“I can’t give you permission to sell it,” my husband said, “because it isn’t in trust just for me.”
“If I talk to the girls, they’ll tell their mother. And Abby will bring the lawyers down on my head.”
My husband said he was sorry, but he couldn’t tell Cal to go ahead and sell the painting without talking to his other children.
Cal got mad then, and said, “I’m desperate. Don’t you get it? I’m telling you I’m desperate.”
“Look,” said my husband, “I can’t stop you from selling it if that’s what you want to do. But I can’t tell you it’s okay, either.”
When my husband told me about this conversation that evening, I said, “You could stop him, if you wanted to. You could pick up the phone and call Abby.”
“I know,” he said.
“But you won’t, will you?”
“No.”
I was scrubbing out a pot, scouring in big, angry circles. “How desperate can a man with a fifty-two-foot boat be?”
My husband shrugged, and looked at me. I didn’t say anything else. I turned on the water so hard that it splashed the front of my shirt. Desperate, I said to Cal in my head, you don’t even know what desperate means.
Then I thought that maybe he’d used that word on purpose, knowing the terrible power it would have with my husband in the wake of my father’s death.
Or maybe he really was desperate.
I looked at my husband, who was wiping down the counters briskly and dazedly. Despite the distance in their relationship, I knew that he loved his father—but that wasn’t what was going on here. What was going on was a careful decision not to take any action, because the consequences of that action were unpredictable. My father’s death had made a permanent shift in how we saw the world, in what we were certain of and what we were aware of not knowing. There really was no way to tell for sure if a man was in a corner. And what that man, if he ever got into a corner, might do.
Then one afternoon my husband called me from work, more upset than I’d ever heard him. Neil, he said, wanted my mother to pay him back for covering my father’s share of the bank loan.
“I told him the estate would cover it, if he could just be patient,” my husband said, “but he wants to be paid now. And he says he knows your mother has the money to do it.”
“But the only reason he knows is because she confided in him,” I said.
“I know. I said, ‘Neil, this is family. This is my wife’s family. You’ve sat across from these people at the dinner table.’ He said he didn’t see what that had to do with anything. He said that when they signed the loan agreement, your father looked him straight in the eye and promised that he was good for his share.”
“And he killed himself because he couldn’t make good.”
“I said that. I said he’d paid the debt in the only way he knew how. And Neil said the debt hadn’t been paid, because he still doesn’t have his money back.”
My husband thought he could protect my mother from all this. He told Neil to back off, and he drove to Connecticut and took Katherine to lunch and asked her to tell Neil to back off.
Within the year, my mother told me that the estate had been settled and Neil had been paid. But recently she said to me, after a Thanksgiving dinner at which Neil had annoyed her, “Sometimes I think he is literally heartless. Remember after Daddy died, when he came after me for that money?”
“He did? We thought we’d nipped that in the bud.”
My mother shook her head. “He called and said he wanted the money right then. Can you believe it? I told him he could just wait, along with the other creditors. I said, ‘Neil, take a number.’”
Families spend years eating meals together, chatting, sniping, listening, not listening, concealing unhappiness, leaning on weak spots, eroding the mortar. You get through time. You don’t say, “I never want to see you again.”
You invite everyone for Christmas, or Thanksgiving, or the birthday. You baste the meat, and light the candies, and open the presents. You get up to make the coffee and put the cookies on the plate, and then you go back and sit down at the table again.
Suicide: factors that may have had direct or indirect bearing on
uneasy problem of blame
GO AHEAD, READER. SAY IT. CLEAR YOUR THROAT, LOOK EMBARRASSED, and say, “Um, excuse me, but how come you’re blaming everyone else for his death?”
Good question.
It was my mother’s fault, for getting carried away with Ted.
It was Cal’s fault, for being rich and heedless.
It was Katherine and Neil’s fault, for being rich and heartless.
All the parents had failed, except for my father. In the months after he died, I felt like I’d lost all of them, except him. I knew it was crazy, but that was how I felt.
Here’s another crazy thing: I thought that if only he were around, he might console me for the loss of the others.
I was merciless toward them—not in my behavior, but in my thoughts. There are glib explanations for this:
Ah. I resented them because they were the parents who were left.
Ah. It was safer to get mad at them than it would have been to blame him.
Ah. Scapegoating.
In the months—more than months, decade—after my father’s death, I was angry at a lot of people, but not at him. He needed my protection, I thought. The world had found him unacceptable. He had found himself unacceptable. I was different, loving, loyal. I accepted his weakness; his despair; his secrecy; his pride; his failure; his shame; his beautiful, stupid, addled ideas about honor; his love for me, which might possibly have been there even in the last instant of his life.
I accepted everything about him, except that he was the author of his own absence.
Suicide: finding some humor in
ashes
A FEW DAYS AFTER MY FATHER DIED, MY MOTHER GOT A PHONE call from a man she knew who was lobbying to get curbside recycling in town. He was calling to invite her to a meeting. She explained that she couldn’t come, because her husband had just died.
The man said he was sorry to hear that.
As they were talking, my mother suddenly remembered that he was the person in charge of the little graveyard where she wanted to bury my father’s ashes.
“Listen, Ralph,” she said, “speaking of recycling . . .”
Suicide: finding some humor in
Valentine’s Day
MY MOTHER AND I WENT OUT TO LUNCH TOGETHER ABOUT A week after my father died, and the waitress asked, “So, did you have a good Valentine’s yesterday?”
My mother stiffened, managed a shrug.
The waitress was instantly alert with sympathy. “Didn’t he give you what you wanted?”
And my mother said, “Not exactly.”
Suicide: glimpses of his character relevant to
AFTER MY FATHER DIED, I COULDN’T SEE HIM CLEARLY ANYMORE. My memories all seemed to say one thing about him; his death said another.
In my memory, he is gentle. He is tolerant, witty, judicious. He smiles. He’s kind.
He takes me shopping for my birthday, and when I can’t decide between two jackets, he says, “I’d like to get you both.”
When my husband is rejected by a graduate program he’d set his heart on, my father takes a day off from work and walks in the woods with him, not saying a lot, mostly just listening. He also writes a letter to the president of the university, chewing out the institution for passing up such a terrific candidate.
He comes to my house the week after my son is born and cooks Thanksgiving dinner, a gorgeous, complicated meal that he gets on the table with no help and no fuss.
He’s warm and patient with a crying baby; he walks up and down the room with my son, sings to him, whispers Edward Lear’s nonsense rhymes into his ear.
Then one day he picks up a gun and pulls the trigger.
All right, maybe he’s not the world’s smartest businessman. He feels like a failur
e at times. He’s proud, and perhaps more easily hurt than he ever lets on. His wife has gotten carried away with another man.
But: He picks up a gun?
He pulls the trigger?
Hearing the news an hour after it happened, I felt that I’d just missed being in time to stop it. Without ever having admitted it to myself, this was what I’d been afraid of for a long time. I had sort of known—occasionally, dimly—that something might be wrong, but I’d accepted the superficial reassurances that nothing was. When he died, it was as if he’d finally been caught, literally, red-handed. He had come out into the open and we had finally spotted him, an hour after spotting him could have made any difference. We saw it an hour after it was too late.
I had never seen it clearly before. But I came to wonder, as I tried in the months after his death to piece together why he’d killed himself, if perhaps I had glimpsed it—that dark hidden thing that killed him—a few times in the past. It was always far away, hidden in the trees. I was never sure if what I was glimpsing was a dangerous and wild creature or just a big dog, someone’s pet, turned into something menacing by fear, and a trick of light and shadow.
Once he hit me. Only once. I must have been about ten. My mother and I were screaming at each other, and I told her to shut up. Then I went running up the stairs to my room and slammed the door.
My door flew open. My father charged across the room and he hit me so hard that my glasses snapped sideways and broke in half, and blood started pouring out of my nose.
I remember that he kept apologizing, as they cleaned me up. They dabbed at me with a cool, wet washcloth. The fight had incinerated itself, burned in a fiery instant down to nothing. “I’m sorry,” my father kept saying. “I’m so sorry.” I was sorry, too, that I’d provoked him to become unrecognizable, to do something that hadn’t even seemed in the range of possible things he might do.
I didn’t know that night, or indeed until after he died, that he’d been beaten by his father, sometimes to the point of broken bones.
I remember my bathrobe: white terry cloth, with appliqued gingham flowers down the front. I remember the blood on the flowers. I remember the numb, tender feeling of my nose and lips, and the chill of the washcloth, and my father’s voice saying over and over, “I’m sorry.”
I was twenty-three and had just started a job in a Boston advertising agency. It was my lunch hour; I was in the Lord & Taylor on Boylston Street, buying shoes.
Seeing the other women in the agency had made me realize that my wardrobe was nonexistent. I needed everything, and I was having fun. A white blouse with pleating down the front. Another in lavender-gray silk, with small abalone buttons. A narrow red skirt. And now, today, two pairs of shoes: dark-red leather flats, and black suede pumps with heels. I handed the salesman my MasterCard.
“Sorry,” he said, “we don’t take this one. Lord & Taylor charge? American Express? Or you could always pay by check.”
I knew there wasn’t enough money in our checking account to cover the shoes. I hadn’t gotten my first paycheck yet, and my husband and I had wiped ourselves out with the move to Boston, but my salary was a good one and the money would be there in a week or two.
My father had given me an American Express card on his account, to use in an emergency. I’d had the card for several years and never used it, but I was sure he wouldn’t mind; I would send him a check as soon as I got paid next Friday, so he would have the money before he even got the bill. I pulled the card from my wallet and handed it to the salesman. He was fiftyish, nervous, with long strands of graying hair combed across a mostly bald scalp; he’d scurried around, bringing me the shoes I had asked to try, and I had thought, How sad, to be that age and selling shoes; could he possibly be supporting a family that way?
He came back holding the American Express card in front of him, between thumb and forefinger. “There seems to be a problem with the card.”
“What kind of problem?”
“The charge is being declined.”
I’d never heard of anything like this. “But what does that mean?” My voice had gotten shrill.
The salesman didn’t say anything; he just looked at me over the tops of his wire-rimmed glasses. It suddenly occurred to me that he thought I was trying to get away with using a defunct or stolen credit card; it probably happened a lot, and he’d been trained to deal with us crooks politely. He was still standing there with his eyebrows raised, holding out the card. I took it, and said in a regal voice completely new to me, “Is there a telephone I could use? I’d like to straighten this out with American Express immediately.”
I sat in the wooden phone booth with the door open, one leg crossed over the other and jutting imperiously out into the shoe department. I read off the card number to the American Express woman. “Just a minute,” she said. She came right back. “I’m sorry, that account is delinquent.”
Delinquent. I digested the word for a moment. “Are you saying the bills haven’t been paid?”
“That’s right,” the woman said. “There’s an unpaid balance of eighteen thousand dollars.”
“But it’s my father’s account,” I blurted out. Then I realized that of course this meant nothing to the American Express woman; she didn’t know my father. “I’m sure it’s a mistake. I guess I should call him?” Meant as a statement, not as a question; but the uncertainty of it seemed to elicit a little sympathy from the American Express woman.
“That’s probably a good idea,” she said.
I called my father at the office and told him the whole story. “And then,” I said, and, “Can you believe it?” My indignation was audible proof of my faith in him. “They said the account’s delinquent,” I finished, and waited. My father would laugh in annoyance, I thought. He’d say, Oh, Christ. And then he’d say, Let me call them and straighten this out.
But there was a long silence.
Finally he said, “It’s being taken care of.”
Surprise made me stupid. “You mean the bill really hasn’t been paid? Why not?” I regretted this the moment it came out. I should never have made this phone call. I should have taken the card back from the salesman, put it in my wallet, and never told my father I’d tried to use it.
His shame came over the phone wires as clearly as his breathing. He was explaining: it’s a business account, we ran into a little cash-flow problem, it’ll all be straightened out at the end of the month—
I interrupted him. “It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me.”
“Well,” he said. “You know how it is.”
But I didn’t know. And I didn’t want to. I’d caught a glimpse into some frightening, uncertain business world where my father spent his days, and which he tried to keep private. It was something I shouldn’t have seen, and it was my clumsiness that had knocked down the partition.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“What for?”
“Well, for trying to buy the shoes. I know that’s not why you gave me the credit card—”
“That’s exactly why I gave you the card,” he said. “Of course you should use it to buy shoes.”
A silence, while the echoes of this magnanimous boom died down and we both remembered that no, I couldn’t buy the shoes.
“Listen,” my father said finally. “One thing.”
“What?”
“Don’t tell Mom.”
“But doesn’t she have a card too? Shouldn’t you warn her not to use it?”
He sighed. “She probably won’t. Let’s hope not, anyway.”
I got off the phone, told the salesman I wasn’t going to take the shoes, and walked back to the office.
Nine years later. Only a year or so before he died. My parents were visiting us in Cambridge, and my father and I went out for a walk. It was a cold, gray winter afternoon. We threaded our way through streets of houses where the lights were already coming on, and eventually came out onto Massachusetts Avenue.
“You’re cold,” my father said.
“Let’s find you a cup of tea.”
We stopped at a little café, got our drinks at the counter, and carried them to one of the small tables at the back. We stirred in milk and sugar.
“Really hits the spot,” my father said. He smiled at me.
“So how are you?” I asked.
“Not too bad.” He smiled again. Then he said, slowly, “It’s been a rough week.” It was unusual for him to say even that much.
“You want to talk about it?”
He shook his head. “You know. The usual.”
“Would it help to tell me?”
“Tell me about you.”
I looked at him, then bowed my head and drank more tea.
Finally he said, “Oh, let’s see. Debts. Angry customers. Unfilled orders. Maybe a lawsuit.”
We took it item by item: I asked him about each of those things, and he told me. At some point while he was telling me, the owner of the café, who was notoriously mean, came over and yelled at us for sitting at a table with just drinks; the tables were for people who had something to eat. I almost started arguing with him—the other tables were empty, we weren’t preventing anyone with food from sitting down—but then I just asked him for two slices of linzer torte. He brought the plates and slammed them down in front of us.
After he walked away, I asked my father, “Do you ever think of getting out?” I meant: getting out of his business.
“It’s complicated,” he said, after a moment.
“But it sounds like it’s complicated to stay in.”
“That too.”
We both tasted our cake, which was excellent.
“Sometimes I feel like everything I touch turns to shit,” my father said.
He had never said anything like that before. Probably not to anyone; certainly not to me. I think it terrified both of us. The silence went on and on. We kept eating our cake, by small forkfuls. When the cake was gone, we smashed the crumbs with the backs of our forks and slid them between our teeth. We kept picking up our cups and sipping from them even though all the tea was gone.
The Suicide Index Page 9
