The Suicide Index

by Joan Wickersham

  Health scares turning out to be nothing.

  An Easter morning in Venice, with the windows wide open and all the bells of the city ringing.

  A St. Matthew Passion sung by a Japanese music group in a candlelit old church in Boston.

  Reading Turgenev, and thinking, Yes you’re right—that’s exactly where Lavretsky would have gone after dinner.

  Asking your kids what they’re making with the clay they got for Christmas, and having them tell you, “A nightclub.”

  Being with your husband in a city where you’ve traveled to see the architecture, and having him say, “The hell with the architecture” and taking you into the hotel bar instead, and drinking Campari and eating peanuts and then going upstairs to bed and spending the next day in bed too and leaving the city without ever looking at a single building.

  But.

  Suicide: opposing versions of

  “I CAME HOME FROM WORK, AND IT WAS COLD, AND I REALIZED I didn’t know how to make a fire,” my mother told me over the phone. “He always did that, made the fires. How could he leave me alone, with no one to make the fire? How could he abandon me?”

  I said, “I know.”

  My sister said, “Our family was rotten from the beginning. We came from rot.”

  I said, “You think?”

  My mother said, “Poor Daddy. Poor man. I have nothing but compassion for him.”

  I said, “Mmm.”

  My sister said, “I think it was in him for a long time. I don’t understand how he held on for as long as he did, why he didn’t do it sooner.”

  I said, “Well.”

  My mother said, “Do you think it was my fault?”

  I said, “Of course not.”

  My sister said, “You know what? I’m not sure I’m even all that sad. He had a right to do what he did. If life had gotten that painful for him, then maybe he made the right choice.”

  I said, “I don’t know.”

  My mother said, “Do you remember Valerie Smith? Well, guess what: her husband left her. She came home the other day and he was gone. Can you believe it? She had absolutely no inkling that he was thinking of leaving. How can a woman live with a man and not pick up the slightest signal that he’s planning to leave?”

  I said, “It does seem strange.”

  My mother said, “Today’s the anniversary.” Of his death, she meant.

  I said, “I know. That’s why I called, to see how you’re doing.”

  “It’s a very hard day for me,” my mother said.

  I said, “I know. For me too.”

  “Yes, but it’s very very hard for me,” said my mother.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  My mother said, “I had a mole removed on my back, and I can’t reach the spot to change the dressing. He promised to take care of me in our old age. Where the hell is he? What kind of man promises that and then just disappears?”

  There was a silence.

  “Why don’t you answer me? Are you there?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Suicide: other people’s stories concerning

  IT TURNED OUT THERE WAS ANOTHER MOTHER AT MY SON’S nursery school whose father had killed himself. I learned this when I came back to Boston, ten days after my father died. I dropped my son off at the school and watched as he darted off, quick as a released minnow, into the space that was so familiar to him. One of the teachers came over and asked how I was doing.

  I nodded.

  “You should talk to Kate,” she said.

  I barely knew Kate.

  “Look,” said the teacher. “I haven’t told anyone what your father did. I just said he died. But if you want me to, I’ll tell Kate. Her father did the same thing.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  The next morning when I brought my son to school, Kate came up to me. “What are you doing right now?” she asked. “Do you have some time?”

  We went to my house. For some reason we decided to sit in the backyard. It was a warm day for February, but it was still February. We had mugs of tea, and we kept our gloved hands wrapped around them. I remember Kate blowing on hers, the steam rising in front of her cold face. She sat with her long legs up on the table. She was seven months pregnant, wearing overalls and a red down jacket.

  She asked me what my father had done, and listened while I told her.

  “Mine used a gun, too,” she said, “but other than that it was pretty different.”

  “Different how?” I asked.

  “First of all, he kept threatening to do it. For years. He had this whole big Hemingway thing going on. The drinking, the guns. He kept telling us he was going to shoot himself. We didn’t believe him anymore. Nobody wanted to listen. We were all exhausted.”

  “Did you feel guilty, then, when he did it?”

  “No,” Kate said. Her voice was cool; she made it sound convincing. “I wasn’t relieved, either. Just: okay, yup, now I know the ending.”

  She told me that her father had been staying alone in their house in Florida. “My brother and I flew down that night, as soon as we heard. He wasn’t there anymore. They’d taken him away.”

  Her cool, soft voice got even quieter. “The room was a mess. He would have liked that; it would have pleased him, knowing what a mess he’d made. My brother and I cleaned it ourselves. I guess we couldn’t figure out how else to get it done. I picked this big thing off the floor and I didn’t know what it was. Then I turned it around and I realized it was his jawbone.”

  My mother-in-law’s friend Doris, whom I’d met only once, years ago at a cocktail party, sent me a note in shaky handwriting, from the nursing home where she lived now.

  “I know how you feel,” the note said. “I remember what it was like for me, when my father did what yours did.”

  I told my mother these stories. She shook her head. “They keep crawling out of the woodwork,” she said.

  She had an old friend named Gloria, who was so beautiful that my father had nicknamed her “Glorious.” That’s what our family had called her for the past thirty years.

  Glorious had come to visit my mother some time after my father died. They’d sat up late, talking, not about anything much, according to my mother.

  Then, out of nowhere, Glorious had suddenly said that her mother had committed suicide. She’d been in and out of institutions for years, Glorious said. She was a beautiful, beautiful woman—she was always being painted, and photographed.

  “And she shot herself in the face, in front of my father. In their bedroom—she’d kept the gun in her glove box. A tiny pistol. He didn’t even know she had it.”

  My mother had been stunned. “All these years we’ve been friends, and you’ve never told me this.”

  “I’ve never told anyone,” Glorious said. Then she leaned forward and took hold of my mother’s wrist. “Promise me you won’t tell. I don’t want Dan to know about this.”

  Dan was Glorious’s son. He was forty.

  At prep school, my husband had been close to a boy named Thad. Thad’s mother died during their tenth-grade year from an overdose of pills and alcohol. Thad had been furious at his father, who kept insisting that the death was accidental, and who married his secretary seven months later. My husband spent hours listening to Thad talk about how miserable his mother had been (she’d known about the secretary), how desperately sad, how lonely.

  After my father died, my husband called Thad. They’d kept in touch over the years, but sporadically, not in any deep way. My husband told Thad what my father had done, and said, “I need to talk to someone who’s been through this. And I’m remembering what it was like for you, some of the things you were feeling, after your mother’s suicide.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line. Then Thad said, “I’m not sure what it is you’re remembering, but my mother’s death was an accident.”

  One of the men I worked with was married to a woman named Jane. They invited us to dinner one night, and when everyo
ne was settled with drinks in the living room and Jane disappeared into the kitchen, I followed and asked her if I could help.

  She smiled at me—thanks—and then the smile dropped off her face. “I hope you don’t mind, but Rob told me about your father.”

  “I don’t mind,” I said.

  “It’s hard,” Jane said.

  She put down the salad spoons and sat on a stool, and motioned me to sit down, too. She said, “My sister did it when she was on the phone with me. She told me what she wanted to do, and I spent about forty-five minutes trying to talk her out of it. I kept trying to think of a way to call someone else to go to her house, to just get there, but I also wanted to keep her talking. Finally she put down the phone, but she didn’t hang up. She cut her throat. I could hear—”

  Jane and I looked at each other.

  Then Jane said, “I don’t think she was trying to torture me. I think maybe she was afraid, and she didn’t want to be alone.”

  Claire was someone I liked from a distance. I’d been to her Christmas party; she’d been to my house for dinner a couple of times. Then her brother cut his wrists and jumped from the roof of his apartment building.

  When Claire reappeared a few weeks later, I asked if she wanted to get together. Yes, she said. I brought her sandwiches. We sat in her kitchen. She told me that the saddest thing was the stacks of Help Wanted sections in her brother’s apartment, so many ads neatly circled in red marker.

  “He was so smart,” she told me. “You should have seen his bookshelves—history, political theory, economics, musicology, anthropology. He was one of those people who could have done anything, but nothing ever quite worked out. And then all those careful red circles: copy editor. Public relations assistant. Hotel management training. He had a Ph.D. in astronomy.”

  She said, “I hope you don’t mind if I ask you this.” She asked me if there had been a lot of blood in the room, when my father died. I told her that I didn’t think so. The gun had malfunctioned, so that even though he’d put it into his mouth and it had killed him, there had just been a little bit of blood on the baseboard. My husband cleaned it up late that night. He told me it had been just a small amount, and I believed him.

  I told Claire that I’d been the one to ask my husband to clean it, but afterward I was sorry. “Or not sorry, exactly,” I said. “I don’t know what it was. But I kept going into that room. Not just that week, but for months after that, years. I still go in there. And I kneel, and I look at the woodwork. Like I just want there to be some trace of him, or of this thing that happened.”

  She said that was why she had asked: she felt the same way. She had stayed away from her brothers apartment for weeks, because she was afraid of seeing the blood. But then when she finally went there, and saw that there wasn’t any blood, she was disappointed.

  I went to visit a friend who was teaching English at a small college in upstate New York. She told me that a man in her department, a writer who had been there on a one-year fellowship, had hanged himself the month before.

  That night we went to a department picnic, and she pointed out the man’s wife to me. I watched her for a while, from a distance. She was a little younger than I was, maybe in her late twenties, pretty, with long black hair. She was standing alone, with her arms crossed. I went over and introduced myself. Then I blurted out—quietly, but it was still a blurt—that I was sorry to hear about her husband and that my father had killed himself, too.

  She looked blank for a moment, and I was appalled at what I’d said to her. I started to apologize, but she said sharply, “No. No. Tell me. Did you have any idea? Did you know he was going to do it?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not sure he even knew he was going to do it. And he certainly wouldn’t have given any warning. He was a very gentle, considerate man—”

  “That’s just like Johnny!” she said. “That’s just how he was. He never told anyone he was unhappy—everyone else came to him with their problems.” Her face was white, pinched, excited. Her thin fingers were opening and closing like bird claws.

  The outing was being held on an asphalt basketball court. We moved over and stood next to the chain-link fence. We talked for a while about these exceptionally kind men. How they could be so accepting of other people, and so secretly intolerant of themselves. How they could listen, but not talk. How they were like radiators that lack the little valves to let the steam off, and it just builds and builds and eventually explodes. How they couldn’t see that there wasn’t a lot of territory between keeping everything private, and dying. It got dark while we were standing there.

  She turned to face the fence, and threaded her fingers through the metal links. “It’s so weird for me here,” she said. “I’m only here for the rest of the year, and then I have to figure out what to do next. I only came here because of Johnny’s fellowship.”

  She said, “I’m so glad you came over to talk to me. None of them talk to me.” She jerked her head sideways, at the milling-around people from the English department. “Not that they ever did, before. Then I was just Johnny’s wife.”

  She flashed me a smile, a mix of irony and panic. “But now they really don’t know what to say to me.”

  My friend Claire went to a wedding in Australia, where she stayed in a guest cottage with three other women. One night they sat up late talking, and they found that all four of them had brothers who’d committed suicide.

  We find each other. We’re referred by friends. Or we happen to sit next to each other on an airplane. We end up standing together in a hallway, during a party. We stop noticing who is coming and going around us. We talk. It’s urgent. We have nothing new to tell each other. Even when the stories are different, they’re the same.

  A friend’s sister dies: pills. The friend disappears; she’s gone home, to be with her parents.

  I drive by her house and leave a note. “Call me,” I write, and I give her my love. I leave the note in the space between the front door and the screen door.

  I drive away. I am thinking that a day ago my friend didn’t know any of this; now she will never not know it. I’m sorry for the freshness of her knowledge. I’m sorry that she’s just at the beginning of it.

  I’m thinking about all the things that have happened, or that will happen but haven’t yet. All the things that are teeming, unseen, behind the walls of all these houses.

  Suicide: other shoe and

  THE WEEK AFTER MY FATHER DIED, SOMEONE CALLED AND ASKED to speak to him. I was still staying in my mother’s house, and I answered the phone. The woman asked for my father, in a crisp, confident voice.

  It was the first time since his death that this had happened, and for a moment I couldn’t answer her.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but he’s dead. He died last Friday.”

  “Oh, my God,” she said.

  There was a long silence.

  I thought, She’s his mistress.

  She’s the daughter of a mistress he had a long time ago.

  She’s his blackmailer.

  She’s the person he was working for at the CIA.

  She’s a banker, and there’s an even bigger loan that we didn’t know about.

  She’s a reporter, and there’s a crime he got away with years ago, but she recently uncovered it and has been hounding him.

  I thought all these things, and didn’t believe them. I thought them all without explicitly thinking any of them. They didn’t crop up sequentially in the moment, as newly formulated ideas; rather they were items on a list that had been building in my head since his death. A list that built itself in response to the question What else was going on that we didn’t know about?

  Here it is, I thought, during that silence on the phone.

  Finally I said, “I’m his daughter. Can I help you?”

  The woman explained, her voice uncertain now, that she wasn’t sure how to proceed. She was calling from an insurance company. “Your father was in a
car accident two months ago, down in Virginia.”

  Here it is, I thought again. “What happened?”

  “Well—” she began.

  “Was someone killed? Or hurt?”

  “Oh, no,” she cried, flustered, sorry to have alarmed me.

  “Did he leave the scene? Fail to report it?” I went on. Shut up, I told myself.

  “Oh, no, no, no, no, nothing like that.”

  “Then why do you need to talk to him?”

  “Maybe I don’t. I was calling to go over some of the details with him, to clarify a few things. I need some more information for one of the forms—but listen, maybe I can just talk to my supervisor and see if we can just, you know, proceed with what we already—”

  “Was someone else in the car with him?”

  “No, no, he was alone. It was nothing. A fender bender, really. Really nothing.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She was sure. She was sorry. She would call back if she needed anything else; meanwhile she was very very sorry to have bothered us.

  She never called back.

  Someone told me about a man who had killed himself without leaving a note behind. But the following year, at Christmas, his family found a note, tucked into a box of ornaments. He was hiding it, he wrote, because he knew that reading it would be painful for his family, and he didn’t want them to find it until some time had elapsed.

  Whoever this guy was, he sounded self-indulgent and manipulative. Hey, buddy, if you’re killing yourself, then you are exiting permanently. You can’t stage-manage your family’s reactions. You can’t resurrect yourself months later as a considerate guy.