Hold Still

by Sally Mann

  Went to see Ace in the afternoon: that black scoundrel of a dog is the most beautiful specimen of caninity I have ever seen… we were both overjoyed!…

  Next morning (9th) received train and ship tickets. Went back out to see Ace.

  “Overjoyed!” A hot word from my cool father.

  Proust’s narrator recounts how the family’s cook, Françoise, exhibited a calculated cruelty toward those working under her in the Combray household while lavishing pity on the suffering of distant humanity—a pity which, the young narrator mordantly observes, would increase in direct proportion to the distance that separated the sufferers from herself. This kind of telescopic compassion is not an uncommon phenomenon, and has a close relative in the kindness one sees displayed toward pampered urban household pets, even as, a stone’s throw away, homeless people sleep on benches.

  Loving dogs seems to have been my father’s telescopic way of getting around to loving us. In a certain sense, you can make the argument that it is pure and easy selfishness to love those most immediate to us—spouses, children, family—and that, by increasing the radius of our affections one dimension (in Daddy’s case to his patients) or one species (his dogs) beyond the family circle, he was admirably stretching his love limits, which were, it is generally agreed, rather inelastic.

  There’s no question that he loved his mother and his dogs, but for us in his family, the abiding and soul-niggling question was: did he love his wife? His brother? His children?

  One of his children, my brother Chris, has often wondered that and remembers, as do I, being cruelly teased by our father. In a letter Chris sent me, long after Daddy’s death, he quoted a few lines from Graham Greene: “Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.” To which Chris added: “We—us boys—were never taught that we could love and be loved or how to do it. We felt only the need. The son of a bitch.”

  I know what he means but I also know for a calcified fact that the man loved me (and the rest of his family). If you have any reason to doubt this, refer to Exhibit A at the end of this book, the simplest among several clever, labor-of-love letters he wrote me over the years; and to further dispel any lingering doubts, take a stab at Exhibit B. Then tell me he didn’t love me (or, here’s a late-breaking thought: perhaps he wanted me to love him?).

  I was the longed-for baby daughter who came along nine years after the first son, Bob, and seven years after Chris. I came at a good time in my parents’ lives, postwar (1951), with the medical practice established, and Boxerwood just finished, so named, of course, for the dozen or so boxer dogs my father had at that time.

  All the same, I understand Chris’s sentiments. Despite being in the birth-order and gender catbird seat, I felt very little emotional or affectionate love from either of my parents. We were not a family that touched, and there was little kissing; maybe a peck once I was tucked in bed. I don’t think I ever heard the words “I love you” from any member of my family, but I don’t recall missing them, either. Looking back on it, they would have seemed superfluous, even suspect.

  But during one particularly emotional period in my life I felt that those words needed to be spoken, even if the sands were running out for the one to whom I wanted to say them. It was 1987. My father had been diagnosed with a malignant meningioma and was sick and weak from radiation. I steeled myself for the visit the night before, and in the morning I resolutely buckled myself into the car and drove to Boxerwood. Going in though the kitchen, I falsettoed a fakey “yoo-hoo,” which he either didn’t hear or pretended not to, and then I worked my way toward his study.

  Daddy was there alone, going through his files (for a final time, as it turned out) and puttering about distractedly. Even sick, he stood with the posture of a powerful man who had never gone to fat. When he used to work shirtless in his gardens, he reminded me of the barrel-chested older Picasso I had seen in pictures. Now Daddy was in his maroon wool Brooks Brothers bathrobe, thin and moth-eaten in places, the same robe that clothed his body when it was shoved into the crematorium and which I would willingly march back through all the crowded years to roll him out of, if only I could have it.

  His back was toward me, and, although I am sure I did not proceed in this manner, I retrospectively envision myself as an exaggerated cartoon cat-burglar, tiiiiippy-toeing toward my quarry, my anticipatory forefinger dangling before me.

  The forefinger did in fact tap the maroon bathrobe, and its startled occupant turned toward me. His surprised expression suggested that, indeed, I was that predatory, black-goggled cartoon character, which didn’t help the real me in blurting out the impossible four words I had rehearsed for the past twenty-four hours: “Daddy, I love you.”

  The surprised look passed from his unshaven face and it softened, almost in pity. He hesitated, then reached out and patted me on the shoulder and said, as if consoling a weeping patient, “There, there.”

  Even without overt demonstrations or verbal expressions of love from my father, I still believe there was love, of the deepest kind, in everything he did. I, like all who knew him, remember the sincere love he felt for his land and of course his dogs, but also for the practice of medicine and his patients. The thing that accounted for his cool remove, his air of solipsistic distraction, was, as my mother so trenchantly wrote, that he reserved his love hierarchically “for Ideas, for Art and then for People… and very much in that order.”

  “People” did not necessarily mean those in their limited social circle, but for sure it meant his patients. They knew he cared for them, and they were right. Hardly a night of my youth went by when I didn’t hear the phone ring and my father stir in the bed that two sheets of drywall separated from mine (which raises some questions: what did I hear of their lovemaking? I remember nothing… or was there none?). He would reach over to the telephone’s black Bakelite handle rubbed smooth by many a nighttime grasp, then there would be a brief murmur, more stirring, my mother’s querulous voice, and before long the sound of a car engine clattering to life and heading out. Often he’d drive for miles and miles to address a problem as insignificant as a week-old hangnail or as momentous as a footling breech, and would return haggard and unshaven for breakfast.

  Daddy somewhat resembled Dr. Ernest Guy Ceriani of W. Eugene Smith’s famous “Country Doctor” photo essay and often had that same look of haunted exhaustion.

  Like Dr. Ceriani’s patients, Daddy’s were the poorest in the rural county where we lived. Once the war was over (Daddy was the designated wartime doctor in Rockbridge County during World War II) and he had the time to take some pictures, he occasionally stopped by their homes with his Leica and, later, his large-format Linhof, to make their portraits—arguably an ethically compromised and problematic thing to do, but his sensitivity to the issue seems undeniable.

  In the attic are several large envelopes of letters from patients that attest to the fact that he loved them and they loved him back. Where he would not show his own family the slightest bit of concern for any illness with a fever under 103 degrees, he would lavish attention on patients with a litany of specious complaints as long as your arm.

  An especially neurasthenic patient wrote my father this letter, probably in the mid-1940s. She was thirty-two years old.

  I get blind and drunk and sick and some days stay that way all day and if I don’t vomit I nearly die. and nearly everything I eat makes gas on my stomach I have the indegestion sometimes until I get so weak and nervous I don’t know where i’m at. and other times when I eat it don’t make me sick at all but it seems like what I eat won’t stay down I have to throw it back up and if I eat one bite to much it gives me the indegestion. I have to make water ever little while and it just burns me until I get so sore that nothing does me any good but washing in cold water. and I itchis so bad to, Is a place on me below just hurts like a beating some times it burns and hurts like a raw sore and other times it just thumps and hur
ts. and if I stoop on a walk much it hurts worse. I get sore across the lower part of my stomach. and feel so full by times like I am swelled. around my waiste and up my back by times feels like it is dead. I have the whites night bad to. by times I get numb all over and so hot. by times I just ache and hurt all over espacilly my breast and between my sholders. also take the sick headache. have the nearalgia in my teeth and jaws. the least little thing just worries me nearly to death and I can’t Keep from crying. my womb was inflammed about nine or ten years ago and I have been nervous ever sence. I stay so tired I don’t care what I move or not and can’t sleep at night. I get so weak down below it feels like ever thing in me is coming out, I stay blind and light headed…

  He had a high proportion of female patients, or at least it seemed so to me. I think he showed them exceptional respect and was known for spending an unusual amount of time, even back then when an average appointment was a full thirty minutes, really listening to what they were saying. You can be sure this concerned mother heard back from him after he received this letter:

  My father’s acceptance of human frailty and his tolerance and patience in his medical practice were almost godlike, or so it appeared to us, as we watched him dozens of times uncomplainingly lay down his linen napkin before taking even the first bite of a long-awaited holiday feast and gather up his medical bag to head to the OB floor for the night—and this without ever a disparaging comment or a rueful sigh.

  But, all the same, I doubt it would surprise his patients to know that, yes, he just plain lost it one time.

  It was the summer before his retirement on his sixty-fifth birthday, November 22, 1976, probably sometime around the bicentennial celebrations in July. As I recall it, some staggering drunk, fathead father of six revved up the roadster and packed his terrified family into it for a joyride. On the bridge over the bypass he lost control of the car and it flipped, smearing all of his un-seat-belted children along the road, and raining them over the sides of the bridge onto the windshields of the startled drivers below.

  The ambulances brought them to the emergency room, where Daddy, the only doctor on duty that day, worked feverishly to save them, the unharmed husband raging in the waiting room. When the last of them, the wife, died under his desperate hands, Daddy went out into the hall and pressed his forehead against the cool plaster wall. The new widower found him there, and along with the powerful smell of whiskey came invective and accusations, most affectingly: “You little shit, you let her die on me.”

  That was the line my despairing father kept repeating when he came home, tired, pissed off, and looking more than ever like the exhausted Dr. Ceriani. It was the only time I ever heard him talk about a patient or his medical practice. Ever.

  Sometimes I wonder if it was the diminutive that bothered him as much as anything. He was a “little shit” (the writer Tony Horwitz said that he was once greeted in a saloon in Tennessee with the words, “I shit out a turd this morning that was bigger than you”). Daddy might have been a shit at times, but he wasn’t that little. At least not as little as the height on this 1928 passport says:

  In addition to being off a digit on his birth date, I sure as hell hope it was incorrect as well about his height: five foot three at age seventeen? Hell, I’m an osteoporotic old woman and I still break five foot four. His next passport in 1936 pegs him as five foot eight and he looks about that next to my mother (five foot five), who was wearing heels for her wedding.

  But, okay, five foot eight isn’t all that tall, and there’s this about him, too: he was oddly sensuous.

  Here he is in September of 1926, at age fourteen, leaving Dallas to enter the seventh grade at Choate.

  Isn’t there something languidly insouciant in his hip-cocking posture? A coddled Dallas kid with a background of sunny privilege should be rigid with fear heading off by himself to the cold Northeast with all the steely sons of the robber barons.

  Evidently, he found his own steeliness at Choate (which must have taken some doing, what with his father’s death in his second year) because he almost immediately discovered a talent for wrestling. By his junior year, he was captain of the Choate wrestling team, which was so successful that they occasionally took on collegiate-level opponents.

  Ultimately, wrestling in 1933 at Washington and Lee University, he won every match of the season not by points but by pinning his opponents to the mat. His W&L wrestling career culminated in the Southern Conference Championship of 1933, which he won despite having dislocated his shoulder (and which provided me with this arresting image now framed in my studio):

  Still, despite the new steeliness and that athleticism, something about him, the full lips, his easy physical grace and his sinuousness,

  combined with an aloof intellectualism, reserve, and hauteur,

  suggests that my Mom had a tough row to hoe.

  All that and, of course, his “death thing.”

  It’s not as if she didn’t have plenty of warning about that death thing. Surely she must have visited his apartment on Pinckney Street in Boston between her somewhat understated report of their first dinner together

  and the wedding three months and eight days later.

  To be sure, my mother’s first sightings of the “interesting gent” wouldn’t have given her any inkling of what she would find on Pinckney Street. She was then an impoverished lab technician earning eighty dollars a month at Massachusetts General Hospital in the Ear, Nose, and Throat Department. She had graduated from Bennington College in 1937, thanks to Aunt Ethel’s tuition payments, which had continued well past the death of Uncle Skip. But, despite having been accepted at Yale and Johns Hopkins medical schools, her lifelong dream of becoming a doctor had to be scuttled once the Gages’ money stopped coming, so she took a job. (Summer jobs during her college years included a stint giving tennis lessons to young John Kennedy and changing Teddy’s sheets at their summer home in Hyannis Port.) Perched on a stool by a window on an upper floor of the hospital, she painstakingly counted blood cells all day.

  During her thirty-minute lunch break she would drink a Coca-Cola and idly gaze out the window at the traffic circle leading to the hospital entrance. Especially in those straitened times, it was impossible not to notice the chauffeured car that arrived punctually at noon and then returned its trim, white-coated passenger exactly one and a half hours later.

  After months of voyeuristic conjecture, perhaps even fantasy, she was startled one Wednesday morning in July to find herself in the elevator with her employer, the renowned Harvard laryngologist Dr. Harris Mosher, and the spruce little doctor with the generous lunch hour. When the elevator stopped at her floor, they all exited and by the time the elevator returned the two professors to their offices, a dinner engagement for that night with the man she referred to as “the smoothie Southern doctor” was in my mother’s date book.

  He was a fast mover, my father. Twenty-eight days later, when stymied by my grandmother Jessie’s sudden and somewhat hypocritical prudery in not allowing my mother and the brash doctor to sail up the Nile together without benefit of matrimony, he announced cavalierly, “Well, I guess I’ll have to marry you, then.”

  And that was his proposal of marriage, after only three dates. Her diary reports that each of them was a dinner date and they were a week apart, during which time my mother also dated several other people, especially her main squeeze, the historian, future MacArthur Fellow, and Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Schorske. Each date with the smoothie Munger was reported, but without any emphasis or elaboration. Completely baffling.

  The day after the proposal, which had come on August seventeenth, her diary reveals that she “put in a plea for time to think, but I have a certain feeling.” The day after that she said yes, and, with what I suspect was relief, she reported, “his eyes made me sure.”

  Obviously, she was not put off by whatever she had seen of his domestic life on Pinckney Street. His decorating theme even then was Morbidity.

  (Yes, those are fingers f
rom a real mummified hand to the left of the unconcerned Buddha.)

  If she had rifled through his drawers (as who wouldn’t have, left alone while he mixed her a highball in the next room?), she would surely have noticed a similar theme running through the items from his youth that he chose to keep.

  No report cards, yearbooks, letters, wrestling trophies, or dried boutonnières were preserved from his six years at Choate, just a 1930 literary magazine in which he published a pair of short stories. They both featured the same main character.

  It was Death.

  I suppose that even if she had discovered these things at 91 Pinckney Street, my mother was far too enraptured to have realized how big a part his fascination with death and life’s evanescence played in this young man’s life. I wonder if she noticed that even their honeymoon was structured not around what most red-blooded males would be looking forward to, but rather around a visit to the Orozco mural at Dartmouth College, and in particular the panel featuring a skeletal mother delivering stillborn Knowledge into the bony hands of a ghoulish academic.

  After the wedding my father took but one picture of his new bride. But after this lone honeymoon picture, as you unspool the tightly rolled and crumbling 35 mm nitrate negatives, come image after image of the Orozco mural. It seems clear that Daddy chose the honeymoon destination as much because of his interest in Orozco’s approach to the concept of Death as for the romantic possibilities of autumn-ablaze New Hampshire.

  I’m guessing that his fascination with mortality began with the all-too-real death of his father when he was sixteen years old, but it was during his 1938–39 travels around the world that he married it with his blooming interest in art and literature, a marriage that lasted as long as that with my mother. Let’s look back for a minute: remember my mother’s first recorded impression of my father from her diary of July 19, 1939?