The Suicide Index

by Joan Wickersham

  My mother called me a couple of days later, when I got back to Boston. “Ted thinks you don’t like him,” she said.

  He started inviting my mother to come in to New York. To the ballet, to a concert, to have dinner at Windows on the World, to hear his friend the cabaret singer performing in the Bemelmans Bar. Sometimes my father went with her, and other times she went alone. Ted would go to a hotel and let her stay in his apartment on Eighty-third Street. “It’s small, but perfect. Like a jewel box,” she said of it, each time.

  She would take the train in, and Ted would arrange for a car and driver to meet her at Grand Central. That was how he did things, she said: you came out of Lincoln Center at midnight in the rain, and there was the car and driver waiting to take you across town.

  “Sometimes it’s not enough just to have a good time,” my mother said. “I’ve been trying to explain this to Daddy for years. Sometimes what you need to have is an expensive good time.”

  I was visiting my parents, and I asked my mother if I could borrow a sweater. When I opened her closet, I saw that the shelves were full of turquoise-and-black boxes with little interlocking “T”s all over them.

  “Some he’s given me, some I’ve bought,” my mother said. She had followed me into the room. She was smiling. “At a deep discount, of course. But it’s an addiction. Like smoking. It’s ridiculous. I’ve got to quit.”

  Each box was labeled with the bag’s material and color.

  Patent: Black.

  Kid: Green.

  Sequins: Multi.

  Alligator: Wine.

  “Alligator wine,” I said to my husband later. “Doesn’t it sound like some really sleazy drink?”

  “A potion,” he said.

  Ted moved in with them, because he was having his house redecorated.

  “I thought he decorated it when he bought it,” I said.

  “That was nothing, compared to this,” my mother told me. “Like, guess what, he’s having new windows made, because we think the mullions need to be more substantial.”

  “We do?”

  “He consults me. That’s what he calls me now, my nickname. The consultant. Even Daddy’s picked it up—like when we’re trying to decide if the roast beef is done, Daddy’ll say to Ted, ‘Let’s ask the consultant.’”

  “I wonder why he’s never married,” she said. We were sitting at an outdoor table at a restaurant, under an umbrella, eating chicken salad sandwiches.

  “Ma, he’s gay,” I said.

  She had been about to take a bite of her sandwich, but she stopped. “He is not.”

  I nodded. “Yes he is.”

  “I think he’s very masculine,” she said.

  “I didn’t say he wasn’t.”

  I fed the baby a spoonful of applesauce.

  “Besides,” my mother said, “there was a woman once, a long time ago. Someone in New York. He almost married her, he said.”

  “So?”

  She picked up her glass of iced tea and stirred it with the straw. She shook her head. “I think he’s kind of shut down, that way. Or has been, anyhow. I’m not sure why.” She frowned and drank some tea. “I don’t think it’s really men or women. That’s what I think.”

  When I went to visit my parents the following winter, Ted was still living with them, and my mother had begun to redecorate, also. Not on the scale of having floors ripped up and replaced with old salvaged wide-board ones, or installing dropped canvas ceilings—both of which were going on in Ted’s house then. She was re-covering furniture, buying lamps. And she had bought, at Ted’s urging, a huge French armoire for her bedroom, lined its worm-channeled insides with shirred Provençal fabric, and fitted it out with compartments for sweaters and a slide-out shelf for the TV.

  “Way, way too expensive,” she told me, “but he made me do it.”

  He had also made her remove the doors from the closets, hers and my father’s, which lined the narrow passageway leading to their bathroom. He’d said the doors were a nuisance, that they took up too much room when opened, and that it was much chic-er this way.

  “How does Daddy feel about all this?” I asked my mother, when she showed me the improvements in the bedroom.

  She shrugged. “Fine, I guess. I don’t think he really cares, one way or another.”

  The day after my father died, when we all went back to the house for the first time, I went upstairs into their bedroom. The bed was unmade, the pillows dented. I thought of him getting out of bed early yesterday morning, and of my mother getting up an hour later; he was already dead by then, but she didn’t know it yet.

  I thought of her having to come back into this room, later today; of how she would look at the rumpled bed and think of his head lifting from his pillow while she still slept; of how she would have to decide whether to make the bed, and when to change the sheets.

  At least if I changed the bed she might not have to think so much.

  I stripped the sheets and blankets off and slid the pillows out of their cases. I gathered up the linens, and when I went to put them in the bathroom hamper, I walked by my parents’ closets. I saw my mother’s clothes, and all the little boxes with the interlocking “T”s; and my father’s suits, and his shoes neatly lined up on the floor, and his sweaters folded in the shelves up above, where his hands had rummaged yesterday morning, groping for the gun.

  And then I thought, without pity, in fact with a momentary coldness that was almost pleasurable, of how my mother would have to see all this every time she walked past on her way to the bathroom, because there weren’t any doors to shut it all out.

  But I’m jumping ahead. A few more things, from before he died.

  The swimming pool.

  My mother had gotten estimates, and the work was going to be done in the spring. The pool would be an irregular curved shape, so that it would look natural; and the water would be a dark, dull blue, not that fake Caribbean color. There would be stone paving around it, and then gardens. Ted had suggested grading the land, and putting in some rocks and a waterfall, but my mother had drawn the line there: too expensive. As it was, the pool was going to cost eighty thousand dollars.

  I heard about these plans that year at Christmas. On Christmas Eve, I was outside with my father, helping him to stack firewood. “So you’re getting a swimming pool,” I said.

  He gave me a sweet, odd, rueful smile, and shrugged.

  I said, “Don’t let them shove it down your throat.”

  “Ouch,” he said. “That would certainly hurt.”

  We piled up some more logs. It was late afternoon, very cold. The light was clear and weak and thin. I thought of what I knew: the problems he was having with his business, the balloon payments that were going to be due soon on the loans. The way he never would tell me, really, what was going on, but once recently on the phone I’d wondered if he was crying.

  “What I mean,” I said, “is don’t let Mom and Ted just decide about the pool. You should be part of the decision.”

  Again that odd little smile, and then he looked away, at the sky. “Apparently,” he said, “it’s already been made.”

  A late-night conversation between my father and Ted, which my mother told me about.

  “We’d had Ted over for dinner, but it got late. I’d gone to bed,” she said, “and they were sitting up, drinking cognac. And they were talking. I know this from Ted. Daddy suddenly looked at him and said that I was the most important thing in the world to him. Why do you think he said that?”

  “I told her I didn’t know,” I said to my husband.

  “What do you really think?” he asked me.

  “What do I think he meant? ‘Back off.’”

  “But your father knows they’re not having an affair, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But he’s not sure if my mother knows it.”

  The cake.

  My mother went to a fancy bakery to pick up a cake for Ted, whose birthday was the next day. When she got out of her car, she saw m
y father coming out of the bakery carrying a cake box. She laughed and said to him, “Great minds think alike.”

  He just looked at her.

  “Maybe he wanted his cake to be a surprise,” I said when she told me. “Maybe he was disappointed that you’d seen him.”

  “No, it was weirder than that. He didn’t recognize me. I said, ‘Paul, it’s me.’ I said, ‘Paul. It’s your wife!’ He just looked at me. And then he got in his car with the cake and drove away.”

  This thing with the cake happened on Monday, four days before he died. She told me about it Saturday night. We were sitting in the dark, on the love seats in my parents’ living room, trying to figure out if my father had shown any sign that something was wrong.

  After my father died, my mother kept asking me what I thought.

  I had to be careful about what I said to her. I said, “I don’t know.”

  But here’s what I really thought: my father kept needing to prove that the thing with my mother and Ted was safe.

  I think he went to the bakery to show that, see, he had no problem with Ted—in fact he was so at ease with the situation that he was buying the guy a birthday cake.

  I think that when my mother showed up at the bakery, my father thought, Christ, they don’t even need me to do that.

  Another dream she told me, in the months after my father’s death:

  She is in an office building, a big one, in New York, she thinks. She is running down the corridor, and my father and Ted are ahead of her. They are getting on the elevator to go down, and she keeps yelling, Wait! Wait for me!

  But they don’t wait. They ignore her. The doors close just as she reaches them.

  “And then you want to hear something weird?” she told me. “I woke up, and then when I fell back asleep I had the exact same dream again.”

  That dream came later, after the thing with Ted was over.

  On Monday we were getting ready to leave for my father’s memorial service when a truck pulled into our driveway. The driver said he was there to deliver a chair.

  For one wild moment I thought it was the chair that my father had died in, which my husband and Ted had taken to the dump on Saturday morning. I thought maybe it was making its way back to us in some mysterious, obstinate way, like a lost animal.

  “No!” From behind me, my mother was yelling at the driver. “This is not a good time. You’ll have to come back.”

  The driver said he couldn’t do that. She’d asked for delivery on the eleventh and this was the eleventh. He’d driven up specially from New York. She needed to take delivery of the chair.

  “My husband is dead!” my mother screamed. “Leave me alone about the chair!”

  “What chair is this?” I asked.

  “It’s the one from my bedroom. It used to be yellow. It was getting re-covered. Ted made me do it.” She screamed at the driver, “I don’t want it now!”

  I told the driver to just bring it in.

  Ted was around a lot, the week after my father died. My mother had asked him to do a eulogy, and he said he would. But then he changed his mind. He said it would make him uncomfortable.

  He offered to take charge of the food, for when people came back to the house after the service.

  After everyone had left, my mother said to me, “Didn’t you think the meal was elegant? I think Ted did that as a labor of love for Daddy, instead of speaking at the service. It was too hard for him to put his feelings into words.”

  A few nights later I came downstairs and she and Ted were in the kitchen, laughing.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  My mother pointed at Ted, who was holding the salt shaker in one hand and its lid in the other. “Daddy,” she said, gasping, her face red, “always insisted that the one with the fog hole was for pepper, and the one with all the little holes was for salt—”

  “—and I always said,” Ted continued, laughing, breathless, “I said, ‘No, Paul, it’s the other way around.’ And so just now I happened to notice the salt and pepper shakers sitting there, so I said—”

  “—and so he said, ‘Aha! Finally I can just switch them!’”

  After I went back home to Boston I called her every day.

  “Ted is being wonderful,” she said each time.

  “I’m glad,” I would say.

  One night she told me that the strangest thing had happened.

  “Before Daddy died, he started to put some wire fencing around the edges of the property. So deer couldn’t get in this summer, and eat the garden. Well, today I looked out the window and there was Ted, at the edge of the woods, and he was finishing the deer fencing. He didn’t even ring the doorbell to tell me he was going to do it; he was just there, doing it.”

  “That’s nice of him,” I said.

  “I went outside to thank him. And he said something really weird.”

  “What?”

  “He said, ‘Don’t thank me. I have my own guilt, you know.’”

  A few days later, she asked me what I thought Ted had meant, about feeling guilty. “Guilty about what? What would he have to feel guilty about?”

  I knew what I thought. Guilt because he’d imagined his friendship with my mother was harmless. Guilt because he’d believed my parents were secure people happily opening their arms to him. Guilt because he hadn’t seen that my mother had been using him to get at my father, and that my father was not okay.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You don’t think,” she said, and then there was a pause, and she lowered her voice. “You don’t think he’s in love with me, do you?”

  There was a surface layer of skepticism and horror, but underneath was tremendous excitement.

  “No. I don’t,” I said.

  It must have been a few months after that, the night when she called me and then couldn’t talk, because she was crying. Heartbroken, gulping sobs.

  “What?” I said. “Mommy, what is it?” I hadn’t called her “Mommy” in decades.

  “He called me a cunt,” she whispered.

  “Who did?”

  “Ted. He called me a cunt in King Neptune’s Palace.”

  That was the name of the seafood place where they had dinner together once or twice a week. “Sssh,” I said. “Tell me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Oh, Mom.”

  “I didn’t mean—I was just trying to empathize,” she gulped out. She told me: Ted’s father, to whom he had not spoken for years, had died the week before. And so at dinner she had said something to Ted about how they both had enormous losses now to deal with; and he had asked her how she could even begin to think of comparing those two losses.

  “And he looked at me. Such a look, the coldness of it. And he said, ‘You are such a cunt.’”

  It was after that, I think, that she began telling me over and over how much she missed my father. And began to say sometimes that she felt guilty, but when I would say, “Guilty about what?” she would say, “A lot of things.”

  That was also when she began telling me about the dreams.

  I am remembering now that the last time I saw Ted, before their friendship ended that night at King Neptune’s Palace, I tried to thank him for whatever it was he was giving my mother. I told him a little stiffly that he’d been great.

  He gave me a funny look and said, “I don’t know how long I can keep it up.”

  I’m not sure what happened, why he pushed her away so hard. Maybe he had liked her as part of a couple, but didn’t want to be stuck with her alone. Maybe between the two of them, Ted had, in fact, been more deeply attached to my father. My mother believed that for Ted she was the sun and my father the moon, but maybe she got it backwards. Certainly my father’s death sobered Ted. Certainly he and my mother had been giddy together, and in their giddiness they had missed my father’s despair. Maybe after he died Ted felt chastened, and was repelled because my mother seemed to feel only abandoned.

  I don’t know. What I know is: She�
��s my mother. My love for her has very little to do with liking. It’s a fierce, dumb love. It’s a love compounded of anger for all the things she could never see, and desire to protect her from ever seeing them.

  When I called her at the rehab place at lunchtime today, she sounded tired and subdued. She told me some of the sensation in her legs is starting to return.

  “That’s good,” I said.

  “It hurts,” she said.

  She told me another dream.

  My father is dead, but he is back with our family for a while, on a kind of furlough. We all know he is dead, but no one is supposed to mention it. He is very tall, wearing a dark suit and the kind of brimmed felt hat he used to wear a long time ago, when he was on his way up in business.

  He is sitting with my mother. She is holding his hand, which is warm. She keeps meaning to ask him where the steel platter is, the one he used to carve the meat on. But she keeps saying other things instead.

  He gets up, and she knows he is leaving.

  Where’s the steel platter? she tries to say. This time she can’t say anything. No words come out.

  But just before he leaves, he looks at her and he is smiling.

  And he tells her: Don’t worry about the steel platter. It’s all right. I know where everything is.

  Suicide: factors that may have had direct or indirect bearing on

  pots of money

  MY HUSBAND’S FAMILY WAS COMPLICATED, AND VERY RICH.

  When I met him in college, his parents had been divorced for years and had both since married other people. His father and stepmother lived in Connecticut with their two young daughters, on a gentleman’s farm fueled by old family money that seemed to be astronomical and inexhaustible. They had boats and yacht clubs, horses and hunt clubs, and a huge shingled summer house on Cape Cod that had been in the family for three generations. They drank a lot, fought a lot, and threw large, raucous parties for the handsome young guys who crewed on their racing yawl and the girls who mucked out their stables and schooled their ponies and rode in horse shows up and down the East Coast.