by Joan Wheelis
All that survived the ravages of war were some of their belongings and my mother to pass along their stories and point out who is smiling in the photo at Lake Bled and the subtle asymmetry of her mother’s eyes, which my son and I share. But my mother couldn’t bring herself to reel in their past. She left it out in deep water on a slack line. She didn’t want to be any closer to her guilt, to the overwhelming trauma and chaos, to the loss. Their legacy lies within me now and in all their letters and journals waiting for my attention. Pages and pages, some over one hundred years old. They will need to be translated. Will I have time to sort it all out before I die? The paper is already fragile, the photographs fading. The weight of more loss pulls at me.
fire 2
I WAKE UP WITH A START, DISORIENTED, TRYING TO FOCUS IN the darkness of early morning and reorient myself to where I am. I have been traveling. Back and forth, Cambridge to San Francisco, to attend to the unwieldy details of my mother’s death and the rippling effects of now being an orphan. The loss of the intangible is vast and I find that I hang on to the things. I don’t want to throw anything away. But I must. And I should. I have so much richness within. So many memories. Layers and layers. But I have become obsessive and ritualistic. I can’t give away my parents’ clothes unless I can give them to someone I know. I can’t alter a stack of letters or photos until I have figured out why they were grouped in that particular way and tied with a silver ribbon. I have boxes of leather-bound classics in German that were part of my grandparents’ library in Vienna. I call the Goethe Institute, the German department at Harvard. No one wants the books. I can’t put them on the street for the recycling truck. My grandparents were picked up off the street in Vienna and sent to their death in Poland. The parallel is upsetting, so the books stay in boxes in my basement. With everything else that has traveled in time though two world wars and then back and forth across America. I fret about these things. I ordered two large fire safes, and before I travel I make sure to lock up the papers that seem most important. I am constantly thinking, if there were a fire in my house, how long would it take for my alarm system to alert the fire station, four blocks away, to send the fire engine to put out the fire? I consider the time of day, the traffic, how the fire might start.
the dove
MY FATHER DIED JUNE 14, 2007, A FEW MONTHS SHY OF HIS ninety-second birthday. He died in a fashion that would have suited his sensibilities. For years before his death he suffered from back pain. He tried any number of painkillers, which worked for a while, intermittently, or not at all. No surgeon wanted to operate because of his age until he developed sciatic pain in addition to the stenosis in his spine. The pain was so excruciating that he required a walker to go even a few steps, and my father was deeply upset with this harbinger of advancing decrepitude. But ultimately he implored the surgeon to reconsider. Whatever he said to the surgeon must have ignited his compassion sufficiently to offset the obvious risk, for he agreed to operate. My father chose to be awake for the surgery. The two-hour procedure was a success and my father was reportedly very pleased to receive the news. He was closed up, rolled over and ready to go to the recovery room when a large blood clot to his lungs took his life. Even with a full code, he could not be brought back. My mother called to tell me while I was dictating a clinical case, the moment indelibly fixed in my mind. A practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst myself, I was sitting in my office in Harvard Square, looking out over the rooftops. When I got off the phone with my mother, I returned to my dictation and then saw a patient. I hadn’t expected him to die for a while and nor had he nor anyone else. My mother had made panna cotta for his welcome home dinner. And he was still seeing patients and had appointments scheduled for the week following his surgery. It didn’t really bother me that I hadn’t said goodbye. It wasn’t necessary. Enough had been said. And what wasn’t said was already known.
Six months after my father died, my husband left. My son, in the throes of an adolescent bid for freedom, was rarely home and, when he was, he had little interest in my company. With all the men in my life gone, I felt bereft without my familiar bearings and daily routines. Letting myself fall asleep was a challenge every night. I crawled into bed reluctantly, as late as possible, settling into a narrow channel on one side of the bed I had shared for twenty years with my husband. I slept up against a life-size stuffed dog. It offered some comfort to be held in place in the big bed. Books and magazines piled up on the other side like a dam. I never wanted to turn out the light. I didn’t want to end the day and I didn’t want to become part of the darkness. Each night fell like a cement wall collapsing, twilight racing into the rubble of blackness. Most nights I fell asleep with a book or newspaper on my chest and the lone shaded lamp arcing out from the wall emanating its light and warmth over me. I didn’t want to invite sleep by turning off the light in preparation. I didn’t want to think or feel or face my dreams. It was less jarring to drift into sleep unwittingly. Even so I would wake frequently in the night with dreams of fire and devastation. And sometimes images of my father’s cold, damp face in death, or the sound of his faint voice. Desperate not to lose contact with the voice, I strained to follow it out of my sleep. Sometimes I sat up in bed like a dolphin leaping out of the water, shouting, “Daddy, wait! Don’t go!” When full consciousness returned and I remembered that my father was dead and my husband gone, I fell back in bed clutching the stuffed dog. My nights awake became longer and longer as I tried to avoid the tormented sleep. I cried every night and my ribs ached from the exertion of sorrow.
One night in April, I woke up at three to something different. The sky, still inky black, was full of sound. Initially I thought it was inside the house and decided it was the copper heating pipes chirping with the first call for heat. The sound, however, did not fit the intermittent clanging expansion of water pipes. It was an orchestra of sound. After a few minutes of lying in bed listening to the curious noise outside, I pulled off the bedcovers and walked to the window. As soon as I had opened the window, it became apparent that the sound belonged to birds. Lots of birds singing in a pitch black night. A smile spread automatically across my cheeks. I hurriedly put on slippers and a coat over my nightgown and went outside. The night was still, and the air cool. I searched in vain to see the birds. I could tell there were many, maybe a hundred, as their sound was so dense. I stood in my garden in disbelief. Why were these birds singing at three in the morning? The thought made me laugh. What was I doing at three in the morning? Spontaneously I called out, “Daddy?” The birds were suddenly quiet. I waited expectantly for a single bird to respond, but within a minute they were all singing again. I returned to my bed. Just as the black night was pulling away from the morning light, the birds stopped singing.
For weeks the birds sang in the night. Always a chorus of chirping. During the day I occasionally asked my neighbors what they thought of the nightly visits of the singing birds, but no one had heard them. In the midst of my sleep-deprived state and my growing doubt about my mental functioning, I wondered if my grasp on reality was slipping away. I never saw the birds or even determined where they were perched when they sang. I never heard them fly away. They provided solace nonetheless, punctuating my fragmented sleep with their playful chatter.
On June 14, 2008, exactly one year after my father died, the birds did not sing. The coincidence was disturbing and I stayed up all night hoping the birds would return. The next night the birds didn’t come either. It made me feel as though I had lost yet something else. I had let myself cater to the fantasy that my father was one of those chipper birds, singing because he was now out of pain. I wanted some signal to tell me that he was still out there. The following night, desperately tired from two sleepless nights, I finally sank into a restful sleep. I awoke at five in the morning, immediately upset that I might have slept through the birds’ visit. I dressed and went outside. Day was just starting to break and the sky was thick in mist. I sat down on the cedar love seat in the garden. It was cold and damp. F
rom nearby came the muted flutter of wings. I struggled to locate it in the mist but couldn’t. There was only silence.
I felt disheartened. I started to rise to go inside, glancing upward. To my surprise, perched on the telephone wire above my head was a lone dove. It was a large bird, its head pulled down as if cold and trying to stay warm. It seemed tired and didn’t move.
“Daddy?”
In the blink of my eye and as a tear dampened my cheek, the dove was gone. Neither the singing birds nor the dove have returned since. But then again, I can now turn off the light.
the office
ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS I DID AFTER MY FATHER DIED WAS to go to his office to get his appointment book so I could contact his patients. My mother sent me with the keys. “Come right back!” she said, reluctant to let me go alone.
The office was peaceful and uncluttered. I sat in his large black leather chair—something I had never done while he was alive—and took in the view as he had known it. The two beautiful Oriental rugs lay on the rich mahogany parquet floor. At the far side of the room stood a wooden desk that he had had built; it spanned the entirety of the wall and had multiple drawers and cabinets with shelves beneath. A large blotter in a leather frame lay at the midpoint of the desk in front of the high-backed office chair. The desk held a pair of black-framed reading glasses, a netsuke of a monkey and a small ruby red cut-glass vase from Austria with two sharpened pencils, a Parker ballpoint pen and a maroon Montblanc fountain pen. A silver and gold dish full of beach stones made by a local jeweler, Victor Reiss, lay atop a small wooden box with multiple drawers. My mother had it made and engraved for their second anniversary in 1957. Above it a small barred window faced the outside steps. It had a straw shade that allowed light in but was opaque from the outside.
From his consulting chair my father could discern who was approaching the front door. He would know by the time of day and the outline of the person and their movement whether it was the garbage man or the deliveryman from Swan Oyster Depot or me coming home from school. Large teak stereo speakers sat on the desk on either side of the window, and a small fine antique Baluchistan rug hung on the wall. A green marble chessboard awaited the next move. A framed copy of Munch’s Dance of Life leaned up against the wall, along with a picture of my mother in 1938 with her parents at a train station. The mahogany-paneled wall behind his consulting chair was bare but for a hanging glass lamp. A few feet in front of him sat the patient’s brown leather chair and ottoman. Sometimes I sat in that chair when my father summoned me down after dinner for a serious talk. The analytic couch was separated from his chair by a Danish teak credenza. On its one shelf sat his stereo receiver along with a photograph of my mother smiling. On top was a black glass paperweight with a design of waves and a moon, the maroon S. T. Dupont fountain pen I had given him a few years before he died, two ballpoint pens (one red), a sharpened pencil, and his current appointment book. I imagined him the night before his surgery. Leaving his office for the last time. Did that thought cross his mind?
To the left of where he sat was a custom-built rosewood bookcase and at eye level an entire shelf of black appointment books lined up chronologically. The shelf below had CDs—the ones he played most often: the Mahler symphonies, Schubert impromptus, Beethoven sonatas. His dictionary, his own books and some of his current or favorite books (On Heroes and Tombs, Under the Volcano, Light Years, The Engineer of Human Souls, A Heart So White) were on the shelf above. Several more shelves above were also full of books. Nietzsche, Popper, Camus. The bookcase ran to the edge of a large three-paned window that looked out over a large planter box with shrubs and trees growing from it. A white filigree curtain let in light and the shadows of the trees and bushes while maintaining privacy from passersby climbing the stairs to the front entrance. Beneath the windows was a low built-in rosewood bookcase; a handblown glass candle holder in the shape of a mermaid, a green ceramic bowl and various other treasures sat on top. Underneath, two bookshelves with The Columbia Encyclopedia, stacks of the TLS and the New York Review of Books. The patient lying on the couch faced a wall of nonfiction books, and the other walls of bookcases contained the fiction all alphabetically organized. At the foot of the couch was a Danish wooden chair upholstered in white leather with a blanket and a patchwork velvet pillow my father’s mother had made for him. One narrow, locked wooden door led to a closet, which held a three-drawer filing cabinet with patient records and other important documents. On either side were his tennis rackets, spare lightbulbs, rags, and padded envelopes for mailing books. A small heater was mounted in the wall.
The air was chilly. I got up and turned on the wall heater as I knew my father always did when he entered the office. I didn’t want to leave. Furtively I unlocked his desk drawer. Any minute my mother would be calling down through the elevator shaft for me to hurry up. My heart was pounding and I felt clammy. I opened the top drawer. There was his worn manila folder of postage stamps, each denomination of stamp separated by a sheet of waxed paper from one cent on up. I remember coming down to his office at night to ask for a stamp and he would take out this folder. “What would you like?”
“It’s a first-class letter.”
He would let me pick—maybe a six-cent stamp of an American bald eagle and a two-cent Cape Hatteras or a six-cent stamp of the landing of the Pilgrims and two one-cent songbirds. I loved to watch his fingers carefully passing the pages so I could see and choose. He always used beautiful stamps, and when I left home for college we each selected stamps for the letters that we sent each other. A love stamp or one of California or just something particularly beautiful. I started to keep my own collection of stamps and would be pleased when I discovered a new special-issue stamp before he did.
My mother called for me from upstairs. Feverishly I took the stamp folder out of the drawer before locking it. And then I returned to his chair and took the maroon-colored pen I had given him. I put them under my sweater. I felt greedy. I was alone in the forbidden office where, until this very moment, I had only visited in my father’s presence. I felt guilty yet entitled to be there. I unlocked the next drawer. In it a large box taped shut and labeled “Private, Do Not Invade. Journals” and beneath it a locked metal box. The gun box. I’d forgotten all about the gun, but seeing the box recalled the story.
When I was five, my father bought a Smith & Wesson Model 19, .357 magnum, with a four-inch barrel, from Abercrombie & Fitch. My mother was very opposed to guns generally, let alone one in the house. She insisted that the dangers of having a gun were far worse than the dangers of not. She was most worried that I would find a loaded gun. But my father decided it made sense to have a gun on hand to protect his family in case of an unforeseen menace. He had a door with a lock and key made for his open-shelved night table. He kept the revolver inside in a gray steel cash box that had a keyed lock as well. Some of the bullets were kept in a box inside the bedside cabinet and some in his desk in his office. I’m sure my father imagined the scene that would lead to his firing the gun and rehearsed it in his mind repeatedly. He wakes up to the sound of glass breaking downstairs as the intruder enters the house. He sits up in bed, reaches for his keys to open the bedside cabinet, then unlocks the cash box, takes out the gun, then the bullets, loads six, stands up, and unlocks the bedroom door. There my father, in his pajamas, faces the marauder and fires. His family is safe, nothing is stolen, and the criminal is shot but not killed. The police arrive, handcuff the intruder, and commend my father for his heroic behavior.
After a few years the gun was moved to a locked drawer in my father’s office. The reason became known only years later when my mother told me that she prevailed on my father to move it out of the bedroom. I can only imagine that she described a different scenario than the one my father had been envisioning. My father wakes up to the sound of breaking glass. Disoriented, he slowly becomes aware that someone is in the house. He sits up, fumbles for his keys. He opens the bedside cabinet, takes the gun box out, fumbles again with th
e small keys to unlock the box. As he takes out the revolver and loads it, the bedroom door is broken down by the criminal, who is unarmed. He sees the gun, grabs it and points it at my father. The practical realities of using the gun eclipsed the notion of the John Wayne hero he might have hoped to be.
The discovery of the journals and the gun rattled me. As I heard my mother coming down in the elevator, I shut the drawer and locked it, replaced the stamp folder in the top drawer, and put the pen back on the teak bureau. I grabbed the appointment book and left. No sooner had I locked the office door than I remembered I had left the heat on. Struggling with the keys, I got back into the office and turned off the heat just as my mother appeared from the elevator. She was agitated.
“What are you doing in there?”
“Nothing.”
“Give me the keys!”
My mother entered the office and looked around. “I don’t like being here. Let’s go. We’ll deal with this office another day.” We never did.
She gave the gun to my half-brother, let me take the pen and told me that the taped box of journals was left to me. She added that I couldn’t take them yet as she might want to read them. The stamps stayed in the drawer, and I was never alone again in the office until after my mother died.
thoughts
From Allen to Ilse
19 April 1997
43rd anniversary
THOUGHTS
I
He thought
I had a treasure
but somehow I lost it
The birds fly north
I’m sad
II
He thought
I had an ordinary thing