The Suicide Index

by Joan Wickersham

  There was a picture, done a long time ago, lost now, or hidden in a pile of papers in a drawer: a silhouette of his father dancing. Perhaps he was doing a part out of the Arabian Nights: the head was turbaned, the lines of the limbs were loose, flowing, Eastern-costumed. One arm was across the chest, its palm out, pushing the air; and one leg was lifted across the other, ready to leap and caper. Just a black shape on white paper, but tilted and witty and fluid, full of energy and elegance.

  “No, no, Father, you’re looking fine,” he said, bending to kiss his father on both papery cheeks. “How are you feeling?”

  “Hungry. Agathe has done a wonderful meal, and we were very good and waited for you to get here.” The voice was the same as ever: booming, theatrical, heavily (almost comically) Russian-accented.

  So he had lunch with them after all, at a round table before the big sitting-room window. Agathe had made veal, rolled and stuffed, in a light sauce, potatoes with parsley, and braised endive. There was a white tablecloth, and a bowl of grape hyacinths, and a bottle of gewurztraminer. The room was high and white, filled with sunshine; the window looked down on a small brick-walled garden. “Isn’t that nice?” his father said. “Someone grows roses down there in the summer, and it isn’t me.”

  “Oh, yes, those are always the most beautiful roses: the ones grown by someone else.” Saying this—the same thing his father had just said, parroted back to show that he understood—he felt a pinch of self-loathing in his stomach. He took a breath and concentrated on stopping it, on not letting himself fall, the way he might have tried to clear his head during an attack of dizziness. He and his father could never just agree; they had to congratulate themselves on agreeing. (And a voice whispering in his ear, Kurt’s voice: You heard what he just said about the roses, didn’t you? All the beauty and none of the work. That’s his motto. That’s the story of his life. Kurt being devilish.)

  (And Kurt, hearing this thought, too, whispering in his ear: I’m not the devil, you idiot. You’re having lunch with him.)

  “Agathe and I have actually been doing some growing of our own up here. We’ve become very interested in cactus.”

  “So I see.” The windowsills were lined with them, green and brown and gray, growing in polished copper troughs. “They look very healthy.”

  “That’s it. They look always the same. There’s no suspense to growing them, no waiting for anything to happen. They’re prickly; they stand there; they’re always the same. And they can live to be ancient. There are some in America—in the Southwest, New Mexico, Arizona—”

  “Yes—”

  “Thousands of years old. Have you ever seen them?”

  “No.”

  “I haven’t either. I would have liked to. I should have gone, at some point. In all those years when I was living in America.”

  “But you were living in New York. New Mexico isn’t exactly next door.”

  “I was a lot closer to New Mexico then than I am now. You should go.” Pointing a finger.

  For a moment he recoiled from his father’s finger pointed, at his face; then he nodded, smiling. “Well, maybe. It’s hard to find the time, to get away. And the family—”

  “No.” His father sat back, crossing his arms imperially. “Don’t be polite. If you don’t want to go to New Mexico, don’t go, but if you do want to go, then make sure you go.”

  Agathe laughed. “This is the silliest conversation. What are you talking about, you two? You’re all snarled around. Don’t make him go to New Mexico; don’t put him in a corner about it. He may not even like cactus.”

  “No, I do, I do like cactus. Agathe,” he wiped his mouth with the corner of his napkin, “this is a wonderful lunch. Everything is delicious.”

  “Yes,” said his father. “For a while they had me on a diet, for my heart. Nothing was wrong with my heart; it’s just that diet they’ve devised to punish old men. No cream, no cheese, no butter. Nothing with any taste. But I thought, maybe this will help me live to be a hundred. Now, of course, I eat whatever I like.” He reached over and put his hand on top of Agathe’s wrist. “Tell him about the—what was in that souffle you made the other day?”

  “Oh, let me remember. Gruyère. Asparagus.”

  “No, but the flavoring. What was it that made it so—” The pursed lips fluttered, almost kissed the air.

  “A little bit of mustard? Nutmeg?”

  “Nutmeg. That was it.” The eyes closed. “Everything tastes so good.”

  “He sleeps now.” Agathe came back into the kitchen. “Just for a little while, every afternoon. It refreshes him.”

  “Is he getting any treatment?”

  “Not now. He had radiation, but it didn’t work. And it made him sick, and exhausted. Very depressed. He’s better since it all stopped. He feels better.”

  “And this isn’t something that’s operable?”

  “We hoped it was, initially. He did have surgery.”

  “When was that?”

  “A year and a half ago.”

  “Ah.” He took the wet plate that Agathe held out to him and dried it with the linen towel, then placed it gently on the shelf. “I wish I had known.”

  Agathe was scrubbing another plate. “It wasn’t the right time, then,” she said.

  He thought of asking her what she meant, and decided he preferred not to know. But he did know. From where they stood at the sink, they could see his father sleeping on the living room sofa, covered in a moss-green blanket, chest rising and falling, face slack, frowning involuntarily under the sunshine. His cane lay on the floor beside the sofa. One hand trailed onto the floor, palm up, amid the soft blues and reds of the carpet, the fingers loose and open. A sound like a purring cat: steady, faint snoring.

  “He seems so tame now.”

  “He is,” said Agathe, handing over a fistful of wet forks. “Now he is.”

  Cane, belt, broomstick. Shoe. Hanger. Once, when the fire went out in the basement furnace, a poker. Two broken ribs, that time.

  “And how is your mother?”

  The light had moved; the room, which had been bleached and dazzling, was now blue with shadows. His father sat on the sofa, the green blanket spread over his lap. Paul and Agathe sat at the table, their chairs turned sideways to face him. They were drinking coffee, out of thin green-and-white cups.

  “She’s fine,” Paul said evenly. An hour from now he would be in a taxi, heading for his train. He was at once exhilarated and cautious, like a long-distance runner anticipating the finish line, gauging how much energy was left, how much was still needed. They’d made it through the lunch (now that he’d actually gotten through it, he was touched that they’d waited so late in order to eat with him), and there had been the respite of his father’s nap. Some pleasant, hushed talk with Agathe—she’d shown him photographs of the honeymoon trip to Egypt she and his father had taken nine years ago. Now he couldn’t stop looking at his watch; there was a sense of precarious accumulation, of all these unexpectedly good things piling up with ease, so that the possibility of dropping them became more and more terrible.

  “Her health is good?” his father went on.

  “Very.”

  “She sent a Christmas card, but not much of a note. Right?” turning toward Agathe. “Usually she writes a longer note. But maybe she’s too busy for us, these days.”

  “Stop that,” Agathe said sharply. Then, to Paul, “She is busy. She seems to be doing more teaching as time goes on, rather than less. I saw her, you know, in New York last year.”

  “You did?” But it was his father he was alert to, tense and waiting. You could not speak to his father the way Agathe just had. But his father sat still, smiling mildly, swathed in the blanket, like a baby in a perambulator.

  Agathe said, “It was fun. She and I are old friends, you know, school friends; we go way back, long before either of us married—” she jerked her head sideways “—him.”

  “Yes, she told me. She was so glad when she heard you were gettin
g married.”

  “We had fun this last time, in New York,” Agathe said again. “She invited me to come to a class—to observe, you understand. I couldn’t have participated at twenty-five, let alone seventy-five. And there she was in the middle of all these young dancers, and she pointed to one girl and told her to do something, and the girl said, ‘I can’t. Nobody could. It’s impossible.’ And then your mother leapt up in the air, and twisted or flew—it was so quick and so beautiful I almost didn’t see it—but suddenly she was on the other side of the room, and she pointed back at the girl and said, ‘Like that. That’s how you do it.’”

  Paul laughed. “That’s wonderful.” He’d heard plenty of these stories about his mother, from people she’d worked with or had taught. “She’s amazing.” But he was still afraid for Agathe. His eyes kept darting back toward his father, whose very silence was familiar and terrible, a gathering of force before the roar and the spring. Something was said, and the usual response was immediate outrage. How dare you. And escalating from there. But worse was when no response came. Then you thought that maybe the thing you’d said had been received as an innocent remark, or had been overlooked. You’d examined your words before you said them, and your tone; you’d washed them and rinsed them and made sure they came out of your mouth white and sanitized. Maybe this time they had passed inspection. The silence might mean safety. But no, it was just a delay.

  How could Agathe just keep chatting away, standing directly under the teetering boulder?

  But, “Your mother cooked supper for Agathe,” his father was saying, now, in a voice rich with laughter. “I have trouble imagining it. Your mother cooking. Not just a bowl of macaroni, or a cheese sandwich. It was beef Stroganoff, no less.”

  “And it was delicious,” Agathe added, chuckling. His father was chuckling, too.

  Paul had a giddy sense that it was time to go. He stood up, slowly. “So—”

  “She cooked.” Agathe twinkled at him. “I didn’t say she ate. She ate only the tiniest—less than a child’s portion, and she didn’t even finish it.”

  “Agathe says she’s thinner than ever. Funny, when we were first together, she never cooked, would have considered it utterly bourgeois; and she was too fat, for a dancer, anyway. I was always at her about it.” Rubbing the side of his face with his fist. “And rightly so, I think. She did lose weight, became quite slender.” Opening the fist, rubbing his cheek gently with the palm. “And now she’s too thin, and she cooks.”

  “Make her eat,” Agathe said, standing up and taking Paul’s hand in both of hers. “Make sure she takes care of herself.”

  And then a roar from his father. “You’re not going now!”

  Paul drew in his breath and tensed his hands. He said quietly, “I have a train to catch, and business in Frankfurt tomorrow.”

  The green blanket thrown back, the cane fumbled for and picked up. His father rising, coming toward him. Still roaring. “Oh, my dear child, I wish you didn’t have to go! It’s been such a long time since I saw you. And such a short visit! So wonderful to see you.” His father’s arms were around him; he was being rolled back and forth in his father’s arms. “Oh, oh, oh,” his father said.

  Then the arms released him. “Come with me,” his father said. “I want to give you something.”

  Paul glanced over at Agathe; she raised her shoulders and her eyebrows, a quick shrug, and then began clearing away the coffee cups. He followed his father, who was lurching away-down the dark hallway. His father opened a door and stood aside to let Paul pass through it. “In here,” he said.

  His father turned on a small lamp with a rose-colored shade, which cast a dull light across a wide bed, spread with a plum satin coverlet. Above the bed were three framed watercolors: mountain scenes, with snow-covered rocks and icy skies and dark smudgy fir trees. The walls were the color of a manila folder. The rug on the floor was dim and brown, so worn that it crunched underfoot. Paul, standing just inside the doorway, watching his father rummaging in the top drawer of a tall bureau, thought suddenly that nothing in the entire apartment was familiar to him; there was not one object, one piece of furniture, one picture that he had ever seen before. Everything must be Agathe’s.

  But then what possessions had ever been associated with his father? They had never had a proper home as a family in Germany: touring with the dance company and staying in rooming houses, the children living most of the time with their grandmother and great-aunts, away from the parents. Then had come the basement in the Bronx, barely and cheaply furnished, then (after his grandmother died and a little bit of her money found its way across the Atlantic) an apartment on the Upper West Side. His mother still lived in that apartment, and all of the broken-down, beautiful pieces in it—the chipped-gilt smoky mirrors, the inlaid French chests with all the drawer pulls loose or missing, the tall dirt-smeared Chinese vases, the tarnished silver trays and hairbrushes—belonged to her, had come from her family. After the divorce, his father had lived in a succession of furnished New York studios, then had moved back to Germany in the early 1960s.

  There were only two things Paul could remember, now, that had belonged to his father, definitely and indelibly: a black wool beret, which his father had worn, year after year, over his bald head in cold weather, and which suited him, made him look elegant and wicked and free. And then that painted silhouette of him dancing, which come to think of it made him look the same way.

  “Come here,” said his father now, turning from the open bureau drawer, holding out his hands. “I’ll let you choose.”

  Paul went closer. Lying on one of his father’s open, upturned palms was a gold pocket watch and chain; on the other was a hunting knife with a gnarled bone handle.

  “You choose,” said his father again. “I’d really like you to have one.”

  Paul clasped his hands behind his back and bent his head to look more closely. “Boy oh boy,” he muttered, speaking English for the first time that afternoon. “It’s a tough decision.”

  “Take your time,” his father answered, also in English, breathing heavily; Paul could feel the warm, gusty breaths on the back of his neck.

  Was this some kind of test? If he reached for the watch, would his father think him unimaginative and greedy (both accusations that he’d made before)? If he chose the knife, would his father call him stupid, perverse? (There you go again, Boris; anyone else would have picked the watch. But you can’t just do the straightforward obvious thing, you always have to show off. Everybody else goes left so you go right. Who the hell do you think you are?) And he didn’t want either of these objects, didn’t associate either with his father; and if there had in fact been some object associated with his father, he wouldn’t want that either. And at the same time he was thinking: why make me choose? Why not just give me both?

  “You choose, Father,” he said after a long moment. “Which one would you like me to have?”

  “No, no. You.”

  He took the watch. It was warm from his father’s hand. The gold case was engraved with a delicate flowering vine; it opened to reveal a white face, with delicate Roman numerals. “Thank you,” he said.

  His father closed his eyes, smiled. “It doesn’t work. But you could probably get it fixed.” He turned and put the knife back into the drawer.

  Paul snapped the watch shut and put it into his pocket. His father was still grinning at him, obviously expecting something more to be said. “Thank you,” Paul repeated, speaking in German again, enunciating carefully. “Was this—have you had this watch for a long time?”

  “Yes, a long time. It was a present.”

  “Someone has to go,” came Agathe’s pointed singsong from the doorway. “Someone has to go to the train station. Or he will be late. And miss his train.”

  “Yes, yes, we’re coming.” To Paul: “From a lady.” A theatrical whisper. “I was always getting presents from ladies.”

  Paul asked if he could use the bathroom. When he came back out into the b
edroom, his father and Agathe weren’t there. The top drawer of the chest was still slightly open. Quickly, silently, as if every motion had been oiled, he crept over to it, edged the drawer out a little more.

  It was full of knives. The one his father had shown him lay in a nest of others: blades of different lengths and thicknesses, handles made of ivory and leather and bone and wood and steel. There was at least one other pocket watch that he could see, and several wristwatches, and square jeweler’s boxes in worn blue and green velvet. He picked one up and opened it—silver cufflinks—then shut it and put it back. His fingers closed around the sinewy handle of the knife his father had shown him, and he lifted it out of the drawer.

  He ran his fingers along the blade; it was dull (if he’d chosen it, doubtless his father would have pointed this out, and advised having it sharpened). He slipped the knife into his pocket.

  He was pushing the drawer shut, trying to approximate the slight gap his father had left. But then he stopped, slid it open again, pulled the knife from his pocket, and gently put it back where he’d found it.

  Agathe and his father were waiting by the front door. Agathe handed him his raincoat and kissed him. Then his father held out his arms and pulled him close. “Thank you for coming. Thank you. Thank you.”

  “I’m glad I came,” Paul said, hugging his father back.

  “Are you?” His father finally let go, took a step back. He was crying, his nose red and running, his old eyes boiling with tears.

  Paul felt as though he might cry, also. Agathe opened the door, took his hand, and looked into his eyes. “Thank you,” she said once, gravely, firmly. Then she gave him a radiant smile, and then he was on the other side of the closed door. Through the heavy wood, as he walked rapidly toward the top of the staircase, came his father’s faint calls: “Good-bye, Boris! Thank you! Thank you!”