by James Wood
And now—he was sitting in the bath, steaming and spreading like a sponge—he had to go in three days to Saratoga Springs, to be there for his daughter, for poor Vanessa.
The first warning sign had come just before Christmas, when Vanessa canceled a long-standing plan to come over to England for the holiday. She wasn’t feeling well, she had too much “work” to do. Alan knew from long experience that Van’s physical ailments were rarely confined to the body, and that claims of “work” covered many evasions and much nonproductivity. Then a few weeks later, in early January, came the terrible e-mail from Josh—sent only to Helen, but forwarded by her to Alan. Josh said that Vanessa had slid into a deep depression in early December. Vanessa began to “withdraw” from him, “and withdraw from life—that’s how I would really put it.” There had been what he called “an incident,” just before Christmas, when Vanessa fell down some stairs and hurt her arm. Josh got scared: “I think she was in danger of doing harm to herself.” He said that she’d been better in recent weeks, but was still pretty fragile, and he was writing because he knew that Helen came to New York often for business. When Helen was next in the city, would she think of coming upstate, to Saratoga Springs? “You and your dad, of course, know her ‘history’ so much better than I do.”
Helen replied that she was in fact going to be in New York City, for the record company, in early February; she could make a trip upstate then, and she would try to bring Alan. And Alan, perhaps because Josh had not written to him but to Helen, perhaps because he was too afraid, too polite, too bloody English, had not e-mailed to ask exactly what Josh meant when he suggested that Vanessa’s accident had been deliberate. “In danger of doing harm to herself.” Not this again: Alan had thought it belonged to the past, had been left behind in Oxford, when Van was a student. If she had tried to harm herself, it was clearly not for real, it was just a “signal,” a message, an SOS—isn’t that what people said about such gestures? While he also thought, with horror: but she couldn’t just toss her life aside, like an unfinished crossword puzzle … A father—a parent—helped his grown-up children in any way he could. He had known unhappiness, and some of it had been quite severe; but he didn’t think he’d ever really known despair. Despair was of the spirit, it was terminal. Despair was the color blindness that afflicted those who could not see hope. Why did Helen find happiness easy, when her sister found it hard? The girls had always been so different. Perhaps Van’s “history” went all the way back to birth. And then what could Alan possibly do? That had always been his torment; how little he could do. He couldn’t make Van see life through his eyes: where he saw a white bird, she saw a black one. But of course he would come, of course. He would buy a plane ticket immediately, and he would go with Helen. It would be Van’s belated Christmas gathering.
4
Vanessa and Helen, Helen and Vanessa … Vanessa was the elder by two years, born just after ten o’clock on the evening of July 30, 1966, the day England beat West Germany in the World Cup. The one and only time! You couldn’t forget that day: those jubilant hours, the black-and-white television bringing forth its frail, unlikely pictures, and Cathy walking stiffly around the sitting room, pressing her hand into her lower back, her groans mixed now in his memory with the roars from Wembley Stadium—and there, a little later, Vanessa was, jaundiced and moist, furrowed with folds, most loved because the first. “Only the best for her.” A lucky girl. But as she got older, she became harder to embrace, awkward, softly distant. She didn’t or wouldn’t fit—like Alice in Wonderland, either too tall or too short. It was the divorce that changed everything. After Cathy walked out, Vanessa withdrew. The girls dealt differently with that catastrophe. Always fierce, Helen sided with her father and accused her mother, who had, after all, left Alan for Another Man, of being “obsessed with sex.” (She was only thirteen, poor thing.) Vanessa was different. She took no sides, just went quiet; seemed to absorb all the consequences of the event, and disappeared from sight. She was always upstairs in that damn bedroom of hers, where she lay on her bed and read: massively, widely, seriously—novels, poetry, philosophy, feminism, even ecology. He had never heard of most of her authors; sometimes he thought she chose the most obscure people she could, just to spite him.
In happier times, Alan and Cathy had loved to observe the differences between their daughters. How often, in the evening, when other conversation faltered, the two parents talked about “the girls,” with the kind of fanatical wonderment—monotonous but somehow never boring!—that revolutionaries must lavish on their plans for the future. Helen was exuberant, playful, disobedient, physical; Vanessa was shy, gentle, slow to anger, studious, very private. For a while, these differences seemed provisional, part of the scramble of growing up; everything was potential. But eventually, so Alan discovered, the child’s feet stop growing, her trousers don’t need to be let out anymore, her handwriting has the form it will have for the rest of her life, her bedsheets bear the occasional but unmistakable bloodstains of new adolescence—and, as if suddenly, while you were not properly attending to the matter (or so it seemed to him now), while you were too busy with your own foolish crises, your daughter became an adult, and those qualities that had seemed malleable were now hardened and fixed. Both girls were full of will, but while Helen’s willfulness seemed to bring her pleasure, Vanessa’s brought her unhappiness. She seemed so keen to mess up her own chances. That was the phrase he kept on reciting to himself in those days. Why did she want to mess up her own chances? Why didn’t Van invite any school friends over to the house? Didn’t she have any friends? She said she wanted to put herself forward for the school debating society, but it never happened. It was the same with the school orchestra, the school play. All her pastimes were solitary: reading, playing the piano or the flute, listening to music, writing poems. (Poems mostly full of despair and lament: one of them was especially horrifying, it seemed to be about some unrequited crush on a boy, and it ended with a line he would never forget, about wanting to “jump from a high wall onto a hard pavement”; these poems greatly alarmed her parents when they discovered them in a notebook hidden under her mattress.) Later, a student at Oxford, Vanessa decided that she would give away all her possessions; a friend was so worried about her stability that she reported her to the university health services, who contacted Alan and Cathy. Helen spoke so easily to adults, confident in her ability to charm; Vanessa held back, in a gesture that seemed to combine—worst of all worlds—judgment and fear. Helen was naturally joyful; Van needed to be reminded of that category of human experience. And one day, you realize that your children’s differences are not only temperamental and biological, but also moral and political, that each has a very distinct worldview. One day—he remembered it well—you witness your elder daughter, now seventeen, firmly lecturing her younger sister about the misery of life and the cruelty of all human beings, of all life, holding up a book her father had no idea she possessed, George Ryley Scott’s History of Torture, waving it around, and saying: “Read this, read this, Helen, and you won’t have any doubts about it!”
Is that how it had been? Her childhood a torture?
5
Helen and Vanessa, Vanessa and Helen … Vanessa did her doctorate at Princeton—“because I’m stifled in Oxford, and they’ll pay for me to be at Princeton, and they actually want me there”—and had been seven years teaching philosophy at Skidmore College; there was now a faint suggestion, like a breeze carrying a smell of rot with it, of a career stagnating. Of unfulfilled promise. There had been a few papers: one of them, which Alan understood to be about how to combine French philosophy and English analytic philosophy in order to make a great new product—like combining French grapes and English soil to make that questionable wine they were now producing in Kent?—did fairly well, and bounced around the conference circuit. But now she was forty, and there had been no “big book,” and no advancement. The same faculty profile and atrocious snapshot sat on the departmental website for all these year
s—these academics, thought Alan—Vanessa’s beautiful dark hair pulled harshly tight at the back into a scholarly bun, her lovely intelligent face obscured by hideous clock-sized spectacles, and that fixed bibliography, with the eternally dangling promise of “Four Essays on Personhood (forthcoming).” Alan couldn’t imagine her in Saratoga Springs, New York. She told him that Skidmore College was one of the best private institutions in America, and she told him something about the town, about its history as a vacation resort, a nineteenth-century spa with healing waters: the Baden-Baden, the Vichy of upstate New York. It was full of parks and grand hotels; people still gambled and raced horses there, and there were handsome, wide streets. Five years ago, he was reading Diamonds Are Forever—he had been rereading all the Ian Fleming books, on a whim—and was chuffed to see that James Bond and Felix Leiter visited the famous horse track at the very same Saratoga Springs.
But he didn’t go to see her. She came to him, and he imagined that she came to Northumberland every summer because she was keen to escape America, or New York State. In summer, in Northumberland, the sheep made their pleated, laugh-like noises and rubbed their wool onto the drystone walls, and the straight old Roman roads glimmered in the broad gentle light, and there was really no better place to be on earth. Last summer, she had come for the whole of August—he liked that very much. He left her alone for a few days, went down to London, and when he came back there she was, still there—sometimes in her old bedroom, lying diagonally on the bed in her usual way, reading a book, sometimes in the sitting room, or outside on the lawn in a deck chair, smoking, always with a book and a pen in hand, wearing those curious baggy trousers. Unlike Helen, Vanessa seemed to need very little. She wanted to be at home, to be intermittently alone, and to be able to work. Little else. From the back door, he could see her in the deck chair, notebook open, pen in hand, cigarette packet and lighter on the grass beside her coffee cup; she’d got a bit heavier in the last year, perhaps the curious wafting trousers were hiding that. She slouched in the chair, her tongue slightly protruding. The notebook was balanced on her knees, and with her right hand she intensely twirled her hair, as if twisting thoughts from her brain. If Candy seemed to be asleep when meditating, Vanessa seemed almost to be posing as a thinker. She rarely wrote anything: fascinating, the ratio of thought to frequency of writing. She was like a trumpeter playing Haydn in a symphony, picking up the instrument only every hundred bars or so. Aphorisms, maybe? Philosophical fragments? It would be funny if she were just writing jokes, or writing a letter, or doodling aimlessly. And though he knew he shouldn’t, he would go out and disturb her, offer her some more coffee, ask her if she needed anything from Corbridge, tell her one of his own jokes, to match those in her notebook.
Had she really tried to do herself some harm in Saratoga Springs? Put aside her life—he kept coming back to this image—like a half-finished crossword puzzle? Of course, thought Alan, Josh had been deliberately vague with Helen, when he described the incident on the stairs, probably because he wanted to ration the alarm—enough to get them to come, but not so much that they would insist on taking Vanessa home with them. Josh must love her, then; he was possessive in the right way, watchful in the right way—and obviously kind. Alan thought the e-mail reflected pretty well on the young man.
After Vanessa ran away from boarding school, Alan and Cathy decided that she should “see someone” about her depression and anxiety. They found a child therapist in Newcastle, who was attached in some way to the teaching hospital there. She was hard to find, he remembered. No one had “therapy” in Newcastle in 1982! And Vanessa did not want to go, had to be almost dragged into the grim office on Percy Street. Worse, much worse, the therapist—her last name was Lennon, like John—insisted that she see the whole family for the first session. All of them, even Helen. Alan and Cathy had been separated for eight months and had stopped communicating, except to talk about matters relating to the girls. Alan sat there in a fury as Dr. Lennon told them that she was going to use a tape recorder; she found it useful to listen to them talking—to detect, after the session, their recorded hesitations and evasions and weaknesses and lies. Of course, she didn’t put it quite like that, but that was the gist: cherchez the parents, find out how the parents were to blame, and stitch them up. And they were to blame. Of course they were. Poor, poor Vanessa—she cried and cried, while the little gap-toothed wheels of the Memorex cassette squeakily rotated, while Alan and Cathy tried to explain how hard things had been for both girls. (And yet Helen did not cry, did she?) Dr. Lennon then had four sessions with Van on her own, and when it was all over, she called in the despicable parents, and explained that she couldn’t of course share any details of what Vanessa had told her—just what had Van told her?—but she could certainly inform them that in her opinion their elder daughter was extremely anxious, and “severely depressed.” The therapist recommended that Vanessa write about her fears and sadness, in creative form. Alan didn’t mention that Van was already doing that …
Van did get better; happier, more fulfilled in her academic work, drawn—drawn out—by the task of serious philosophy. The last two years of school, and the first year at Oxford, were comparatively serene. (Everything was comparative, in Van’s case.) But then she collapsed again—in her final year at Oxford—and tried to give away all her possessions to her friends, and had to be brought home by Helen, and at that time she spoke of being pursued by what she called her “demons.” Had she intended to harm herself at Oxford? Was she thinking of … suicide? He could hardly bear to think, let alone speak, that word. He had to look away from it, as from the sun. And perhaps it was true, he now thought, that because he looked away from that word, he had also looked away from the other word, depression. He looked away, and by the time Van was in her mid-twenties, Alan had decided that most of Vanessa’s problems were not really chronic, but largely related to her solitude. She never seemed to have a boyfriend, she read books all day (hard, systematically unhelpful books, as he saw it). She took no exercise, never went for a walk or a bike ride. Ma wasn’t correct when she said that if Josh was “the one,” Alan would blame the lad for taking his daughter away. Not at all: he welcomed Josh with relief. The news about a boyfriend was received as another parent might receive news about a child’s new job or first house. And the truth was, Vanessa had been much happier in recent months, since she and Josh started going out in June; she was full of new projects and resolve, as he saw in the summer when she sat happily in the deck chair, carefully answering her philosophical riddles. He tried hard to keep this summery Vanessa in his mind, not the girl who disappeared for two days when she was fifteen; or who refused to get out of bed for what seemed like a whole month when she was twenty-one; or who very nearly abandoned her Ph.D. four years later and spoke seriously about opening an organic restaurant in Corbridge; or who was about to turn down the offer of the assistant professorship at Skidmore and come home to England without a job, “because what’s the point of teaching philosophy?”
What he strongly remembered today was walking with Vanessa when she was five or six, past the medieval church in the village, the church which flew a red-on-white St. George’s flag from its tower. In the northern wind, the flapping cloth pulled away from the metal pole like a young soldier eager to dash into battle. That day, it was at half-mast, and little Vanessa, happy Vanessa, asked him what that meant. Someone prominent had died, he said. For several years afterward, when they went past the church and the flag was back at full-mast, Van would look up and announce with satisfaction: “No one died today.”
6
Helen had it worked out. Tart, humorous, and always very efficient, she e-mailed him a bristling itinerary. She was already in Manhattan, where she’d been for a few days, on the record company’s shilling. (He imagined a prairie-sized hotel suite, loaded with goodies.) He would fly on British Airways, London to New York, spend the night at a hotel he’d never heard of on Park Avenue, the same one that Helen was staying in, and the next
morning they would take the 8:15 train from Penn Station to Saratoga Springs. Helen could only spend three days with him—she had little Jack and little Oliver, and big Tom, to get back to in London, and big Tom, though thirty-seven years old, was presently as babyish and self-absorbed as the three-year-old twins. Alan was staying for six days. She reminded him to take his laptop, the melatonin she’d given him a few months earlier, his sleeping pills, and a pair of sunglasses (“counterintuitive and counterseasonal, but you’ll understand when you see American sunlight on snow”). He packed the thing he was currently reading about the Big Bang, and two new books from Candace, one about Zen Buddhism by the man with the same first name as him, and a popular Chinese psychiatric guide to decoding your dreams. The problem with the Chinese dream book was that most of the analyzed dreams featured dragons, doves, and pigs, rather than, say, strangely faceless but arousing women, or Cathy. (Though page 23, and this could be useful, told him that a dream featuring doors meant that his children would be “unsuccessful.”)
He flew from Newcastle to Heathrow, and had lunch at the caviar bar in Terminal 4, an allowable luxury. The airport was like a fancy hospital, patients ambling up and down the bright corridors, pushing their medical apparatuses, fatalistic and expectant at once. They popped into Gucci and Prada for preflight necessities. His smoked salmon was very good. They knew how to do things in London, even if they squirted the dill mustard onto the plate from a large plastic bottle. He was thirty-six before he ever tasted smoked salmon, so had no guilt at all, he was making up for lost time. Next to him, rather astonishingly, a man seemed to be sacking a junior employee—gently, sympathetically, warmed by Sancerre, and with pauses to allow him to transfer fresh sheets of pinkish salty tissue from the plate to his fat mouth. Alan leaned closer, as he generally did in such situations. Nowadays, people seemed to enjoy being eavesdropped on, even spoke a bit louder when they knew there was a chance of being overheard.
