The Suicide Index

by Joan Wickersham

  “Listen,” I said finally. “Let’s figure out what else you could do.”

  He looked at me.

  “If you ever did decide to get out of the business.” I pulled a napkin out of the dispenser on the table. “Here, we’ll make a list.”

  It was one of those well-meant, bad ideas. You start it, realize the folly of it, and keep going, because you don’t know what else to do. We wrote down that he could become a consultant to American companies wanting to conduct business overseas, and to foreign companies wanting to do business here. “Not just rules of set-up and operation,” I scribbled, “but also subtleties of business climate, culture, etiquette.” We wrote down that he could teach in a business school, or teach business courses at a college or even a high school. We started to get far-flung. He could become a history teacher, or a guidance counselor, because he was so good at listening to other people’s problems. He could go back to school and get a degree in psychology.

  “I could write an espionage novel,” my father said, and he went on to outline the plot of one he’d imagined.

  “Great! Great!” I said, writing it down.

  Finally we got up to leave. When we were outside on the street again, he put his arm around me and squeezed my shoulders. “You’re so good for me,” he said.

  When I went through his dresser drawers after he died, in one of my restless searches for a note, a clue, something, anything, I found the napkins, covered with all those hopeful, useless alternative lives he might think of pursuing if he ever decided to get out of his business, all written down in my panicky blue scrawl.

  Three glimpses, of things that were ordinarily hidden.

  His violence.

  His shame.

  His despair and self-loathing.

  It’s hard to imagine a list any more concise that that, or any starker. It looks like a recipe for suicide.

  Or maybe not. If my father hadn’t died the way he did, would the events I’ve set down here have any particular meaning? Don’t we all have terrible days, moments when we lose our balance? What about the times when he was happy?

  Suicide: information from his brother sparked by

  THAT FIRST SUMMER AFTER MY FATHER DIED, I WENT DOWN TO New York to meet with my editor. I was finishing my first novel. I had a contract and a series of deadlines, which I was managing to meet, although the writing had gotten hard, since my father’s death had convinced me that I didn’t know anything about anything. When I got to the city, I called Kurt. He invited me to come and see the play he was appearing in that week.

  I took a taxi down to the Lower East Side, to a theater that was labeled only with a tiny scuffed sign on a door between a discount beauty-supply store and a taco stand. Up two flights of stairs, the theater space was small and shabby, but full of people.

  The play was about a group of passengers on an ocean liner. There was an angry artist, and a pair of young lovers, and a nimble cynical kleptomaniac and his old and very religious mother. I don’t remember who the other characters were: the usual ship-of-fools assortment. What I do remember is Kurt, wandering around the stage in a seersucker suit and a bow tie and a small-brimmed straw hat—the sort of pale spiffy outfit businessmen used to wear, decades ago, on the hottest summer days. His character was a professor, a serene and learned man who in the beginning of the play was all knitted together.

  Then the play’s pivotal disaster occurred: a tidal wave. (A group of stagehands dressed in dark blue leotards thundered forward on bare feet, holding aloft an enormous billowing sheet of blue-gray silk.) The passengers spun around, the stage listed, the ship was crippled. Everyone panicked. Everyone’s traits became exaggerated. The lovers clung and quarreled; the religious old woman called more loudly upon God; the thief took compulsive, agile advantage of the general confusion to lift more objects from more pockets. Only the professor—Kurt—remained calm. The other passengers asked him to be their leader, to come up with a plan, and he agreed; but then he didn’t do anything. He just kept drifting around the stage, never losing his gentleness, growing vaguer and more lost. The passengers ganged up to accuse him of being ineffectual, of leading them nowhere. By this point he’d lost his mind so entirely that he couldn’t respond; he just held on to the sinking ship’s railing and looked blankly out to sea. There was a big philosophical argument then: the lovers were blaming Kurt for their fate; and the kleptomaniac was defending him as a fatalist, who had seen and accepted doom long before the rest of them (he extracted a gold watch from Kurt’s pocket in the midst of this long speech); and the old lady bleakly and predictably lost her faith. I wasn’t paying much attention. I was watching Kurt, standing alone at the front of the stage in his natty clothing; I was watching his frozen, mild face as the ship went down.

  Afterward he took me to a small dark Russian restaurant a couple of blocks away. We ordered vodka, and I told him how good I thought he’d been.

  Then I said, “The character you played tonight, the professor—were you thinking of my father?”

  Kurt’s shoulders hunched suddenly; he looked startled, almost furtive, but not displeased. “So you could tell?” He took a quick swallow from his glass.

  “Yes,” I said. I took a sip of vodka, too, and waited for the slow cold burn of it to travel through my throat and chest. I was confused and shy about what to say to him. I didn’t understand how Kurt, who had not been close to my father, had known so much about him. Or, conversely, why, if Kurt had known him so well, the two of them had been unable to be close.

  What I finally did say was “You and I saw some of the same things in him.” I was thinking of my father’s proud, baffled loneliness; his rigid paralysis in the face of crisis; the beautiful manners that concealed deep pessimism; the erudition that brought pleasure but no real solace, animated as it was by intellectual, rather than spiritual, curiosity. The spiritual question had been answered long ago, and the answer was “no.”

  The waiter brought our blinis, and there was a silence of a few minutes while we began to eat.

  Kurt asked me then, lifting and replacing his glass on the tabletop over and over, to make a circle of wet interlocking rings, how much I knew about my father’s childhood.

  “Some,” I said. “I know your parents left you in Germany, while they came to America to get settled. My mother always thought my father must have felt abandoned.”

  Kurt laughed. “God, no. Abandoned? Are you kidding? That was the happiest time of his life, those three years. We were in the country, with Tante Wanda and Tante Erma. They were our grandmother’s sisters, twins; they never married but they loved kids, they adored us. And the school they sent us to, in the Alps—we loved that, too. Your father used to do the most beautiful, sensitive drawings—plants, flowers—”

  “We have some of his old notebooks, in the basement. I never knew where they were from.”

  “So you still have those sketchbooks? I’d love to see them again. I always thought Paul—well, we still called him Boris then—should have been an artist.” Kurt ran his hand through his hair. “No, I’m telling you, that part was fine. It was after that the trouble started. After our parents sent for us, and we came to America. Don’t you know? He never told you any of this?”

  Something—hints my mother had dropped, and a sudden sickening instinct of my own—made me say, slowly, “I know he didn’t get along too well with your father.”

  Kurt said, “Our father was a sick bastard.”

  This was it: this was what he wanted to talk about.

  “Our father thought that no one else in the world mattered, only him. Not his kids, not his wife, no one. Nothing was his fault. He was a brilliant good man alone in the universe, wasn’t he? Wasn’t he? Wasn’t he wonderful, talented, beautiful, amazing? Wasn’t it unfair that the world didn’t care? More than unfair—wasn’t it sinister? When he had a call-back for a Broadway show, a good dancing part, whose fault was it that he was reduced to this, having to compromise his talent, forced to whore himself
to make money? When he overslept and missed the audition, whose fault was that? Who forgot to set the alarm clock? Here he was trying to make a little money so the family could eat—who was it that had conspired against him by forgetting to set the alarm? No, he couldn’t call the producer to reschedule, because if his family was going to conspire against him then let them starve, let them lie in the bed they’d made.

  “Our parents were the supers of the building where we lived, in the Bronx. There was a terrible old furnace. Sometimes it went out. Boris would be down there at five in the morning, sweating over it, swearing, praying. Once it just wouldn’t start. The building owner came down and yelled at our father, and our father beat Boris. Screaming, the whole time, about how dare Boris humiliate him like that, make him lose face, maybe make him lose his job; we would all be out on the street and it would all be Boris’s fault.

  “I used to lie in bed at night trying not to hear the beatings, trying not to hear Boris’s screams.”

  I cleared my throat. “Where was your mother while all this was going on?”

  “She was in there with the two of them. Maybe he made her watch; I don’t know. She was afraid of him. He hit her, too. At one point she was pregnant. I remember her in those big smocky clothes. Then one day he beat her up, and he left us, stalked out of the apartment and didn’t come back for days. She started bleeding. Boris was the one who got a taxi; Boris took her to the hospital, this eleven-year-old boy. And then when my father came back and heard what had happened, he gave Boris another beating—it was all Boris’s fault that my mother lost the baby; he hadn’t gotten her to the hospital fast enough.

  “God,” said Kurt, pressing the tips of his fingers into his forehead, “God, I just remembered something else; I haven’t thought of this in years. They sent us to summer camp one time. And some of the boys saw Boris in his swimming trunks, they saw the marks on his body, and they asked him what all that was from. Anyway, we told them. We’d never told anybody before. But these boys, they helped us come up with this whole plan, to report my father—”

  “Report him to whom?”

  “We didn’t even know. It didn’t matter. It seemed so real, such a plan. It made us feel safe, all that summer—we were going to have our time at camp, and then we were going to go home and report him—”

  “And did you?”

  “Of course not. Once we got home we were much too scared. Of him, and of exposing him. He was always talking about how people were trying to humiliate him; we wanted to protect him from anything like that—” He looked at me. “I know, it was crazy. But we were kids. Boris was just a child, eleven, twelve, when my father was doing all this stuff to him. Not just the beating. The words. ‘Boris, you’re stubborn, lazy, worthless, you can’t do anything right, you’re evil’—at least once I heard him call Boris evil.

  “When you grow up with things like that, you never get rid of them, never. Words like that are a tape that plays in your head for the rest of your life.”

  We sat there at the restaurant table, looking at each other. Kurt’s face was creased, wrinkled, as though all the different characters he’d played over the years had settled themselves in his skin.

  “He never told you any of this?” Kurt asked.

  “No,” I said. “I knew he’d had a bad time with your father, but that was as much as he ever said. And I knew that when your father was dying, my father went to see him in Munich.”

  “Yeah, the big reconciliation. I couldn’t believe it when Boris told me. I said, ‘Well, I’m glad you can forgive him, but I never will.’”

  “So he beat you, too?”

  People were leaving the restaurant, and new people came in and filled up the tables. The waiters kept gliding by. No one paid any attention to us; we were like two ghosts sitting in some separate shadow-world.

  “No. Never. He never touched me. It was always Boris, only Boris. That’s what I’ll never understand.”

  We drank some more, Kurt paid the bill, and we finally left the restaurant. I hadn’t felt drunk when we were inside. If anything, the vodka had sharpened me: I felt as if I’d been listening to Kurt while balancing on a narrow blade of some kind, and that I hadn’t fallen because I’d kept my eyes focused on his face. But outside in the cool June night, Kurt steadied me. Then he went out into the street to hail me a cab. “Be patient, it may take a while, down here at this time of night.”

  I looked at my watch. It was midnight. I was suddenly very tired.

  Recently I had found a photograph at my mother’s house. It showed my father as a very young child—perhaps three or four. His arm was stretched upward; he was holding on to an adult’s hand, being led away. But he had turned his head back to laugh over his shoulder at the photographer. His hair was wildly curly, so blond it was almost white; it looked like light. That’s what you saw when you looked at the photograph: that pale glowing aureole of hair, and the big delighted laugh.

  A cab was gliding in, next to Kurt. He opened the door, and turned to hug me. “Be well,” he said.

  “Keep in touch,” I muttered into his shirtfront. Then, enunciating more clearly, wanting to be sure he heard, I said, “Call me. Will you?”

  “I will,” he said, and he did. Over the next year or two he would call me sometimes, and we would talk, and he would tell me a little more each time. After a while his calls became less frequent. I didn’t mind. I was even glad in a way. As time went on we had less to say to each other, and there were long silences when we were on the phone together. And his voice was so similar to my father’s; after a while I began to find the sound of it too disturbing.

  Suicide: intrafamilial relationships reexamined in light of

  Munich

  HIS FATHER WAS DYING, OF A CANCER WHOSE NAME HE DIDN’T understand when his stepmother said it; as soon as she said it, he forgot it. His vocabulary, in German, was still largely that of a nine-year-old, to which had been added a set of fluent phrases and terms needed to do business. Nothing in his German experience had taught him words that applied to sick old men.

  Would he have made a special trip from America, just to see his father? Luckily, he didn’t have to decide; he had to go to Germany for a board meeting that spring; it would be fairly easy to take the train to Munich for a day. Not even a day—an afternoon. The morning spent on the train, then a taxi through the city, arrive after lunch. Visit visit visit, accept a cup of tea or coffee, decline if they offer dinner: another train to catch.

  He called Kurt before he left the States, to tell him he was going to see their father. Did Kurt have any message he wanted to send?

  “Are you crazy?” Kurt said.

  “He’s an old man.”

  “So?”

  “Agathe says he only has a few months to live.”

  Kurt was silent; then he let out a long, gusty sigh that sounded just like their father’s old sighs. “Well, best of luck.”

  “That’s what you want me to tell him?”

  “Not him. You.”

  “So you don’t have a message, then?” Stubborn, prosaic: this was the way to deal with melodrama. Ignore it; become willfully dull.

  Another sigh from Kurt. “If I think of one, I’ll call him myself.”

  All cities are beautiful at the end of April. But Munich, that day, seemed to have a special, startling loveliness. (He’d never been there before; he’d imagined it gray, steely, Gothic, like falling down inside a church organ.) Soft sunny air, blowing fresh and cool through the half-opened window of the taxi. Beds of red tulips, jaunty and alert. Streets of houses in light, Italianate colors—cream, yellow, pumpkin. Tall old trees, their outspread limbs just beginning to soften beneath a tracery of pale green blossom.

  The taxi dropped him in front of a dark red building that looked as if it had been made by a child grimly determined to use every single block in the toy chest. It bulged with towers, arches, bays—and yet it had about it no sense of fun or fancy. It was serious and very German. Inside it was dark, too
. He stood in the small lobby for a few moments before his eyes picked out the staircase wrapping around a small elevator in an iron cage. Riding the elevator seemed too passive, too helpless; he walked up to the second floor.

  Agathe, his stepmother, hugged him, kissed him on both cheeks, and squeezed his hands. Her blue eyes shone at him; her downy cheeks were pink; she smelled of some soft cologne that made him nostalgic, though he didn’t know for what or whom. She took his arm and pulled him down the dim hallway toward a room full of light at the end. There was an archway, and there was his father coming toward him, walking with a cane.

  The first two things his father said were: “Boris!” and “You’re looking well, and I’m not.”

  Both would ordinarily have irritated him. His father would never call him “Paul,” and having to remind him, or argue about it, made it seem as if the affectation lay in his own insistence that he be addressed this way, rather than in his father’s refusal to adopt a name change the rest of the world had long ago accepted and forgotten. And his father was incapable of making a remark or having a conversation that was not primarily about himself. But so what? These first utterances, so predictable, seemed almost amusing; he had come to this visit so well armored, so overprepared to defend himself in case of a major attack, that these greetings merely bounced off his breastplate and fell softly, harmlessly, to the floor.

  His father looked old. He’d looked old for years, had been completely bald since his mid-forties, but he’d always had a kind of fierceness in his face, with its bold black eyes and eyebrows, its audaciously large, bony nose. Now the eyebrows were white, and the real bones of the face had emerged; the forehead bulged, the cheekbones jutted, and between them the dark, dull eyes were sunken, like the eye cavities of a skeleton. The walk, too, was brittle and shrunken; there was an uneasy sense, watching him, of bone grinding on bone. Each step seemed painful, a wince.