The Suicide Index

by Joan Wickersham

  My father is sitting next to her, holding her hand. He doesn’t turn around when I come into the room; he thinks he’s alone with her. He is saying, “Mother, it’s me. Paul. It’s Paul, Mother.” His voice is quiet but desperate. He leans in, and I hear him say, “Mother, it’s Boris.”

  He’s crying.

  Her memorial service is held on a sweltering day, in the auditorium of the Ethical Culture Society. Kurt gets up and speaks. So do I. So do Faustina and several of the students and colleagues from the institute. A musicologist talks about going with my grandmother to Africa and Australia in the 1950s, to study indigenous songs and dances. Vashti does an eighteenth-century dance that my grandmother reconstructed and performed in Berlin in the late 1920s. My father doesn’t get up to speak. He keeps his sunglasses on, and stays silent. Tears are running down his face. He ignores the movement choir. I get up to join it, though, and I look back at him. He and my mother are marooned sitting there, alone in the midst of everyone else who knew her.

  The movement choir loops down the aisles, up onto the stage, and back down again. We’re all swaying, sweating, crying. Nobody is in the center.

  After it’s over, people linger. They stand in the aisles, in the vestibule, on the front steps, outside on the baking sidewalk, all reluctant to break away.

  Breaking up her apartment is hard. Everything looks like her, and it all belongs together, in a jumble. Dividing it diminishes everything.

  There is no sign of the farm, or of the plastic garden.

  We throw out her clothes, which are old and worn; in the last few years she’d got to the point of not caring.

  “Oh, my God,” my mother says. She is holding a piece of paper which she’s just pulled out of the bottom drawer of my grandmother’s dresser.

  “What?” I ask.

  She keeps looking at it, but moves close to me so that I can see it too. At first it doesn’t make any sense. A big drawing of concentric circles, dated a couple of months ago, with “Circle of Love and Healing” at the top in my grandmother’s handwriting.

  The circle at the center is very small, with my grandmother’s name written in the middle of it.

  It’s surrounded by a slightly larger circle, in which my grandmother wrote the names of Kurt and his wife, along with Faustina and Vashti.

  My family is in the next circle outward. “Boris,” she wrote, and my mother’s name, my sister’s, and mine. Along with ours are several other names I don’t recognize.

  There are more circles surrounding ours, radiating outward, filled with names.

  My mother’s hands, holding the paper, are shaking. “Now do you see?” she says. “Now do you see why I never liked her? She never protected him, not from anything. What kind of person does something like this? What kind of mother loves one child more than the other and then writes it down? What kind of mother has to map it all out in circles?”

  She’s upset but triumphant: at last my grandmother’s villainy has been documented. Here it is, laid out clearly, for the record.

  My father comes in, from the living room. “What’s all the commotion?”

  I look at my mother. No. Don’t show it to him, I think.

  But she’s already giving him the piece of paper, the evidence, all mapped out in circles—something irrevocable and permanent, the last word he’ll ever have from his mother, written in her graceful hard-to-read hand.

  Suicide: items found in my husband’s closet and

  A SATURDAY MORNING, A YEAR OR SO AFTER MY FATHER’S DEATH. I was in my house, sitting on the floor of my husband’s closet. I was rummaging around in the stuff on the floor.

  I’d been doing this—these aimless, restless searches—ever since my father died. In closets and basements and chests of drawers, in my parents’ house and in my own. I was looking for clues. Also, I kept hoping I’d find a note—that maybe my father, with his ornately circuitous ideas of honor and secrecy, might have written a note and hidden it, for reasons we wouldn’t understand until we found it.

  My husband’s closet floor was a jumble of shoes and boxes of old papers and shopping bags full of old clothes to be donated to charity. I moved one of the bags, and behind it was a large manila envelope. When I opened it, another envelope slid out. I read the writing on it: my father’s name, and the date of his death, and the words CONTENTS OF POCKETS.

  Inside was a collection of smaller envelopes. I tipped them into my lap.

  RIGHT REAR POCKET, one said. I opened it. My father’s wallet. His face looked up at me from his driver’s license: a tiny, law-abiding citizen.

  RIGHT FRONT POCKET. A white handkerchief. A roll of peppermint Certs, half gone, with the gold foil folded over to protect the top one. A prescription bottle of Lomotil. His key chain.

  LEFT REAR POCKET. A green plastic compact filled with Tucks hemorrhoid wipes.

  I sat there. After a moment, I screamed for my husband. He came running up the stairs and saw me sitting there with all the little envelopes in my lap.

  I said: “I think he was murdered.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because look.” I held up the thing of hemorrhoid wipes. “There’s no way he would have put these in his pocket if he’d been planning to kill himself. Or here—” I held up the prescription bottle “—this is diarrhea medicine. You know how private he was. He would never have wanted this stuff to be found on his body.”

  My husband sat down on the floor near me. “He wasn’t murdered.”

  “Yes!” I said. “My mother was asleep. Someone could have come into the house without being heard, and gone into his study, and shot him.”

  “Why would anyone have wanted to murder him?”

  “Maybe he borrowed money from someone and couldn’t pay it back. You know the business was failing. Or maybe he was involved in something we didn’t know about. He spoke all those languages; he was always traveling. Maybe he was a spy.” I looked at my husband’s face. “I’m serious—why couldn’t he have been a spy?”

  “Because he wasn’t sharp enough. Not in the last few years.” My husband’s voice was gentle.

  “Well, maybe that’s why they killed him. Maybe he’d started fucking up, so it was too dangerous to let him live. Have you checked the telephone records? Have you gone through all his file drawers?” I was shouting. I knew that what I was saying sounded crazy, impossible—but so was the idea that he’d killed himself. After all these months, after all the moments when I’d thought I’d known it was the truth, I still didn’t know; I still didn’t believe it.

  My husband said: “They know it was suicide.”

  He said it in a clear, deliberate way. He was telling me something new.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They know because of the way he was shot.”

  “In the heart?”

  “In the head,” my husband said.

  I turned my body to face him.

  He said, “The police told me, one of those times I went to the station. I wasn’t going to tell you.”

  “But the blood was on his chest. There wasn’t a head wound.”

  “Yes there was.”

  “How could my mother not have seen it?”

  “It was inside.”

  There was a silence, a new abyss slowly opening. “You’re saying he put the gun in his mouth.” We were sitting cross-legged on the floor. The sun was gilding the window glass; the morning was passing. The house smelled of bacon and eggs. I was still in my nightgown. “So the blood on his chest must have come out of his mouth and his nose.” We sat there some more.

  I thought: So that was the bulge.

  I said, “But why wasn’t his head blown apart? Isn’t that why people shoot themselves like that, so their heads will blow apart?”

  “The police didn’t understand that either. They said they’d never seen this happen before. They said it might’ve been because the gun was so old. A malfunction of some kind.”

  “A malfunction,” I said. “S
o it could have not worked. It could have just wounded him, not killed him. He was lucky.”

  “In a sense.”

  I said, “So all my mother’s stuff about how he shot himself in the heart to be considerate of us, to not make a mess—that was all bullshit. For all he knew, he was going to blow his head apart. And she would have found him like that, and he didn’t care.”

  I kept sitting on the floor in my nightgown, with the contents of my father’s pockets lying in my lap.

  In that moment, I knew he was dead.

  I knew that he’d killed himself, and I knew how violently he’d wanted to wipe himself out.

  I knew that everything we thought we’d known about him—his gentleness, his love for us—was open to question.

  And I knew I would never understand how he’d gotten from putting hemorrhoid wipes in his pocket to shooting himself in the head forty-five minutes later.

  I forgot it all again, afterward. Those moments of knowing are sharp and merciless, but then they fade out, like stars when the sky gets light in the morning. You know, and then you don’t know. And then comes another moment when you’re learning—something new, or the same things over and over again.

  Suicide: life summarized in an attempt to illuminate

  LET’S SAY I AM A BIOGRAPHER. I AM HIS DAUGHTER, BUT I ONLY happen to be his daughter. Say I am also scholarly and earnest. I intend to write slowly, to think carefully. I want to look at the bigger picture, to examine his suicide in the context of his whole life.

  I read somewhere that every year in America, there are twice as many suicides as murders. I want to write about it because it’s important.

  Let’s say I’m impartial.

  Let’s also say that I’ve been given a grant to pursue this biographical piece of work. A residency at an artists’ colony. I’ve been given a studio to work in, a quiet cabin that overlooks both a patch of woods and a sloping, grassy field. It’s only the beginning of November, but it snowed last night; and this morning the field, which was green and rippling, looks hard and flattened and faded.

  The room I sleep in is in a house in another part of the colony. I hike over here, around seven each morning. I come in and make tea, in a red teapot I brought from home. I brought other things as well. Old papers and photographs. A draft of the failed novel I tried to write about my father. Music that reminds me of him.

  1.

  Start with a thesis, or a statement of purpose: I am going to try to reconstruct who he was, because I’m not sure anymore.

  Suicide destroys memory.

  It undercuts one of our most romantic, and most comforting, notions: that we don’t really die when we die, because we live on in the memories of those who love us.

  When you kill yourself, you’re killing every memory everyone has of you. You’re taking yourself away permanently and removing all traces that you were ever here in the first place, wiping away every fingerprint you ever left on anything.

  You’re saying, “I’m gone, and you can’t even be sure who it is that’s gone, because you never knew me.”

  So what did I know about my father, really?

  He was tall.

  He was tired.

  He liked desserts made with berries. Shortcake. Sundaes. A German pudding called rote grütze: whipped raspberries, or maybe it was red currants. His mother used to make it sometimes.

  He liked Purcell, Vivaldi, Telemann, Mozart—anybody composing before 1800. After that things got too overblown for him, too overtly emotional.

  He liked Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde, and could quote long passages. Once he got going at the dinner table, it was hard to stop him.

  He spoke German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.

  He was fascinated by Japan, at least until he had a bad experience doing business with a Japanese company, and then he decided, abruptly and irrevocably, that “you can’t trust them.” Them. Suddenly these colleagues whom he’d liked and respected became Them.

  “What he meant was: they had hurt him and betrayed him by having seemed so trustworthy. They’d been polite and thoughtful and then screwed him, whipped out a knife that he hadn’t even imagined they could be carrying.

  (Oh, but that last paragraph is fiction—my moving away from the cautious, measured, responsible tone of biography into the kind of wildness I now believe was churning behind his calm face. Slipping from what I know is true to what I think must have been true.)

  (And of course that betrayed bitter wildness is true for me, too. He was so polite and considerate, and wound up using a weapon I never knew he had.)

  He liked to read books that prophesied disaster—economic or political—and that suggested that if you were prescient and canny enough, you could not only avoid being harmed by the impending catastrophe, you could actually profit from it. He liked novels about conspiracies and espionage. I think he believed that there was a different, dark world operating beneath the bland cover of ordinary life. You’d be crazy and naive to deny that it was there. It was cleverly hidden, but sometimes it gave itself away; if you stayed alert you could sometimes glimpse it. Its forces, if seen and understood, would explain everything.

  Maybe, for him, such an explanation felt necessary. He had experienced those two worlds—the safe one and the terrifying, merciless one—in his childhood. Life was a war between civilization and brutality. Civilization was a deliberate construction; it was very much to be desired, but not to be trusted. He wanted to trust it. He believed he could choose it. So his father had hit him years ago, so what? So his childhood had been rough. Was he going to let that determine the tone of his whole life? Of course not.

  Bad stuff happens. You can wallow in it and feel sorry for yourself, or you can get on with things. Be a grownup, be a man, be reliable and dependable. Love your wife and daughters. Succeed. Forget about brutality. It’s old, it’s over. It can’t hurt you anymore.

  Ah, but brutality was real. You could wish it gone, you could try to geld it, but you knew it was there. It was what lurked underneath. If you fell down into it there was no point in screaming for help, because no one would come.

  2.

  Okay. We’ve learned something: a formal biographical essay won’t work. In this case, with this writer, it gets too emotional, too easily out of hand. It may act like a well-schooled horse, but then the minute it gets out of sight of the stable, into the open countryside, it gallops away, with its rider clinging desperately to mane and saddle.

  Let’s try something different.

  Let’s look at the photographs. Spread them out, put them in chronological order, use them to organize and anchor the narrative.

  The first one isn’t a single photograph; it’s a whole album, from my grandmother’s childhood. She came from a rich family that made all the pins and needles in Germany. The album is bound in heavy maroon leather, with an ornate brass clasp. The words UNSER LIEBLING are stamped in gold on the front cover, OUR DARLING. Chunky, gilt-edged leaves: photographs of posed children with big, soft, timid eyes, their hair in ringlets, wearing starched white dresses. My grandmother was the oldest. When she was twelve, they all got rheumatic fever. The brother died, the sister was left with a heart condition, and my grandmother’s joints were affected. She started dancing as a kind of physical therapy. She married a university professor, who disappointed her by turning out not to want children.

  Then she met my grandfather.

  The next picture is of the two of them, dancing, presumably with the touring troupe they formed. They’re wearing ragged vagabond costumes, facing away from each other. Her elbows are looped through his; he’s leaning forward, lifting her off the ground so that she’s lying on her back against his back; her feet are kicking in the air. They’re both laughing, big free open-mouthed laughs. Sex cackles and shivers off the old photographic paper.

  My grandfather was a childlike, charismatic, self-dramatizing man, a Russian who’d grown up rootless and parentless, wandering through eastern Europe until he eventually
found his way to Berlin. Before he met my grandmother he survived as a dancing teacher, and a gigolo. He sneered at my grandmother’s smug, sheltered, bourgeois life; yanked her out of it by her thrilled arm; assumed, of course, that her money would come with her. But it didn’t. Running away with him (and away from her marriage) made her the black sheep of her family.

  But her family must not have broken with her completely, because here is my father, at the age of four, sitting next to a tall jar of flowers on the floor of my great-grandmother’s apartment in Berlin. His hair is a mass of blond curls, and he is wearing a dress. They got hold of him for a while, while his parents were touring with their dance troupe, and raised him in the Unser Liebling mold.

  He remembered that life as organized and formal. Safe, but stuffy and restrictive. They thought he ate too slowly, so they put an alarm clock next to his plate and when it rang, the food was taken away. This was how it was done: so.

  Another piece of my father’s childhood needs to be in here, but there’s no photograph of it. The times when his parents took him along on their tours, which he hated. No bedtime, no set mealtimes. Being left alone in a dark hotel room with his baby brother while his parents were out performing, the baby smearing shit on the walls and my father not knowing what to do about it.

  All his life he believed that artists were irresponsible.

  Now he’s a little older, six or seven, away at boarding school in the Alps. Standing in a group of children, all of them in costume for a play or pageant: elves in tights and doublets and peaked caps; my father, unmistakable because of his wild hair, in a white gown, wearing a crown and carrying a lantern. He told me once that in the winter, at that school, they all got around on skis, casual and skilled enough not even to need poles. It wasn’t a sport, he said; it was transportation. He told me about climbing mountains, walking up through clouds and emerging above them.