Out Came the Sun

by Mariel Hemingway

  From the outside, I’m sure it would have looked comical: my stilted expressions of fury, calculated to cause the smallest amount of damage. But it was the first time that I had allowed myself to come out of my shell (mostly) without fear of consequence. I opened up a little bit wider emotionally, even if I didn’t have the experience to turn it toward productive ends.

  The one place it helped, I think, was in parenting. Most of parenting small children had been about task fulfillment: dress, feed, drive. But my daughters were growing up, which meant that they were entering a period when they were feeling their way through new emotions. That meant, in turn, that they needed more from me than a checklist. In my own family, growing up, I had always been the baby sister, a little bit removed from my sisters’ adolescent turmoil, but memories of it started to return to me. When I looked at Langley and especially at Dree, I saw other images superimposed over them: Muffet flouncing around in scarves, Margot getting drunk with boys. My daughters had been babies and then little girls. They had been on the mat with me, playing, or on my lap. Then, suddenly, they were shimmying into skirts that were too short and talking back to me with fire in their eyes. One day, I sat Dree down for a talk. She was twelve, but she was rapidly outpacing herself: she had all the early signs of trouble with boys, with substances, with self-regulation in general. “Look,” I said. “I have a story to tell you about your Aunt Margaux.”

  She had known Margaux only faintly, and only at the end. I went back in history, told her about Margot before there ever was a Margaux. I told her about how people in families felt left out sometimes, and how that could result in disappointment or sadness but also become something more volatile, a kind of uncontrolled fury. “She started to get the idea that all of her value came from outside of herself,” I said. “From how she looked and who she was willing to spend time with, to what she drank and what else she did. She went to extremes to be seen, and they backfired.” I told Dree about her aunt’s death. I used the word “suicide” with her for the first time. I laid it on thick, the way that Margaux would have done.

  By the time I was done, I had scared her a little but softened her a little too. The teenager, temporarily returned to childhood, went up to her room.

  * * *

  IN 1999, there were several programs and events celebrating the centennial of my grandfather’s birth. My dad did most of the interviews and appearances. He held the reins when it came to that kind of thing. I did my part, in one small way: I narrated an episode of A&E’s Biography about my grandfather. It was called “Wrestling with Life.”

  The centennial was bracing. It connected me to my grandfather but also reminded me of the weight of his legacy. I felt more than ever that the rest of us were under scrutiny. We were representing him. I was paranoid about ever seeming foolish in public. I wouldn’t do PR for film projects if it seemed silly. I wouldn’t have a drink when Stephen and I were out. It even kept me in my marriage, in a sense, because it applied pressure for me to keep up appearances.

  The Hemingway centennial brought out all kinds of analysis, from close literary readings of my grandfather’s work to more general commentary on the way America treats its celebrities. There was one strain of discussion that frustrated me, and that was speculation on his state of mind, especially toward the end, as he grew more and more depressed and eventually succumbed to suicide. It’s one thing to be an academic and specialize in literature. Scholars had every right to dissect and explain his works, to situate them alongside F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein and look at the ways in which they informed later masters like Norman Mailer. But the pop psychology was harder to justify. How could anyone imagine that they truly knew the man? How could they wonder aloud about his inner state without a shred of evidence? And yet, questions kept surfacing in the press. Was his depression inseparable from his genius? Had his death been connected to alcohol? To impotence? To a misguided sense of immortality? To simple fear?

  I remembered when I was a child, how I learned about my grandfather’s suicide: slowly, and with a growing sense of how difficult the idea was for people to process. Local priests, for reasons of their own, resisted calling the death a suicide. My father didn’t speak about it very often, and when he did, he used a kind of shorthand with other adults: quick comments, averted eyes. Ernest’s decision couldn’t be completely explained. No one could ever truly know if it was premeditated or the result of a moment of despair or even intentional at all. It was an unanswered question, an open file in a closed case, and because of that people didn’t know quite what to do with it.

  During the centennial celebration, as I revisited those memories, I realized that I was doing the same exact thing to Margaux. I had a working theory about the end of her life, which was that she had become immensely famous for something unsustainable, and that she had never really felt that her fame was earned. The person she had become in the public eye didn’t match how she felt inside, and as that public persona began to fade, she had nothing to fall back on. She didn’t have the habits necessary to reconstruct a sense of self. More to the point, she had habits that made that reconstruction difficult: not just alcohol, not just drugs, but a lifetime of pushing back against the dysfunction of our family, defining herself in large part as someone who produced tension, possibly to distract herself and others from even more painful emotions. And yet, I still couldn’t completely fathom that her confusion and depression had taken her to the point where she had opted for death over life. That didn’t mean it hadn’t happened, only that I couldn’t bring it into focus. As blurry as suicide is for the person driven to the edge of it, or over it, it’s just as blurry for those left behind. Suicide blocks everyone from a clear view, and proximity doesn’t make anything easier.

  In those years, I thought often about how many other families were in the same position that we were—how many other families struggled with the suicides of loved ones, often not even admitting at first that that’s what they were struggling with. The shame of losing a family member or spouse to suicide is sometimes so powerful that it distorts everything around it. And then there is just the broad impossibility of it all: to those of us enmeshed in the daily business of life, struggles and victories both, it’s hard to fathom that we might ever want to remove ourselves permanently from existence. Over the years, I have come to see things more clearly, or at least to recognize that there is rarely any rhyme or reason in suicides. They can be a cry for help gone wrong, or a punishment to those you’re leaving behind, or one fateful twenty-minute window when you lose your bearings and can’t find the reasons to go on. Maybe, at the end, in her bedroom, candles going, Margaux was just a lonely woman who couldn’t do it anymore.

  As I write this chapter, history has furnished one more sad coincidence. Robin Williams, the great movie comedian, has been found dead in his house in Tiburon, California, from a suspected suicide. The news is only days old, and the wheels of speculation are spinning furiously. News outlets are turning over everything he ever said about his depression and his battles with addiction, not to mention more abstract demons. There is a quote that’s circulating, something he said in character in a film: “Suicide is a permanent answer to a temporary problem.” Personally, I think that’s too pat. The truth is scarier, because it reveals something more profound about the ripple effect of suicides, how they leave behind a lifetime of wondering, doubting, and rationalizing, a lifetime of slowly coming to the understanding that there is no definitive understanding, and there never will be. Suicide is a permanent question.

  18

  THE SPACE IN THE ROOM

  “TOMORROW?” I ASKED. “Are you serious?”

  “Yes,” my father said. “The doctors looked at my heart and didn’t like what they saw. There’s enough arterial blockage that they wanted to schedule a triple bypass right away.”

  “But tomorrow?” I was in Los Angeles. He and Angela were in New York, staying at a hotel on the Upper East Side.

  “They didn’t want t
o wait.”

  “I’ll come see you right away,” I said.

  “No need,” my father said. “I’ll just relax and recover, watch football on TV and write. I’ll be fine.”

  “But I won’t be,” I said. “Be there soon.”

  I flew in the day after his procedure and went over to the hospital in the morning. He was there with Angela. He brightened as I came in the room. “Hi, sack of potatoes,” he said. It was my least favorite nickname, but it felt like my favorite. The television was on, a little too loud, showing election coverage. It was Bush versus Gore, with the results still in dispute in Florida. Gore was calling for hand recounts. My father and Angela had become very conservative, and they didn’t like that the outcome of the election was in dispute. I watched with him and tried not to say anything that would set him off.

  After a little while, he shut off the television and told me the story of his surgery. One of his doctors was a distant relative, and my dad had great things to say about him. “More than competent,” he said. “Really understands the whole process, inside and out.” As if summoned, that doctor appeared at the door. He shook hands with my father and told me that they had planned a fishing trip together.

  When his fishing buddy left, my father got quiet. He was looking at me, and then he seemed to be looking at a spot above my head. He looked smaller, and for a second he seemed sad. “You know everything is going to be okay,” he said.

  “I know,” I said. “The doctors told me the surgery went well.”

  “I mean it will all be okay,” he said. He took my hand in his. “Everything will be fine. I had to take care of things. I’m not afraid.”

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” I said. At that moment his heart burst. My hand was in his. My eyes were on his face. He tensed and then slackened. It was as if I could see his soul leave his body. I ran into the hall, yelling for the doctors, but they were already there at the door.

  From that moment forward, my father was no more. The doctors put him on life support. Angela had a hard time letting him go. I sat with him every day and talked to him. The television was usually on, still tracking Gore and Bush, almost a mockery now. I turned thirty-nine with my dad in the hospital in late November, and on December 1, they let him go. Where he had been, there was just a space in the room.

  The doctors were surprised. “He was in pretty good shape for an old man,” one of them told me.

  “Thank you,” I said. A minute later, when he left the room, I felt dizzy. Why had I thanked him? Where was my father? I needed time to think. When my mother had died, when Margaux had died, I had gone walking in Idaho. Now I went walking in New York City. After a little while, I was tired, uncommonly so, and I sat on a bench and tried to cry, the same way I had tried with my mother and with Margaux. But I was older and less interested in the performance of the thing.

  Instead, I stood back up and walked to the corner of Central Park. I looked at the trees and thought about how my father had taught me about nature. He had taught me about its healing power, about its ability to settle the human spirit—we were all so small and so temporary compared to everything that was around us. I thought about how the two of us had walked through the park when I was twelve, when he had come with me on my audition for Lipstick. We had gone past the Alice in Wonderland statue, and he had stood back a bit and watched me be amazed by it. If my mother’s death had seemed almost like an afterthought, an ellipsis trailing away from the sentence of her life, the cancer and the frailty, my father’s death was a hard stop that I could not quite get beyond. It sent me back to other losses. It made me think about Margaux, about my grandfather, about all the people who had been important to all of us and who were no longer on the earth. It hurt in ways that I couldn’t quite explain to myself, and I had to stand at the corner of the park just to remind myself that it was real. It was a little while before I told Muffet.

  My father was buried in the cemetery with the rest of the family. Angela wanted him placed next to Ernest, which meant that he was buried far away from my mother and my sister. There wasn’t much speech-making at his funeral. He would have been the one to do it. Later, I took A Moveable Feast down from the shelf and turned to a passage about when my father was a baby in Paris:

  My wife could go to work at the piano in a cold place and with enough sweaters keep warm playing and come home nurse to Bumby. It was wrong to take a baby to a café in the winter though; even a baby that never cried and watched everything that happened and was never bored. There were no baby-sitters then and Bumby would stay happy in his tall cage bed with his big, wonderful cat named F. Puss. There were people who said that it was dangerous to leave a cat with a baby. The most ignorant and prejudiced said that a cat would suck a baby’s breath and kill him. Others said that a cat would lie on a baby and the cat’s weight would smother him. F. Puss lay beside Bumby in the tall cage bed and watched the door with his big yellow eyes, and would let no one come near him when we were out; and Marie, the femme de ménage, had to be away. There was no need for baby-sitters. F. Puss was the baby-sitter.

  The cat was long gone. The femme de ménage too. And my grandmother who had played the piano in a cold place and my grandfather who had written about it and now my father too, under the earth in Idaho, where he would be forever.

  * * *

  MY FATHER’S DEATH wasn’t a tragedy, not exactly. It was crushingly sad to be there with him in the hospital, both at the moment the doctors rushed into the room and for those weeks when he lay still in bed. But he was an elderly man who had lived a full life. He had survived his wife and one of his daughters. He had remarried and enjoyed his old age. I left Idaho after his funeral with some peace in my heart.

  And yet, there was significant discomfort too, not because I was saying good-bye to my father, but because I was saying hello to a version of myself I wasn’t quite prepared to face. As long as my father was alive, I could tell myself that I had something positive to look forward to: a conversation on the telephone, a visit when I could show him pictures of the kids. I could look through family photo albums and share memories with him. With my father gone, all the memories were suddenly my own, and that meant that I had to try to own the truth of those memories as well.

  What was that truth? In part, it was being clear with myself about the fact that my family had tremendous difficulty expressing straightforward love, especially during my childhood. My parents had both found themselves in a marriage that didn’t suit them, and they had reacted accordingly: my mother by affecting a pose of critical bitterness, my father by retreating into abstracted affection—and, at the same time, by retreating physically into the basement. My parents were so preoccupied by their own problems and the secondary problems that resulted (simmering resentment, compensatory drinking) that they didn’t always have energy for parenting, and what limited energy they had was quickly drained by Muffet’s struggles with her mental health. The result was that Margaux and I, in a sense, were neglected. The situation was complicated all over again by serious health problems, first my father’s heart attack and then my mother’s cancer, both of which put my parents at the center of the family and pushed the children to the margins all over again.

  As I moved through adolescence and into adulthood, I often looked to my parents for protection and guidance, and every time I found them all too willing to leave me exposed. When Woody Allen invited me to Paris, they didn’t object the way I wanted them to. When I decided to move to New York, they didn’t force me to stay and finish high school. The sense of neglect thickened, and the result was that I became preoccupied with forging a new kind of order for myself. I grew obsessed with food issues and body image, conflicted about love and sexuality, compromised in matters of straightforward emotional communication. I was extremely efficient in all things but not necessarily engaged in my own life. Every time I had experienced a major loss—my mother’s death, say, or my sister’s—I wondered why I couldn’t feel simple sadness. And every time I m
ade a major commitment—to a film, to a marriage—I wondered why I couldn’t feel simple joy. Was I angry at my parents? Was I too empathetic to their frustrations? Did I both love and hate the way that my family had shaped me? Finding those emotions was like reaching through a gray curtain.

  When my father died, though, that curtain parted. For the first time, I let myself take in the full sweep of my life—the good and the bad and everything in between—and recognize that every single one of my experiences helped make me who I was. In mourning my father, I began, in real ways, to mourn my sister and my mother, to come to terms with my own limits and choices. When I was a child, I used to press myself against my bed to try to become invisible. I didn’t want to be seen amid all the chaos of my home, and maybe I didn’t want to see it. When my father died, I began to think about how I might tell my own story—first to myself, and then to others—and how telling that story would, for the first time, make myself visible within it.

  19

  THE PAIN IN THE HEAD

  “MY HEAD HURTS,” Stephen said.

  “Did you take aspirin?” I said.

  “Not in my head,” he said. “On it.” He bent down and pointed at his crown. I felt around. There was a tender spot around the size of a nickel. “Weird,” I said. “How long has that been there?”