All the Lives We Ever Lived
Page 1
Copyright © 2019 by Katharine Smyth
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
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CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Image of To the Lighthouse, holograph notes: Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. Owing to limitations of space, permissions credits can be found on this page.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 9781524760625
Ebook ISBN 9781524760649
Cover design by Michael Morris
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Preface
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Part Two
Part Three
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Credits
For my mother
“It was strange how clearly she saw her, stepping with her usual quickness across fields among whose folds, purplish and soft, among whose flowers, hyacinths or lilies, she vanished.”
—VIRGINIA WOOLF, To the Lighthouse
PREFACE
Perhaps there is one book for every life.
One book with the power to reflect and illuminate that life; one book that will forever inform how we navigate the little strip of time we are given, while also helping us to clarify and catch hold of its most vital moments. For me, that book is To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf’s novel about her parents, Julia and Leslie Stephen, who died when Virginia was thirteen and twenty-two, respectively. First published in 1927, it tells the story of the Ramsays, a family of ten who, along with an assorted group of friends, spends the summer on a remote island in the Hebrides. Tells the story of the Ramsays? I should rephrase: To the Lighthouse tells the story of everything.
I first read it as a junior in college, a literature student studying abroad at Oxford University. It was Christmas 2001, and my parents and I were visiting my father’s family on the south coast of England. After dinner, I joined my father and Robert, his older brother, in the sitting room. My father was listening to Handel and reading, and I was listening to my uncle talk about books. An eccentric, shuffling bachelor, he asked about Oxford and told idealized stories of his own time there; he scoffed at the novels I had been assigned and wrote me a syllabus of his own. As he left the room to find me a copy of his magnum opus, a history of one of England’s ancient woodlands, my father looked up from his sailing magazine and smiled. “He’s sweet,” he said.
“He makes me nervous,” I said. “I think he thinks I’m an idiot.”
“No,” my father said. “He thinks you’re twenty.”
Robert returned. I expressed admiration for Forest People and Places and then we each settled down into our respective worlds—mine, the sitting room in which Mrs. Ramsay joins her husband late at night, a room much like the one in which our minds now roamed, and feels herself swinging from branch to branch, flower to flower, climbing, climbing, as she murmurs the words of poetry her husband had recited at dinner. My father and uncle drank brandy; my father smoked cigarettes and my uncle cigars. The logs on the fireplace cracked and blackened. Earlier my father had latched the wooden shutters and drawn the heavy velvet drapes; now, in the softened space he had created, the music seemed to strengthen and the stillness of the night to grow. So too on that far-flung Scottish island, where Mr. Ramsay sets down his book and looks up at his wife, who, still climbing, nevertheless begins to sense the pressure of his mind.
Did I already suspect the revelatory role these words would play for me? I don’t think so: To the Lighthouse is a work that rewards—that demands—reading and rereading; it was not until at least my second time through it that I had the impression of actually swimming round beneath its surface. But already, as I curled up with that book by the fire, it was beginning to reciprocate and even alter my experience, while also giving me a vocabulary by which to fathom that experience, so that I would always understand that Christmas night, a night on which I relished my father’s vices rather than cursing them, as a version of that final sitting room scene, and its tacit, book-tinged intimacy a version of Mrs. Ramsay’s final triumph.
* * *
A FEW WEEKS later, my parents called me from Boston. After eight years of failed cancer treatments, they said, my father’s oncologists had decided to remove his bladder altogether. My father assured me he was pleased. He hadn’t been feeling well for some time, he said, and I remembered that over the holidays I had occasionally turned to see him grimacing. There was one more thing, my mother said. The surgery would mean that he could no longer drink. No longer drink! How marvelous that would be, and yet, how impossible to imagine.
At the time of the twelve-hour operation, I was visiting Amsterdam with a group of college friends. My mother called almost hourly with updates. Dim sum, a trip to the Van Gogh museum, and a walk through the red-light district were all interrupted with medical reports: “Well, they’ve removed the bladder completely, and they’re about to build a new one from the intestine.” We were watching an impeccably choreographed and oddly sterile orgy scene at a midnight live sex show when my mother called one last time to say that the surgery was over and couldn’t have gone better. For weeks I had been having nightmares, but with this news I immediately lost a bit of interest. Of course it had been a success, I thought.
It was this same winter that Virginia Woolf, escaping the prim ranks of Women Writers to which my high school teachers had consigned her, became instead the nexus of my reading life. My tutor, Shane, was a sharp, wry Beckett scholar who had taught me James Joyce earlier in the year; his comprehension of British modernism was so effortless and unsentimental that my own hard work and enthusiasm embarrassed us both. Miffed by Woolf’s snarky dismissal of Joyce—a “queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples,” she famously called him—Shane never missed an opportunity to ridicule her snobbishness and eccentricity. On the day we were to discuss Orlando, he brought in a particularly unflattering photograph of Vita Sackville-West, her friend and paramour. “How anyone could writ
e a love letter to that is beyond me,” he chortled. I enjoyed his irreverence; certainly I needed reminding that one mustn’t take literature so seriously all the time. But as I read my way through every one of Woolf’s novels, my own admiration for her only intensified. It wasn’t long before I began to answer Shane’s questions with uncharacteristic certainty, and though I couldn’t always locate the corresponding textual evidence, I never failed—as I had constantly during our Joyce tutorial—to produce the exact response for which he had been angling. He soon grew frustrated by this instinctive, unscholarly version of literary criticism, but when he told me, not at all complimentarily, that I seemed to have “an intuitive sense of Woolf,” I was overjoyed.
One week after my father’s operation—I was foraging for Mrs. Dalloway criticism in the depths of the Bodleian Library, a pleasure that, as Woolf acerbically recalls in A Room of One’s Own, had been denied her as a woman some seventy years earlier—my mother called again. My father was fine, she said, but he had reacted badly when they tried to switch him from a feeding tube to solid food. When she called the following day, it was to say that he was actually suffering from delirium tremens, or alcohol withdrawal. The previous evening, he had started to complain of a terrible smell, then to frantically wave away the hundreds of tiny gnats he saw swarming the hospital room. (Neither my mother nor the doctors smelled or saw anything unusual.) Within hours he had become incoherent, hostile, and violent. He shouted at doctors, nurses, and my mother; he tried to tear out his many tubes; he had several near-fatal seizures; and he was moved to intensive care and restrained. My mother related all this only after the worst was over.
I wanted to go home. The next available flight to Boston left in two days’ time, and I spent those days trying to ignore the morbid scenarios being staged in my mind. On the plane, I grew increasingly frightened, convincing myself that he had died during the flight, and that my mother would greet me at the airport with the news. But she didn’t. She drove me to the hospital instead. Due to a bed shortage, my father had been placed in the ICU burn ward, where the other patients were contained in giant temperature- and moisture-controlled clear plastic bubbles. Asleep when we walked in, he was lying in what seemed, from its multiple folding parts, like a very uncomfortable bed. His body was shrunken and corpse-like, but for his right arm, which was badly swollen where the doctors had pinched a nerve during the operation. Tubes ran in and out of his veins, and his face was yellow. His lips were two contiguous pieces of flaking skin. My mother introduced me to his nurse, a friendly, talkative woman who said, “Don’t worry, he won’t remember any of this.”
“I’ll remember all of this” came a pitiful and totally unfamiliar voice from the bed. I went to him, uneasily patted his head, and said hello. Sedated and only half-awake, he could barely open his eyes, and when he did, he gave me a clouded, heavy-lidded, tortoise look. He asked us to help him sit up; we failed at sliding his body farther up the bed, and he began to swear viciously under his breath. It was only then I noticed the thick leather bands that restrained all four of his limbs. He was very weak, but whenever he wanted to move he would bang his arms as hard as he could, up and down against the bonds. In a few days, both wrists would bruise deep violet. Finally the flailing exhausted him, and he slumped over to one side. We continued to sit there, talking to his cheerful nurse, and I watched him as he slept. He shook violently, and coughed and wheezed with each breath.
We visited every morning and evening. Sometimes he slept for our entire visit, and sometimes he was talkative, but—paranoid, hallucinatory, malevolent—he was almost never himself. Unsure of his whereabouts, he initially thought himself in my mother’s native Australia, then in Madras—a city to which he had no connection—and finally at our summerhouse in Rhode Island. One particularly persistent hallucination was his belief, which he explained again and again, that he was lying next to an Arab. He would look to his left, as though someone were there, and repeatedly apologize: “Look, I’m terribly sorry, but I can’t move over any further…” Occasionally he was kind. He would smile at me; the nurses said he often looked for me when I was not there. But his most consistent preoccupation was wanting to leave. He kept asking me in a whisper to get a “short, sharp knife” and cut his restraints. When I said no, he grew furious. “Dad, I can’t,” I said. “Rubbish,” he said. “Of course you can.” Even in his stupor, he could upbraid me for being too bound by convention.
It was eight days before he was finally deemed well enough to move to a regular hospital room. He was free of cancer for the first time in a decade—a diagnosis of kidney cancer and the removal of his right kidney had plagued him before the bladder—and he did not recall any of the days he’d spent in the ICU. Now, no longer angry, he was desperately sad. He cried often, from embarrassment, and when he learned he still could not go home. Mostly, though, he cried because he’d never drink again—if he did, his doctor said, he’d drink himself to death. Still, his surgeon assured me he would live to see my children. It was a hope I had never thought to have.
On the morning of the day I returned to England, my mother and I drove him straight from the hospital to an inpatient drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility called Faulkner. The rooms of the clinic were cold and spare, and the halls slick, the color of old chewing gum. Patients loitered by the exit. I could not connect them to my father, to what I knew of his sophistication; how uncivilized, how demeaning, to admit him to such a lonely, ugly place. While he attended an AA meeting, my mother and I went to a support group for families. I took a dislike to the woman who ran it, and to her platitudes about a higher power, and saw at once that these kinds of mantras were something my father would never embrace.
We met in his room to say good-bye. I threw my arms around him and sobbed into his shirt. “Hey,” he said. “Hey. Don’t worry—I’ll be fine here.” Distressing as it was to leave him, I was gratified that he was acting like a father again. And as it turned out, he enjoyed his weeklong stay at Faulkner (the longest his insurance would allow). He loathed the mandatory meetings each morning and evening, but he was a big hit with the other patients, who loved his English accent and thought him hilarious. He in turn was moved and horrified by their stories. “God, people have tough lives,” he told me later. “Their problems make mine look like a piece of cake.”
Less than ten days after my father left rehab, he had a glass of wine. He confessed it with shame to my mother and poured the rest of the bottle down the sink. Within six months, he was back to drinking the equivalent of three bottles daily.
* * *
MY PARENTS RETURNED to England three months after the operation. I was surprised by how well my father looked—apparently his uncanny ability to appear fit and healthy had endured. I was also surprised by his mood, which, unlike the curt, distracted voice to which I’d grown accustomed on the phone, was gentle and subdued. But he was thin, and he walked with a hunch. His right hand was temporarily paralyzed where the nerve had been pinched during surgery. He was in extreme and constant pain. My parents picked me up in Oxford, and we embarked on a short, Virginia Woolf–inspired road trip that finished at my grandmother’s house. At every stop, my father wandered away from the car and lit a cigarette. We went first to Knole, the historic family estate of Vita Sackville-West that was the model for Orlando’s own ancestral residence, and next to Charleston, the country home of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, Virginia’s older sister. We visited Berwick Church, where Grant and Bell had painted every inch of wall as they had their home, and finally Monk’s House, Leonard and Virginia’s own country home in nearby Rodmell. I do not much remember the interior, except that it was dark and shabby, with spindly, inhospitable chairs, well-worn upholstery, paintings dull with time.
It is the garden I recall, with its path of weathered stone weaving through flower beds and opening onto a larger lawn. There was a shaded pool in front, slithering with silver fish, and, in back, a bare and sunlit room
where she wrote—including, in less than a fortnight, the first twenty-two pages of To the Lighthouse. (“Never never have I written so easily, imagined so profusely,” she wrote in her diary of its creation, and later, in a letter to Vita, “close on 40,000 words in 2 months—my record.”) The present caretakers had placed on her desk an empty teacup and a few scattered pages of her diary, and I imagined her setting off, only a moment before, across the yellow pastures that lay beyond the garden gate. Her ashes had once been buried beneath an elm, but the tree had subsequently died, and in its place—off to one side and ensconced in purple columbine—was a bronze bust in her likeness, with an epitaph taken from The Waves: “Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!” It was a warm, brilliant day—a good day—but coupled with my recollection of those places is the image of my father, his body bent as though he were walking into the wind, lighting a cigarette and drifting away from the houses toward the deep green of the woods or fields in the distance.
PART ONE
1
“The house was all lit up, and the lights after the darkness made his eyes feel full, and he said to himself, childishly, as he walked up the drive, Lights, lights, lights, and repeated in a dazed way, Lights, lights, lights, as they came into the house.”
When I was five, my parents bought a summerhouse. For years we had spent our weekends sailing, driving between our home in Boston and the Rhode Island marina where we kept the boat, and for years my parents had admired the row of waterfront cottages they could see from the highway bridge. One weekend, leaving me with friends, they stopped at a local real estate agency. “The houses on the water almost never come up,” the agent said, not quite truthfully, “but one came on the market this morning.” She took them to see it, a wooden house built in 1890 and in a state of price-deflating disrepair. Sheets of plastic were stapled across its windows; to one side was a garage, to the other a desiccated lawn and concrete steps leading to the water. The small adjoining lot was full of rubble, all that remained of a shack annihilated by a hurricane fifty years before. A night nurse was the house’s current occupant, and my parents had to wait until midnight before they were shown inside. They found rooms cramped and badly lit. Dampness seeped from the basement’s earth floor. A bare wooden deck faced the water, but it, too, was wrapped in thick plastic. We’ll take it, my parents said, and in the morning signed the papers.