by Sukey Forbes
I’d already given up on the previously most important man in my life. I’d spent more than half my life worrying about my father, but then, in 1996 or so, about the time when Cabot was born, I reached the point where I said, “I’m done.” After Charlotte’s death, though, he began pressuring me to come visit. I’d lost a child and still had two others to take care of, as well as a husband who was being very difficult. Why couldn’t dear old Dad get on a plane to come see me? But the guilt continued to accumulate, and eventually I relented and bought a ticket for North Carolina.
My father was in his late sixties at the time, but he looked like he was a great deal older. He had spent the last twenty years or so drinking, smoking, and making choices in his life that seemed to me as though he were working to destroy himself. When I arrived for my visit, he could barely walk. He said he wanted me there so that he could see how I was doing, which was endearing, but it felt very much like a command performance and I was exhausted from keeping up appearances.
I stayed for only two nights, and I alternated between being worried about him and resenting having been summoned for a visit.
On the way home, I was boarding the plane and being very careful as I folded my coat and put it in the overhead luggage compartment. It was a green quilted barn coat with two large pockets. These pockets were made for carrying horse treats, but I used one of them for Charlotte’s angel instead. When I got home and emptied my pockets, the angel was nowhere to be found. It must have fallen out on the plane.
I had carried that token every day for three years, planning what I’d wear to ensure that I’d have a pocket to keep it in. I had gone so far as to have a small pocket for it sewn into the lining of my favorite blazer. I would place that glittering reminder on my dresser at night, then in the morning put it back in my pocket. I always wanted it close to my body. And now it was gone. I was devastated.
10
Memory Road
About three years after Charlotte died, I was helping a cousin organize some family papers at her house in Milton when I came upon a lovely painting of William Hathaway Forbes, the father of Donald, the boy who had died of a ruptured appendix on his eighteenth birthday more than a century ago.
I asked my cousin why the portrait was not next to the lovely one of my great-great-grandmother Edith that was clearly its mate and was prominently displayed in her stairway landing. My cousin replied that she did not like the look in William’s eyes because it made her sad. In my case, though, it was the look in his eyes that drew me to the portrait to begin with. I knew that look. I had that look. It was the vacant, “trying to cope, trying to hold your head high and keep bootstrapping along despite indescribable pain” look of a bereaved parent.
I fell in love with William Hathaway Forbes on the day I discovered that painting because I understood him on a whole new level. My cousin told me that if I’d have the canvas restored I could take it to Naushon. It is now featured prominently in the front hall of Mansion House. I look at it every day and it gives me strength.
At the same time, unfortunately, I seemed to be falling out of love with my husband, whose behavior was increasingly bringing back the most difficult memories from my childhood. My father had refused for years to acknowledge his depression or seek any help for it, choosing instead to self-medicate and lay the blame for his problems on others. I had been able to emotionally detach myself from my father—mostly—but Michael and I still had children to raise, and if for that reason alone I wasn’t willing to give up. All I could do was be patient, hope for the best, and get on with living. If only Michael could have said, “I’m in bad shape. I’m really going through hell here, and I need your help.”
To fill the growing void in our marriage, I started taking on more projects, such as redecorating one of the family houses on Naushon, and then putting more energy into my small business—“Antiques and personal adornments . . . with a twist”—which began to take off.
This kind of enterprise has its high-end venues such as the Armory Show in New York, but it also has its down-and-dirty side, where much of the trading between dealers and designers gets done. One of the leading down-and-dirty venues is a kind of antiques “Woodstock” that takes place three times a year in Brimfield, a tiny town in western Massachusetts. I became a regular. In part, Brimfield appealed to my Yankee sensibility of “regifting,” good value, and reuse. But I think I embraced the seediness of it with a special relish as an act of rebellion, like a teenager running away from home.
I also liked the lack of pretension of most of my fellow dealers. I wasn’t the bereaved parent at Brimfield, and I wasn’t Michael’s wife. Here I was just another dealer buying and selling—or “swapping shit,” as my friend Charles likes to say.
It’s a five-day event in which people come from all over the country with tents and trailers and set up a huge outdoor flea market in a series of open fields along Route 20. To transport my gear to and from Brimfield I bought a truck, which I would drive out, unload, then use as a camper. It was like being on the carnival circuit. I met people who had trained at Sotheby’s, but also plenty who drove up from Texas in pickups with gun racks or down from Maine and drank beer for breakfast. Every evening we would sit out together in our lawn chairs and shoot the breeze. This was so not Old Money. It wasn’t even Bright Shiny New Money. It was borderline kitsch, plain and simple, and Michael hated it, which seemed to make me relish it even more.
I also began horseback riding again, which seemed especially important because it was an activity with absolutely no practical utility other than my own enjoyment. There’s a stable at Dana Hall that I had access to as an alum, and once a week Beatrice and I took lessons there. It was fun to be learning alongside my daughter. There’s something very grounding and healing about grooming a horse, then getting on its back and riding. Moving through a round of jumps takes great focus, as well as an intuitive connection with the animal. Hitting the jump just right gives you a fleeting moment of being weightless, of being carried safely through danger, that I found enormously soothing. Something bigger than me was taking care of me. Something with a pulse.
More and more my interests were shifting toward the physical and the elemental. Michael and I took the family out west to visit Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Tetons, and I resumed my annual ski trip with girlfriends that we called Chicks on Sticks. One weekend Cabot and I went to a place in New Hampshire that had an upward-blowing wind tunnel that allowed you to experience the sensations of skydiving, only indoors and just a few feet off the ground. It was the first time he and I had shared a mother-son activity that was just about fun and adventure. We both loved it and learned as equals in the training. I noticed him watching me smile while I was flying in the wind tube, and I saw his face soften. Cabot and I held each other’s gaze and grinned as I tentatively dipped up and down in the tube. I knew he’d been watching both his parents closely. I knew that seeing me move to a more emotionally comfortable place was healing for him.
I had always been encouraged to push the limits a bit when it came to physical risks, with chain saws, axes, and shotguns all basic equipment in my childhood. There was a tiny hunting lodge on one end of Naushon, with no phone, no electricity, and a tiny privy, seven miles from the settled area, where a gang of us would go to spend the night when we were barely ten. “Have fun,” my parents would say. “Watch out for the snapping turtles.” And off we’d go with two hard-boiled eggs and a wedge of cheese for lunch, a can of baked beans, gorp, and apples for dinner. We would use the pump at the Cove to get our water for lunch and boil water from the pond to drink at the lodge. Time had taken some of that carefree spirit away from me, and now I was determined to get it back.
One rite of passage for me growing up a Saltonstall as well as a Forbes was to ski Tuckerman Ravine on Mount Washington, in New Hampshire. It’s a glacial cirque, or caldron—a slope in the shape of a concave amphitheater that’s way too steep for a c
onventional ski lift. I could say that I simply never got around to it as a kid, but in all honesty I was just too scared. In 2008, though, I had been feeling small and fragile, even broken, and I needed the challenge. Tuckerman combined a kind of moral fortitude—overcoming the fear to get yourself up there—and then the physical skill to get yourself back down. This was my way of reclaiming the lost wattage.
My brother and I put together a group that wound up being seven men, all solidly expert skiers, and myself. I made a point of wearing white snow pants and a pink parka in honor of “the eternal feminine,” but also in honor of Charlotte.
It was a glisteningly bright day as we made the climb, with Jamie and our cousin Alexander setting a fast pace as we hiked the several miles up, each of us with our skis and boots strapped to our back. When you get to the right elevation, there’s still more climbing to bring you over to the run, where the descent averages forty degrees, with lots of fifty-five-degree drops, plus cliffs of twenty-five feet or so that you simply have to ski over. Given those conditions, there’s also a very real danger of avalanche, and ten people have died there under piles of snow in the past sixty years.
In my pocket I had Charlotte’s prayer card with the Helen Keller quote: “What we have once enjoyed we can never lose; all that we love deeply becomes a part of us.” I also kept having conversations with her in my head: “Please watch out for us.” By this point in my life, when I prayed, it was exclusively to Charlotte.
I found it reassuring that we had my uncle Jed Williamson along, a professional outdoorsman and the editor of the official record book called Accidents in North American Mountaineering. He’s climbed K2 and Everest and run Outward Bound programs. He was the one who’d set up the full army-regulation-style ropes course in our yard when I was kid, and had us walking on a four-inch-diameter oak log with just a rope around our waist tied to a “safety” line above and our encouraging parents fifteen feet below.
All the way up the mountain Alex and Jamie were laughing about stories from childhood, heckling me that I was a wimp and that it had taken me forty years to do this. Peer pressure had never brought me here as a kid, and now my motives were anything but the feeling of pressure. I was eager to embrace all the family rites, and to create a closer bond.
It was so hot climbing that I’d stripped down to a tank top, but then whenever the sun went behind a cloud the temperature was well below freezing. Part of the way up it started to snow. I’d underestimated how hard it would be just to get up there.
When we stopped to have some food, there were only five other people at the “lunch rocks,” which were strewn with boulders the size of cars. The fact that these had a habit of falling all around indicated that this was not the safest place to sit and eat. I had no appetite, but I knew I was going to need an energy boost to get through the rest of this.
Jed gave us the briefing on what to do in case of avalanche—that is, assuming you have a chance to do anything. Ski to the side; don’t try to outrun it. If you get overtaken, swim. If you get buried, try to form a cavity around your head so you can breathe. Then spit so you can at least tell which way is down and which way is up.
We took lots of pictures, my favorite being me biting my nails on one hand and holding up my Blue Cross Blue Shield card with the other. “Here it is, just in case,” I was saying.
Tuckerman is a big bowl, with Left Gully and Right Gully and the headwall above and between the two for the truly insane. It’s so steep that it curves underneath you, and for long stretches there’s nothing beneath your skis but air. Fortunately, there were too many spring rivulets and the headwall was closed.
We hiked up Right Gully, and then my cousin Alex took a step forward and dropped down to his waist.
“Uh . . . guys?” he said. “My foot is swinging in the breeze down below here. I think we’re on a snowbridge.”
I began to wonder if I’d fully recovered from that death wish I’d been exhibiting a few years back. Certainly I’d lost all fear of dying, and I looked forward to seeing Charlotte again. But now that I was feeling life return to me, I was in no rush.
For a moment we stood poised on the rim of Right Gully, and I was thinking to myself, “I’ve made a terrible mistake.” But there was literally no way out but down, and no way down but to ski. Uncle Jed took off, and then Jamie and Alex. So off I went.
The drop was a blur and a rush of instincts, more euphoric than terrifying. In only a few heartbeats I was down and I was alive and I had done it! This was the first step on my way toward deeper, more thoughtful forms of courage. I would need to tap into those deep reservoirs to face the decisions I had to make, some with implications far more frightening than the prospect of a broken neck.
• • •
That summer, Anne and Harry and their girls came to stay with us on the island. My husband seemed to have checked out. One night at dinner, in the short period before he went upstairs, his anger spilled over, and he managed to insult just about everyone. My sister-in-law took me aside and said, “I want you to know that you’re not imagining this. He is being a complete asshole—to you and everybody else.” Anne and Michael had always been close, with a mutual respect and friendship quite apart from the family relationship. It was because of this closeness, and because she had been so careful with all of our family in our grief (and even before she’d saved Charlotte’s life in North Carolina), that this statement felt like such a lifeline to me. Fearful that I actually deserved his anger, I had not protested enough when it was first directed at me.
My mother also pulled me aside. “Is he being physically abusive?” she asked.
The answer was no, but I was humiliated that our toxicity had been so obvious. I worried about the kids, concerned about the message Michael’s behavior was sending to my son about how to treat women, and to my daughter about what she should be willing to accept.
The next afternoon, Cabot, Beatrice, Michael, and I agreed to meet at the dock, converging from different parts of the island to go for an ice-cream run to Woods Hole. But when I got there, they were gone. Yes, I can be late sometimes, but suddenly there was zero tolerance. Zoom. They’d left me behind. My repeated calls to his cell phone brought no response.
I just sat there—not angry, not outwardly emotional at all. I was simply filled with disgust.
For the next hour I sat in an Adirondack chair by the boathouse, looking out over the water. For the very first time I asked myself, “What do I really want?” Michael had been a wonderful man when I married him, but he was becoming impossible to live with—whether because of his grief, or because of me, or because of something unknown and unknowable. I had to ask: “Am I in or am I out?”
But then I thought again what a terrible disservice it would be to Charlotte for her parents to toss away their relationship. Nobody in the world knew the pain of losing her the way Michael and I did. Our shared sorrow was the ultimate bond. So by the end of that hour I had recommitted to the idea that our shared grief was something that was going to galvanize us rather than pull us apart. I’m his partner, I told myself. I chose him and he chose me, and we’re going to find a way to make this work. It just isn’t going to be on the terms that it’s been in the past.
I was still on the dock when they pulled in. I didn’t want the kids to see me screaming. I wanted them to see me being confident and in control. I tried to be very clear with Michael without giving the kids any inkling of just how upset I was. I simply looked at him and in a very calm voice said, “That was really unkind.” Then I dropped it.
My husband may not have understood my reaction, or the importance of the exchange, but this was a huge turning point for me. I was done with crying and showing weakness to get him to respond from a position of superiority. That was the old road, and I was not on it anymore. The path forward required me to actually acknowledge my own power and independence, my will, the value of my own responses and feelings, a
nd to act on those things.
From that moment on, my high-achieving husband was still my husband, but he was off the pedestal, a shift that upset the basic premise of our relationship. As time went on and the remaining bond continued to unravel, I worked less hard at nurturing what was left. When Michael would sit in stony silence for days on end, communicating only through text messages or spreadsheets, I made no effort to pull him back in. I had given up being the sole caretaker of our emotional connection.
My preoccupation was shifting further away from grief and more toward fashioning a future that would be best for me and my surviving children. I was determined not to let the marriage fail, but I was also determined to stop catering to his every whim. I’d already given all I had to give. To survive, I had to become a neutral country, like Switzerland. We could still make this work, I felt, but he was going to have to meet me at the border.
Yoga had been helping me reconnect with my physical reality, helping me get out of bed each day and see the beauty of the world. Now in my meditations I began to focus on my third eye—the “brow chakra,” or inner eye, that true believers say is the portal through which enlightenment can enter. It’s also a symbol for what one Christian mystic called the “naked and undefended now.” All I knew was that it stood for the merger of intuition and reason, sensory input and reflective intelligence, and I liked the sound of that.
Ever the daughter of a sailing family, I thought of the third eye as a porthole through which I could peek out. Sometimes I would visualize pulling items or people in through the portal to keep them close. Other times I would push emotions or thoughts or people out. Eventually, I would see it as a portal through which I could escape and just keep running.