elbows, Blemie on his two front legs. It had been taken in 1931, when O’Neill was living on Long Island. “Mourning Becomes Electra was produced that fall in New York,” Carlotta had noted on the back of the photograph in her flowing hand when she gave this to my father.

  Even in the face of Carlotta’s many acts of graciousness—she sent flowers to my mother now and then, usually with notes of extravagant affection—my father’s annotations made it clear that he continued to regard her with a complicated mix of empathy, because of the injustice that was done to her when she was in McLean, and a painful sense of recognition that she could be unforgiving, “cruel and vengeful,” in the way she treated others, even when she had good reason to dislike them. “Still hates Lawrence Langner of the Theatre Guild. Calls him ‘son of a bitch,’ because he called in Merrill to ‘establish’ her insanity….”

  He noted that Carlotta could also be demeaning to O’Neill himself. More than once, when she was angry, she insulted him in my father’s presence by disparaging his sexual performance, an insult that my father thought peculiarly gratuitous, and verging on the comical, in light of his medical debilitation. O’Neill, in turn, continually insulted her as well. When there was something he wanted her to do for him, he would yell out, “Where’s my whore?” or, sometimes, “Goddamn whore?”

  “You lousy bastard,” she once answered. “Where would you be today if it wasn’t for this whore? In the gutter! Or in an insane asylum where your theater friends would probably have put you while they were busy peddling your plays!”

  Even in the face of these unhappy altercations, my father noted once again that O’Neill depended on her for the very capable, if at times heavy-handed, way in which she managed his affairs. And, except for the times when he was most impatient or indignant with Carlotta, he never ceased to speak of her with gratitude for her unfailingly effective exercise of power when he was working in the fullness of his strength, because she used that power to defend him from distractions that might have intruded on the single-minded concentration that he needed “to release a work he had conceived” (those were my father’s words) but which he felt at first was still entrapped within him.

  In describing the protection that Carlotta had afforded him, he spoke about the sense of desperation he would feel as he grew immersed in the initial stages of creating a new play. He said he would experience “a gnawing sense of guilt at imprisoning what was in me and [was] struggling to come out. The only peace I ever had was made by myself by writing my plays.”

  At the same time, in spite of his reliance on Carlotta in helping him achieve the degree of isolation that he needed in these periods of writing, he also said that her determination to cut him off from all distractions, even those he might enjoy, remained undiminished even when he wasn’t working on a play and, indeed, well into the years when he was unable to write any plays at all. He spoke, for instance, of the willfulness—“ferociousness,” my father wrote—with which Carlotta fended off any mild interest other women now and then might show in him.

  In one moment of revelatory reminiscence, O’Neill told my father of an actress named Patricia Neal, who, at the age of twenty, auditioned for a role in one of his plays. Although she didn’t get the part, a pleasant friendship soon was formed between them. O’Neill confessed he found her “real attractive,” “very pretty,” and he said she brought him “flattery” and “adoration.”

  The relationship between the playwright and Ms. Neal, which had developed when his tremor was already quite pronounced and when he was hardly in a physical condition to carry on an amorous liaison with a twenty-year-old girl, was, according to O’Neill, entirely innocent. He said he had “an ice cream soda” with her once and that their conversations had been casual and light-hearted, although he added that he kept these meetings secret from Carlotta and that, when she learned of them, she grew very angry.

  “Hell! It wasn’t worth it to me [i.e., to pursue the matter]. I needed Carlotta….She was my shield—and sometimes my captor.”

  Carlotta’s uneasiness about O’Neill’s friendship with Patricia Neal remained unabated even after they had moved to Boston and O’Neill was in my father’s care. In 1952, O’Neill confided to my father that he took much satisfaction at the news that the producer of a revival of one of his plays, Desire Under the Elms, was about to sign Patricia for a starring role. Carlotta, however, promptly intervened and ordered the producer to terminate negotiations.

  Ms. Neal’s career was later interrupted by a series of strokes that left her with a cerebral impairment, which she would struggle valiantly and, at length, successfully to overcome. She then returned to acting in a number of performances that brought her great acclaim. Carlotta’s opposition to Patricia’s wish to win a role for which O’Neill believed she was well suited was still in my father’s mind and obviously rankled in his memory as late as 1968, when he saw a reference to Patricia in the New York Times.

  “Brave woman….Did I ever tell you that O’Neill was rather fond of her?”

  Carlotta’s domination of O’Neill’s decision making extended even into areas in which my father found that he himself was innocently involved. O’Neill, for instance, mentioned to him once that he liked to listen to the ball games on the radio. My father quickly seized on this and asked O’Neill if he’d like to go with him to see a game at Fenway Park, which was just a couple blocks from O’Neill’s hotel.

  O’Neill “reacted like a kid,” my father noted–“almost boyishly enthusiastic”–“but Carlotta vetoed….” In a query to himself, he wondered what she possibly could have objected to. Did she think the two of them would disappear, “make a jailbreak,” and decide not to return? Even with her total faith in my father’s judgment in matters that had any real significance, the notion of her husband and his doctor going off to have an afternoon together at the ballpark seemed to pose a threat to her.

  On a far more serious note, she forcefully resisted any inclinations O’Neill would now and then express to get in touch with his daughter, Oona, from whom he’d been distanced since she was a girl of seventeen because he had disapproved of the lively social life she led, which was highly publicized in newspaper columns and which he believed to be a
n exploitation of his name and reputation. His disapproval grew considerably greater only a year later when she fell in love with a much older man, the actor Charlie Chaplin, and in short order married him.

  O’Neill had since had second thoughts about his harshness to his daughter, but Carlotta remained adamant in her hostility to Oona. When, in 1953, the Boston Globe published a photo of Oona and her children, my father wrote, “Showed it to EO’N, but had to do it surreptitiously. Carlotta noted same in paper, crumpled it, and canceled [their] subscription.”

  Some years after “EO’N” had passed away, Oona had written to my father from her home in Switzerland. “Very hurt…, [she] confided later,” according to one of the memos filed in another folder that contained his correspondence with her. Having been excluded from her father’s life for more than a decade when he died, Oona now experienced a yearning to know more about him and his state of mind, his regrets or recollections, in the years in which my father treated him. She asked my father if he would agree to visit her in Switzerland.

  He wasn’t sure at first if it was wise for him to do this. The relationship between the playwright and his daughter had been disrupted for so long, and under conditions that had been so difficult for Oona, that my father worried that a lengthy conversation might simply open up old wounds and would not assuage her longings but, instead, might deepen them. On the other hand, there were statements that O’Neill had made in reference to his daughter, and out of the hearing of Carlotta, that conveyed a tenderness of which my father was convinced that Oona could not be aware. In one moment of reflection, for example, he had spoken lovingly of Oona when she was a child, and he remembered with remorse the way he had reacted to the independent choices she was making in her teenage years.