He got to the station early enough to have a couple of drinks, scotches. He bought an orange and a bar of chocolate, and glanced over a newspaper. All of this seemed strangely vivid. The day was over, and now he was done.
The train was empty, eerily so. Where was everybody? He sat alone, looking at his vague reflection in the black window glass as the station began to slip away. He was suddenly very tired; he hadn’t slept well the night before. And the scotches were probably getting to him, too.
He’d have to think about what to tell Kurt. He could imagine what Kurt would say: Well, that’s the thing about these deathbed reconciliations—you get to forgive him and then you never have to see him again. Very convenient.
And: You know, you didn’t have to forgive him just because he needed you to.
He peeled his orange and ate some squares of chocolate. The wheels clicked on the tracks and lighted towns flew by, each divided from the next by a long swath of darkness. It had begun to rain. Trailing streaks of silver water flung themselves against the cold windows of the train.
He had a book with him, a spy novel he had bought the other day in Frankfurt. He opened it now and read a page. The hero was transporting some documents out of Bucharest in the lining of his mistress’s sable coat.
But Paul’s eyes were heavy; his head dropped to his chest, and he slept, rocking back and forth in his slippery seat. He was going over a border; he’d almost escaped to safety but there was still some worry, still a chance he’d be caught. In his dream, the gold watch was working, and he had stolen the knife. His hand slid into his pocket and he felt them with his fingers, cold, heavy, metallic, tumbling and scratching against each other. He was holding them both, the loot and the gift: something fierce and something ticking.
Suicide: intrafamilial relationships reexamined in light of
my grandmother
HER HAND. GRACEFULLY HELD UP IN CONVERSATION, WHEN SHE is making a point. A dancer’s hand, palm pressing forward, curved fingers arching back, with the pinky and thumb straighter, slightly more extended than the rest. A square scuffed old sapphire ring, the only jewelry she ever wears, loose, slipping sideways.
On Christmas Eve, we take a taxi through Central Park to the West Side, where my grandmother lives. Her apartment is full of candles. I am told about the Christmas trees in Germany, lit by candles, with always a bucket of water standing nearby in case there’s a fire. The food she serves is strange, and awful: herring salad, with beets and hard-boiled eggs; damp black bread; German wursts bulging with gristly bits of bone and blood. But then for dessert there are cookies my grandmother has baked. Weightless chocolate meringues. Buttery hazelnut circles. Spicy cinnamon stars that shatter when you bite them.
My grandfather is there sometimes. He and my grandmother are divorced. He’s completely bald; his Russian accent is hard to understand; and he has a fierce face and a way of speaking that is too much. He is so happy to see me! He hopes I will like the present he got for me, because it was very difficult for him to find something he thought I might like! He hopes I will remember to send him a thank-you letter, because it would be rude not to! He hopes I understand that even though he doesn’t get to see me as often as he would like, he does love me very much!
The grownups sit at the dinner table for a long time. I wander around the apartment. There are things that frighten and disgust me: brown stains in the bathroom sink and tub, beneath faucets that never stop dripping. My grandmother’s roommate, Renee, who lives in the other bedroom, has white hair and dead-white skin and gigantic floppy breasts under a stained man’s cardigan, and is constantly smoking and coughing, a wet retchy cough that sounds like she’s throwing up.
But there are also things I love. An old Easter egg that sits on my grandmother’s desk, pale yellow, painted with intricate interlocking flowers and vines. A bronze statue of a dancer in a corner by the sofa. A chipped-gilt mirror, so old that the glass is smoky and everything reflected in it is rippled and distorted. A set of tiny plastic barnyard animals, with a farmer carrying a bucket that actually swings on an infinitesimal handle. A little plastic garden with dark flat beds the size of graham crackers, with holes poked in them, and flowers whose stems stand upright when pushed into the holes.
I take off my shoes and run around on my grandmother’s bare floors in my white tights. The bottoms of my feet turn black. Sometimes my grandmother takes off her shoes, and I see that her feet are black, too.
Her feet are long and narrow, with high curved arches. Red, mangled-looking toes. Dancer’s feet.
Dance is what she does, her profession. Not ballet, which she says distorts the body’s natural alignment. She does modern dance. She takes me sometimes to a studio to watch while she is teaching or choreographing. There is a lot of crouching, leaping, slithering, creeping, rolling around on the floor. The other dancers’ bodies are like hers: lean and muscled. When they stand and gesture, everything juts: hips, elbows, chins. They’re all very serious. Sometimes one will come over to talk to me, bending gracefully in her leotard near where I’m sitting in a corner on the floor. She asks me a question—Do I like school?—imbuing it with enormous gravity, tragedy almost, and then listens too carefully to my answer, which makes me feel that I have not given enough consideration to the matter of school.
The three my grandmother is closest to have amazing names: Eleonora, Faustina, Vashti. They collaborate with her not just on the dance, but on the other work she does: movement therapy. She works with polio patients, and with mental patients. She goes all over the world to study how people move in different countries. She writes articles, gives lectures.
“Your grandmother is a very great woman,” Vashti says, staring at me with sad dark eyes.
“Vashti. I bet her real name is something like Mildred, or Ethel,” my mother says.
My mother doesn’t like my grandmother, and I don’t understand why. I try asking.
“What do you mean, I don’t like her? Of course I like her! Don’t you ever say anything like that ever again!” she screams at me. “Don’t talk about things you don’t understand!”
When other people are around, my father and my grandmother speak English. But sometimes, when the two of them are alone in a room, they have long quiet talks in German. It always sounds like they’re whispering—lots of hissing “s” sounds—but I’m never sure whether that’s the kind of conversation they have or the sound of the language itself.
“Mostly about business,” my father says when I ask him what they’re talking about. “She’s not good with money, so sometimes she asks for my advice.”
My grandmother has a lot of money, but not as much as there once was. This, I know, is one of the things my mother is furious about.
Some of it got lost when my grandmother left her first husband to run off with my grandfather, who was her dance teacher. I never understood how this loss happened. Did her first husband get the money in the divorce? Did her parents take it away from her?
Some got lost when my grandparents fled Germany just before the war. (“Other people,” my mother says firmly, “were smart enough to get out and get their money out, too.”)
Some got lost when she invested it with her brother-in-law, who ran a chemical company in Dusseldorf. Though he managed to hang on to his own money (we visit him, one summer; he has a castle on the Rhine), he either stole or lost hers.
The details of how she lost bits of her money are so vague that I imagine vagueness itself as the culprit, implicated in the losses. I imagine my grandmother sitting down with her money on a park bench, and then getting up and wandering off, abandoning it like an empty lunch bag or an umbrella.
Abandoned. That’s the word my mother uses, over and over again, when she asks my father about his childhood. “Didn’t you feel abandoned, when they left you alone in Germany?”
“I wasn’t alone,” my father says. “Kurt was with me, and we liked the school in the Alps. And in the vacations I stayed with the aunts, whom I loved.”
“What kind of parents go off like that and abandon their children for three years?” my mother wants to know.
“They didn’t want to bring us to the States before they had a home and a livelihood. They wanted to get a little bit established.”
“Three years?” my mother persists.
“That’s how long it took,” my father tells her coolly.
I don’t understand why she keeps trying to make him upset about something that apparently doesn’t upset him.
“They abandoned you,” she says again.
And my father gives her that cool, closed look. “I was happy,” he says.
My grandmother is doing something called a movement choir, in a church in Greenwich Village. My family drives into the city—we’ve moved to Connecticut—and we take her out to dinner first, but she eats only a bowl of broth. Then she leaves. We sit at the table and eat a rich meal and dessert; it’s all delicious, but I feel gluttonish, slothful.
The church is packed when we get there. Vashti has saved us seats up front. “An important evening,” she says, grave and excited. I see my mother and father look at each other when she says it; they don’t roll their eyes, but that’s the feeling.
Kurt and his wife are there, sitting on the other side of my father, but beyond saying hello my parents don’t talk much to them. There’s a coolness there, another of those family things I don’t understand. It has something to do with Kurt and his wife being actors, and my father being in business.
My grandmother stands up at the front and talks about movement, and people in groups, and the ways in which we circle and observe and imitate each other without even being aware of it. “A contagion!” she says in her brisk German accent, and people laugh. She’s wearing a black leotard with a purple scarf wrapped around her waist like a skirt. The lights on the ceiling behind the altar shine through her hair, making a cloud-white halo.
She starts to move, to dance, lifting her arms and swaying. Then, almost immediately, people from the audience stand up and begin moving too, swaying out of the pews and up the aisles to where my grandmother is. They start to make loose circles around her; I can see her white hair glowing at the center. There is no music, just a low murmuring humming buzz coming from people’s lips. I am horrified, embarrassed, frightened. All these grownups, with half-closed eyes and wild hair and raised arms, dancing, stamping, swaying, buzzing. No one is in control. Or maybe my grandmother is: she started this, caused it, presumably condones it, is turning slowly in its center.
Kurt and his wife are up and dancing. So is Vashti, who grabbed my hand and tugged and then, when I wouldn’t go with her, smiled sadly and slid away into the aisle. My parents are still in their seats, looking straight ahead, their faces stiff and expressionless. We are not the only ones not dancing; a few other people, mostly very old, are still scattered around, seated, in the pews. But their faces are animated, interested. My parents are the only ones with that look of stiff disapproval. Even though I think I disapprove also—the dancing feels so unsafe—I can’t ally myself with them. Their coldness is prudish, disloyal. The dancing goes on and on. My father leans down and whispers something in my ear, which I can’t hear. He whispers it again, louder. “Not your cup of tea either?” I’m too frozen even to shrug.
Finally, finally, it’s over. We have to wait a long time to get to my grandmother, who is still standing at the center of a crush of people. When we reach her, she puts her thin strong arms around me, and I kiss her damp cheek.
“What did you think?” she asks, and I nod my head up and down many times and say, “I liked it.”
“Wonderful, Mother,” my father says, in a big, false voice.
There is going to be a party afterward, in the church basement, but my father says we need to get home. I kiss my grandmother again. As we’re making our way up the aisle to the door, I see Vashti, and we smile at each other apologetically.
It’s Vashti on the phone. She sounds upset and asks if my grandmother is with us. I say yes, she’s visiting for the weekend.
“Well, can I speak to her?” Vashti’s voice is high and vibrating.
“Just a minute, I’ll get her,” I say.
She is in the living room, alone, working out some dance steps. “It’s Vashti,” I tell her, and she stops abruptly, with one foot lifted and an arm curved above her head. “Oh,” she says. “Yes.”
Later that day my mother tells me, in a low voice, what happened. Vashti was getting married that day, expecting my grandmother to be her attendant. My grandmother had promised, months ago. And then she had come to Connecticut for the weekend instead. She told Vashti over the phone that she was very sorry, she’d forgotten.
“Can you believe that?” my mother asks me. “Forgetting the wedding of your closest friend—a wedding you’re supposed to take part in? So here’s Vashti, on her wedding day, having to call around, trying to locate her. Trying to see if there’s some explanation. Which, really, there isn’t.”
“Maybe she did just forget,” I said. “Maybe she’s starting to get old.” This had never occurred to me before, that my strong grandmother might start to weaken.
“She’s not that old,” my mother said. “And you know what? This is typical. This not showing up for the people you’re closest to. She abandons people. All she really cares about is her work.”
The book she has been writing for as long as I can remember, a summation of her work, is published. My mother is furious when it comes out, because of the dedication. It reads “To my two sons, Boris and Kurt.”
No one has called my father Boris in years. He had always hated the name, and changed it to Paul when I was a baby. Even my grandmother calls him that. So why did she use the name “Boris” in the dedication?
“To embarrass him,” my mother says. “There’s no other explanation.”
But then she keeps coming up with more. “To rebuke him, for throwing away the name she gave him. To put him in his place, for daring to reject her sloppy bohemian lifestyle, unlike Kurt. Or,” my mother says, getting even angrier and more excited, “maybe she just forgot. Maybe Daddy means so little to her that she can’t even remember his name. I mean, he’s only her son. I mean, that’s nothing, when you’re busy writing a book and founding an institute.”
I come home from college and drive into New York with my parents to the opening of the institute for movement studies. White loft space, with photos on the walls of people moving: dancing, walking, running. You can tell from their bodies how they were feeling when the pictures were taken: happy, frightened, tired, angry, depressed.
The rooms are crowded, festive. I recognize Faustina from a distance, though I haven’t seen her since I was a child; she’s as erect and beautiful as ever. Vashti comes over to talk to me, and I think: So, that friendship did survive. She isn’t wearing a wedding ring, and I wonder whether or not she’s still married.
“Isn’t this just breathtaking?” Vashti asks me, sweeping an eloquent arm at the crowd.
“Yes,” I say, meaning it.
My father and I stand together looking at the photographs. A young woman standing near us introduces herself and says she’s a student here. “And what’s your connection to the institute?” she asks. When my father tells her, she begins to breathe very fast, and to flap her arched dancer’s hand in front of her face. “Oh, my God—you’re her son?” she says. “And her granddaughter? Oh, my God.”
“I half expected her to genuflect,” my father says in the car going home. “Didn’t you?”
My mother says, “It’s ridiculous, the way they idolize her.”
“Really, it was as if I’d said, ‘Hi, I’m John the Baptist, and this is Mary Magdalene,’” my father says.
Forgetting. It’s happening more and more. My grandmother forgets birthdays. Forgets where she put her glasses, or her checkbook, or her scarf. Writes to me and leaves out letters in the middle of words, words in the middle of sentences. Comes for Christmas and forgets one of
her bags on the train. Forgets the recipes for the Christmas cookies she’s been baking for years.
She is getting older. I realize this one day when I walk by the living room doorway and see her moving, working out steps with the same dreamy grace and energy she’s always had—and there’s a long piece of toilet paper trailing behind her, hanging from the waistband of her loose black trousers.
But then suddenly she leaps, flying across our living room in a dance step, like an arrow shooting through space. And I also see that she’s managed to push all the furniture against the walls, to get it out of her way.
Her foot is gone. There’s a structure beneath the bedclothes, a kind of tent, so that nothing will touch the site of the amputation.
She’s been fleeing this operation for six months, ever since she got out of the hospital the last time, with a not-quite-healed infection on her toe. She went to Hawaii and taught, but the damage kept creeping upward. A toe, then two toes, then all the toes. No amputation, she said, and she tried other treatments—biofeedback, chelation therapy. Finally they told her she would die without the surgery, and it was scheduled. That’s when her students found her lying on the floor. Maybe she took something, an overdose, they are saying now. Maybe she couldn’t face living without her foot.
“No,” my father says, when I ask him about the rumor. “Mother would never do that. She would find the idea of suicide completely unacceptable.”
Is she aware that the foot is gone? No one knows if she’s conscious or not. Her eyes are open, but she’s frozen. She can’t move or speak. She’s like some character out of a terrifying fairy tale—fleeing, but then frozen and helpless and captured.
The Suicide Index Page 12