by Joan Wheelis
In what used to be their bedroom, the two blue bags sit on an old oak dresser. That the question still exists as to what to do with their remains comforts me. The presence of such opportunity somehow keeps their lives intact. I can imagine taking them back east again and burying them in the Mount Auburn Cemetery where my mother would have more company. But for now they are together in that beautiful place. My father is where he wanted to be: with my mother. I don’t think he is silent and brooding. I imagine they have plenty to talk about.
the log
IN 1990 MY FATHER GAVE MY MOTHER AS A BIRTHDAY PRESENT a one-hundred-page document entitled “PARTNERS, A log of the Journey 1951–.” It begins a few months before my father met my mother. The entries are pithy in outline form:
1951, January—Deeply depressed
July—Ilse arrives in Stockbridge
Some are evocative allusions to their romantic beginnings.
October 7—Sunday I deliver a carton of grapefruit to Ilse who now lives at an apartment on Main Street.
December 30—Sunday The long gray afternoon
One hundred pages of entries: who came to dinner parties, what meetings were attended, doctors’ appointments, comings and goings, births and deaths, annotations on the meaningful and the mundane. My mother showed it to me. Amazed, I asked my father how he could possibly remember all of this. He told me that in his appointment books he wrote such notes down in red ink. Of course he had kept all of these appointment books—thirty-nine of them by 1990. He went through them all and collected his entries and made the log. For my mother, now for me: a reference book to anchor my discoveries of their journey and mine.
the audograph
AFTER MY MOTHER DIED, THERE WAS A DELAY IN FACING THE “dungeon,” as the main storage area of our basement had affectionately been called all my life. The space lay under the kitchen and dining room and abutted the landing where patients either went directly into my father’s office or took the elevator up to my mother’s office on the top floor of our house. Accessible from the kitchen and down a flight of steps, the dungeon was midway down the basement corridor that led to another door through which was the landing. The entrance to the dungeon was two feet off the floor of the basement and had a flat wood door and padlock (which was never locked although always in place). The door opened out 180 degrees when fully extended, but if you didn’t open the door fully, it could slam shut, locking you in with no escape. I suppose this is how the space came to be called the dungeon. The keep of our castle. The enclosed area was four feet high with exposed plumbing pipes. At the far end was a small latticed sash three feet off the floor of the dungeon but six feet above the floor of the landing on the other side. Once between patients my father needed something from the dungeon and accidentally locked himself in. Peering out from behind the sash he called out to my mother’s next patient, who was about to enter the elevator. She was disoriented and confused to hear my father’s voice and then startled to see his face appear from the darkened space above her. As the story was told over the years the patient was then instructed to proceed down the basement hall to release my six-foot-three father from the locked dungeon.
The dungeon was an archeological marvel with its layers of history buried in boxes and bags and suitcases. It was also the place where extra rolls of paper towels, tin foil, toilet paper and boxes of Kleenex were kept (and my mother always forgot that they were there) along with old clothes, books, toys, unwanted gifts, papers and financial records—out of the way of the elegant quarters above but kept here as testimony to the long, rich, full lives of my parents.
One of the first things to be sent to Goodwill after my mother died was my parents’ Audograph, a heavy gray machine that could record and play floppy cobalt blue discs. No sooner had it been removed from the dungeon than I came upon a stack of these discs in envelopes that had been mailed across the country between my parents. I checked the dates, January and February 1954, and knew these likely were love letters sent before my father left Stockbridge for San Francisco to marry my mother. My mother, married to her first husband, Ernest, and living in California, had gone to the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in 1951 to complete her psychiatric residency at the urging of her psychoanalyst, Erik Erikson. My father, married with two small children, was on staff there, having followed his psychoanalyst, Robert Knight, from the Menninger Clinic in Topeka a few years before my mother arrived. Unhappy in their marriages, my parents began an affair soon after my mother arrived in Stockbridge in 1951. They fell in love, but by the time my mother returned to San Francisco two years later, they had said goodbye, having forsaken the idea of being with one another. That was August 1953. In December they attended the psychoanalytic meetings in New York. In my father’s log the entry on December 6 reads, “The decision is made.” They knew then that they could not bear to remain apart.
I called the Goodwill on Clement Street where we had taken the Audograph, but it was a fool’s errand, as they had no idea what I was talking about. “I’m looking for an Audograph, which I brought in last week.”
“Whose autograph?”
“No, Audograph. It’s a heavy gray machine, the precursor to the tape recorder.”
“A tape recorder? We have several.”
“No, it’s not a tape recorder. It’s like a tape recorder but big and heavy. It’s gray and plays cobalt blue vinyl discs.”
“Oh no, we don’t have anything like that. Call the main office.”
Several phone calls later I was no closer to finding my parents’ Audograph and sadly acknowledged the possibility that I might never be able to listen to the blue vinyl discs. I found information online, and upon the suggestion of my sister-in-law I started looking on eBay. Almost two years later, two Audographs were posted for sale: $50 to buy the two and $50 to ship. The machines looked familiar, sending an arrow of memory back from childhood when I made my debut at age three with a recital of “This is the house that Jack built.” I recalled staring at the large gray machine with the white light on, holding the microphone and becoming out of breath as I got to the end of my performance. It seemed a questionable purchase as only one turned on and neither functioned. When I brought them to my friend Bruce, an electrical engineer, he too looked dubiously at the machines. “I’ll do what I can. You’ll need to give me some time though.”
“No problem.”
My mother had died two years before and those discs had sat around for fifty-six years before that. I could wait. In fact, knowing that it was a possibility made me a bit hesitant, even reluctant to listen at all. A friend had commented to me that I should throw them all away—that it was their life, not mine. Then again, they could have thrown it all away themselves or if they couldn’t bear to do that, could have left a note saying “Please do not listen, destroy upon my death.” But neither had done so.
When Bruce called a month later, I expected to hear that his efforts to revive the antique machines had failed. But to my surprise he said, “I just heard your father tell your mother how much he loved her and how he couldn’t wait to see her.”
AND SO BEGAN my journey into my parents’ passionate and tormented love life. Each day I transcribed two new discs—a daily visit with my parents, their voices so familiar—speaking to one another before I was born. They spoke of their great and deep love and desire to have a baby, but also their anxieties and guilt about breaking up two marriages, leaving two children on the opposite coast, getting divorced.
Each of my parents had kept the letters and discs of the other in their office files. My father’s communications to my mother were bound in loose ribbons and placed in unlabeled boxes; my mother’s correspondence to my father was neatly organized in labeled folders. When I opened my father’s file labeled “Letters from Ilse December 1953, January and February 1954,” the first thing I found was a small slip of paper with the words “Audograph machine is in teak cabinet in dungeon.” Was that in case he forgot? Or was he ensuring that I could f
ind the machine and listen to these tapes after he was gone?
I was a much-wanted child and loved deeply by two extraordinary parents. They gave me much in their long lives and then left me with their treasures and secrets: the letters and journals, photographs, official documents and correspondence of my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. Against the odds of a century of time, several continents and oceans, two world wars, divorces and so many moves by boat, rail, plane and car, it is miraculously all with me in my house in Cambridge.
string of all sizes
IT WASN’T UNTIL MY MOTHER DIED ON JANUARY 9, 2012, THAT I went through my father’s office and packed it up. He was meticulous and maintained his papers with unique and impeccable care. When I was a child, he told a story about the discovery of a box of string after the death of a ninety-five-year-old angler. He had a wooden box with six small drawers that sat on his desk. The drawers had labels to indicate the length of string in each drawer: String 24–36 inches, String 18–24 inches, String 12–18 inches, String 6–12 inches. In each drawer there were several pieces of each length of string tied in gasket coils. In addition to a drawer labeled “Tools” that contained several pairs of scissors in different sizes, there was another drawer labeled String Too Short to Use. My father was amused by this story for the obvious parody of his own obsessive tendencies taken to a new extreme.
Outside of his writing, my father was a very private man and all but two drawers in his office were kept locked. My mother also was very private, and after he died, she took the office keys and hid them along with all the other keys that were most important (the key to the safe deposit box at the bank, the skeleton key to the chest of silver). It would be a major event when we would take the house elevator down to his office to find something she needed. The office was always chilly, and I think my mother wanted my presence to steady her anxiety about entering my father’s shrine. As soon as the checks or a health insurance form or the like was located, the drawer would be locked up and the keys returned to their secret hiding place.
When my mother died, I had the keys and access to everything. The known, the secret, the forgotten pieces of string of all sizes.
love
MY FATHER LOVED ME DEEPLY BUT NEVER SAID SO DIRECTLY until I was twenty. It was 1975 and I was a junior at Harvard College and had been sick. My parents returned from France where they had been vacationing to help me navigate abdominal surgery and a brush with cancer. I had multiple postoperative complications and my father stayed for several days after I had returned to my dorm. I was weak but determined to return to my college life. My memories are thin as I felt exhausted, the challenges of each day eroding the strength of memory. I recall that the day before my father left to return to San Francisco, he washed my long hair. Unable to be fully in the shower, I sat on the floor of the bathroom in his hotel room at the Sheraton Commander with my head over the tub. It was a tender moment, almost too intimate. I felt the familiar certainty of the care and attention of my exacting father. The day he left, in suit, tie and hat as always, I felt an aching pain of impending loss. I think he did too. As the cab pulled up on Walker Street outside my dorm, he turned toward me, stretching his long arms around me, pulling my body gently toward him. Without looking at me, he whispered, “I love you very much.”
Without pause I said, “I love you too.” I wanted the moment to stand still as much as I wanted to break away from his embrace. It felt almost too much to take. Typically my father was so silent and his presence so formidable that I often felt fearful that I might upset or, worse, alienate him. I always worried that I had to be careful around him, that any misstep might incur his wrath or his retreat. These thoughts were in my mind as he drove off—this time it was I who stood in the road, waving my long arm as he waved from the back seat of the cab. Within a minute he was out of view.
Three years later I was reminded of this event. It was August of 1978. My father came into my room in our summer house in Puget Sound. He sat down next to me and handed me a large bound book for which he had fashioned a beautiful book cover out of fine Italian wrapping paper. He handed me an unmarked, unsealed envelope. On the outside of the card was a reprint of Claude Monet’s Poplars and on the inside, in the blue-black ink of his gold-capped black Parker fountain pen, he had carefully written:
Dear Joan—
This is the story I have been working on during the last several years, another version of The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. I am not sure it is finished, but it is dedicated to you and already, finished or not, belongs to you.
Love,
Daddy
I felt the same tension as I had three years before—a welcome heaviness holding me in place next to my father, sitting beside me on the edge of my bed, and an imperative to spring up and run out of the house, through the orchard and down to the beach, to release the tension in my body.
The manuscript was entitled The Scheme of Things and on page 2 were the words “For Joan.” Over the next few days I read the manuscript and recognized myself in the character Abby and my father in Abby’s uncle Oliver. The story revealed how my love and reverence for animals and the sanctity of life had surprised and moved my father and how it taught him something about love and attachment. Much of the novel was true and what wasn’t might as well have been. About some things I am no longer sure.
The novel details the story of my much beloved dog, Monty. When he died in 1975, it was but a few months after my own surgery. I was preoccupied with school and romantic interests and was absent from the goings-on at home in San Francisco. A year earlier on a visit home for Christmas, I had noticed that Monty seemed awkward on his feet. He was soon diagnosed with prostate cancer and had to be euthanized a little over a year later. My father and I had always spoken of burying his body at our summer home in Puget Sound, but when it came down to it, my father held him as he died but then left him at the veterinarian’s office. When my parents called to tell me this news, I immediately said, “What did you do with his body?” My father, overcome with emotion, got off the phone and my mother whispered from the other extension, “Your father is very upset. Don’t talk about it.” And I didn’t. Not then nor for many years after. And when I thought about that phone call, it made me feel acutely guilty. The following summer in Puget Sound we found a piece of driftwood that bore some resemblance to Monty’s physical form and we mounted his name and the years of his life, 1963–1975, upon it with slender brass numbers and letters. No longer recognizable as a dog, the wood is still there, slowly decomposing, and the brass letters and numbers are falling away.
In the novel my father tells the story of how Oliver feels accused by Abby. Wracked by guilt for having left their beloved dog, Barney, at the vet, he becomes obsessed with finding the body and ends up at the city dump, digging day after day in vain. His colleagues worry about his mental health. A year later, Oliver finally finds the remains of Barney. When I read this, I felt my heart pounding in a combination of anxiety, incredulity, guilt and dread. Had my father actually done that? Did I drive him to it? Driving to the local landfill and digging for a dead dog? I was away at college. He might have. The question haunted me.
It took almost a year for me to ask. I had graduated college and was living in Berkeley, California, visiting my parents on a Sunday afternoon. My father was sitting with my mother in her office. He was reading Galway Kinnell’s Book of Nightmares, and my mother was going through her mail. When my mother stepped out of the office to make us tea, I felt a sudden need to know the truth.
“Daddy, I need to ask you something.”
“Yes?” he said, peering inquisitively at me over his reading glasses.
“Did you actually go to the dump to look for Monty?” I felt faint as if any moment my legs might give out beneath me. I wanted to know and I dreaded the answer.
My father took off his reading glasses altogether, and with a bemused yet ever so slight look of critical disbelief he replied, “Of course not, sweetie!”
I blushed and turned away. I felt embarrassed and relieved. Reassured and freed of the guilt that I had felt, I then reread the ending of the novel. Oliver has taken the remains of Barney to Puget Sound and dug a grave. He says:
“Well Barney what can I say to you? Abby is far away. When, as a little girl, she would speak on such an occasion I would stand by and listen. I would listen as an adult, sympathetic to an expression of feeling, which, though heartfelt, I considered childish and sentimental. I was present not to learn but to comfort. I had no sense that she was speaking for me. But she was. She was putting into words something I was learning to feel. So as she has at such ceremonies spoken for me, now in her absence I speak to you for her.
“ . . . You’re home and it’s time to say good-by. From here we go separate ways. You are going down in the earth, there from to become part of the ongoing waves of life. What will happen to your spirit—to that devotion, that radiance in your brown eyes, to that way you had of racing into the wind on a white beach, of leaping high in the air—I don’t know. But so long as Abby and I live, all that is safe will live with us.” (pp. 191–192)
It made me cry, as it still does each time I go back to it. His words, witness to his deep love, echo back through time, erasing any doubt I ever had.
goodbyes
THE ACCUMULATED EXPERIENCE OF DEPARTURES FROM MY parents is deeply etched in my mind—lugubrious and poignant, agonizing and tender.
My mother rarely went to the airport to see me off but liked to spend time with me and my father before I left the house. Sometimes my departure would result in her giving me some cash or a gift—something important to her from her home in Vienna that she kept in a secret cubbyhole in her office. She prepared a bag of smoked salmon or prosciutto sandwiches, fruit and Florentines from Fantasia bakery for me to take on the flight. My father sat in the leather chair in my room with a book or newspaper and kept me company while I packed. Frequently my flights were at night and my mother cooked a dinner for us, which we ate in the kitchen. Long before I had to leave, she would start worrying that I would be late. When finally we had to go, my mother hugged me tightly with both anxiety and resignation. She had left Vienna in 1938. She left both parents behind. It was clear that she worried each time I left that she might never see me again, like her parents.