The Suicide Index

by Joan Wickersham

  This is my version. I get to say what happened. I get to leave out whatever I want to. You can’t interrupt me. You can’t say, “But.”

  I want that power, but I hate the nagging feeling of needing to be responsible with it. Any stark, violent truth makes me want to equivocate, to disclaim, to soften. To write a next sentence that begins, “On the other hand. . . . ”

  On the other hand, they used to stand in the kitchen kissing.

  On the other hand, he gave her a string of pearls for Christmas.

  (Ah, but on the other other hand, he gave them to her because she made him feel he was supposed to. He couldn’t really quite afford them. And she raged to me later, in her bedroom, because the pearls were a single strand and she had told him, told him, that she wanted a double strand. What did I think it meant that when he gave her a present it was never the thing that she really wanted?)

  These stark violent truths are true. That’s the problem.

  7.

  The studio where I’m working is ordinarily used for photography. When I get stuck or bored or scared, writing this, I stand up and wander into the darkroom at the back.

  It’s full of warnings, PHOTO FIXER SILVER SOLUTION—HAZARDOUS WASTE. EMERGENCY EYE WASH STATION. 28% ACETIC ACID—POISON. Some of these items actually have little skulls and crossbones printed on them.

  Dangerous work has been done here.

  The people who have used the place before me—photographers, writers, filmmakers, sculptors, painters, architects—all signed their names on the wooden plaques hanging on the wall just inside the door. The earliest signatures, some so faded as to be almost invisible, date from 1969. There are twelve plaques, with twenty-eight signatures on each.

  That’s 336 people who have spent time in here, making something.

  The wall behind my desk is a long one, made entirely of tackboard. I’ve hung up some of the family photographs, and I tack up my pages at the end of the day. The wall is pockmarked with pinholes, made by the 336 people over the years.

  I’m alone here all day; those 336 people, with their signatures and their pinholes, are my company. I think about them tacking up their work, along with other words and images that meant something to them. The pinholes are many and tiny and oddly clustered, like stars—constellations of pinholes, galaxies, an entire universe.

  Okay, pins and needles. The family business.

  1969. We moved to Connecticut. A big old white farmhouse, on a shady corner. A tumbledown carriage house which we might fix up one day. Cats, dogs, an old horse. A garden: huge forsythias, then peonies, then tomatoes and corn. Summer evenings, my father’s car coming noiselessly into the circular driveway. He would change into his bathing suit; there was an old swimming pool, out beyond the giant spruce trees that cast soft dark shadows on the lawn. The smell of smoke from the stone barbecue on the terrace. The phone always ringing for my mother, who was involved in everything: the League of Women Voters, the opera board, the school building committee.

  My father drove me to school in the morning and then went on to work. He was being groomed to be president of the company, but Franz Axel wanted to stay on for a year or two before retiring, and so for now my father was the number-two man. He was great at this. Quick, alert, good at anticipating problems. Good at generating ideas, good at listening to other people’s ideas, good at explaining ideas to Franz Axel, and good at carrying out any ideas that Franz Axel approved of.

  He was the sure-footed fellow from the old Future Business Leaders Club, filled out now, starting to live up to all that promise. The future, which used to seem so far away, was very close. He was almost there.

  And then, suddenly, he was there. Franz Axel stepped aside. My father was a company president.

  And this, I think, is the moment when something starts to be missing. Or the moment when the thing that was missing all along starts to matter.

  He was a better heir to the throne than he was a king.

  He, of course, didn’t see this. And my mother was thrilled. Adored and admired him. Picked out sweet-smelling grass-cloth wallpaper for his new office. Accompanied him to business conventions at various resorts. Borrowed Franz Axel’s chauffeur on weekends to run errands, and later, to pick me up at boarding school in New Hampshire. (My mother wanted the chauffeur to wear his uniform on these occasions. I said that if he did, I would lock myself in my dorm room and refuse to come down to the car.)

  Franz Axel had not retired after all. When he had made my father president, he’d made himself chairman. He was having trouble letting go. “Which is understandable,” my father said. “He’s run the company for a long time. It’s hard for him to turn it over to another man.”

  Things went along. As far as I knew, everything was fine. My parents were my parents, big and secure in their lives. I was away.

  One Sunday afternoon my father was driving me back up to school after a weekend at home. Suddenly the car swerved toward the edge of the highway. I said, “Dad!” and looked over at him and saw that he was asleep, and his eyes flew open and the car straightened out.

  There was a long silence. “Sorry,” he said.

  He kept getting sick. I kept getting called to the narrow phone booth on the second floor of the dorm: “Daddy’s in the hospital.” I kept taking buses home and visiting him, bringing him the most vivid-bloomed plants I could find in the hospital gift shop. Cinerarias, begonias, azaleas. He looked white and exhausted in all those beds, just lying there in the middle of the day, smiling at me and saying quietly, “I’m so glad you’re here.” I knew he was glad, but I also knew he’d be glad when I left; he was too tired to have anyone in the room with him. They thought he’d had a heart attack, but it turned out to be an infection. They thought he might have cirrhosis, even though he wasn’t a drinker. They took out his appendix. He got pneumonia.

  “And of course the pressure is terrible, with the business,” my mother would tell me on the car ride home. “He’s under terrible pressure to get up and take control of things again. He needs to rest, but he needs to get well fast.”

  I kept going back to school. He’d get better, but then sick again. Things went along.

  That summer I had a job working in the town drugstore. One night when he came to pick me up, I got into the car and he told me he’d quit his job that day.

  I asked him why, trying to match his calm tone.

  He said it was a lot of things. Basically, he said, every time I make a decision, Franz Axel undoes it the minute my back is turned. Basically, he said, Franz Axel will never let go. I can either fight him, which will ultimately undo me, or I can turn into a yes-man, which will ultimately undo the company. Basically, he said, it was a no-win situation.

  I told him I thought he was brave. A lot of men, I said, stay in jobs they hate; they never have the guts to leave. I’m so proud that you had the guts.

  Well, he said.

  When we got home, my mother was upstairs in her room with the door shut. My father stood at the foot of the stairs in his raincoat, looking up at the shut door.

  She’s pretty upset about this, he told me. You go up. Go in and see her. She needs you to be nice to her right now.

  I knew that he was sending me up to her because he was afraid to go himself.

  All that summer, and then after that for months and years, my mother’s fury went on.

  “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this,” she’d say, and then she would go on to tell me.

  He hadn’t really quit; he’d been forced out. If he hadn’t resigned, Franz Axel would have fired him.

  He was too passive. When they’d gone to all those business conferences at the fancy resorts, when all the other men were downstairs having drinks and mingling, my father was sitting in the hotel room, reading. He thought that once he’d attended the seminars, his day was over. She would think: skip the seminars, for God’s sake—but go downstairs in the evenings and mingle! But when she tried to tell him that, he’d tell her to stop nagging. You
couldn’t tell him anything; he never wanted to listen.

  He was too soft. There had been a vice president maneuvering him out, angling for Franz Axel’s ear, planting doubts. Daddy saw this, but he never knew what to do about it. It had gotten worse all those times he was in the hospital—the other guy had used those absences to bolster his own position. And now that guy was president of the company. Could I imagine how she felt, how Daddy felt, to know every day that that guy was sitting in the chair that used to be Daddy’s?

  He was too stubborn. He wouldn’t compromise. She knew I thought that absolute integrity was a virtue—but it wasn’t, not in business. She knew I thought he was so noble—but he wasn’t, he was naive. It was his job to compromise; it was smart to compromise; he was supposed to compromise.

  And how could he have done this to her? She couldn’t hold her head up. She was resigning from all her committees. Did I understand what it was like, to be on the planning committee for the Lions’ Club Ball knowing that she was going to have to sit at the head table up on the stage with Daddy, knowing that everyone there would know he’d been forced out of his job? Did I understand the humiliation?

  I feel like I’m humiliating her a second time, telling this. I should be able to temper and shade these memories. Give her some more dimension, make her less extreme. Sympathize.

  Sometimes she would catch herself—hear herself. Come up with her own “on the other hand.”

  “Do you know how much I love Daddy? Do you have any idea how much?” she would ask me, out of nowhere.

  She was scared. I understand that now, looking back. She’d grown up poor, and she was afraid of being poor again. The plan, which had been hatched and refined and counted on for years, had failed, and there was no plan B.

  And she was starting to be scared about my father. If he couldn’t do this, what could he do? And why hadn’t he been able to do it?

  He had lost his job. Something was wrong. He was a failure.

  That’s what she thought, and that’s what he thought.

  That event, his leaving the job, or losing the job, was the turning point in our family; before it we were rising, and after it we just kept going down.

  Whoa. Too bald a statement for a biographical essay, or even a memoir. This kind of writing is never really objective—though it sometimes pretends to be—but the writer doesn’t usually come right out and tell you what she thinks.

  Still, it’s impossible to look closely at lives and not begin to discern, and to impose upon them, some kind of shape. Even the physical structure of a volume of biography has an implied shape and arc to it, a concept.

  Take a biography down from the shelf and look at it—it doesn’t matter who wrote it, or whom it’s about. There is a big clump of pages occupied with the subject’s birth, background, education, and initial tottering steps toward success, or notoriety, or whatever achievement or quality led to the biographer’s interest. The ascent, one might call this part.

  Then comes the arrival—or, as old popular biographies used to title these chapters, The Years of Triumph. Elections won. Movies starred in. Plays written and produced. A love affair with a king. Continents explored, territories claimed. A long streak of bank robberies or murders, gotten away with.

  At some point, right around here, there’s a section of photographs. A glossy, captioned interlude. If the subject’s face is well known, the childhood and youth photos look unformed—intriguing because whatever it became, it isn’t there yet. Then come the pictures from the Years of Triumph: familiar, the famous face we know. And then there are the last few images: my God, look what happened.

  And what did happen? Sometimes it’s tame or ordinary—aging, retirement. (Still: how much smaller, more faded, less themselves they look.) But often it’s sensationally bad, gripping. Political scandals. Hollywood scandals. Plays that flop. Syphilis. An avalanche. Hanging.

  Once you get past the pictures, the going generally gets tough. Life is harder and sadder on the other side of the photographs.

  8.

  I am walking in the woods near the edge of the artists’ colony, and I hear a gunshot.

  Maybe there’s a ceremony going on in town, some kind of military thing. Today is November 11: Veterans’ Day.

  Or maybe someone is hunting deer.

  My feet keep moving forward on the path. I keep listening, wondering if there will be a second shot. But no: just one.

  He started sending out letters and résumés, looking for another job. His old secretary came over sometimes on Saturday afternoons to help him. Once I saw that she was crying as she got ready to leave. “Your father is such a good man,” she whispered to me fiercely.

  In the fall, my parents drove me to college. We unloaded my stuff and then my father went to park the car. I was outside on the sidewalk, and he came walking toward me, smoking a cigarette. He hadn’t smoked in years. When he saw me he threw the cigarette into the street. He didn’t mention it, and neither did I.

  He was going into the gold business. Gold was about to be put on the market as a commodity. My father didn’t know anything about commodities trading, but his new partner did. My father had valuable knowledge about international business, and also he was investing money in the company. For Christmas he had miniature gold bars mounted as cuff links for my mother’s three brothers.

  At college I got the Times. I never had a chance to read it; it piled up in my room and I used it to make fires in my fireplace. But I did start checking the price of gold every day. It just sat there. This gave me a sense of dull unease. Wasn’t my father’s business predicated on the idea that gold was sure to go up?

  After a while he wasn’t in the gold business anymore. It was partly that gold hadn’t performed, and partly that his partner had been rotten. Somehow the partner had gotten away without losing any money, while my father had lost his entire investment.

  “I won’t tell you how much,” my mother said over the phone, “but it was a lot. A lot.”

  He was going into the machinery business. His partner invented machines that cut shapes out of wood, and plastic, and Lucite. Manufacturers used them to make tabletops, or the mats that went under office chairs to protect the carpeting. There were also machines that made carving boards with depressed channels in which meat juices could collect.

  His partner knew about machines, but nothing about business: that was where my father came in. Once again, his title was “president.” They rented space, two long rooms in a corrugated metal building in the woods near his partners house. They made up a corporate-sounding name, to which they appended the word “International.” My mother rolled her eyes.

  The business was diagonally across the state from where my parents lived, almost three hours away. My mother didn’t want to sell their house and move if things weren’t going to work out, so my father rented a small apartment to live in during the week. He would drive down there on Sunday nights, and on Friday he would drive home again. The town where I went to college was on his way, and he began stopping there on Fridays, to take me out to dinner.

  We ate and ate: that’s what I remember about those dinners with him. Mostly we went to a restaurant that faced out onto the town green. It was a hybrid of elegance and gluttony: thick white tablecloths, a platter of tiny potato pancakes with sour cream that would appear on the table before you’d even had a chance to order. We ate tenderloin with béarnaise sauce. Lobster tails. Coq au vin. The lighting was warm and dim. I don’t remember what we talked about. We smiled at each other a lot, and ordered coffee, which neither of us wanted, to make the meal last a little longer. “Everything all right?” we both kept asking.

  I met my husband in college, and after that my parents started slowly to recede. I was twenty-one when I got married. During the wedding ceremony, when the judge read the part about “forsaking all others” I started to cry; the idea of forsaking my parents, even for the man I was marrying, seemed unbearably disloyal. But as time went on my allegiance, and all m
y attention, shifted.

  My parents moved. The machinery business seemed to be solid, so they bought a house nearby and started living together again. But my mother had changed. She told me she wanted her own business and her own bank account. She didn’t trust my father anymore to take care of her.

  I thought this was great—not that she didn’t trust him, but that she wanted to have something of her own. I had always thought she’d been born too early, that if she had come of age among feminists she would have gone out and become president of her own company, instead of being my father’s frustrated backseat driver.

  She decided to open an art gallery. She rented an empty H&R Block store in the next town over. She went into New York and bought a lot of prints and lithographs from a friend who dealt in modern art. She had a sign painted, and cards printed, and an opening show and reception with wine and cheese. But between May and December (after that the H&R Block people would need their space back), she sold virtually nothing. It was the wrong town: people went there to buy hardware and shampoo and snowblowers and groceries, not art. When the lease was up, the gallery was dismantled. The pictures leaned in stacks against the walls of her basement, and the sign sat in her garage until she sold the house eight years after my father’s death.

  So her business failed. But it didn’t seem to smolder and sear between my parents, the way my father’s failures always did. It had happened to her, not to him. Less was at stake.

  9.

  Aren’t lives apples and stories oranges? What really goes on when you try to change one into the other?