Hamlet’s Dilemma
Linda Grant
I dreamed again last night. It’s getting clearer, I think. I can see my father’s face down to the small dark mole just above the jawline a bit to the right of his left ear. My sister’s face is less clear, but I know now that is not just a memory from an old photo. I’ve been through the albums. The image from my dreams is not in any of them.
The action never changes, even if the images become sharper. I see more, notice details better. It’s like a home movie—the visual quality improved by a stronger projection bulb, but the progression of shadowy images unchanged. They struggle. She is above him, standing on something that gives her height. Her body is slight; his is massive. Her mouth is open, screaming words I cannot hear. Then suddenly she flies backward, up and away, her eyes wide with fright.
My dilemma is this—is it just a dream my warped psyche has manufactured and is now rerunning for its own satisfaction, or is it a memory of a real event? I believe my father is perfectly capable of the acts I see each night. But that does not mean he committed them.
You’re thinking I’m talking about repressed memory, the current psychofad. That I’m just another hysterical woman seeking restitution for perceived misdeeds from the past. Or that I’m a victim. Well, I’m neither. I simply want to know what happened and I want justice. Not the warm, fuzzy comfort of public confession à la Oprah or Donahue. Nor the nasty confrontational catharsis of Ricki Lake or Jenny Jones. Justice. The assessment of guilt and where it is found, punishment.
Some family background is in order here. My name is Andrea Wilkes. My father is James Wilkes, chairman of the comparative literature department at a prestigious liberal arts college in the eastern United States (names have been changed or omitted to protect the innocent—and the guilty). My mother, Sara Wilkes, is a faculty wife, which is to say that she has no role in the community other than as my father’s spouse. I had an older sister. Her name was Alyson, Aly for short. She died in an accident when I was four years old.
No one talks about the accident, so it’s been hard to find out what happened. For many years I was told that she’d fallen from the balcony of our house and that the fall had killed her. Then when I was in junior high, Brian Rigby, a nasty kid with red hair, too many teeth, and a compulsion to sneak into the girls’ bathroom, suggested that she had died “of drugs.” Confronted with this accusation, my mother admitted that Aly had indeed experimented with drugs and that her fall had occurred while she was high. “She thought she could fly,” Mother said, “so she jumped off the balcony on the third floor.”
I heard the story many times as I grew older, along with the injunction to stay away from drugs, alcohol, “the wrong kind of people,” and everything else that promised to be fun or exciting. I had a very dull adolescence.
My books were my escape. And the means of capturing the thing I craved the most—my father’s attention. Never particularly interested in me, he could always be seduced into a discussion of the book I was reading. I became cunning in framing questions to catch his fancy, in proposing arguments he couldn’t resist. As a child I presented them to him shyly, as one might offer a handpicked bouquet; in adolescence, I hurled them at him in a theatrical show of defiance. Today, I present them coolly, over lunch at the faculty club or Sunday dinner at home.
I often ask myself why I am still here, living only a few miles from my parents, teaching English in the high school I attended. I could go elsewhere, live in a big city where I could be someone other than James Wilkes’s daughter. But I stay. I understand why the idea of flight might have tempted my sister to her death. But my wings were clipped before I learned to use them.
My father is not a violent man. He has never struck me, and I never saw him strike my mother. But I sensed her fear when he withdrew into his study with a bottle and his books and refused to come out or even to speak to us. I have seen flashes of the deep anger he keeps hidden from others. He could kill; I believe that.
But I also know that I have thirty years of resentment to feed my dream. Thirty years of rejection, of offering him my best and seeing it judged not quite good enough. Thirty years of staring at the closed door to his study and longing to be allowed inside. Just as he is capable of killing, I am capable of creating this dream in which he kills.
Having always been a bookworm, I am poorly suited for the job of ferreting out secrets. I find the people in novels much more interesting than those I meet on the street. Real life has always seemed rather pedestrian. I’d rather read about the evil machinations of a Professor Moriarty than the senseless slaughter of drive-by shootings. And I would far rather follow the investigations of V.I. Warshawski or Sharon McCone than explore my sister’s death.
But my sister cannot claim justice for herself and the law long ago accepted the explanation of a drug-induced accident, so it is left to me to test the accusations of my dream.
I begin where I think a detective would begin, with the newspaper articles about my sister’s death. In a larger city, the back issues would be on microfiche, but here the papers themselves are bound and stored in a small back room where they share space with office supplies and an ancient snow shovel.
Margaret Perkins, the business manager and office staff of the paper, guards the front desk with Cerberus-like ferocity. She is an ageless woman whose wrinkles deepen each year while her hair becomes blacker. I try not to stammer as I make my request.
She does not approve, that much is clear, but she finally allows me entrance to the back room. I realize too late that in coming here I have announced my investigation to the entire town.
The air in the room is stale. The cloying peppermint of disinfectant mingles with the smell of dust and old paper. There is no chair, so I sit on a box of copy paper while I begin my search.
The story is on page one but below the fold, in the right-hand corner. GIRL DIES IN FALL FROM BALCONY, the headline reads. Above it, a one-column picture of Alyson. Her school picture, the one that sits on the end table beside the couch in my parents’ living room.
Her hair is long and straight, dark like mine. Her face is an oval, again like mine. As I was growing up, people frequently commented on my resemblance to her. But her smile is broader, her lips fuller and more sensuous. There is a mocking self-assuredness to it that I could never manage.
The story is testimony to the now-dead convention of journalistic restraint, and to my father’s power in the community. There is no mention of drugs, of a troubled adolescence, no question of how or why a sixteen-year-old would climb onto the rail of a third-story balcony. Several teachers comment on how bright she was, the drama teacher extols her acting ability. The part about her love of acting is new to me. Everything else is old news. I write down the names of the teachers, though I know none are still at the school.
If anyone knows what happened to Aly, it would be my aunt Hannah. She is my father’s older sister and my mother’s confidante. She lives in a nearby township, about twenty miles away. The problem is that Hannah adores my father. She would never speak ill of him, even to me.
I go to her immediately, before news of my visit to the paper can reach her. She answers her door wearing a deep rose pants suit and floral print blouse. She is several inches taller than my five feet four, a substantial woman with breasts that jut out aggressively. Like my father, she has a face that is handsome but stern.
She invites me into a meticulously tidy living room furnished with antiques she has collected for many years. I confront my father’s picture on the mantel, in a double frame he shares with me.
I must be devious, which is not my way. She will never tell me what I need to know if I am too direct. So I begin not with Aly but with my grandmother. “Why did they move from Boston?” I ask, knowing that just as my father can always be seduced into discussions of books, Hannah cannot resist retelling stories of the family.
She slips easily into storytelling mode, a bit of the sternness of her face relaxing as she ta
lks. She brings out the albums as I knew she would. Then it is an easy matter to flip through them, asking occasional questions, until I reach Aly’s baby pictures.
“What was she like?” I ask. “What did she do as a child?”
“Oh, she was smart, just like you,” she says. “A very clever child. Learned to read early, played the piano like an angel. A bit of a tomboy though. Always had scabs on her knees and elbows. Used to sneak into the Barneses’ pasture and ride their gray gelding. I don’t know how many times they chased her off. She just loved that horse; couldn’t stay away from him.”
She smiles with pleasure. The young Aly is still a happy memory.
“When did she change?” I ask, and in the back of my mind an awful thought forms. Last month at the faculty meeting a social worker lectured on sexual abuse. I remember her saying that you should pay attention to changes in a child’s temperament. Aly had changed. Everyone attributed it to drugs. Now I wonder if the drugs might have been a result instead of a cause.
Hannah’s smile is gone; her face is sadder than I remember seeing it. “She had a hard time with adolescence,” she says. “Some children do. And things were so crazy then. Drugs were everywhere. The students looked like hoboes and they took over buildings, threw rocks at the police. The young were so angry. It was a bad time.”
“Was Aly angry?”
“Oh my, yes. She was angry about the war, about the rules at school, about her family. She was a very angry young woman.” She pauses. “But not at you. At everyone but you. She really loved you.”
I know that. I have been told many times how much Aly loved me. That she was my protector and champion. I’ve heard the story of how she chased off the Bryants’ big shepherd when it frightened me and badgered Derek Bryant until he kept it on a chain. In lonely moments, and there have been many of them, I fantasize about how it might have been different if she’d lived.
“Why did she climb up on that railing?” I ask.
Hannah shakes her head. “Who knows what was in the child’s head,” she says. “She may have thought she could fly. She may have just lost her balance. But let’s talk of happier things. Would you like some lemonade?”
I accept her offer and let her think she’s distracted me, but later, after lemonade and more stories of more dead relatives, I come back to Aly.
“Did they test to see if she had drugs in her system?” I ask.
Hannah’s expression sharpens, her shoulders straighten as tension creeps into her posture. “Why all the questions about Aly?” she asks. “You know all this.”
A clever detective would have a story ready, an excuse to ward off suspicion. I have nothing. “I’ve just been thinking of her lately, that’s all. Trying to understand her death.”
“Let it go,” she orders. “No point in poking at old wounds. Well never know what went on in her head. You’ll just upset yourself thinking about it.”
I leave twenty minutes later, knowing nothing more than when I arrived. No, that is not quite true. I know that Hannah is uncomfortable discussing Aly’s death. She does not hesitate to speculate on the parentage of cousin Clara’s bastard child, enjoys repeating the tale of how her uncle shot the grocer in an argument over a gambling debt. Aly’s death seems the only subject she will not discuss.
I fill my evening grading papers, mostly quizzes on the first half of Hamlet The play has new resonance for me this year. I have always been fascinated by the ghost. Now, with my dream, I have a ghost of my own. And like Hamlet, I am tormented by its accusations.
Each time I teach the play I explain that Hamlet cannot know whether his father’s ghost is real or a fabrication of the devil. If real, he must obey it for both his father’s sake and his own, but if the ghost is from the devil, killing his uncle will damn him to hell for eternity.
I place them on the scale—duty to father and Hamlet’s immortal soul. But the students are unable to weigh them, because for them the concept of an immortal soul is fuzzy at best. They understand the thirst for vengeance, the need to redeem the family honor, to fulfill a dead father’s last request. But the concept of the soul and Hamlet’s responsibility for it, that eludes them.
Even Joel, the son of a fundamentalist father who’s involved the boy in his own fanatical crusade against abortion, cannot understand Hamlet’s dilemma. Joel accepts the existence of an immortal soul, the battle of good and evil, but for him truth is “revealed.” That Hamlet cannot know whether the ghost comes from heaven or hell is incomprehensible to this child of a true believer.
I am jealous of Hamlet. Of his fixed moral universe. His belief in an immortal soul and ultimate justice. I was born on the empty plain of twentieth-century agnosticism, where faith is unsheltered from the harsh glare of reason. With no hope of justice beyond the grave, I would give anything to have an immortal soul to risk.
The next day I visit Elise Winters, the woman who was secretary of the English department for thirty-five years until her retirement eighteen months ago. I have never liked Elise. She is a woman with no boundaries, no sense of the spaces between people. She will ask anything and expect an answer. Usually, she gets it. Which is what makes her so useful now.
I come at four, after school is out. By now she will know of my visit to The Sentinel. She and Margaret Perkins are friends, two crows on the same phone wire. I have created the excuse of asking her to help judge a poetry contest for my class, but she begins her interrogation before I offer a reason for my visit.
“Margaret said you were at the paper yesterday,” she says. “What was it you were looking for?”
“I wanted to know more about my sister’s death.”
Her eyes are bright with curiosity. “An awful thing,” she says, but her avid expression does not match her words. “I always wondered myself.”
“What did you wonder?” I ask.
“Oh, how it happened. Why. There were rumors she was taking drugs. So many of the youngsters were then.”
“And you think that’s what happened, that she was taking drugs?”
She gives an elaborate shrug. “Well, well never know,” she says. “Your father wouldn’t let them do an autopsy. I was a bit surprised they didn’t insist, but I suppose Sheriff Curtis didn’t want any trouble with the college. There was enough town-gown tension in those days what with the demonstrations and all, and nobody wanted to make it worse.”
“Surely you had some idea about it,” I said. “You’ve always known everything that was going on.”
I’m afraid she’ll be insulted, but she smiles proudly. In my mind, I see the crow again with its quick, hungry eyes and sharp beak.
“Well, there were some who suggested it might be suicide,” she says. She lowers her voice as she says it, though we are alone in the room. “Marge saw her coming out of the clinic, the one that does pregnancy tests. She said Aly looked upset.”
“She was pregnant?” I say.
Elise shrugs. “I didn’t say that,” she says, “I’m just telling you what the talk was at the time. And since they didn’t do the autopsy, there’s no way to know. Come to think of it, Aly and the Curtis boy were part of the same group. That might be another reason the sheriff didn’t push about the autopsy.”
I look around me to escape her sharp eyes. The room is filled with things—armies of porcelain figurines, an entire shelf of owls who stare at me with jeweled eyes, fading photos dwarfed by their ornate frames. I feel surrounded. The air is heavy with Elise’s poisonous suggestions, and suddenly I find it hard to get enough oxygen. I know she can hear the fear in my voice as I leave. She smiles at me from the doorway as I flee down her sidewalk.
Tonight I am grateful for the stack of papers that permits me a kind of escape. My fifth-period class is ahead of the others. They have just finished the graveyard scene with Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” soliloquy. That speech has always been a favorite of mine, but today as we read the words in class, they cut like knives.
The boys are impatient with Prin
ce Hamlet. Raised on action-adventure flicks where justice is meted out with an Uzi at a moment’s notice, they want resolution. “What’s this fool’s problem?” Richard asks. Tony announces he’d have taken out the uncle in Act I. He believes in swift action. His brother killed a seventeen-year-old who “dissed” him in front of his girlfriend. “He had to do it,” Tony says. “Can’t be lettin’ no one get away with that kinda shit.”
I don’t understand Tony’s brother; he doesn’t understand Hamlet. I wonder what Tony would do about my dreams.
At seven-thirty, the doorbell rings. It’s my mother. She’s brought me tomatoes and zucchini from her garden, but the real purpose of her visit is to learn why I’m asking questions about Aly’s death.
She is gentle and consoling, and she is hurt that I didn’t come to her first. I can feel her pain and confusion. Have always been able to feel it. She kept me so close, during my growing up that I often felt separated from her by only the thinnest membrane.
I ask my questions, listening not to the words of her answers, but rather for the subtext, for the subtle tones beneath. For years I have hidden behind the protective boundary I erected between us, now I tear away at it. Will myself to feel what she is feeling. I become a human polygraph.
But boundaries built over years do not tumble so easily. I’ve lost the ability to merge with her. Still, I know one thing. She is frightened by my questions.
Over the next month I assemble bits of information. Nothing conclusive. Much that piques my suspicious mind. I learn that the father I always knew as cold and distant was warm and playful with Aly. The albums confirm it: pictures of him pushing her in swings, her riding on his back. She sits on his lap in the early ones. Later they wrap long arms around each other.
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