Bright Precious Thing

by Gail Caldwell

  Tyler will be thrilled: She is in love with all things wild right now. I’ve seen coyote only once before on these grounds, though I have spotted a red fox, groundhog, chipmunk, vole, and a rabbit who had just given birth in an open field and wouldn’t leave her nest. When I realized how exposed the rabbit was I ran at her and clapped my hands, hoping to get her out of harm’s way. But she moved only long enough for me to see what she was shielding—a litter of newborn kits, still in their amniotic sac. I gasped and retreated and she returned to her post. Maternal instinct had won out over fear. I doubt the litter survived the night.

  I’ve been walking this cemetery for years, by now a pilgrim’s trek that began as a dilettante’s stroll. I just came here one day to walk the dog. But it was the winter after my father died, buried in Texas, and two years after I’d lost my best friend, buried nowhere, and I see now that I needed a place to go—a place to find what was missing. I used to lean up against the fence in the corner of the veterans field and talk to my mom, too, gone more than a decade now, and to this day I imagine stories that go with the names and dates on the soldiers’ markers.

  The place is a cathedral of meaning, much of it unfolding in the tributes left by the living. One year, a pair of black patent high heels shows up on the headstone of a long-married couple. Birthday balloons and playing cards, a box of Milk Duds. At two graves I visit, I leave small rocks on the headstones—my wave from this side of the river. The graves belong to people who died more than a century ago, and stay bare from year to year. But I’ve grown a filament of care for them over time, so I leave the rocks.

  I’ve always felt at ease in cemeteries, where the veil lifts long enough to cinch my heart to what I’ve lost. Grief is worse untethered, I think, when it doesn’t have a home. And this is a universe entire of people gone and people missed; here on the great beach of time, my losses soften and recede. There are other regulars I see from afar—bird-watchers, a sketch artist who once asked for directions. One man who walks the same route every day, the opposite direction from me, and we nod and smile. I think of him as The Walker, though that is probably how he thinks of me as well. People are mostly silent here, not discounting the woman who sits near her husband’s grave with a lawn chair, talking.

  Veterans from three major wars lie here, and old New England families, and people who died too young. Whenever the Patriots or the Red Sox take a big win, the fields light up with sports caps and pennants, a New England version of Día de los Muertos. Some days everything about the place feels sacred: You can hear kids’ voices from the athletic field that abuts the cemetery, the megaphone shout from a crew coach on the nearby Charles. It’s an intersection of the messy ongoing fact of life and the stillness of its end. No unfinished arguments here, no power plays or murderous impulses, not anymore. The wolf finally did lie down with the lamb.

  The past couple of years have been so brutal. So much change, so many injuries revealed, public and private. The meanness of the world exposed. I need this place, this quiet dust. My solace for an hour or so each day, even if confined to memory and myth.

  14

  “Honey, don’t do that. It’s unbecoming.” Maybe I had sworn, though more likely I’d crossed my leg ankle-over-knee, like my dad did, or slouched or rolled my eyes. “Unbecoming” was my mother’s admonishment of choice—at least until I became much worse than that—and her correction rolled off the tongue with casual ease. It was her code for what she might have called “class,” also achieved by walking with a book on your head (good posture) or keeping your knees together (good girl) or the common jingle for pec isometrics (“We must! We must! We must improve the bust!”).

  My mother was never harsh when she labeled a behavior unbecoming. She was trying to pass on what she knew, and with me she had her work cut out for her. For a teenage girl in the Texas Panhandle in the early 1960s, there were so many obstacles to clear: miniskirts, dark lipstick, splayed legs, smoking, cursing, Everclear parties, back seats with boys. As I got older and farther away from the nest, the challenges got grander and the dares more dangerous. Drugs, hitchhiking, wild men, wild women, protests of every magnitude. A whole landscape—a life—of things unbecoming. First innocent, then eager, I tried them all.

  The origin of the usage of “unbecoming” is military, and suggests an order broken, a fall from civilized behavior not befitting, say, an officer and a gentleman. By the time the word fell into the vernacular to describe female behavior, it had taken on a cautionary aura: “Unbecoming,” at least when my mother and the women of her generation said it, sounded just this side of slatternly. The word hinted at something shameful, and the accent that delivered it, at least in my memory, was a testament of southern refinement. That’s so unbecoming. Annihilation by etiquette. Crushed by a crystal dinner bell.

  Certainly there was no crystal dinner bell in our house, or in my mother’s—her mother, a Texas farmer’s wife who wore jeans and laughed loudly, rang a large brass dinner bell on the back porch when she hollered to announce a meal. So “unbecoming” had a little class aspiration to it, too: Its manifest opposite was “becoming,” heading up a staircase in the clouds toward a better life.

  Two of my aunts had direct and radical paths to unbecoming. “We found Billie on the bathroom floor this morning,” my grandmother wrote, describing one of several of Billie’s efforts to no longer be. It was sleeping pills that time, and years later, when she died, they simply wrote “heart failure” on the death certificate. Sometimes medical euphemism is the only bearable salve for tragedy. I didn’t get that then. When I learned, far after the fact, about the troubles in my extended family, I was indignant that I hadn’t been told before. I was old enough to challenge family myths but too selfish or green to understand them. You have to have your heart smashed to comprehend why people mess with the narrative in order to live.

  Aunt Connie’s dissolution took longer, its path punctuated by shock treatments, hospitalizations, bad marriages, disappearing into the bottle. I look like her, my mother used to tell me, and I was pleased by the comparison: She was a high school basketball star and swimmer, all legs and smiles before the bad stuff began, and to me she was the epitome of an independent, mysterious woman. She loved dogs and reading and fishing with my dad, and she let me hide out in her room and read her novels when we were at the family farm. I adored her and was slightly scared of her, and she died suddenly, around fifty, when I was fifteen. It must have been my first real taste of grief, the leaden feeling, and I can almost see the air that day, it hung so heavy at the gravesite. I remember the dress I wore and the way the trees looked out the car window as we drove home from Breckenridge, where she was buried. I was so sad, sad in a whole new way. I was facing a despondency about something that I knew wouldn’t change. That dead was dead. All the things you think are obvious truths until you feel them like a stone upon your heart.

  Are all teenaged girls drawn to tragedy? It was a touchstone of my adolescence: the bad poems I wrote with funereal images, the anthologies dog-eared at Plath and Dickinson and Sexton. In the margin of Dickinson’s “Pain has an element of blank,” in Norton’s third, there are four slashed stars in ink, as though I had just discovered (and I had) a terse, holy definition of the fugue of despair. At first I hid this side of me; later, I made a lame effort to cultivate a persona around it. My mother saw the books and read a few of the poems and her inevitable comment was “Don’t brood”—as though such sadness might be turned off like a leaky tap.

  She must have worried that what she glimpsed in me was too close to what she had seen in her sisters. But brood away I did, even happily, finding respite in heroines whose troubles trumped my own. I clung to these stories through my young adulthood, through my years in academe, and then I started to see the strings of the puppet master behind the tragedy. Tolstoy sending Anna K. to her death. Hardy giving his Tess a lethal mix of lust and innocence that made her downfall all but c
ertain. Everywhere I looked there was some guy creating a tragic heroine and then tying her to the railroad tracks. If women authors could be just as murderous, their intentions seemed to reflect a different kind of suffering—less distant, less cold, and less titillating. Maybe that’s why I loved Faulkner so much and so early—he sent Quentin off a bridge but let us keep his beloved Caddy.

  I stumbled upon these insights on my own, which was fortunate for me—if I’d been taught them in the new critical theory invading the campuses in the seventies, I think I’d have lost what moxie I possessed. I fled those theorists, whose ideas for me diced and deconstructed novels into shards of eye-glazing dullness. What I had instead was a cache of half-interpreted novels behind me, most of them read on the sly, and the cultural heft of a women’s movement that made me trust my own opinion. That combination, free of cant, was what gave me the courage to throw a typewriter in the back of my old Volvo and decide that I could be a writer. Or that I would never forgive myself if I didn’t try.

  Nearly four decades later, I remember that journey—the geographic one out of Texas and the interior one toward a calling—as dangerous but worth the risk, unlike so many of the treks I made over unsafe terrain. This one had an end in mind, a plan and a self worth saving, even if I did have to go mano a mano with Scotch in an attic apartment. I had my mecca in sight.

  I had almost fallen, though, for an old trope: that high bridge between death and liberation, a gratifyingly tragic ending that we embrace in modern culture without a second thought. It’s the Thelma-and-Louise promise of going out strong, but its origins are ancient. Now I see it as a cheap ploy, a fantasy about sacrifice and art or heroism, but the myth is intractable. It’s a warrior-martyr mentality, and the allure is different for women, a blood sport of self-destruction. In the past half century we’ve gone from hiding anguish to fetishizing it. Some of the early feminist icons appropriated their pain as an act of reclamation, then left themselves on the marble slab of art. “The woman is perfected. / Her dead / Body wears the smile of accomplishment,” wrote Plath in “Edge,” in Ariel. And then Anne Sexton’s near-retort, upon hearing of Plath’s suicide, “…I know at the news of your death, / a terrible taste for it, like salt.”

  Why did happy and free always have to be so far apart?

  15

  John and I both declared we wanted to learn the cello when we got old. “When I get old…”—that territory, the color of clouds, that tethers the present by promising a future. We sat in newsrooms together for more than two decades, and on nights we had to wait for page proofs, we let our tired minds wander. The cello suited us both, expressing the dark sensibility we shared but rarely discussed. Instead we matched each other for shots of Stolichnaya in the bar across the street, or swapped passages of novels we loved. We complained about mediocre writing; when one of us made a comment about the dilution of modern literature, John started a list of watered-down titles as a joke and hung it in the newsroom: Stendhal’s The Pink and the Gray, Dostoyevsky’s Misdemeanors and Time-Outs, Faulkner’s The Noise and the Kerfuffle. By the end of the day, thanks to the shared wit of the staff, it was two pages long.

  Humor and intellect masked his pain: A former coworker wrote about John that he was so confident he didn’t own a dictionary, nor did he need one. The story was apocryphal, but then John’s editorial skill merited the inflation. To disappoint him was an awful feeling, though he responded with gentle civility. But to please him was a great joy. Once I wrote a headline he admired and he walked into my office and bowed, like a knight to his queen. Only because he knew so much more than the rest of us did we swoon in the face of such praise.

  John didn’t grow old. Instead, at fifty-two, he left the house for work, his reading glasses in his pocket, and climbed into his Volvo station wagon. He started the engine but didn’t raise the garage door. Upstairs he had left letters for his wife and daughters. The rest of us—all of us—were left with that cavern of doubt and speculation that is the one-way dialogue after a suicide.

  You can always tell the story but that’s never enough. It explains nothing, or rather explains a mere glimpse of the chasm that is suicidal depression, gives you a snapshot of a particularly bad day with the most fixed of endings. We are always frantic for a reason: a bad diagnosis, a drug problem, an unhappy home life. Please, God, name a reason so I can protect myself from the contagion that is life, the horrifying notion that someone I knew or loved or admired chose to leave because…the dark at that moment eclipsed the light.

  The service was devastating. I was one of the people from John’s work life who were speaking, and I labored over my remarks for days. On the way to the church I had to pull the car over and breathe. I didn’t drink anymore and I didn’t smoke and I couldn’t call my friend Caroline, who had died two years earlier, so I sat there and watched my hands shake and then closed my eyes.

  When I got into the pew where the other speakers were sitting, I saw that they looked how I felt. How do you say goodbye to someone who chose the early exit? What can you say that is true and honoring and most of all a consolation? Only one of us dared to hit it head-on, and she turned to John’s daughters and looked at them as she spoke. “The depression that took John was not John,” she said, with such tenderness and enunciation that she clarified a truth that often goes unspoken. Suicidal depression is an interloper who breaks into your house. It is not the man himself, the father who laughed with you and went apple picking and edited clumsy young writers hours past their deadline. It’s a stranger, a condition that won the fight that day. The depression is the perpetrator.

  Tell me about my dad. His older daughter asked me this and I wanted to weep, and I said that yes, of course, I would. I never did. I never could. I knew she wanted to know everything, she wanted to fill her pockets with stories she hadn’t heard and days when she hadn’t been there; she wanted a father to keep.

  One thing I didn’t tell her, and ought to have, is that John’s soft voice kept me sane when my own father died—when I was on my way home to Texas to bury him. I had fled town when my mother called to say that my father was failing, and I’d left a review that was running that week, and John stepped in to take over. He called while I was in flight and left a message on my cellphone, telling me not to worry, that he had taken care of everything. And then he said a few things about losing my father that were so kind and true that I played the message, again and again, as I walked, tears on my face, through the airport terminal.

  I tried to talk to him once about his drinking, years after I had gotten sober, when I knew it had him by the throat. He blew me off, appreciative but distant. The week before he died, in 2004, I handed in the manuscript for my first book, and out of nowhere the thought crossed my mind that I couldn’t possibly send in something so naked, something that John hadn’t edited. Everything I’d written for years had passed through his hands. A week later I got the call, at nine P.M., that he had died, and I threw the phone across the room.

  I was only a bit player in his life. Not a wife, a daughter, a sister, a close friend. Suicide’s concentric circles cannot be imagined, I think, by the person at the end of that long hallway, who in his final reasoning has found a way to believe that he is doing the best thing for everyone. And yet each step leaves the notion of “everyone” further and further behind.

  Five men I’ve known well have chosen suicide, or rather suicide chose them; only one woman. Women try in far greater numbers, but men succeed, at least in the United States, by almost four to one. This is known as the gender paradox in the epidemiology of suicide, with one speculation being that men choose more direct or violent means: a rope, a cliff, a gun. Less quantifiable is the notion that women are more likely to reach out, get help. Every demographic has its guiding detail: weather, cultural or sociological status, the effects of war. The reasons are always particular and universal, a mystery and a fact that can’t be undone.

 
I heard a story about a musical prodigy who ended his life because, his friends believed, he could not bear the internal pressure of trying to live up to his talent, which he had come to loathe. His gift had become a scourge. The story broke my heart. An envy to the outside world may be a private prison. A woman came into an AA meeting one night and broke down, sobbing over her failed efforts to get clean. She had tried again and again to no avail. Choking, she said, “The thing is, I want to live.” Those last four words: the most important ones, a vessel of hope. I want to think she made it.

  When my mother was in her late seventies and I was years sober, when the fear and trouble between us was in the far past, she confessed how worried she had been during my adolescence. “I was scared,” she told me. “I was afraid that you would take your life.”

  The thing is, Mom, I never would have. Never. Even on the worst days, there was too much here. Even when I was drunk and heartsick in that attic apartment, my first year in the Northeast—when I was estranged from everything I knew and cared about. Except for the idea that I might become a writer.

  And I guess that’s what it comes down to, for everybody. You have to find something you love enough in this world to stay in it.

  16

  Caroline and I were walking in the woods, a setting that might have defined half our physical time together in the seven years we had. We loved the woods outside of Boston, the trails near Franconia Notch in New Hampshire, the marshes on the Vineyard and the pond paths near Truro. Cat Rock, Mount Misery, Wellfleet’s Great Island Trail. We weren’t picky, so long as we had the dogs and each other and some water and maybe chocolate and a car to get us home.