“So that’s what he did,” Sarah said. “He showed me my house, which I really hadn’t seen before. He sort of blessed it.”
We sat there. It was a moment when it would have felt good to cry, but I waited and nothing happened.
Sarah looked toward the dark kitchen window. “I always think of him, when the lilacs bloom, or when I spot a praying mantis in the summer. I hear his voice, telling me how wonderful it’s all going to be.”
11. The Neighbors Vanish
My mother decided to sell her house and buy a condo. My father had been dead for seven years.
“That’s great!” I said. “I think it’ll make you feel so much better to get out of this house.”
“Yes, well, George and CeCe Oliver just sold their house. They’re moving to Arizona,” my mother said. I knew that the Olivers were her next-door neighbors; their house was hidden in the woods about a quarter of a mile away.
“And the Giffords are gone, too,” my mother went on. “Ed died last year, and Daisy bought something smaller.”
“Uh-huh,” I said into the telephone. I wasn’t sure why she was telling me about the Olivers and the Giffords leaving; my parents had never been close to any of the neighbors.
“And then those other people in the yellow house—what was their name, the woman with the weird hair, and they used a clothesline instead of a dryer. Anyway,” my mother said, “they’ve been gone for ages.”
“So you feel like the old neighborhood is breaking up?” I said doubtfully. I knew that wasn’t it, but I didn’t know what it was.
“No, the point is,” my mother said impatiently, “that this is what I’ve been waiting for. Now there won’t be anybody left to talk. To start a rumor that might put off a buyer. The point is that when George and CeCe go, there won’t be anyone left who remembers how Daddy died.”
12. My Mother’s House Is Cursed with His Presence and Inadequate Closet Space
My mother put her house on the market.
We went down to help her get it ready. We cleaned, and we persuaded her to get rid of stuff. We put away the CDs. We threw out the bag of trash from my father’s study, opening it briefly to stuff in the curved supplicating suede work gloves.
The next time we went to visit, we saw that the house had begun trumpeting its own virtues. Little signs, embellished with the logo of my mother’s real estate firm, were taped up everywhere, ESTABLISHED PERENNIAL GARDEN! announced one hanging next to a living room window, BUILT-IN BOOKSHELVES! crowed another, in my father’s study.
The house sat on the market.
My mother called me and said, “Apparently my house is unacceptable, and I’m unacceptable too.”
She called again. “Maybe I should burn it down. Would that make people happy?”
Finally a buyer materialized. The offer, according to my mother, was insulting. But she made a counter-offer, which was accepted. She began happily debating the pros and cons of various condominium complexes, and talking about which furniture she would take with her.
Then one afternoon my phone rang, and when I picked it up she said, in a flat drained rasp that was so quiet I could barely hear her: “It’s happened.”
“What has?”
“Psychological impact. The buyer. I knew it. I knew this would happen.”
The buyers had heard a rumor about my father’s death, and they had submitted a question to her, in writing. She read me the sentence from their letter: “We heard that your husband died in the house, and that a gun was involved.”
She was sobbing; she could hardly talk. “I’ll never get out of here, I’ll never get away from this.”
“Mom,” I said. “Mom.” I started asking her a lot of crisp questions about what exactly the law allowed and required. She, choking and crying, told me that the buyers were allowed to ask the question, and that she could choose whether or not to answer it. “But not answering is an answer,” she cried, “not answering is like saying, yes, you’re right, my husband did blow his brains out in the house.”
“Are you sure the law allows this? Are you sure this isn’t discriminatory?” I said, still in my crisp efficient problem-solving voice. “What does your lawyer say?”
“I haven’t talked to him! It doesn’t matter what he says! The point is that people are always going to be asking this question!”
She was like the person in the horror movie who sees the ghost and can’t stop screaming. I was the one who doesn’t believe in the ghost, and then goes numb when it appears.
She screamed, “Daddy did this to me. This terrible thing. It was his job to take care of me, and he didn’t! How could he have done this to me?”
I said, “I know how you feel, I know you’re upset, but I don’t want to listen to this.”
“Every time I try to talk to you, you tell me what I say is wrong. Everything I feel is wrong. Maybe I should commit suicide, too, and then you wouldn’t have to worry about me anymore.”
A silence. I hung up on her.
My mother decided to answer the buyers’ question. She told them that yes, her husband had died in the house. She said it was an accident. He’d been cleaning his gun, and it went off and killed him.
The buyers withdrew their offer. They said the closets were too small.
13. He Appears in the Airport
My mother’s house finally sold, to a buyer who loved the pool and the garden and the private setting, deep in the woods. She and I decided to meet in Paris, to spend a week there together. (That’s how it went between us. We would have a horrible fight, which at the time would feel insurmountable. It was impossible to see how we could continue from there. And then somehow, we would continue.)
I checked in for my Paris flight at Logan, and sat in a chair drinking tea and doing a crossword puzzle. I got stuck on a clue and looked around the room. My father was sitting across the lounge, at the end of a long row of chairs.
He was wearing a suede jacket, reading the Times, waiting patiently for his flight to be called.
It was different from the other times when I’d spotted him—in the cheese shop, or sitting a few rows ahead of me at a concert, or climbing slowly out of a parked car as I went by, helplessly, in the passenger seat of a moving one. This time I knew it wasn’t him. I was like a veteran of the desert who knows about mirages but can still be stirred by one, capable of simultaneously discounting and savoring the sight of green trees and a pool of clear water.
I sat in the departure lounge looking wistfully over at this guy. Not only did I see him, I understood him. He was living a peripatetic life, flying to and from Europe where he could travel easily, comfortable in the German of his childhood and the French, Spanish, and Portuguese he spoke so fluently. He was living this other, secret, gypsy life because he was afraid to come home.
I knew I wasn’t going to get up and move closer. But I imagined what might happen if I did. I imagined that he would have looked up to stare at me with uncertain, smiling amazement. His cover would have been blown, but we would both have been relieved that I’d blown it.
I would have said to him: “It’s okay. You don’t have to worry anymore. It’s safe. The mess you left has all been cleaned up. You can come home now.”
14. I Have It Out with His Ghost
I went down to my parents’ house one last time, before my mother moved. She had sold some of the furniture and pictures, given away extra dishes and the lawn mower and the pool equipment.
That night, when everyone else was asleep, I went into my father’s study and shut the door. I sat on the floor in the blank space where the blue armchair had been, the one he’d sat down in to shoot himself. I took a last look at what he must have looked at that morning: the grass-cloth wallpaper, the Japanese samurai sword hanging on the wall, the photographs of the grandchildren, the shelves with their rows of optimistic-sounding business titles (Successful Hedge Fund Investing, The Twelve Hats of a Company President).
I wondered what the buyers would do with this roo
m. Once it was empty, and no trace of my father lingered here, it could be anything. It could be a baby’s room, or a place for exercise equipment. It could be turned into a large bathroom. It could be knocked together with the room next door to make something big, or it could be knocked down altogether as part of a major remodeling project. Or someone might use it as a study again.
It would either vanish, or survive; most likely it would survive but in some unrecognizable form.
He wasn’t here, in this room. It was us, not the house, that he was haunting. He was our ghost. We were the only ones who could see him, and even we couldn’t clearly recognize him. Other people were scared by what he’d done. We were scared that he was the one who had done it.
Sitting there for the last time on the floor of his study, with my knees drawn up to my chin, I spoke to him. I didn’t talk out loud, but I was addressing him and he was listening.
I said: You swung a huge punch at me and then ducked out of my reach.
You did it because you felt unacceptable.
But you only became unacceptable by doing it.
But if “it”—that ending, that irresistible desperation to blow yourself apart—was encoded in you all along, secretly and inseparably part of you, then maybe you were right. If I had been able to see you clearly, maybe I would have found you unacceptable too.
But I loved you. The words “acceptable” and “unacceptable” are gibberish.
The more I sat there thinking about him, the more I felt like I was focusing on the wrong things. I was standing at the gate arguing with some pompous uniformed official, while the right things, the real things, whatever they were, were vaporizing, escaping into the air.
Suicide: readings in the literature of
“Although Enlightenment writers had fought to establish the right to suicide as a moral, rational act, the argument in the nineteenth century was not whether suicide was moral but whether suicide could ever be rational.”
—GEORGE HOWE COLT, The Enigma of Suicide
“Anyone who could imagine the terror—the pain—of those who survive a suicide—against whom a suicide is committed—could not carry it through . . . Of course, when one is at that point, imagining others becomes unimaginable. Everything seems clear, and simple, and single; there is only one possible thing to be done—”
—A. S. BYATT, “THE CHINESE LOBSTER”
“At Metz, each suicide was put in a barrel and floated down the Moselle away from the places he might wish to haunt. In Danzig, the corpse was not allowed to leave by the door; instead it was lowered by pulleys from the window; the window frame was subsequently burned. Even in the civilized Athens of Plato, the suicide was buried outside the city and away from other graves; his self-murdering hand was cut off and buried apart.”
—A. ALVAREZ, The Savage God
“But even in suicide, seemingly the ultimate expression of free will, fate, over which one has no control, plays a part.”
—YUKIO MISHIMA, The Way of the Samurai
“Each way to suicide is its own: intensely private, unknowable, and terrible. Suicide will have seemed to its perpetrator the last and best of bad possibilities, and any attempt by the living to chart this final terrain of a life can be only a sketch, maddeningly incomplete.”
—KAY REDFIELD JAMISON, Night Falls Fast
“For every person who successfully commits suicide, it is estimated that there are seven to ten people intimately affected: parents, siblings, children, aunts, uncles, grandparents, grandchildren, close friends. If we accept the official United States Health Department suicide toll of approximately 30,000 people a year, that means that between 200,000 and 300,000 people become suicide survivors each year. If, on the other hand, we take the more likely (unofficial) figure of over 60,000 suicides a year (a percentage of automobile accidents, drug overdoses, alcohol-related deaths, suicides that are covered up by relatives and coroners), then the numbers become larger—between 350,000 and 600,000 new survivors are created each year.”
—CHRISTOPHER LUKAS AND HENRY M. SEIDEN, Silent Grief
“For suicide is, after all, the result of a choice. However impulsive the action and confused the motives, the moment when a man finally decides to take his own life he achieves a certain temporary clarity. Suicide may be a declaration of bankruptcy which passes judgment on a life as one long history of failures. But it is a history which at least amounts to this one decision which, by its very finality, is not wholly a failure. Some kind of minimal freedom—the freedom to die in one’s own way and in one’s own time—has been salvaged from the wreck of all those unwanted necessities.”
—A. ALVAREZ, The Savage God
“Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.”
—ALBERT CAMUS, “THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS”
“No single theory will untangle an act as ambiguous and with such complex motives as suicide.”
—A. ALVAREZ, The Savage God
“One who chooses to go on living having failed in one’s mission will be despised as a coward and a bungler. . . . If one dies after having failed, it is a fanatic’s death, death in vain. It is not, however, dishonorable.”
—JOCHO YAMAMOTO, Hagakure
“The suicide doesn’t go alone, he takes everybody with him.”
—WILLIAM MAXWELL, The Folded Leaf
“There is a doctrine whispered in secret that man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door and run away: this is a great mystery which I do not quite understand. Yet I too believe that the gods are our guardians, and that we men are a possession of theirs . . . And if one of your own possessions, an ox or an ass, for example, took the liberty of putting himself out of the way when you had given no intimation of your wish that he should die, would you not be angry with him, and would you not punish him if you could?”
—PLATO, Phaedo
“We want to die because we cannot cause others to die, and every suicide is perhaps a repressed assassination.”
—GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, IN A LETTER TO LOUISE COLET
Suicide: romances of mother in years following
1. Her condo
“Isn’t it elegant?” she asked me.
“Yes,” I said.
It was big and sunny, a brand-new townhouse in a suburban Connecticut development built to look like Georgetown or Beacon Hill, with red-brick facades and black iron lampposts. Her condo felt, to me, both grandiose and rickety, with a polished marble hearth and a banister that jiggled like a loose tooth when you put your hand on it. My mother bought herself a Steinway grand piano, which bestowed a curvaceous, odalisque glamour on her carefully pale living room. She knew how to play only one piece, a Chopin ballade she had learned as a child; but whenever I visited she sat down and played that piece over and over, with graceful wrists and a look of concentrated rapture on her face.
“I’m finally living the way I want to live,” she told me.
2. Going on cruises
My father had had two modes of travel: business, and visiting family. He’d traveled with a sense of purpose and belonging. His trips had a fundamental austerity that made my mother wistful and uncomfortable and also, frankly, angry. She wanted Caribbean vacations, romantic aimless wanderings around Paris. The way they traveled was luxurious but utilitarian and, she felt, inconsiderate of her and her wishes. They went where he needed to go. When they got there, she was often left alone, unable to speak the language and needing to fend for herself. (Once, in Germany—a country that put her back up anyway, because of all her French cousins who died in the camps—she was being driven around by my father’s aunt’s chauffeur, and he told her, by way of conversation, that he’d begun his career as a driver for Eva Braun.)
It was after she finally sold her house and moved into the condo, eight years after my father’s death, that she began traveling on her own. She did something that she’d always wanted to do, and that my father would have sneered at: she took cruises. He would have thought them hokey, boring, and timid, a thousand passengers sharing a mass delusion that they were traveling when really they were staying in a luxury hotel that happened to troll the world’s oceans, stopping briefly at various shopping streets. In my mother’s cruises, and in her life, years after he died, there was a clear note of defiance of him, as maybe there always is after a marriage ends (no matter how it ends) and once the first shock has passed. A decision to listen to music that the other person would have hated. A gradual diagonal spreading out in the bed at night, arms and legs sprawled across what used to be the other person’s side. A general Damn you, you’re not here anymore so now I’m going to do what I want.
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