The Suicide Index

by Joan Wickersham

  One of these parties was going on the first time I visited their house, shortly after my husband and I met. His father and stepmother, Cal and Abby, greeted him in a way that was at once hearty and distracted, and they shook my hand and said, “Ah, another potential daughter-in-law.” Then they sent us into the library to get ourselves drinks.

  “Let me show you the paintings,” my boyfriend said. Over the library desk, which was crowded with liquor bottles and monogrammed glasses, was a Boudin seascape. I looked at the signature and then looked at my boyfriend, shocked. A Boudin was something you saw in a museum, or in an art history slide show; you didn’t have one hanging around in your house. My boyfriend laughed at my face, and told me that his grandparents had bought a bunch of paintings on a trip they’d taken to Paris in the 1920s. “A Boudin!” I said, and he said, “Yeah, but for the same money they could have been buying Monets.” Then he offered to show me the Corot, and when I gasped about that he said, “It’s not a very good one.”

  “How could a Corot be not very good?”

  He took my hand. “I’ll show you.”

  The Corot was hanging in a corner of the dining room. A gray country landscape with a cow in one corner.

  “Oh,” I said.

  I was giddy, even though I’d only had a couple sips of my drink. Everyone else at the party was laughing and hollering and arguing about who got hit by the boom during last year’s Bermuda Race. My boyfriend and I were gliding around invisibly, snickering at his family’s inferior Corot.

  His mother, Katherine, lived with her husband Neil in New York. They worked in a Wall Street brokerage firm; Katherine was in the marketing department, and Neil was on his way up, putting together deals buying and selling companies and looking to buy one of his own someday. They must have been making good salaries at that point, but they weren’t really rich yet. They lived in one of those bland, boxy white buildings east of Lexington Avenue.

  Out of their small, flimsy apartment, Katherine had made something glamorous. Cocoa brown walls. Old rugs on the floor, faded tans and golds. A fur rug draped over the back of a damask settee. Silver boxes, red leather picture frames. Huge salmon-pink amaryllis, green leaves splayed over the rims of blue-and-white Chinese pots. Books and newspapers piled everywhere. Old travelogues, biographies of English statesmen. Gardening memoirs. Architectural histories.

  We would come in to the city from college on the train, and they would take us to the theater and then a late dinner at Christ Cella’s or the Russian Tea Room. Or we would all get into their car—it was small and very fast—and drive up the Hudson, to look at Washington Irving’s house and have lunch at the Culinary Institute. They were warm and self-contained; they simultaneously coddled us and left us alone.

  By the time my boyfriend and I got engaged, at the end of our senior year, my parents had grown friendly with Katherine and Neil. We would all have dinner in New York or at my parents’ house in Connecticut. My boyfriend and I sat close together on my mother’s blue love seat, or on Katherine’s needlepoint bench. My mother and Katherine talked about art and spread goat cheese on crackers to pass around. And my father and Neil would sit on a sofa, slightly separate from the rest of us, talking in low voices about business.

  By this point my father had had a couple of professional failures, which had devastated my mother and had some effect on him, I thought at the time, though it was impossible to tell what the effect was or how deep it went. He was very quiet.

  Neil had an assurance about himself, and about the ups and downs of business, that seemed to scoop up my father and include him and suggest that the two of them were comrades in the trenches, out there every day fighting the same you-win-some-you-lose-some battles. Watching them as they had these rational-looking, inaudible, murmured conversations brought me a comfort I didn’t even know I’d been seeking, in answer to a fear I didn’t know I had. Neil found my father credible; they were two executives on a couch.

  My parents’ relationship with Cal and Abby never got off the ground. My boyfriend and I had a brief, grubby, awkward engagement summer; we were jobless, inept, and so young and fiercely austere that the hoopla of planning a wedding mortified us and bemused our friends. Once during the engagement, my parents invited Cal and Abby over for dinner. They lived in the next town, and my mother knew people who knew them. “Pots of money,” she said, with frank relish and awe.

  She was nervous about having them over. What should she cook? What should she wear? She and I were peeling or chopping something on the day of the dinner, when my father came into the kitchen and said he was going to call Cal. “It’s such a hot day, I’m going to tell him not to bother with a coat and tie.” But Cal, on the other end of the phone, didn’t seem to know who my father was. My mother and I heard my father repeating his name several times, and then finally saying baldly, “Your son is marrying my daughter.” Then he laughed and said, “Yes, well, I’m glad we’ve finally got that straight.” He came back into the kitchen afterward to hang up the receiver, and with a kind of wobbly dignity and a faintly English accent said, “An interesting conversation,” and then he went out again and my mother hissed at me, “He didn’t know who Daddy was?” and I made vague murmurs excusing Cal’s behavior but my hands were shaking.

  After we were married, my husband and I would sometimes go out sailing with Cal, and I would wish that my father had been invited, and feel relieved that he hadn’t been. Cal’s boat was a fifty-two-foot racing yawl, sculpted and sleek. There was a picture of it one year in the sailing calendar my father liked me to give him for Christmas: an aerial view, taken off the coast of Nova Scotia, the sails ballooning out like pregnant bellies and the deck littered with a dozen tiny figures in orange foul-weather gear. My father had shown me the picture and said, wistfully, “That must be some boat.”

  My father had only recently taken up sailing. He had all the passion of a newcomer, and the careful reverence for terminology. He had joined a boat club on Long Island Sound, and on weekends he liked to take out one of the twelve-foot dinghies. Sometimes my husband went along too (“It makes me feel much better when I know you’re with him,” my mother muttered into his ear, “because you actually know what you’re doing”).

  Cal sailed with a cigarette in his mouth, his fingers on the wheel, his squinting eye on the wind and the compass and the crew and the horizon. He expected everyone on his boat to be expert and offhand. The first time I went out with him, he shoved a line into my hand, and when I just stood there he shouted, “Tail, damn you, tail!” Then when I still didn’t know what he meant, he grabbed the line away from me and tossed it to his nine-year-old daughter, and after that he ignored me.

  I imagined my father as a guest on the boat, avid and deliberate and too slow. It would have been humiliating to see Cal size him up and then dismiss him as a sailor—one kind of humiliation if my father was aware of the dismissal, and a different, equally excruciating kind if he was ignorant of it. Better, maybe, that he was never invited. But the lack of an invitation, which could have been extended with such ease and would have been received with such delight, ate at me. So did my father’s telling me that he’d seen Cal and Abby once or twice in the Parnassus Diner on the Post Road but that they never seemed to recognize him when he waved at them.

  Meanwhile, my parents’ friendship with Katherine and Neil had developed to the point where they would get together on holidays even if my husband and I weren’t there. When our son was born, nine years into our marriage, the four of them jumped into a car and drove from Connecticut to Boston to spend a thrilled, doting half-hour with us in the hospital.

  The following year, at Christmas, my mother and I were in her kitchen, checking on the roast beef, when she said, “So did they tell you about the sixteen million dollars Neil is going to get from the sale of his company?”

  “How much?” I said, straightening up from basting the meat. I remember that my necklace, heated from the open oven, swung against my throat and burned. />
  “Just wait. You’ll hear her in there, going on about it.” She glanced through the open doorway into the living room, where my one-year-old son was sitting on the floor pulling at the large wooden fire truck that Katherine had brought for him. “So,” my mother said, “now there’ll be a rich grandmother and a poor grandmother.”

  “Cut it out,” I told her.

  We went back into the living room. Neil was talking about the Rolls-Royce he was buying. “I made a vow, when I was a scholarship kid in business school, that someday I’d have a Rolls.”

  “That’s great,” my father said. He was smiling.

  “And a sable coat for me,” Katherine said. “That was always our deal, darling, right? The car for you and the coat for me. But I have to tell you two what I did.” She looked back and forth from my mother to me, her face glowing. “It was so bad of me. They showed me a mink, which I just fell in love with. And I thought, what the hell, and got both. I mean, what’s another ten thousand for a mink when you’re already spending a hundred for a sable? Right?”

  “Right,” my mother said.

  Back in the kitchen, alone with me, she hissed, “You see?”

  I did, but I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to hear what she was going to say. I poured some wine into the roasting pan and started scraping the drippings off the bottom.

  “What’s the matter with them?” My mother was mashing potatoes; white chunks were leaping above the rim of the pot. “I didn’t think they were like this.”

  “They’re just excited,” I said. “It’s brand new; they’re drunk on it. It’ll die down.”

  “I don’t know why she can’t just say, ‘He sold his company,’ and leave it at that. I don’t know why she thinks we need all the specific dollar figures.” The masher kept thudding up and down, very fast. “There’s a reason why it’s considered rude to talk about money. Because it makes other people feel bad.”

  “I’m sure she didn’t mean to make you feel bad.”

  “Well, maybe she should be a little more considerate.”

  “She’s excited,” I said again. “They both are. They’ve worked very hard for this.”

  “Daddy works hard,” she said. She banged the masher a few times on the rim of the pot, and then dropped it into the sink. She stood there, looking out the window, though it was dark outside and she must have been looking at herself and the reflection of the kitchen.

  After a minute she said, “Daddy vowed to buy a Rolls-Royce, too, you know.”

  Later, after dinner, I went into the kitchen, where my father was loading the dishwasher, and asked if I could help. He said I could get the coffee started. “And maybe put some cookies on a plate?”

  I did both of those things, and then I went over and put my arms around him. I laid my cheek against his soft blue-gray sweater.

  “You okay?” he said.

  I nodded. “You?”

  He held me for a moment.

  “I hope there are enough of those cookies,” I said.

  His arms tightened, and then he let me go. “If not,” he said, in his stagey fake-English accent, “then let them eat cake.”

  Sometimes he said things like that, where I didn’t quite know what he meant; but the jaunty gallantry of the remark, as well as the obscurity of it, would break my heart.

  It was in Antigua, the next winter, when Neil laughed and told me about the ulcers. We were walking on the beach together. He was repeating a remark that had been made to him by a man who had lost his job as a result of a leveraged buyout Neil had done. “So the guy says to me, ‘Some people get ulcers, and some people give ’em. And you’re one of the ones who gives ’em.’” Neil imitated the man’s grim tone and then laughed. “He thought he was insulting me. I told him I considered it a compliment.”

  My husband and I were in an awkward position. On the one hand, we hated all the talk about money. On the other, Neil and Katherine were giving us some. Enough to replace our crummy old car, enough to put in an upstairs bathroom, enough to feel that we might actually be able to afford to send our son to college when the time came. My husband was an architect and I was a writer, and neither profession paid well. We were in our thirties now, but still austere and fierce. My husband felt guilty about taking the money. He thought we should stand on our own, and that Neil only respected self-made men.

  “So what?” I said. “We need it; he’s offering it; just take it.”

  “The more we take, the less he’ll think of us,” my husband said. “I guess I just have that classic trust-fund guilt.”

  “Yeah, except you don’t have a trust fund,” I pointed out: Cal may have had pots of family money, but my husband didn’t have even a small saucepan.

  Neil had a kind of straight-shooting pragmatism that was tough but bracing. You knew where you stood with him. That was what my father said, when he told me Neil was investing in the door company that my father and his partner, Gil, were starting. They were planning to import doors made cheaply in Korea and sell them to builders here. Neil, my father said, had looked over the paperwork and thought they all stood to make a nice return on their investment.

  “But are you sure it’s a good idea to go into business with someone in the family?” I asked.

  My father shrugged. “Ordinarily, I’d say it’s a terrible idea, because the feelings in families tend to run so high. But I’m not worried about that with Neil. Business is business and family is family. He’s tough, but he’s out in the open. It’s all perfectly straightforward.”

  At the time I must have thought, of my father: He knows what he’s doing.

  Now I think: Oh, my God. His dignity, and his incompetence. His haplessness.

  The door business flopped. The bank called the loan. Neither my father, Gil, nor the third investor could come up with the money.

  It looked like the bank was going to turn its sights on Neil.

  My father got up early one morning, went into his study, and shot himself.

  Of course that wasn’t the only reason why he did it. Nor does it justify what he did; people withstand greater pressures, and worse disgraces. But my father had a code of honor. He was proud. He must have felt responsible for getting Neil into the mess. A debt had been incurred, which was now going to fall with disproportionate heaviness on Neil since my father couldn’t repay his own share. Paying with his life must have seemed (oh, such cockeyed, pompous, macho, fucked-up logic) like the right and noble thing to do.

  Two days after my father died, my mother said she wanted to talk to Neil about money. She was worried about whether she’d have enough to live on, and whether she could afford to stay in her house.

  My husband and I looked at each other. My father had never told my mother about the bank calling the loan. She didn’t know that Neil was having to cover my father’s share, and that he would be one of the creditors looking to be paid back out of the estate.

  Her house was full of people, making tea and hugging and crying and washing dishes. We took her into the small, dark laundry room behind the kitchen, so we could talk privately. I told her about the loan. I expected her to start screaming. That same expectation, I knew, combined with his own shame, was what had prevented my father from telling her. But she just said, “All right.” She asked what my father’s share of the debt was. We told her: fifty-five thousand. Then she said, “So you think it’s a bad idea to talk to Neil about my finances?”

  “That’s up to you,” my husband said.

  She thought for a minute, then shrugged. “I trust him. And he knows about money. I would value his advice.”

  We all went upstairs and sat in her bedroom. She told Neil how much money she had. There was almost nothing left in my father’s brokerage accounts, but there was several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of life insurance. Some of the policies had suicide clauses, but Neil looked at them and said she’d be all right; the clauses had lapsed. My mother also had some money of her own, which she’d saved from her year
s working in real estate.

  “How much?” Neil asked.

  “About two hundred thousand.”

  “Great,” Neil said.

  “So you think I’ll be all right? The kids just told me about this big bank loan.”

  “I’m covering it for now,” Neil said.

  “But the money’s there, in the estate, right? So you’ll get your share back?”

  “Right,” Neil said.

  “Thanks for helping me sort this out,” my mother said. She kissed Neil.

  “Okay, kid,” he said.

  Cal showed up at my father’s memorial service, alone; Abby had filed for divorce several years before. He listened to all the nice things people said about my father: how kind he had been, how considerate, how loving. When the service was over, Cal went and hugged my husband and said, “I guess I haven’t been a very good father to you.”

  “And what did you say?” I asked coldly that night, when my husband told me this story.

  My husband looked at me helplessly. “What the hell could I say? I told him he’d been fine.”

  A few months later, Cal called my husband and asked if it was okay to sell the Boudin. It was hanging in his house, but since the divorce it was officially in trust for his three kids. Things were tough financially, he told my husband. He’d had a bad year in business and he owed a lot in taxes.