The Suicide Index

by Joan Wickersham

  “But you knew he was dead.”

  Her hand was shaking. “There was all this blood.”

  “Where? Where was the blood?”

  “Here.” She took her hand out of mine and drew a shape on her chest, like a bib. “He shot himself in the heart.”

  I looked over at Ted. There was a woman in the kitchen with him, helping him cook. That must be Annette, the cabaret singer who was always coming up from New York to stay with him. Ted paid her rent when she was short of money, my mother had told me. He got her jobs, he introduced her to people in the record business. She was lazy, she used him, my mother said. Annette saw me looking at her; she smiled at me and raised her hand in a limp little wave. I looked at my mother again.

  “Why there?” I said. “Why in the heart?” My hand went to my chest, feeling around for my own heart. “How did he know exactly where to aim? That’s risky, the heart. You could miss, or hit a rib. Why not the head?”

  The blanket was slipping down; she pulled it up to her chin again. “I guess because he thought it would be less messy. He was trying to spare me. You know how considerate he was.”

  Ted came over and handed us coffee, in big white china mugs. My mother drank some of hers. “You want to hear something weird?” she said. “He cleaned his closet before he did it. I was asleep, but I heard him. I must have opened my eyes for a second. He was straightening out his sweaters on the top shelf. Isn’t that strange? But he was so neat. In thirty-five years I never had to pick up after that man. Not one dirty sock. I want you to say that, at the funeral.”

  “He was getting the gun,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Was that where he kept it?”

  She didn’t answer me for a moment. Then she said, “I don’t know. I guess maybe it was.” Then, “You think so? Oh, my God, why didn’t I just wake up? Why didn’t I sit up and say good morning? Then he wouldn’t have done it.”

  “Yes he would,” I said. “Maybe not this morning, maybe not right then. But sometime.”

  “No,” she said. “The moment would have passed. I could have gotten him through the moment.”

  She drank more coffee. She told me about the coffee he’d made, how he only made one pot.

  “So he knew,” I said. “It wasn’t just a moment.” I thought of him bringing her coffee up the stairs, putting it on the night table, knowing. Apologetic, I thought, like a dog bringing its master’s slippers when it knows it’s done something bad.

  “He tried so hard to take care of me,” my mother said.

  “How can you shoot yourself in the heart with a rifle?” I asked. I remembered that rifle; long ago, at our old house in the country, my father and I used to go out to the big field behind the house and shoot targets. We would lie in the grass. My father showed me how to slide back the bolt and put the bullet in and lock it into place, as I balanced on my elbows to steady the gun. I remembered lining up the sights and squeezing the trigger, the gun’s small jump as it went off, the satisfying click of the bolt as I released it to let the spent golden shell spring out. The targets, when we went to collect them, were pockmarked with small holes—some wildly isolated at the outskirts of the black concentric rings, but most clustered at the center. Both of us had good aim.

  Would you ever use it for hunting? I asked him.

  No, he said. Once as a boy I shot a rabbit, and it was so terrible that I decided I’d never kill anything again.

  Then why do you have the gun?

  For protection, he’d said.

  “A rifle?” my mother asked, surprised. “Why would he use a rifle?”

  “You think he went out and bought another gun?” I didn’t agree with her that he’d done it in the impulse of a moment, but this amount of premeditation was too much for me.

  “He had another gun.”

  “He did?”

  “A little one. A handgun. He’d had it for ages. He bought it in the summer of 1964. The summer of Watts. When everyone was saying there were going to be riots all over suburbia.”

  “But that’s crazy,” I said.

  My mother shrugged. “It didn’t seem so crazy back then.”

  I looked up and smiled in the direction of Ted and his friend. “You must be Annette,” I said, in a loud voice.

  “That’s right,” Annette said, smiling sadly at me. She had long pale hair that lay like yellow satin ribbon on either side of her chest.

  “Well,” I recited in polite exaggerated singsong, “it’s nice to finally meet you.”

  We laughed.

  “I’m sorry about your father,” Annette said. “He was a lovely man.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “What are you making?”

  “Soup.”

  “Chicken soup,” Ted said. “Your father’s chicken soup, as a matter of fact. He made it for me a few weeks ago when I had the flu, and I asked him for the recipe.”

  “Fresh dill,” I said.

  “That’s the secret,” said Ted. The phone rang, and Ted answered it and brought it over to my mother. “Eric Parsons calling you back.”

  “Who’s Eric Parsons?” I asked.

  “The lawyer,” Ted told me.

  I went and stood at Ted’s kitchen window while my mother left the room to talk to the lawyer. I looked out at the hillside where his back garden was. When I’d come here at Christmas, my mother had walked me up the hill through the garden, which was studded with dozens of metal rings supported by wires, like haloes in a school Christmas play. Peonies, my mother had told me. Ted’s put in thirty-seven different varieties of peonies.

  I didn’t know there were thirty-seven different varieties, I’d said.

  Well, apparently there are. Even Daddy’s impressed, she’d said.

  The garden now looked exactly as it had that day: a bare rocky brown hillside caked with ice, each peony waiting invisibly beneath its frozen glittering cage.

  The floor trembled under my feet; my mother was walking into the kitchen, replacing the phone in its cradle.

  I turned to look at her. “What did he say?”

  “He was appalled. That’s what he kept saying, I’m appalled. Fuck him.”

  “You need a different guy,” Ted told her. “Call my guy. He’s terrific.”

  “Who is he to be so fucking appalled?” my mother said.

  “He was appalled,” Ted said. “Gee, that’s too bad.”

  “Fuck him,” I said.

  “Yeah, fuck him,” said Annette.

  We went on like that: for a few moments Ted’s kitchen was filled with “appalled”s and “fuck”s, murmured over and over until all of us were smiling, as if at some distorted message in a game of Telephone.

  Finally I said, “But did he have any advice?”

  “Advice?” my mother said. “What about?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Call my guy,” said Ted.

  The doorbell rang and Ted went to answer it. My sister came into the kitchen. She was carrying a suitcase. Her face was puffy and her eyes were red. I stared at her. She and I hugged for a long time. I didn’t want to let go of her; I didn’t want to start talking again.

  “You poor girls,” my mother announced. “Your father.”

  “Well,” I said, releasing my sister. “Your husband.”

  “But your father,” my mother said. She sat down in the striped armchair and pulled the blanket up over her lap.

  My sister said, “What happened?”

  My mother told her. He got up, showered, shaved, and dressed for work . . . She put in all the details I’d prodded her on before—the handgun, the blood on his chest, his feet crossed at the ankles. When she finished, my sister was crying, soundlessly. My mother stroked her arm and got up and went into the bathroom.

  My sister whispered to me, fiercely, “He brought her the coffee.”

  “I know,” I said. I told her what I’d thought before, that it was like the dog bringing the slippers.

  “No,” she said, “it was like �
��fuck you.’”

  When my mother came back, my sister said, “Was there a note?”

  “A note?” my mother said. “No, there wasn’t any note.”

  “On the desk?” I said.

  “I didn’t look,” she said. “The desk was a mess. You girls don’t know. He hadn’t cleaned it for months. I used to say to him, ‘Let me help you, I’ll sit down with you and we’ll spend an evening sorting it out.’ But he wouldn’t.” Her voice was rising. “He was so damned secretive. He never told me anything. I was always saying to him, ‘I really should know what we have and where it is. What if something happens to you?’ But he would never tell me. You know what he said finally? He said he was afraid that if I knew, I would leave him. Can you believe it? He thought if I knew where the money was I would take it and leave.”

  My sister looked at me and I could tell we were both thinking the same thing: maybe there wasn’t any money. Maybe that’s what he didn’t want you to find out; maybe that’s why he thought you would leave.

  “That desk is such a mess I don’t know how anyone could find anything there!” She was screaming now. “Oh, my God. You think there was a note? You think he left me a note and I didn’t see it?” She looked at my sister and me. “What if the police find it and read it? What could it say?”

  “I thought Monday for the funeral,” my mother said. We were back in our places: she in the armchair, without the blanket now, my sister and I on what looked like ancient wooden milking stools that Ted had produced from somewhere.

  “Daddy wouldn’t want a funeral,” I said.

  My mother shook her head, blinking. “Yes, he did. He wanted them to play the Mozart Requiem.”

  “Well, we’re not having the Mozart Requiem,” I said loudly. Then, trying to explain my vehemence, “If we do anything, we have to make it something we can get through, and that’s something I couldn’t bear.”

  “I agree,” my sister said.

  “I mean, Ma, whatever he may have said to you about wanting a funeral, these circumstances—”

  My mother cut me off. “He’s dead. Never mind how. A lot of people are going to miss him.”

  “I know that, but—”

  “There’s a Unitarian church. It’s very simple inside. We could do it there, Monday morning.”

  “You mean with a coffin and everything?” My voice was rising, beginning to shake.

  “No,” my mother said calmly; it seemed we were taking turns, the three of us, being the calm one. “He wanted to be cremated.”

  I took a breath and tried to match my mother’s tone. “We can wait until spring, then, to scatter the ashes. We could do it in Long Island Sound, where he sailed.”

  My sister said, “I don’t want him in the water. There needs to be a place.”

  “There’s an old graveyard up on Diamond Rock Road,” my mother said.

  “Why?” I said. “Why does there need to be a place?”

  “So we can visit it,” my sister said. “I want to be able to take my kids there.”

  “Well, I’m not going to visit it,” I said.

  “Don’t,” my sister said.

  “If he’s dead then let him be gone,” I said, my voice cold, hard.

  My mother put her hand on my wrist, fingering the end of my sleeve. “We’d better start calling people. Get Ted to give you some paper. We’ll make a list.”

  The paper Ted gave me had a tiny red pineapple printed at the top, with his initials underneath. I wrote down names with a black felt-tip pen: my mother’s brother and his wife and their grown children. My mother’s other brother. I chewed on the top of the pen for a moment and then wrote down the name of my father’s business partner.

  “Let’s see, who else,” my mother said.

  “Kurt,” said my sister.

  “Kurt?” My mother frowned. “God, I forgot about him. I suppose you have to call him.”

  “Of course we do; he’s Daddy’s brother,” I said, annoyed; I’d forgotten about him, too, but my hand, writing his name, was shaking. “You should call him, Mom. You should be the one to tell him. I hardly know him.”

  “No, no, you do it. I can’t deal with him now.”

  “Well,” I said. I looked at my watch. It was nearly three o’clock. He must be gone by now, I thought; they must have finished and taken him away. I didn’t want to make the phone calls; there was something limbo-like about sitting there in Ted’s warm kitchen. My father was sort of dead, but not all the way yet; we hadn’t told anyone in the family; something might still change.

  “Use the phone in the study, upstairs,” my mother was saying. “Ted will show you where.”

  All these studies, I thought. I said, “Do you want me to tell people how?”

  “What do you mean?” my mother asked.

  “I mean when they ask what happened. Should I say it was suicide, or should I say a heart attack or something?” I was aware, suddenly, that I was trying to pick a fight: my mother would say heart attack, and I would argue for telling the truth. My sister, I thought, would back me up.

  “Why should we hide it?” my mother said.

  “I just thought—you know, because Daddy was so private—”

  “We’ve got nothing to be ashamed about,” said my mother, and my sister said:

  “If he hadn’t been so private, maybe he’d still be alive.”

  My husband came with me to make the phone calls. I let him do the talking, pulling people out of meetings. It’s an emergency, he said.

  Yes, it is, I thought; and there was something of a relief in hearing him say it. This was not a debatable emergency, like calling the pediatrician on a Sunday morning when our son had a fever; this was emergency in its starkest, purest form. We had a perfect right to interrupt meetings, to shock people out of the ordinary progress of the day. I liked it that they came to the phone a little ruffled, a little worried, but unprepared for what my husband was about to tell them. I listened to him explaining over and over that my father was dead and how it had happened, and I felt a startling calm sense of power that was almost a thrill, as my cousins and aunts and uncles went over the road that I had already traveled that morning. They were innocent, then they were shocked and saddened; they were out on that rainy, windy road but I was farther along than they.

  “What did they say?” I asked my husband after each call was over.

  He told me: They were upset.

  No, no, I wanted details. How did their voices sound, what words had they used exactly? They were mobilizing, he reported. One cousin would drive up from the city tomorrow, another was leaving the office right now to go break the news to my mother’s eldest brother and his wife. My uncle was sick, he had heart disease; he and his wife had adored my father, and the cousin thought someone had better tell them the news in person. Good, I said, pleased to have set so much in motion. Things were happening, after the eerie stillness of the morning; people were scurrying, waves were rippling out from the spot where the stone had hit the water.

  The sky was getting dark behind the bare tree branches at Ted’s study window. The lights of the rooms below made pale wedge shapes on the frozen stones of the terrace. The day was receding; the last daylight my father had seen would soon be gone.

  “Who else?” I asked.

  “Just Kurt.”

  “Try him at the theater.” I flipped though my mother’s black address book and found the number. I stood up and wandered around Ted’s study while my husband dialed. The silvery barn-board walls were covered with photos of Ted when he was younger, chiseled and aloof, leaning on a Jeep, running on a beach. A series in black-and-white, Ted standing in jeans and a white shirt against a crumpled paper backdrop. My mother had told me that Ted had been a model when he first got to New York. He must have been gorgeous, my mother had said. He looks like Montgomery Clift in those pictures.

  “Oh,” my husband was saying, “well, do you know where I can reach him?”

  At the top of Ted’s stairs, in the corn
er, there was a stair-climbing machine. I went over to it and held on to one of its chrome railings. There was a lamp next to it; I switched it on and the room was filled with stark yellow light, throwing huge sudden shadows among the eaves high above.

  My husband hung up. “He’s not there. They said he’s probably on his way in, for tonight’s performance.”

  “Try him at home anyway, just in case.” Let him not be there, I thought; please make him be out. But I heard my husband say, “Oh, hi, Kurt. Listen, um . . .” He went on to tell Kurt who he was and why he was calling. Then, “Yes, he’s dead . . . No, nothing like that. He killed himself . . . no, with a gun . . . no, we’re pretty sure it was instantaneous . . . Yes, this morning . . . sometime before seven.” There was a long silence; then my husband said, “Kurt. I know . . . I know. Kurt.” He took the phone away from his ear and covered the receiver. “He wants to talk to you.”

  I shook my head and walked quickly to the stairs.

  “She can’t talk right now . . . Well, because it’s been a long day, and everyone is tired.” His voice rose. “I know, but we didn’t call anyone. There’s been a lot to do, and—Kurt. Kurt, calm down.” His voice was rough, angry.

  I started down the stairs. Behind me my husband said, “No. In the heart.”

  The police were there, in Ted’s kitchen. Three of them, two wearing uniforms and one in a khaki raincoat. “You’re the older daughter?” one of them said to me. “Do you mind coming with us into the other room?”

  They took me into the living room. There was a fire going in there, too. I sat on a green velvet couch. The man in the raincoat sat down on a spindly wooden chair and asked me to tell him my name, my address, whether I was married, how many children I had. He said, “Can you think of any reason why your father might have done this?”

  “He was having some business problems,” I said.