The Suicide Index

by Joan Wickersham

  He was happy there.

  Something else that couldn’t be documented photographically: his parents’ absence. They left Germany and went to America in 1936, when my father was seven, with the intention of sending for their children once they were settled. They’d been staying in Munich one night, and a Jewish man was beaten to death beneath their window. My father told me, “They knew they didn’t want to stay in a country where things like that could happen.”

  I didn’t learn until after my father’s death that my grandfather was Jewish; my father made it sound like the issue was one of ideology, not survival.

  When I said that to my mother, she got angry. “Oh, that didn’t matter. Your grandmother’s family was very powerful and could have protected everybody.” Well, maybe—or very possibly not. My mother’s Jewish family in France was decimated. Does she think it’s because they weren’t powerful and had no one to protect them?

  Now we come to the greatest happiness of his childhood, the place that would always haunt him as a lost paradise. Here we have another album: a big one, covered in linen that must once have been cream-colored but is now brownish-gray, HAUS MERBERICH, it says on the cover, KINDER UND BLUMEN. Children and flowers. Merberich was the country house near Aachen that belonged to his two unmarried great-aunts. Leaf slowly through these heavy pages, the life there recorded in muted shades of dove and fawn. A long row of French doors opening out onto terraced gardens and a lake with swans. Fields, barns, goats. Nine cousins stepping across the lawn holding hands, with a great-aunt in a white dress smiling at either end of the line. A big Christmas tree blurry with candles. A close-up of my father in the garden, laughing, his hair whitened and cloudlike, its ends radiating and disappearing in the sunlight.

  My father went back there once, on a trip he made to Germany in the early 1950s. Four or five families were living in the house, and the land was being strip-mined.

  1939. He and his younger brother, Kurt, are standing by the ship’s railing, watched over by some starchy-looking woman in a uniform who must have been a nurse hired for the voyage. They’re on their way to New York.

  It was summertime, and theirs was the last boat to get out of Germany before the war started.

  I don’t want to write this next part. And there aren’t any photographs.

  When he got to America, to his parents’ cold little apartment in the Bronx, his father started beating him. His mother watched. Kurt lay in bed in the next room, hearing the screams.

  No photographs. School in the Bronx. He got teased for not knowing any English; he learned English very fast. He got teased for his foreign-sounding name. Early on someone pulled a knife on him; the next day he brought in his own knife, and after that they left him alone.

  A boarding school in the Berkshires. No photos here, either. But I have a diary he kept. Full of rage and swearing and bad grades and how unfair the bad grades were. On almost every page, hoping for a letter from Mother or hoping she’d come to visit. And then, “No letter, God damn it,” or “Shit, she didn’t come.”

  Kurt told me about this school, after my father’s death. Sadistic teachers, maggoty food. No heat in the winter. For a while some of the boys kept a pet rabbit, but the headmaster wouldn’t let them have food for it, and it starved to death.

  Kurt also told me that my father ran away from the school once, to New York. They made him go back.

  The biographer isn’t supposed to cry, or shiver, or feel like she’s about to throw up. She moves away from the computer and looks out at the sky. It’s a dull, luminous gray through the bare branches in the woods; but above the field it’s blue, streaked with clouds that look like shredded tissue paper. The clouds are moving very slowly. Or maybe what she sees is the world turning.

  In the distance, at the top of the hill, is another small building, red-shingled, with big windows. She doesn’t know who is using that studio, but she knows it’s being used by someone: lights go on in the evening. It must be a painting studio, with those windows. Maybe the painter is looking out at the sky now, too. Maybe trying to paint it.

  His old college yearbooks. Four volumes, four different photographs. He is a member of a club: the Future Business Leaders. In his freshman year, he is a thin impassive face, half hidden in the back row. By the next year, he’s moved up to the middle of the group. As a junior, he’s in the foreground, club secretary. And by the time he’s a senior, he’s the president, sitting in the middle of the front row, relaxed and keen, grinning. If brains and patience and quiet confidence are the necessary ingredients, then he can’t possibly miss.

  3.

  I can go forward chronologically or thematically: look at what happened next, or think about how and why he did, after all, miss.

  The word “miss” is so wistful. As is the word “wistful,” for that matter. They both have sighs embedded in them, that “iss” sound. Which also sounds like “if.”

  Biographers don’t usually play with words—they leave that to the poets. But when I think of the word “miss” in connection with my father, I’m instantly drawn to leap further, all the way to the even more wistful, sighing word “missing.”

  He had something missing. By the end it was something big.

  Was it missing all his life? Or did it start small and grow?

  So: a tentative choice to proceed thematically brings me right back to chronology.

  He was young and poor when he met my mother, on the train coming back from Tanglewood.

  “Young” and “poor” sounded so promising, the way my mother always told me the story. Temporary conditions: poignant “befores” that existed only to contrast with triumphant “afters.”

  He was tall and skinny and confident. In the train he smoked all her cigarettes and then told her he would need to see her again in order to replace the pack.

  Their first date. A hot summer night. She waited for him in a brown sleeveless dress, with her arms raised over her head so she wouldn’t sweat on the dress and ruin it. He brought her champagne, and then took her to ride on the Staten Island ferry. She found it dashing, the way he was so wittily forthright about being poor. They stood at the railing and he told her his plan for himself. One day I’m going to be the president of a company, he said.

  She was twenty-nine, four years older than he, working in public relations with the men who invented the Diners Club card. She was sleek, intelligent, voluptuous. A sophisticated New York career woman, living with a roommate in a Sutton Place apartment.

  He saw her that way. He saw what she hoped was true.

  Here’s what else was true. She had only recently broken away from living with her big, close, poor family in Brooklyn. Her mother had always said that something terrible would happen to her if she moved to the city, and her mother said dark things with such conviction that they seemed to contain some truth. And dark things had already happened in the family. The oldest daughter dead at thirty of cancer. One son with all his hair gone, and his scalp pitted with brown and white burn scars—there had been a little spot, when he was a child, and the doctor had said, “No problem, we’ll just use x-rays to get rid of it.” Another son, who had gone to Korea to cover the war as a reporter for the Times: his plane had crashed, and he’d lost a leg and nearly died.

  You’re my baby, her mother told her. Stay with me; don’t leave me.

  Maybe this is part of what drew my parents together: they both knew bad things could and did happen. They were confident and attractive and on their way up—they firmly believed this, but they also deeply doubted it. They shared, in nearly identical proportions, an idiosyncratic mix of jauntiness and pessimism, of hope and catastrophe.

  4.

  If my parents were to read this, they would say, “You’re getting it wrong.”

  And of course I am. I’m not my father or my mother. I don’t know what it was like to be either one of them.

  I remember some things. Other things were told to me; I either believed them or felt uneasy with them. Or
I believed them once, but don’t anymore. Or I was too young to understand, but now I can see better what might have been going on.

  About some things—but not others—I could ask my mother. She might fill in details for me. Or she might insist, her voice rising in annoyance or panic, that the thing I’m asking about never happened, I am making it up.

  There’s no way to check out what’s true. The kind of truth I’m looking for is slippery.

  The biographer listens to anecdotes, looks at diaries and letters. But people remember things wrong when they tell anecdotes; they slant things. And people lie in diaries and letters. Or they write in moments of passion, and then they put down the pen and go make a sandwich. A biography may highlight a certain pivotal letter—but maybe the writer sent it off and then forgot all about it, and the recipient read it once, shrugged, and tossed it into a drawer.

  Lives are made up of days, and days are made up of hours—good ones, bad ones, so-so ones. Biographers try to organize the mess, which inevitably changes its nature.

  I don’t believe there’s any subject of a biography who would say to the biographer, “You got it right.” How could biographees not be disgruntled? They’d point out oversimplifications, wrong emphases, big lapses, and an infuriating tendency to link spurious causes to dubious effects.

  On the other hand, I suppose a really nervy biographer might say to the subject, “No, you’re the one who’s getting it wrong.” And go on to point to instances of self-delusion, glossing over of embarrassing or painful memories, self-justification in retrospect, and a general inability to see the forest for the trees.

  You can’t possibly understand my life, the subject would tell the biographer, because you didn’t live it.

  And the biographer would retort: You can’t possibly understand it, because you did.

  5.

  Before I show up they are two people, sharp and distinct. Once they become my parents, they start to blur.

  They were mysterious to me when I was little. I wanted to get closer, to get inside, to know.

  I kept asking questions. Why were my father’s parents divorced? Why did my mother seem to dislike my father’s mother? Were we rich or poor?

  The answers came back like slaps: never mind. None of your business. That’s private.

  I wanted to know why my father had changed his name. When I was very young, he’d had first and last names that sounded Russian, but then our last name suddenly changed to something shorter and American-sounding; and then his first name wasn’t Boris anymore, it was Paul.

  “Because,” my father said when I asked.

  My mother said, “Because it sounded like a Russian spy, that’s why. No one would give him a job with a name like that.”

  “But it’s a secret,” my father added, “it’s nobody’s business. If anyone asks you why your last name is different now, you just tell them to mind their own business.”

  In the morning, when they were still asleep, I would prowl the apartment. They’d had people over the night before. Coffee cups with lipstick-smudged rims, smelly ashtrays, little bowls flecked with salt and a few brown shreds of peanut skins. The bridge scores lying on the card table, radiating a kind of Cold War paranoia that I felt in my stomach but was too young to understand. We-They. We-They.

  My father read to me at night. The Madeline books, setting up each couplet and then pausing so I could crow out the final rhymes. Curious George and Babar. Edward Lear and A. A. Milne, which he read with patient silliness and an assumed English accent.

  We got up early and made pancakes together on Saturday mornings. He had a special way of making the batter, with extra milk and eggs; his pancakes were thin and weightless. Every week he would pop the first one into my mouth and wait, eyebrows raised: “My hand has not lost its touch?”

  He took me out to buy a Christmas tree. To see a parade. To pick up Chinese takeout. To see the snakes in the zoo on Staten Island. To buy a fish tank, on my fifth birthday. He painted the outside of the aquarium’s rear wall a deep blue-green, filled the bottom with pebbles, packed the plastic filter with charcoal and white cotton wool, and filled the tank with water he’d shaken up in an old milk bottle to remove the air bubbles. I was impressed that he knew to do all this. When he got home from work at the end of the day, he would come with me into my room and ask after each fish by name.

  When he was here, he was here. But when he was gone, he was emphatically, horribly gone. He went away a lot, for business, on airplanes, which I was always sure would crash. He was gone for weeks, sometimes months. Europe, South America, India, Egypt, Australia. We had a framed map, with pins stuck in the places he’d been. I counted the pins over and over: all those places where something bad could happen to him. Even when a postcard came saying he had arrived safely, I worried. He could die there, or the plane could crash on the way home.

  Other times he was gone because he was in the hospital. Kidney stones. Gallstones. Pneumonia. Appendicitis. Pericarditis. Diverticulitis. Ulcerative colitis. I didn’t know what all these words meant, only that miserably painful things were always going wrong with him. My mother would shake me awake in the middle of the night: “I’m taking Daddy to the hospital.” Bad sounds of him groaning in the bathroom; my younger sister’s frightened face.

  When he finally came home he would be thin, white, hunched, quiet. Himself but not. No jumping on him. No bothering him. He needed to rest. In the summer, when he wore his bathing suit, there would be a new purple shiny ragged scar somewhere.

  Did I imagine it, am I exaggerating it, this air of imperiled fragility that seemed to hang over my father? Did he get sick more often than other fathers? Was I more of a worrier than other kids?

  Some of the atmosphere of crisis came from my mother’s grim panic: her dire whispers in the night, her big frightened eyes, her absences when he was in the hospital, her inability to deliver reassurances that she wouldn’t have found convincing herself. (“But is Daddy going to be all right?” And she would scream, “Leave me alone, I don’t know.”)

  As time went on, he hid discomforts and minor symptoms from her. She watched him suspiciously, on the lookout for winces and grimaces. “What?” she would demand, if he looked uncomfortable. “What’s wrong?”

  And if he did admit that something was wrong, then it must be bad. “Where’s the aspirin?” he might ask, and my mother’s mouth would tighten: “Shit! Shit!”

  I grew up believing that he was doomed. It wasn’t that he got sick and got better; it was that he almost died and then didn’t. Each episode closed with a sense of nervous temporary reprieve. Not this time? The next time, then.

  Depression, the condition that would actually kill him, was never diagnosed or even mentioned. Doctors didn’t look for it back then. And he didn’t have it all the time, not yet. If he did have some glimmering that it was there, it wouldn’t have occurred to him not to conceal it.

  We worried about his heart, his liver, his stomach, his lungs. It was like Brueghel’s painting of the fall of Icarus—we were looking the wrong way; the focus was on the big events in the middle of the canvas. Nobody noticed the terrible small thing that was starting to happen in one corner.

  6.

  When did it begin to form, the plan that he might take over the American branch of the family business, the German pins-and-needles company?

  Let’s invite my mother to tell this part. She is bursting to tell it.

  “It was my idea,” she says. “I was the one who saw it so clearly. I knew that this was what he should do. I was the one who said, ‘Start by getting a seat on the board of the company in Germany. Get your mother to give you her proxy votes—she’s never been interested in the business anyway. Get on the board, and cultivate your cousin Franz Axel. He’s the president of the American branch; he’s the one you should get to know. Start going up to Connecticut, and have lunch with him a few times. Let him know about all your import-export experience. Let him know you’re interested in becoming more i
nvolved with the business. He’s getting old, he’s probably getting ready to retire, and you’re the only family member in America with the right kind of experience to take over from him.’ I saw it so clearly, how it could all happen for Daddy.”

  Her tone as she says all this is miffed, hurt, baffled. How could this intelligent, logical plan have failed to work out?

  Or rather, how, after it had started to work out exactly as she’d imagined it, could my father have screwed it up?

  Her plan didn’t kill him. He was the one who had the desire, after all, to be a company president. She was only the strategist. But the way he died makes any plan she might have had for him seem dangerous, Lady Macbeth-ish.

  And the part that I do think may have been lethal was her contempt (which she hid from herself, though not from him) for his inability to pull it off.

  (After he died, when we learned that the gun had malfunctioned slightly—it put a bullet into his brain but did not fire with enough force to blow his head apart as might have been expected—my mother said, “Jesus Christ, he couldn’t even do that right.”)

  But I’m jumping ahead. Stay with the pins and needles, the family sewing business.

  I will, I’ll get back to that in a minute. But that last paragraph about the gun is bugging me. It’s angry. It’s true, but it’s only part of the truth. And that feels like an unfair use of the power that I’m grabbing by writing.