Tolstoy and the Purple Chair

by Nina Sankovitch

  Where does desire come from? In the books I was reading, it came from many points of stimulus, both physical and mental. Words stirred ardor, as surely as a hand across a breast. But how to hold on to desire?

  Desire comes from love between two people, and also gives back to the bonds between them. Ardor waxes and wanes, and I could understand Laura Hamilton feeling as if her quota has been met. There are times when I’d rather read a book than jump into bed, and I’d certainly rather read a book a day than have sex every single day for a year. But I also know—and the books I was reading proved me right—that sex strengthens the connections between my husband and me, adding muscle and flexibility and longevity to a union that is based on much more than just a physical need.

  Jack and I are together because we love each other and what we have made out of our love is a place within the world where we are safe—or as safe as we can be. After losing Anne-Marie, I know the limits of security, but I want to be held as tightly as possible within those limits of love and caring. Welcome mat outside the door, a flag against danger and a beacon for life.

  Chapter 15

  The Man in My Dreams

  Here is the old argument . . . “Death is sweet, it delivers us from the fear of death.” Is this not a comfort? No, it is a sophistry. Or rather, proof that it will take more than logic, and rational argument, to defeat death and its terrors.

  JULIAN BARNES,

  Nothing to Be Frightened Of

  IN LATE MAY, THE NORTHERN ALLEY OF TREES IN THE CONSERVATORY Garden in New York City’s Central Park is shadowed by twisting black branches heavy with green leaves. The stone-paved path between benches is littered with fallen apple blossoms, past bloom, and the bordering ivy is thick, rising up the tree trunks like clinging hands desperate for rescue. Under the third tree on the right, the bench dedicated to Anne-Marie waits, inscribed with her name and with the words she spoke to Marvin when together they strolled this alley between trees: “For who can end in despair when there is such beauty in the world?”

  My family meets every year on the anniversary of her death at this bench in the park. This year the date fell on a Tuesday. It was a nice day, warm and sunny. On the train into New York, I read short stories of George Saunders collected in Pastoralia. Saunders’s characters are tortured by how life has not quite panned out for them. They are the unfairly unloved, the hesitant bystanders, or the family caretakers no one cares about. But Saunders’s characters hang in there, certain that eventually life will swing their way. They feel an unwarranted—and admirable—optimism. One of the characters in “Sea Oak” dies before getting the just rewards she was so sure of. And so she comes back from the dead as a decomposing corpse to claim what is hers. She is mad as hell, and she isn’t going to take it anymore: “Some people get everything and I got nothing. Why? Why did that happen?” She may be dead, but she is still kicking. Fiction or possibility?

  I have always hoped for the possibility of some sort of existence after death. When I read the title of Julian Barnes’s memoir of his own struggle with mortality, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, it made sense to me as a genuine statement of fear. Since childhood, it has been the nothingness that comes after death that frightens me. When I was twelve, I had a dream so vivid that I still remember every detail. I’m at home, standing in the raised doorway between our dimly lit one-car garage and the book-lined study. A man stands next to the shelves in front of my father’s chess table. He stands where the wooden-framed dome-shaped chair with the green cushion belongs but that now has somehow disappeared. He is glaring at me with angry eyes, and his mouth is a thin line of hate. He moves toward me. Holding a gun to my head with one hand, he restrains me with the other, preventing me from running away. I feel the gun against the side of my head, and I know then what death will be. A darkness, an eternal void, an ending of all thought. Behind the man are all the books I will never read; in front of me, blankness forever.

  Barnes deals with his own fear of nothingness by becoming a troubled agnostic: “I don’t believe in God, but I miss him.” He wonders if his transformation from atheist to maybe-believer is a function of age (the closer death comes, the better an afterlife looks) or of intellect. He can’t find proof of life after death, but neither can he find disproving evidence.

  I love Barnes’s story about an atheist getting to the gates of heaven after dying and being pretty pissed off about it all: “Watch the Fury of the Resurrected Atheist.” I wouldn’t be angry at all to find pearly gates and endless clouds and the faces of friends and family who’d passed over years before. I know I’d be deliriously relieved and giddy with excitement. I can buy the argument that there are many dimensions we cannot fathom, and that the spirits of those who have died can hover about in those dimensions, appearing as a remembrance or in that déjà vu feeling we are all familiar with. I know my sister comes to me in dreams. I just wish she would come as a perfectly viewed apparition. I wouldn’t scream, I promise. I would grab her, wispy bits of air or not, and hold on.

  Natasha met me by the clock at the center of Grand Central.

  “Do you ever feel as if Anne-Marie is still hovering?” I asked her.

  “Yes, of course,” she answered quickly, and then was silent for a moment before continuing. “I know she’s here when we talk about her.”

  We walked up to the Conservatory Garden in Central Park, entering through the wrought-iron gate at 105th Street. We turned right and entered the northern alley of apple trees, almost past their time of flowering, and found our parents already there, sitting on Anne-Marie’s bench.

  Red roses had been tied onto the bench, and we added our own white roses and a thick bunch of rosemary held by an electric blue ribbon. Rosemary for remembrance.

  “Do you remember when we all came here just after Peter turned one?”

  “Peter in his little plaid pants and jacket. He ran all over the garden, and Anne-Marie followed him everywhere.”

  There is a picture of us from that day, the three sisters. We are sitting on a bench like this one, but in the southern alley of trees. In the photo we are glowing, smiling, holding confidently onto each other as if we had all the time in the world to talk, laugh, and hold on. Now I ask someone passing by to take a photo. He nods, smiling, and snaps the picture. Two sisters remaining, a mother, a father. Red and white roses, deep green branch of rosemary, a slash of blue ribbon: the colors frame us against the black of the bench.

  Was Anne-Marie there with us? Could she be? In the year after Anne-Marie died, I came to this bench in the fall to sit by myself. I looked up to see a raccoon overhead, peaceful and secure, clinging comfortably to the branch above me. That raccoon was either very real or it was an apparition of Anne-Marie, her spirit counseling me. When I came again to the bench a few months later, this time with a friend, I sat down and cried. Suddenly a hard branch came flying out of nowhere and hit me on the head. I looked at my friend.

  “Did you see that? Anne-Marie hit me! She’s telling me to stop crying.”

  My friend nodded, her eyes opened wide. I stopped crying.

  I looked up now, on this fourth anniversary, to see the green leaves filtering out the sun and the last blossoms of faded pink against the blue sky. New life after a long winter. Another message for me. Sent by a spirit or by nature?

  Ghost or not, Anne-Marie still occupies a space in my life. In Grief by Andrew Holleran, the narrator describes grief as being “like Osiris; cut up in parts and thrown into the Nile. It fertilizes in ways we cannot know, the pieces of flesh bleed into every part of our lives, flooding the earth, till eventually Life appears once more.” Osiris, god of the afterlife, offering a rebirth. I think of memories as working that way, of bringing Anne-Marie back before me. No, she is not reborn. And she is probably not a ghost drifting above me, or an angel singing in heaven. But nor is she nothing, and there is not nothing after her death. There are all my recollected moments of time I spent with her.

  Jack and I spent a lot of our weekends ou
t in Bellport with Anne-Marie and Marvin before we had kids. Bellport is a quiet town on the eastern end of Long Island, facing out across the Great South Bay to the dunes of Fire Island. From Anne-Marie’s house, we could hear boat lines jangling in the wind off the bay, and the smell of salty marshes wafted through the house at night on breezes.

  During the summer we went sailing on Marvin’s sailboat or took the town ferry over to Fire Island to play in the ocean. We’d stay on the beach until the last ferry home and then stay up late at night, preparing and eating meals of crab legs, clams, pasta, and tomatoes picked that morning by kids working the local farm stands. After dinner we’d move out to the screened porch with bottles of wine, beer, and scotch, and talk until early in the morning.

  When we visited in the winter, days were spent indoors by a fire, all of us reading books and drinking hot tea, or tramping through the small towns that surrounded Bellport, scouting out tag sales and book sales. One weekend I bought the complete set of Personality Development: A Practical Self-Teaching Course, published in the 1930s. The slim volumes were full of surprisingly wide-ranging advice, like how to pop a blackhead (“Cover the tips of the fingers with clean gauze or linen and press gently to expel the offending material”) and how to choose a book to read (“Be serious, earnest, sincere in your choice of books, and then put your trust in Providence and read with an easy mind”). When I read out loud the section on how to pick up a fallen item with decorum (“Don’t clutch or grab the article but pick it up lightly and gracefully with the fingertips”), Anne-Marie burst out laughing and right away threw a napkin to the floor, allowing me an opportunity to practice.

  I remembered showing up at Anne-Marie’s door the day Gorbachev was overthrown in a coup and Hurricane Bob came hurtling up the Eastern Seaboard. Jack and I were running away from our rented hut on the farthest reaches of Long Island and arrived in Bellport looking for refuge. All was quiet, with no sign of Anne-Marie or Marvin. We called and called for them, and finally I headed upstairs to look.

  Anne-Marie emerged from her bathroom, dripping wet from the shower.

  “A coup? A hurricane? What are you talking about?” Within minutes the power went out, and after waking Marvin, we all went down to huddle in the kitchen.

  The only food in the house was oysters pulled just yesterday from the sea, salty crackers, and day-old bread. There was no milk and no way to make coffee without power.

  “At least we have plenty of champagne,” Anne-Marie offered. So we survived on oysters and champagne and some smelly cheese Anne-Marie dug out of the back of the fridge. We lit candles, made a fire, and had a wonderful day while the wind howled outside. By the next morning electricity cranked through the house, Gorbachev was on his way back to power, and the sun was shining.

  When we started having kids, Jack and I were still invited out to Bellport, despite all the equipment we dragged with us (travel crib, high chair, stroller, bags and bags of diapers, clothes, toys), to say nothing of our loud and boisterous little beasts. The adults still stayed up late drinking and talking out on the porch, but the mornings came much earlier than anyone wanted, especially when punctuated by the noises of little children eager for movement and talk and play. I’d try to hustle the kids out of the house, shushing them all the way, taking them to the world’s coldest diner for breakfast (we took our winter fleeces along to keep warm) and then driving over to the beachside playground. We stayed there until a decent hour had been reached and we could return home to our second breakfast, the blueberry pancakes that Anne-Marie always made for the boys when we visited.

  Anne-Marie used to sit down on the floor with the boys, one at a time. Taking one foot in each of her hands, she would make the feet talk to each other. The feet spoke in little whiny voices, complaining of injustice (“Why do I always have to wear the sock with the hole?”) and arguing back and forth (“You smell!” “No, you smell worse!”). The kids laughed so hard and stuck out their feet, asking for more. And more she would give them, tirelessly.

  In remembering Anne-Marie, I hold a warrant against the worst death has to offer. I laugh when remembering the funny stuff, smile at the thought of all her kindnesses, and I find courage for tomorrow, and for the hereafter. There is no void where there is memory. After I die, someone will remember me and bring me back. Maybe I will be a spirit, floating around in the ether around my kids, goading them on to remember me (she read a book a day for a whole year—what a nut!), but maybe not. And if there is a gunman out there, waiting to cut off my life and keep me away from the books on the shelves, for now I am safe. I have pulled the purple chair in front of him, backed up against his glaring eyes. I am sitting down and reading my fill of books. And remembering. And keeping myself, and the person who was Anne-Marie, alive. I have nothing to be frightened of.

  Chapter 16

  Offering a Better View

  Like today, she remembers, it was so quiet at home, just the two of them with the whole day to themselves, and she was so sure of what she had to do: teach him everything, make him laugh, make him feel that he was safe and watched over.

  RON SUSKIND,

  A Hope in the Unseen

  EARLY IN JUNE, GEORGE HAD A BAND PERFORMANCE. He’d been playing the tuba for months, and I liked the sound of it. His instructor assured me that playing the unwieldy instrument was a sure “in” to college: “Tuba players are rare and necessary,” he told me. I wasn’t thinking about George getting into college yet, and I already knew he was rare and necessary. But I really did like the resonating reach of the deep booms and bahms that came from George’s tuba.

  The concert kicked off a stream of end-of-school-year events. Exams and a prom for Peter; graduations for George and Michael, elementary school and middle school; a beach party for Martin. My kids were growing up. I’d have them home with me this summer, but our days of entwined hours spent together were dwindling. My boys’ lives were spreading out, away from me, and into places where I couldn’t go. Places I wasn’t invited. Places I couldn’t protect them.

  There is a terrifying scene in one of Greg Bottoms’s short stories in Fight Scenes, which I read in early June, where a young boy defaces a photo of himself and leaves it on his mother’s refrigerator. His friend observes that “if a mother had any idea of what her son’s life was like, what his thoughts were like, what he was like, he might kill her by breaking her heart.” I hoped that none of my children had lives or thoughts that would break my heart. I wanted fresh air and happiness for them, and no dark nights or choked thinking. Whatever protection I could offer now came in the values that I’d tried to instill, through sharing and teaching and example. But what had I instilled?

  I have a drawing hanging up in my bedroom that Peter made for me the first summer we lived in Westport. The drawing is titled “Mom Making Dinner,” and it shows me with baby Martin in one arm. He is bawling his head off, with large oval teardrops falling off into space. With my other arm I am reaching helplessly for a salad bowl that is cascading to the floor, all the salad leaves floating around it in a halo of greens. My mouth is wide open in full Edvard Munch Scream mode, and my eyes look a bit wild. But despite the O-shaped mouth and rabies-reminiscent eyes, I look happy. I’m light on my feet, dancing barefoot across the blank white of the page.

  My life for so long was that drawing, mishaps and mayhem and screams but also laughter, togetherness, and light. Lots of light.

  The light still shone for me whenever I looked at my kids, but our moments of building Lego towns and making up new cake recipes (each more sickening than the last) and reading out loud before bed were over. Okay, so we still made Jell-O chocolate pudding as a team: one to stir, one to pour, one to bring to the fridge, one to ladle on the whipped cream before serving, and one to clean up (me). And we still all had dinner together, although it was chicken paillard now instead of nuggets, and my mixed salad managed to make it to the table intact in its bowl.

  All the easy talk that used to happen over dinner had been replac
ed by the boys telling me what they wanted to tell me, when they wanted to. Of course I had never been fully privy to what their thoughts were, but when they were little, they’d prattle on and on about whatever was on their minds. Now I had to rely on whatever words they’d parse out over meals, or resort to more modern forms of expression, like texting and Facebook. Peter allowed me to be his friend on Facebook, but with the threat that if he felt as if I were stalking him, he’d de-friend me.

  “Don’t stalk me, either!” I’d replied.

  “Yeah, right, Mom. Like I’m going to spend my time reading your profile page.”

  No, I knew he wasn’t going to waste his time spying on me. But what was he going to waste his time on? I knew so much about my children, but what terrified me was what I didn’t know. What good examples or advice had I passed on to them? I wondered what had stuck with them, of all the life lessons I’d lobbed their way.

  I know my kids love to read, like I do. When we still lived in New York City, every morning Jack and I walked the boys to PS 9 on the Upper West Side. Then Jack would continue on to the office, and I would head home with George, not yet old enough to go to school. One morning as we were walking, Peter was reading a book and trying to keep up with us at the same time.

  “Peter,” Jack admonished, “you can’t read and walk at the same time.”

  Peter nodded, and we continued on. I noticed after a few minutes that Peter wasn’t with us. I turned around to see him at the end of the block, head in his book. Given the choice of reading or walking—he couldn’t do both—he’d chosen to read.

  I saw in the books I was reading this year both what I hoped for my children, and what I feared for them. In a swirling of voices and scenes, I found guidance not only for my life but for what I wanted in theirs. In The Picts and the Martyrs by Arthur Ransome, I read about a perfect summer spent outdoors, freed from supervision and rules. Ransome wrote twelve Swallows and Amazons books between 1929 and 1947, about the kids from two families, the “Swallows” from the Walker family and the “Amazons” referring to the two Blackett girls. All my English friends read these books when they were kids, and sometimes I think the childhood memories they shared with me were actually taken straight from Ransome’s novels. And why not? The kids in Ransome’s books have great times together.