All the Lives We Ever Lived

by Katharine Smyth

  “No,” I said. “No, Daddy, listen to me. We’re at the hospital, we’re fine. We’ll be fine.”

  I could feel him slacken when I said that. “We’re at the hospital?” he said. “Yes,” I said. “We’re at the hospital.”

  “Oh,” he said quietly. He was very small then, a child. “Oh,” he said again.

  I continued to sit with him, and it was not long before he retreated back into himself, his breathing slow and halting again. A breath and a silence. A breath and a silence. The longer I stayed there, the longer it seemed that the high bed on which we sat drifted on the surface of the slick blue floor, and the longer it seemed, too, that the night outside was summoning us to it, that we had torn free of the pylons that were holding us to earth. I thought then that after all these years the time had finally come, and I was scared, and it was too soon: No, I thought, not yet, I thought, please not yet, I need to do more, say more, please. But as we held fast to that boatlike bed, floating now out over the river, I remembered, and was calmed by, a line about a weary sailor who after circling round and round in stormy seas at last sinks to the floor of the ocean with a feeling of immense relief.

  It was Mrs. Ramsay’s line, I realized later. To the Lighthouse was already lighting my way forward.

  7

  Imagine your childhood home, abandoned in the wake of some apocalypse. (“I could hardly bear to look at it again,” said Leslie Stephen of the impossibility of returning to Talland House without his wife.) Might the books go moldy, the coats and dresses hanging in the bedrooms disintegrate amid a plague of moths? Might a rain pipe blocked with fallen leaves direct its stream into the study, spoiling the carpets, and a mischief of rats scamper through the attics where, long ago, you had pinned strips of seaweed to the wall? Might hail and damp accost the nursery, dislodging plaster from the ceiling and rotting its weird souvenirs—“Whatever did they want to hang a beast’s skull there?” your embattled housekeeper might ask, noticing the bone’s gone moldy too. And when this same housekeeper finally concludes that the job is too much for one woman, when she shuts the door and turns the key, leaving the house to fill with sand like a discarded shell and the shawl to “idly, aimlessly…swing to and fro,” is there any power that might “prevent the fertility, the insensibility of nature” from triumph absolute?

  Before she departed, the housekeeper had taken your mother’s gray gardening cloak between her fingers, had observed her comb and brush upon the table; and from these numb objects, the memories began to flow—the lady bending over her flowers with the washing; caring for one or other of her many children; reserving for the housekeeper a bowl of soup. For one hopeful moment you wonder if they, the memories, might themselves be equal to the force of nature; and, if not the memories, the objects, for how could an errant vine or thistle compete with the legacy of glass and china that has sat upon a dining table laid for fourteen guests? But the housekeeper’s memories, far from lasting, “had wavered over the walls like a spot of sunlight and vanished.” She had shut the door and turned the key. And realizing that “nothing now” withstands “the thistle and the swallow, the rat and the straw,” that nothing now opposes them, you may even find yourself courting the destruction of that which you love most, that which once seemed indestructible. “Let the wind blow….Let the swallow build in the drawing-room….Let the broken glass and the china lie out on the lawn.” Sometimes, says my friend who lost her mother years ago, full months will pass without my thinking of her.

  And so it is that your abandoned home will one day reach a tipping point, a moment at which the whole house, grazed by the weight of just one feather, would have “turned and pitched downwards to the depths of darkness,” would have “plunged to the depths to lie upon the sands of oblivion.” This is an ageless vision; one day it will come to pass. But even should it rouse you with its terror now—Stupid, stupid, you might think, remembering the way you coveted disaster—so that you hurriedly write to the housekeeper to say you’ll be back soon; so that she and a companion arrive with pails and mops, sponges and brooms, evicting spiders from their webs and lifting from the floor thick layers of filth; beating carpets, airing out long rows of books, polishing the baths and taps until they gleam; so that builders come to mend the fallen ceilings, and plumbers to replace the failed pipes; painters to refresh the walls stained brown by rain, and a gardener to mow the lawn and poison the rats; so that after seemingly endless weeks of labor this groaning army finally gathers up its tools and declares the task complete, even then this house upon its battered seascape will be a stranger to you. “Ah,” said the housekeeper before she left, breaking at teatime and rubbing her face with sooty hands, remembering the marvelous parties that your mother used to throw, as many as twenty ladies and gentlemen gathered in the dining room, resplendent in their evening clothes and glittering jewels, “they’d find it changed.”

  8

  For hours I sat on the edge of the hospital bed, waiting for my father to die. I waited so long that eventually the room began to brighten and then to flood with light. My mother rose, my father continued to breathe, and that afternoon he turned onto his side and slept, soundly, for nearly nine hours. He rustled the sheets when he woke, and my mother and I went to him; he opened his eyes and smiled in recognition. “Hello,” he said. “I couldn’t have some orange juice, could I?” He sucked the juice vigorously through a straw, finished it, and asked for some limeade. He finished that, asked for rice pudding and next for half a grapefruit. It was the first time he had eaten anything since his arrival. “I’ve been on the most amazing odyssey,” he said, and spent the following hour recounting, in a voice that was confident and clear, tales of abduction, bobbing gold animals, and sulky bugs the size of tennis balls.

  In the middle of the night he woke again. I had started to sleep with the wariness of an animal, and the moment I heard him stir I leapt up and approached his side. “What are you doing here?” he said when he saw me. “You poor thing. This is no life for a twenty-five-year-old, sleeping at the hospital.” I liked the hospital, I said—I was thrilled at how himself he was—and offered him a cranberry juice. “For some reason I’m off cranberry,” he said. “How about some coffee?” I ran down the hall to make a pot; when I returned, he asked for another rice pudding, coupled with a new concoction, a blend of blueberries, Jell-O pudding, and ice cream. I fed the mixture to him with a plastic spoon. On finishing, he asked for the second half of the grapefruit and finally to lower the bed. “I’ve enjoyed our midnight feast,” he said.

  The next morning Ham came to wash his hair. “Katharine,” my father said, even more cogent than he had been the night before, “this is my hairdresser, Ham.”

  “I know Ham,” I said.

  “I can’t believe you know my name!” Ham exclaimed to my father. “You’re doing so good this morning!”

  “Of course I know your name,” my father said. Two days earlier, he had accused Ham of trying to kidnap him. The doctors concurred with Ham’s assessment, though—with some surprise, they told me that my father’s blood pressure and heart rate were both up.

  That day I still held the pink plastic bowl to his mouth to collect his bile, and took from him the tissues in which he folded his bloody mucus. I helped him shuffle to the bathroom and slide off his diaper, trying not to look at his wasted legs. But I also poured endless varieties of fruit juice—“I like a degustation,” he insisted—fed him meals bite by bite, and raised and lowered the hospital bed. I sliced pears into requested sixteenths and microwaved old cups of coffee; I made new pots of coffee and retrieved cartons of vanilla ice cream from the kitchen. At first I performed these tasks gladly, and with energy, but as the days passed and my father continued to improve, I began to feel irritated by his infinite demands. Then, seven days after the day the doctors told us he had mere minutes to live, they changed their minds and said it would more likely be six to eight weeks. What’s more, they said, h
e would soon be able to go home.

  I continued to sleep at the hospital, but now when I woke in the night to the sound of rustling sheets, my exhaustion struck me like a sickness. I squeezed my eyes closed and pretended not to notice that he was awake. But then I would hear the mechanical whir of the bed being raised—he had learned how to do it himself—and finally a meek voice: “Petal? You wouldn’t bring me a little cup of coffee, would you?” The hospital hallways were bright and largely deserted then, the kitchen empty. I stood by the bed while he sipped the stale liquid—he was strong enough now to hold the mug on his own—and finally, liquid gone, bed lowered, I would turn him onto his right side and build a wall of pillows along the length of his back. Sleeping in this position was the only way he could avoid the tumor that continued to press against his spinal cord. He fell asleep easily, but I never could; long after I had turned off the lights and returned to the couch, I lay awake thinking.

  His becoming unexpectedly better, and my being proven wrong once again about the room in which he would die, was reinforcing a secret suspicion I had carried with me for fourteen years now, a suspicion that, as close as we were, as close as we continued to get, it, his death, would never actually happen. When I considered what it was like, this waiting, I thought again and again of that old paradox, the one that says a runner approaching the finish line must necessarily run half the distance to that line, and half of that distance, and half of that and half again, so that he will never in fact arrive but simply continue to split the space left to travel; and I thought of the way in which my father’s hospital stays—now piling atop one another at an almost exponential rate—seemed to halve the distance to death each time, and to nevertheless each time prevent him, evermore, from actually reaching the end.

  In the days that followed, he was restless, disoriented, and good-natured. He was fascinated by the experience of being ill, and he wanted to entertain; he described at length his hallucinations and insisted I record them in my notebook. (“Try to have a nap, darling,” my mother said. “I can’t,” he said. “Katharine and I are writing my memoirs.”) His confusion meant that we didn’t discuss anything “meaningful,” as I thought of it then, but also that our time was unclouded by the grimness of previous weeks. We talked about rice pudding, methadone, and the best position for sleeping—he wouldn’t trust the construction of his pillow-wall to anyone but me. “Katharine and I have a system, don’t we, Katharine?” he would say, waving the nurses away. We talked about ice cream, and whether or not doctors should have tattoos, and the joys of having a bowel movement for the first time in nine days. (“It’s just the highlight,” he exclaimed, “a major deal.”) He fell in love with the word “bolus,” the term for each new opioid injection and repeated it over and over: “Bolus, bolus, bolus.” His vitality was seductive, and I think there were moments when I, too, forgot that he was ill. I know that when I later saw photographs of those weeks, I was shocked by how sick he looked. His skin was blotchy, his head too large for his emaciated frame, and his hair was so wispy and white that you could see through it to the outline of his skull. He had posed for the pictures with confidence, and I expect he thought he looked just fine, but his smile was feeble and expectant, as though the very act of raising his lips was a struggle. Returning to those pictures made me uncomfortable and ashamed; I had the sense I was looking at something too private, too obscene to be photographed.

  One day his business partner came to the hospital, and for several hours the two men pored over papers and plans, my father trying to pass on all the knowledge Chris would need when he was gone. I doubt they accomplished anything, and I remember thinking how curious it was that the contents of my father’s mind would so soon disappear—not just thoughts, feelings, and memories but also concrete information. Across the river from the hospital was a building that emitted a steady, balloon-shaped cloud of white smoke. “What is that?” I had asked my father one morning, assuming it was pollution. “Water vapor,” he said, and explained that a such-and-such machine produced it for such-and-such a reason. (“He said it so wisely,” Cam marvels of her own father, “as if he knew so well all the things that happened in the world.”) It was startling to realize that these lessons, my education about the way things worked, were coming to an end.

  My father was greatly tired by Chris’s visit. “Tee-tee,” he finally said, bidding his partner good-bye. I helped him prepare for a nap and walked Chris to the elevator. “It’s amazing to see him so much better,” he said as we waited for the doors to open.

  The doctors were similarly astonished by my father’s recovery—having predicted he would die the week before, they couldn’t understand his new fortitude. The only one who wasn’t surprised was my father’s primary care doctor: he had known my father for years, and to him it made perfect sense that he would be clinging so scrappily to life. In the hallway my mother begged him for answers, for some inkling of what we could expect; he told us it could be weeks or even months before my father died. “You forget what a remarkable liver Geoffrey has,” he said. “What a remarkable metabolism.”

  My father’s persistence made sense to me as well, but I couldn’t put my finger on why it made sense. It wasn’t that he was spiritual, or that he believed life inviolable in some way. Nor did he love life absolutely; if he had, I thought, he wouldn’t have lived it so recklessly. There was no doubt something in him—an energy, a restlessness of uncommon force, perhaps—that made him a singularly uncooperative victim. It was the thing that had for fourteen years allowed him to hold fast, the thing that even now was capable of delaying his departure for weeks and months on end. But what I still can’t understand is how someone so self-destructive—so anti-life, it sometimes seemed—could also kick and rear and hold such life within; how a man who claimed to have so little attachment to the world could nevertheless possess a body and perhaps even a soul that cleaved so determinedly to it. Why was my father so intransigent? Why was he still here?

  9

  Just after the death of Andrew Ramsay, the solitary sleepers, still roaming the beach in search of solace, catch sight of an “ashen-coloured ship” on the horizon, of “a purplish stain upon the bland surface of the sea as if something had boiled and bled, invisibly, beneath.” Such mutilations of the landscape give these searchers pause; if once they found themselves placated by the majesty of sea and sky, now they must again confront the possibility that nature, no less ruthless than war-waging men, will not provide them with the answers that they seek. This may be the greatest shock of all: I know that I rarely feel more alone, more forsaken, than when I return to Rhode Island—that cathedral with its watery pews and vault of clouds, that portal (it sounds silly) to all that is most good and holy in this world—and it meets me not with revelation but with cool, unyielding silence; as if all those evenings on the deck when I felt myself so full of light that I thought that I might float away were counterfeit. “To pace the beach was impossible,” the sleepers conclude. “Contemplation was unendurable; the mirror was broken.”

  “Time Passes” is Woolf’s most pessimistic take on the likelihood of locating what she calls “the clear words of truth,” but she does offer an alternative that, though it seems lofty at first, should resonate with anyone who—in pursuit of clarity or consolation or simply the deliciousness of feeling known and understood—has found herself crawling into bed with a good book. If we can’t find meaning in the natural world, she reasons, if the relief it offers is mere artifice, then maybe we must turn to art instead. In one of the novel’s final parentheticals, we learn that Mr. Carmichael’s new collection has enjoyed surprising success, that the war has revived people’s interest in poetry. Mr. Carmichael adored Andrew Ramsay; Mrs. Ramsay thinks with deference of the old man’s devotion to her son, and Lily remembers hearing that when he learned of Andrew’s death, he “lost all interest in life,” a deprivation she senses in him as they share the lawn. But the poems he wrote in response to that lo
ss—as To the Lighthouse itself grew out of loss—offer comfort to a population scarred by war; art may not give us the unequivocal truths that we desire from our world, but it can provide a stay against its chaos and confusion.

  “Most fiction…makes us more aware of ourselves,” Woolf wrote, while yet other of it fulfills our “desire to be steeped in imagination.” Small wonder, then, that Scott’s Waverley novels are among the first objects that Mrs. McNab rescues from the house; or that I drowned myself in The Red and the Black and Wuthering Heights during those long hospital weeks, escaping to the tower prison where Mathilde pays Julien Sorel a visit in disguise, and to the misty, rutted moors that so confound Mr. Lockwood as he makes his way to Thrushcross Grange; or that, at the very moment I believed my father to be dying, my mind alighted, quite involuntarily, upon the pages of my favorite novel, taking solace not just in its lessons but its language, in the rhythm and beauty of phrases as familiar to me as the sound of the waves that break in Rhode Island. “Who am I, what am I, & so on: these questions are always floating about in me,” Virginia wrote while at work on To the Lighthouse, aligning herself with the restless sleepers who demand of the stone and the puddle, “ ‘What am I,’ ‘What is this?’ ” It was books—reading them, writing them—that would bring her closest to an answer.

  * * *

  WE HAD BEEN at the hospital for nearly a month when my grandmother and uncle Andrew arrived from England. They stayed at a hotel nearby, and every morning and evening visited my father in his room. They had come to say good-bye, of course, but we didn’t talk about that; nor did we talk about the fact that for ten years—the result of a falling-out over something long forgotten—Andrew and my father had barely spoken.