All the Lives We Ever Lived

by Katharine Smyth

  My family’s income was cut by roughly three-fourths; my parents began to worry constantly about money. My mother, perpetually frugal, remembers lying awake at night with a stomachache; my father, whose years of flying lessons and BMWs were well in his past, stayed up late making lists with names like “Contacts” and “Existence Variables.” The anxiety was soon to have real, tangible effects on both my parents. My mother, who had always been slim, began to put on weight. My father, who may have suffered as much from the boredom of sitting at home as he did from financial concern, became deeply depressed. Always a cynic, he soon grew downright nihilistic—his word—and always a heavy drinker, he began to drink steadily from lunchtime on.

  I don’t remember when I realized that he was an alcoholic. It wasn’t an epiphany that struck me suddenly, but something I one day knew and had known for a long time. Hard, hazy scenes began to snake their way into our lives: We were eating dinner and my parents were fighting. My father slammed his fist on the table and broke a plate; it cut him to the bone and left a gash three inches long. My mother took him to the emergency room, and in the silence they left behind, I mopped up the blood from the family room table. Or the night I returned to a quiet house; I was making tea when my father approached me in the kitchen. “Your mother and I are leaving,” he said, and I could tell from the slow, stupid way he said it that he was drunk. “Leaving where?” I asked. “Moving?” He shook his head. “No,” he whispered. “Each other. Shhh.” Or the evening when my parents picked up a friend and me from school. My father was jaunty, but his eyes were glassy and red. I sat in the back praying he would say nothing to embarrass me, and the moment we dropped my friend off, I yelled at him for acting so foolishly. When we returned home—my mother was still outside, parking the car—he started to shiver so violently that he had to sit down on the steps.

  In 1993, when I was eleven and my father forty-six, he was diagnosed with kidney cancer. His doctors said it was probably a direct result of cigarettes: kidney cancer is twice as likely to develop in smokers as nonsmokers. I remember being assured by both parents that he would be fine, I remember believing them, and I remember visiting the hospital after his right kidney had been successfully removed. He was sitting up in bed, pale but smiling as I entered the room. “Lovely to see you, Petal,” he said. What I don’t remember, and what I recorded in my diary at the time, is how sullen and angry he became in the following months, and my disgust when he continued to smoke in secret, despite having told my mother and me he had quit. My bedroom was directly above the deck, and during the summer evenings when my window was open, I could smell the smoke as strongly as if he were sitting right beside me. That same summer he walked down the dock in his swimsuit, and I saw for the first time the long scar that cut across his abdomen—it was pink and jagged, the skin around it cobbled and lumpy. I asked him if he minded; his stomach was kind of ugly now. “I don’t give a damn,” he said, climbing down the ladder into the water and pushing off the float with his feet.

  Long ago I used to wonder what would have happened if my father hadn’t lost his job that afternoon. Would he have smoked less, drunk less? Would he be cancer-free today? But I recently came across some letters that convinced me this thinking was foolish. They were written to my father from his doctor, one year before he’d lose his job and five years before he would be diagnosed with cancer; my father had confessed to him that his “predominant sins” were smoking two and a half packs of cigarettes a day and drinking one bottle of wine at night. “I think you must realize,” the doctor wrote, “that you have nearly all the quoted risk factors for premature coronary artery disease.” The revelation that my father was already, in 1988, smoking and drinking so heavily came as a surprise, and a challenge to the order I had established in my mind: that before unemployment he was happy and healthy and moderate, and that after it, he was not.

  In the coming years, my father would continue with increasing recklessness to abet his own decline. Was there something in him—perhaps given to him at birth, perhaps entrenched in him by some defeat or series of defeats—that made his acquiescence to both alcohol and cigarettes not just characteristic but assured? It’s hard to envision any quantity of joy or satisfaction that would have changed my father’s fate; conversely, it’s hard to imagine any low that would have struck him as rock bottom.

  * * *

  LIKE JULIA STEPHEN, Mrs. Ramsay appears very sad—“Never did anybody look so sad,” we are told again and again—and, like Julia, she possesses a past full of shadows, one informed by some central catastrophe. She “had had experiences which need not happen to every one,” she acknowledges at one point, trying to dispel her fear that some calamity awaits her children; significantly, she does not articulate them to herself, a show of reticence that reveals another parallel with Julia. But though it’s tempting to assign Mrs. Ramsay the same history as Virginia’s mother, particularly when we hear the whispers—“Had he blown his brains out, they asked, had he died the week before they were married?”—the reality remains obscure. All the reader knows for certain is that the events of Mrs. Ramsay’s past, coupled with an “instinct for truth” arguably more acute than that of her philosopher husband, have given her a privileged understanding of the world’s brutality; and that, again like Julia, she cannot reconcile it with the existence of an omnipotent, benevolent god. “How could any Lord have made this world?” she asks herself in solitude. “She had always seized the fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for the world to commit; she knew that. No happiness lasted; she knew that.”

  When I first read To the Lighthouse as a moody, impressionable twenty-year-old, I responded viscerally to Mrs. Ramsay’s character. I thrilled to her hasty, incongruous beauty, to her spasms of irritation and glorious epiphanies; I considered tattooing the phrase “It is enough!” across my forearm. (I still might.) I found myself murmuring the most ordinary of phrases—“Come in or go out, Cam”—as if they were pieces of poetry; I was charmed and confounded by the weirdness of her mode of perception, by her mind raising itself from the task at hand, by the wedge-shaped core of darkness she feels herself to be in isolation. “Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading,” she thinks, “it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.” I was drawn to that darkness and depth; it actually hurt to read a sentence like the one above; it was so apt, it was so beautiful; I longed for Woolf’s genius, yes, but I also longed for Mrs. Ramsay herself, for her as my mother, for her as my friend; I wanted to be her—that’s how painful I found the distance between us, the distance between me and that text. I might have swallowed the page. (“Could loving,” Lily wonders, “make her and Mrs. Ramsay one?”)

  For all my enchantment, though, I would have done well to reflect further upon Mrs. Ramsay’s relationship to life, one I glossed over because I found it puzzling. Like Virginia, who wondered in her diary why life was “so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss,” Mrs. Ramsay thinks of life as “a little strip of time presented…her fifty years.” (Julia Stephen died at forty-nine.) She thinks of it, too, as an “old antagonist,” a formidable opponent with whom she is forever in combat: “she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her; and sometimes they parleyed (when she sat alone)…but for the most part, oddly enough, she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance.” I was accustomed to envisioning death and not life in this pugilistic way, accustomed—even when I thought of my father and his illness, especially when I thought of that—to celebrating life and not fearing it; I feared death. And I assumed, reading these words in light of Mrs. Ramsay’s own imminent departure, that Woolf was conflating the two, or that the distinction (between life ending and death beginning) didn’t much matter. But it seems obvious to me now that Mrs. Ramsay isn’t thinking of h
er own mortality, but rather of those experiences she does not name—of the tremendous blows that life has dealt her, that all lives are capable of dealing.

  Alongside the image of my father as a gregarious young man who never wanted anyone to leave is that of those countless evenings when he retired to the deck after dinner with nothing but a drink and a cigarette and the reach of his own mind. Was he moved? Was he bitter? Was he addled, sad, or scared? Was he dormant, like a machine that’s set to sleep; was he distilled, like Mrs. Ramsay, to a core of darkness free to roam? I wouldn’t say that he possessed that woman’s clarity or rigor, or that he would be roused, as she is, by some “insincerity slipping in among the truths.” But I expect that he, too, felt himself locked in a battle with life; that life, which had for decades largely let him be, which he must have thought a loyal friend during those vibrant years in London and beyond, had at long last pounced.

  This ambush changed him. His light—that astonishing light—grew noticeably dim. “If there is any good (I doubt it) in these mutilations,” Virginia wrote of the death of her mother, and of her oldest sister, Stella, “it is that it sensitises.” My father was an alcoholic; I believe that he was born an alcoholic. But seen through the lens of life’s antagonism, his utter capitulation to that disease becomes, if not a commonplace attempt at stifling such sensitivity, the battle plan of a mad general: Pounce if you like. Destroy what you like. I’m way ahead of you.

  8

  In the fifteen years since I first misread Mrs. Ramsay’s rivalry, I’ve developed my own private lexicon, my own primitive tally system, for making sense of—or, more accurately, keeping tabs on—that reckless creature life has shown itself to be. I take pride in knowing, truly knowing, that however high that tally climbs—however long that list of life’s attacks—there’s nothing to stop it climbing ever higher. I keep a tally for my friends as well, a small number of whom are still innocents at thirty-five (“she had had experiences which need not happen to every one”), and for Virginia Woolf as well, who lost her mother at thirteen, her sister at fifteen, her father at twenty-two, her brother at twenty-four; whose first and second breakdowns shadowed the second and third of those deaths, respectively; and who, searching vainly for the “good” in this, herself conceived a narrative of combat, one that envisages life as wild, immense, animalistic, and herself as, if not its equal, at least a worthy adversary. “I would see (after Thoby’s death) two great grindstones,” she wrote of walking London in the months following her brother’s surrender to typhoid, “and myself between them. I would stage a conflict between myself and ‘them.’ I would reason that if life were thus made to rear and kick, it was a thing to be ridden; nobody could say ‘they’ had fobbed me off with a weak little feeble slip of the precious matter.”

  So mutilated, we read even the softest of scenes as a theater of war. It’s been too long since I clipped my cats’ claws, for instance; usually the creatures move about like ghosts, but now, in the dark, I hear them prowling, tsk tsk tsk. Last night Thomas jumped up on the bed and laid his cool paws on my arm; he’s an animal loath to brandish his claws, even in jest, but they’re so long and sharp by now that I could feel their tips like tiny sabers poking from the fur. And falling asleep, bearing those pricks against my skin—a souvenir—I felt him grow heavier and heavier, felt him transformed into a clumsy, ten-ton beast asleep beneath the flowering acacias, whiskers twitching mid-dream before he wakes restless and ravenous at dawn. What is coming next for us?

  9

  “That is the thing itself, she felt, as if there were only one person like that in the world; her mother.”

  When I think of “mother” (the word, the concept, the thing itself), I think of the scene in To the Lighthouse in which Rose and Jasper visit their mother in her bedroom, bearing a message from the cook. Mrs. Ramsay, combing her hair and dressing for dinner, asks if they would like to help her pick her jewelry. Jasper presents her with an opal necklace, Rose with a gold necklace, and she holds the pieces up to her black dress, studying her neck and shoulders in the mirror. (She avoids her face, but her beauty is implicit.) “Choose, dearests, choose,” she says, hurrying them through further exploration of her jewelry case, but she is also patient, “for this little ceremony of choosing jewels, which was gone through every night, was what Rose liked best, she knew.” As she finds herself wondering why Rose attaches such importance to the ritual—Rose whose mouth is too large, Rose who has a wonderful way with her hands—she is reminded of some ineffable emotion that she also possessed, “divining, through her own past, some deep, some buried, some quite speechless feeling that one had for one’s mother at Rose’s age.”

  Like so much of To the Lighthouse, this scene is loosely based upon Virginia Woolf’s own life; she would later recall how she loved to follow the lights in her mother’s opal ring during their lessons, and how, after Julia’s death, she especially missed their “snatched” private moments—among them, when she got to choose the jewelry her mother would wear. And yet it seems to me that the scene above might be based upon any number of lives, for I, too, remember rifling through my mother’s jewelry as a child, sorting her rings and brooches into piles—she had quite a few opals, perhaps because she was Australian—and going through her closet too, where she kept a pair of red flowering sandals with mock-pearl stamens and a peach-and-gold embroidered dress that I conflated with her wedding dress, a pink flared cotton skirt and matching top. On the rare evenings she went out, I would linger in the warm, carpeted bathroom as she put on makeup; she stood at a vanity mirror with small round lightbulbs running down each side, applying perfume and brown eye shadow that I thought made her eyes look bruised—it was because I wasn’t used to it, she said. (One night as my father raged, I met her at this mirror and wrapped my arms around her knees; I told her she looked pretty, a received idea.) And because she always brought me back a treat, some dessert wrapped in a paper napkin, I could envision the parties that she went to, all black and gold and shimmering.

  “How did I first become conscious of what was always there,” Virginia asks of her mother’s “astonishing” beauty. “Perhaps I never became conscious of it; I think I accepted her beauty as the natural quality that a mother—she seemed typical, universal, yet our own in particular—had by virtue of being our mother.” That idea, that our mothers are by definition beautiful, must run deep in little girls; I made that assumption about my own before I even knew what beauty was. And yet I was quite a bit younger than Rose when I began to see my mother differently, and began to see differently all that I had mistaken for her glamour. Her perfume had yellowed with age, and the cheap foam applicators with which she daubed her eyelids were crumbling. She almost never went to parties, and her best clothes hung unworn in the closet, still carrying tags from Filene’s Basement. Aside from those opals and some silver rings and a string of pearls, the jewelry I loved to organize was most often made of wood or plastic. She had never pierced her ears, and her wedding ring—there was no engagement ring—was a thin rose-gold band she had purchased herself on a lunch break in London. Later, when she began to put on weight, it would have to be snipped from her finger.

  “We think back through our mothers if we are women,” Woolf writes in A Room of One’s Own. She is reflecting upon the female novelists of the past, on how the lack of a feminine literary tradition must have exacted a colossal toll upon the work of women. But the sentence also conjures the buried, speechless feeling that Mrs. Ramsay holds for her own mother, and that Rose will one day hold for her—the long chain of motherhood by which all women have been shaped. “You ask how I learned how to fix diesel engines,” my father said once. “More to the point is how the hell did your mother learn to be a mother?” I can see the difficulty she faced in being unable to call upon her own experience of being mothered (for my grandmother was a cold and unforgiving woman), and how her strengths as a parent were born in part of her resolve to be her mother’s opposit
e. I never felt perfect growing up, and I certainly don’t today, but I always felt she thought me perfect, which—and it’s a credit to her that this came as a surprise to me—cannot be said of all mothers and their daughters. Never would my mother have thought my mouth too large.

  But for all this, I wanted beauty, I wanted glamour; I wanted a mother whom I could look to as a paradigm of the feminine as I myself became a woman. And when I first met Mrs. Ramsay at her dressing table, wearing her black gown and raising to her neck the most beautiful of stones, opals and amethysts, she—so unlike my own mother—seemed to me the perfect surrogate. Here at last was my model.