All the Lives We Ever Lived

by Katharine Smyth

  On their last night, my grandmother and I went out to dinner, leaving my father and his brother alone. Andrew was still there when I returned three hours later; I could hear his loud English voice from halfway down the hall. He was sitting on the couch with a beer, gesticulating wildly about something, and my father was sitting up in bed and laughing. The hospital room, typically so sterile, seemed bright and warm; they had been great friends once. When I entered they looked up without seeing me, and Andrew kept talking. I could sense their reluctance to let the night go, and I was sorry to make them.

  The following evening—the last my father would spend at the hospital before going home—he woke from a nap feeling cheerful. I fed him a dinner of spaghetti, green beans, and tapioca, then climbed onto his hospital bed with a notebook. This time, however, he had no interest in recounting his hallucinations; he wanted to talk about business. He reached for the pen and drew a shaky, three-circle Venn diagram. In the center he wrote “DEAL,” and in the first and second circles he wrote “PEOPLE” and “PROPERTY,” respectively. But he couldn’t remember what went in the third circle. “Money?” I offered. He laughed. “That’s a good idea,” he said. The answer didn’t satisfy him, though, and we kept thinking. “Fate?” I said next. He laughed again, a real laugh, so that when I looked at him, his shoulders were shaking and his eyes all scrunched up. But “Fate” wasn’t right either, and the longer we waited, the more palpably I could feel him straining. “Dad, I think it has to be money,” I finally said, and with a start he agreed with me. “Of course!” he said. “Finance!” He wrote “FINANCE” in the third circle. “Gosh, you’re good, Katharine,” he said, and I felt ridiculously proud.

  It was getting late, and I suggested he call my mother at home to say good night. “Katharine and I have written a book!” he exclaimed when she picked up. “We’ve written a book!” His delight was profound, and I can’t help parsing it now—what is the legacy promised by such scribbling, the bridge that it builds to the future? What relief, what reward, that of imprinting ourselves on the page? My father paused, listening to her. “Well, at this rate I could have years and years to run,” he said at last. “At this rate I could have forever. We may still be waving good-bye in another forty, fifty years’ time.”

  I wasn’t sleeping at the hospital that night. I fed my father his pills, pressing each one into a spoonful of applesauce, then lowered the bed and turned him on his side. I lined the length of his back with pillows and drew the cotton covers to his shoulder; I closed the curtains and set a cup of tangerine juice on the bedside table. I turned off the lights and put on my coat, and finally I bent to kiss his cheek. It was warm and slightly bristly, and also slack and soft.

  “You’ll have a couple of fluffies waiting for you at home,” he said sleepily, of my cats.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ll tell them you said hello.” And then, “Good night, Dad. Sleep well.”

  “Mmm,” he said, without opening his eyes. “Night-night, lovey. It was lovely having you.”

  He died two days later, in a rented hospital bed that sat in the middle of our living room. He was fifty-nine years old, the same age as Virginia Woolf when she died in 1941. My mother said that his last few breaths were slow, each one several minutes apart. Everyone who had seen my father at the hospital was stunned—“He seemed so well,” they said afterward—but the doctors and nurses were unsurprised. “It often happens like this,” they said.

  10

  In August 1905, Virginia Woolf and her siblings returned to Cornwall for the first time since childhood. On the night of their arrival, they—Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian, each in their twenties and newly orphaned after their father’s death from cancer the previous year—decided to climb the hill from Carbis Bay to Talland House, a distance of several miles. Julia Stephen had died a decade earlier, and their home sold soon afterward, but as they approached the site of so much early happiness, it was at first as if no time had passed at all. “It was dusk when we came, so that there still seemed to be a film between us & the reality,” Virginia wrote in her diary the next morning. “We could fancy that we were but coming home along the high road after some long day’s outing, & that when we reached the gate at Talland House, we should thrust it open, & find ourselves among the familiar sights again.” In this fantasy, the years have collapsed and the house is still home to that Victorian family of ten, but it’s a fantasy that transforms the living Stephens into phantoms, into children homeless not just in space but time: “As we knew well,” Virginia concludes, “we could go no further; if we advanced the spell was broken. The lights were not our lights; the voices were the voices of strangers. We hung there like ghosts in the shade of the hedge, & at the sound of footsteps we turned away.”

  It was months after my father’s death before I returned to the house in Rhode Island. Once there, I treated it like a museum, touching nothing, as if the same film that seemed to separate Virginia from her reality had rendered me invisible, ineffectual, an apparition. In my parents’ bedroom I avoided my father’s brown leather sandals, looking from afar at the glossy imprint of dirt where his heels had been. When I hung up my coat, I made sure it did not brush his sea-colored down vest. Most disconcerting were the cigarette butts I saw through the window to the deck. They could have been smoked that morning. I felt something akin then to what I had first felt on visiting Pompeii: the voyeuristic sensation of stumbling upon that unexpectedly private thing, an ordinary day interrupted and preserved. So too here, where, for a short while at least, my father’s death had petrified his life, preserving it with uncanny clarity, and in a form both recognizable and alien.

  It was a wet day in April when I first arrived. The sky was gray, the sea was silver and gray, and as I felt the underside of the steps for the house key, I could see small circles bloom and bloom and bloom where rain hit the water beyond the seawall. The basin was empty of boats—deserted pink buoys glowed brighter than they should have beneath the lightless clouds—and the line of land across the way was bleak and brown, its faraway trees slight puffs of smoke. The island to the south was barely visible through the mist.

  My mother had warned me the house was a mess. After emptying the boat for the broker, she said, she had dumped everything on the floor and gone back to Boston. That’s fine, I had said, but as I walked through the rooms, turning on lights and opening blinds, I was stunned. The floors were strewn with stacks of paper and old sailing magazines, with pots and pans and cans of food. In the living room I found foul-weather gear and crinkled cotton distress flags; on the table, plastic mugs and a couple half-used bars of soap. In the billiard room—bereft now of a billiard table, for we had sold that, too—were life jackets, fenders, and tattered white sail bags. At the kitchen counter I nudged aside a tool kit to make room for the kettle and saw that my mother had forgotten to empty the coffeepot: mold grew in green and white rings on the black skin. A few weeks ago, in Boston, I had found her cell phone in the fridge.

  I’d left New York to do some writing, or so I told myself, and when my cup of tea was ready, I settled down to work, curled over a desk in the studio that feels at high tide as though it were cantilevered out over the water. But it wasn’t long before my attention wandered—first to a dry, leggy spider’s corpse that had been there since the summer and next to a seagull that I could see out the window. I watched as she plunged into the icy water, surfacing instantly in possession of a large, hairy crab; then she floated, complacently arranging and rearranging the wings along her back, and seemed almost to forget the crustacean writhing in her beak. But eventually she rose, flew in a compact circle above the beach, and finally, climbing as high as the house and pausing, suspended, let drop her prey onto the rocks below. The crab made a noise like a gunshot as it hit the ground, but the seagull was unsatisfied, and, picking it up, rose once more, circled once more—this orbit slightly larger and spanning the space between the docks—and again droppe
d the crab onto the beach. This effort went on for some time, the circle always widening, the seagull’s wings always pumping harder, until I lost sight of her altogether and concluded she had found another, better beach. Minutes later, I heard a sharp crack—the gull was back, the crab shattered, and for the next half hour she gorged herself, picking and tugging at the flesh within the shell.

  When the rain stopped, I put on a coat and walked to the end of the dock. A length of hose trailed in the water, and I coiled it up and looped it around a cleat. Seaweed grew thickly on the tubing that had been submerged. Different seagull hunger had scattered the float with the broken remains of mussels, crabs, and starfish, and I spent a while tossing back each leg, each claw, each jagged shell. It was difficult, that day, to believe that sunlight had ever fallen there, or would ever fall there again. In summer, when a cloud passes across the sun and the walls of the house turn momentarily to bone, I feel the same. (“What’s it like in winter?” I would ask the hotel owner in St Ives, looking out the window at the mild, luminous beach. “Wild,” he said, “and wet. The wind slams at the windowpanes.”) And yet how many evenings had I spent on this float, at the hour when the sun was setting and turning yellow all in sight? How many times had I called to my father and waited for him to pad down the dock in his purple swimsuit? He always dove without hesitation, and after surfacing swam a few strokes away from the house. “Toasty warm!” he exclaimed of the water, and I would dive in myself and be shocked by the chill. Sometimes we swam to the boat; sometimes we swam from dock to dock, greeting the neighbors who were sitting outside. We crawled back against the current and climbed out, he first, into the cooling evening air. By the time I had taken an outdoor shower and dressed, the sky was pink, the lights were on, and sounds of classical music filled the house.

  At dusk I took a bath in the claw-footed tub upstairs. The walls of this bathroom are painted yellow, and a white wicker armchair sits in the corner beside a low, rectangular window—the same window on which Sally, the seagull, used to tap her beak. During the day its glass had revealed the basin, but now, as the sun set somewhere behind the clouds, it was slowly becoming a blackened mirror. The water pooling and steaming around my knees was a faint turquoise against the white enamel of the tub; for as long as I could remember I had thought it beautiful, and for as long as I could remember I had liked to tilt my head back and watch it play as lines of light along the ceiling. All day the house had been to me a hideous scrap heap, a failed plot, a universe collapsed and cold. But this, I thought—pushing the surface of the bathwater away to create chaos on the ceiling—this is kind of the same.

  After my bath, I put on a flannel robe, knotted my hair in a towel, and lay down in the blue room. I wasn’t intending to fall asleep, but I did, and as I slept I had the most vivid dream yet. It was a hot, bright day and my father and I were sitting in a garden full of flowers. He stood up to leave, and I stood up to say good-bye. He put his arms around me, loosely at first, but gradually his grip grew tighter, and he started to shake, and I knew, though I could not see his face, that he was crying. He hugged me harder and then the cries began to rise in me as well, for suddenly I understood.

  PART THREE

  1

  “For really, what did she feel, come back after all these years and Mrs. Ramsay dead? Nothing, nothing—nothing that she could express at all.”

  I once saw a well-dressed woman on the street receive a phone call. She listened for a moment, then her eyes widened and her mouth opened in a wail; her face and body crumpled, and she fell to her knees on the sidewalk. I knew that the worst that could happen had happened to her, and I was impressed and envious of her single-mindedness—of how tidally she had been taken over by her sorrow. I had often wondered what it would feel like when my father died, and here now was my model: I would be felled as this woman was felled.

  But when it finally happened, it felt like nothing at all.

  I was standing in a university hallway between classes. “Darling?” my mother said when I called her at home. “Dad’s dead.” “Oh,” I said, and cried a bit—not because I wanted or needed to, but because it seemed the thing to do. My classmates flocked to me; I pushed them away; I was conscious of a woman I’d never liked who seemed to watch me from afar. I gathered up my things, feeling melodramatic, feeling floaty. On my way out, I bumped into the man whom I would one day marry and divorce; we had just spent our fourth night together. I wanted to bawl, to collapse in his arms, or rather, I wanted to want these things, but it was so cold outside, and his front, when he hugged me, was hard. I made jokes as he hailed me a cab. A few minutes later, I called to say I felt anxious about the way we had parted—I didn’t like how it was going, this moment I had been imagining for fourteen years. Then my phone died, and I was alone.

  Within the hour I found myself on a train to Boston, rocking with its back-and-forth and holding a copy of the New York Times. My father was dead. How completely strange. I had seen him the previous morning, when I stopped by the hospital on my way to New York. He had been so wild, so full of manic energy—I’d gone to the kitchen to make him a cup of coffee, and when I turned in to the hall, he was standing specter-like at the other end of it. It was the first time he had been out of bed in days, and he wasn’t wearing his oxygen; he staggered toward me, smiling oddly, and he was so thin that he needed to hold up the waistband of his black silk long underwear with both hands. I yelled at him to lie down, and he gave me a cheeky look and darted away, perching eventually on the arm of a nearby chair. When I dragged him back to bed, he spilled the coffee I had made him down his front. It was with relief that I quickly kissed him good-bye and left the hospital for good. In retrospect, it was obvious how little his mind was working, but it had never occurred to me it would be the last time I would see him—we’d been promised weeks and weeks. Nor did it occur to me when I spoke to him on the phone that evening (I was in a cab, going up the West Side Highway) that it would be our last conversation. What had I said? Something about how we could talk later, how I was just calling to say hello. The receiver kept slipping from his hand. An ambulance had brought him home that afternoon, and he was sitting up in bed while my mother cooked him an omelet. She said later that he got up every few minutes to smoke cigarettes by the exhaust fan. I had cut the conversation short, embarrassed by the extravagance of taking a taxi—I hadn’t wanted him to know.

  Now, on the train, I bought a microwave pizza from the café car and read the entire newspaper. Both the newsagent and the vendor had behaved as if it were an ordinary day. My father is dead, I said to myself, my father is dead. I was fascinated by the scarcity of any emotion; was I in shock? I felt quite sane. There was plenty that I could have done to bring on feeling, but bemused oblivion arrived more readily.

  He had been in a coma all morning, my mother had said. He took a breath and then seemed not to breathe. He took another and then he died. Do I regret not being there? I asked myself. Perhaps, but not too much. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. I opened them and asked my seatmate for the time. We were still hours away, and I willed the seconds to pass, even as I had an image then of the death moment as a fracture that had split my life in two, and every minute, every mile, a measure of the growing distance between me and the part of life I much preferred. Some ten years later, I’m still on that train.

  Virginia Woolf called her mother’s death “the greatest disaster that could happen,” and she returned again and again in her writing to the morning on which it came to pass. But the common thread between these scenes is not her devastating grief, but rather an anxiety similar to the one that had already begun to plague me: the insufficiency of her emotions in the face of such disaster, her inability to feel much of anything at all. Twenty-nine years later, she recalled how, visiting her mother’s body for the first time, she “laughed…behind the hand which was meant to hide my tears; & through the fingers saw the nurses sobbing.” And in a different entry ov
er a decade on: “I remember turning aside at mother’s bed…to laugh, secretly, at the nurse crying. She’s pretending, I said: aged 13. & was afraid I was not feeling enough.” The crumpling of the well-dressed woman on the street is a form of loss we recognize, a portrait of despair congruent with our expectations; it appeases in a way insensibility cannot. And it occurs to me now that those awful parentheses—the ones announcing Mrs. Ramsay’s death; the ones that breed dissatisfaction in a reader longing for a scene that will instead spell out the moment’s horror—serve to enact not just life’s fickleness but also the dissatisfaction of the child who, try as she might, cannot adequately feel her parent’s passing. Woolf’s decision to forgo such a scene is a protest, a declaration that truth often flees from the deathbed, that the figure of the sobbing nurse obscures far more than it reveals.

  At last the train pulled into South Station, and I caught a cab to Charlestown. I paused outside the house, as if to enter were to break a seal of some kind, and finally climbed the steps and rang our bell. My mother came gratefully to the door. We clung to each other. Then, passing the closed doors of the living room, we stood together in the kitchen while the kettle boiled. The house seemed extraordinarily silent, our lowered voices an intrusion.

  “You don’t have to see him,” she said. She found it comforting, though—she had been giving him pats all afternoon.

  “I want to,” I said, and eventually, holding a mug of tea, I opened the living room door. The lights were dimmed, the heat turned way down. My father lay in a hospital bed where the dining table had been, a white sheet drawn to his shoulders. From the threshold he looked himself, but when I went closer his face morphed into something other, something so simultaneously like and unlike the person he had been the day before. Virginia recorded how, on visiting her mother’s body for the second time—someone had turned Julia from her side onto her back—her face appeared “immeasurably distant, hollow and stern,” and how, when she bent to kiss her cheek, it was like “kissing cold iron” and she jumped back. Her account is eerily familiar—I know that sense of distance, that cold rigidity, that flight response; they must be hallmarks of mixing with the dead.