by Joan Wheelis
Christmas morning was never organized around the habits of children. While my father never said anything about it, I think he felt that Christmas was a good opportunity to offer lessons in restraint. Nothing happened before nine except the mounting restlessness of children. My father presided over breakfast—grinding coffee, making fresh orange juice, heating pastries, cooking bacon, setting the table. At some point my father agreed to opening the stockings as we drank our coffee and then returning to the presents under the tree after breakfast. As an adult, I was typically in charge of the orange juice, squeezing twenty to thirty oranges. When finally we had finished breakfast, then the dishes had to be put away. It was often eleven before we all sat down to open presents.
Given the revered tradition for using beautiful wrapping paper, opening presents became a spectacle of waiting and watching. It was not deemed proper to open more than one present at a time. The card needed to be read out loud as there might be a witty or poetic clue at which to guess. The ribbon and Scotch tape were meticulously taken off the package and then the present opened and passed around for all to see. Not everyone gave allegiance to this ritual. Sometimes the card was overlooked and the paper ripped off, making my mother wince. Discussions about beautiful paper and cards, about the meaningfulness of being together as a family, were common. Those who tended to rip open the packages received inexpensive paper from the five-and-dime with stick-on gift tags the next year.
Christmas morning often extended well into the afternoon because whenever my mother had to go to the kitchen to do something for dinner we had to pause. It was not uncommon that it would be three o’clock before we were done.
With the years came new protests about our rituals. One year my mother said, “If you see the same wrapping paper three years in a row, then it can be thrown away.” Another year it was decided that unless you were a grandchild of my father, you would not receive a present. Attempts to limit presents or the amount of time allowed to open a present were considered. Once an attempt was made to have only stocking gifts so we could have more time to go out for our Christmas walk. I protested all change, liking it just the way it was.
After my mother died, the two boxes of ornaments were shipped from San Francisco to Cambridge in the spring of 2012. Like everything that came from my parents’ home in San Francisco, it was comforting and jarring to see it in my house. Comforting because the things provided shortcuts into memories of my parents and jarring because their existence in my memories belonged to another place and time. I didn’t want to open the boxes. I was afraid I would let the genie out of the bottle, that something would be lost and that the loss would be final. They were shabby and weak. It felt unreal to see the now sixty-year-old box with the logo of the cat carrying the kitten in my living room. The smell of the basement in San Francisco lingered as I opened the box, and an overwhelming sense of time as both flimsy and solid swept over me.
Attentive to the order in which the smaller boxes were packed into them, I begin to unpack the two boxes. Hesitantly. I am by myself. I feel the eyes of my parents watching me as they always did. They are sitting on the couch, their blue silk velvet couch. With each string of lights and each ornament I place upon the tree, I untether it from the past. By the time the boxes of best ornaments are empty and I am climbing a ladder with the angel, I feel that tying her to the top of the tree will complete the transfer, like data from an old computer to a new one. Teetering on the top of the ladder, I tighten the pipe cleaner around the angel’s waist and the highest vertical bough, draping a few inches of lights to dance off the golden figure. I feel warm; as if the combined and vast energy of all the Christmases I had known were passing through me and beyond like the ripples of gravitational waves reaching out from space. I turn to the blue couch. My parents are fading from view, their features blurred as they depart the moment. I climb down from the ladder. I stand back. The tree is beautiful. I feel wistful. And energized. Different from before. I decide to find new boxes for the ornaments and lights. I take a picture of the cat carrying the kitten on the old moving box in case I become nostalgic. I then break down the boxes and carry them outside for recycling. It is a moonless cold night; the sky twinkles with stars, distant and bright, their energy dissipating silently through time and space.
the pin
AMONG MY MOTHER’S LETTERS I FIND A NOTE FROM MY FATHER. Written in the blue-black ink of his fountain pen are the words, in quotes, “A stone, a ——, a door.” In place of the missing word are two holes in the piece of paper. But what is the quote, the missing word? A leaf! That’s it. Thomas Wolfe. Look Homeward, Angel. I am excited by my discovery. But what about the two holes? And then it comes to me. My mother’s secret space behind a wall in her office where things of special value were kept: passports, cash, keys, jewelry, legal papers and her father’s microscope. I remember as a child she showed me a leaf-shaped pin she kept in a blue pouch. She told me that my father had given it to her in Stockbridge. I haven’t seen it in nearly fifty years. I dream about it and then one day I find it as I open a box labeled “Important.” All the things I remember seeing over the years as I stood with my mother peering into her secret cubby . . . And there, the little blue bag with a silver leaf pin. Intact, preserved, tarnished by time out of place. I bring it to my father’s note and slide the clasp through the two little holes. It fits perfectly.
gift
I AM SIXTY YEARS OLD. I LOOK IN THE MIRROR AND I SEE BOTH of my parents. I look into my son’s face and see myself. I unpack boxes of my parents’ books, noting that in almost every book of my father’s there is a picture postcard written to him by my mother or myself. Was that just a bookmark or something he left for me to find when I opened the book? There are still more boxes with letters and journals that will take me on more journeys. I hope I will finish before I die. Before time and memory swallow up my existence.
And then when I am gone, my son will come upon a photo of me taken at our house in San Francisco. I am eight years old. My parents are standing on either side of me. We are all squinting in the sun. I am holding a large toy horse. I have earned it for having conquered my car sickness. I am very happy and proud. He will remember that he has seen the horse in the kitchen of our house in Cambridge. He may even think that his smile looks like mine. Or maybe not.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The following works are quoted within the text of this book:
Wheelis, Allen. 2006. The Way We Are. New York: W. W. Norton.
———. 1999. The Listener. New York: W. W. Norton.
———. 1992. The Life and Death of My Mother. New York: W. W. Norton.
———. 1980. The Scheme of Things. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Copyright © 2019 by Joan Wheelis
All rights reserved
First Edition
From LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL by Thomas Wolfe. Copyright © 1929 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Copyright renewed © 1957 by Edward C. Aswell, Administrator, C.T.A. and/or Fred W. Wolfe. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Wheelis, Joan, author.
Title: The known, the secret, the forgotten : a memoir / Joan Wheelis.
Description: First edition. | New York : W.W. Norton & Company, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018057904 | ISBN 9781324002581 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Wheelis, Joan. | Psychoanalysts—United States—
Biography. | Women psychoanalysts—United States—Biography. |
<
br /> Parent and child—Biography.
Classification: LCC BF109 .W44 2019 | DDC 150.19/5092 [B] —dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018057904
ISBN 9781324002598 (eBook)
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