I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

by Howard Norman

  “I think I’ve been a little sick all summer. I was seeing things differently. I was feeling things differently.”

  “Did the confusion of it disturb you? It seemed to at times. The phone calls from your brother . . .”

  “Not really. I didn’t mind it. I got some work done. I got some bills paid. That well was goddamned expensive. I only fill up the bathtub halfway now, even though there’s plenty of water. Saw a lot of friends. Saw five or six movies. I spent a lot of time with Emma.”

  “A normal summer with a few extra added attractions—is that how you prefer to see it?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way.”

  “How would you put it?”

  “The guy with the Confederate soldier’s hat was . . . disappointing.”

  “You mean you wanted a ghost. You mean you wanted your fever to have put you in touch with a reality nobody else was in touch with. You wanted a summer of illness to have earned its keep somehow. To have provided you with a once-in-a-lifetime experience. But you are always saying how just everyday things here in Vermont sustain you so much. Actually, you know what? I don’t see any real contradictions there. Not really. Howard, life contains disappointments.”

  “I know you didn’t mean that to be as patronizing as it sounded. But the way you said it was kind of a dull platitude.”

  “Still, I meant it. Disappointment is a subject to discuss.”

  “I’ve always thought disappointment was in direct relation to expectations.”

  “So if you lower your expectations, disappointments arrive less often, or something like that. That’s got some humor to it.”

  “I’m just saying I expected—fever or not—too much from the guy. It was enough that he looked very good in that hat.”

  “I can see you prefer to end on a light note. How unusual. Anyway, our time’s up.”

  The night before I had to, and hated to, leave Vermont, because I had taken a teaching position in Maryland, I had a dream so vivid it made waking life seem a dream. Or something like that. I dreamed of all my friends asleep in their beds. Perhaps the influence was the fact that, before I’d fallen asleep myself, I’d read a poem by Mark Strand that contained the line “my friends asleep in their beds.” It was a poem narrated by an insomniac, the image informed by vicariousness and desire. The poem began with a nighttime tour of bedrooms and sleeping porches of the poet’s friends on a hot summer night.

  Michael and Jackie asleep in their bed. Rick and Rhea asleep in their bed. Roy and Gabrielle asleep in their bed. Denise and François asleep in their bed in Paris. Chet and Viiu asleep in their bed. Alexandra asleep in her bed. David asleep in his bed in Venice. Gary and Vickie asleep in their bed. Kazumi Tanaka asleep in her bed. Richard and Jane asleep in their bed. Susanna and Larry asleep in their bed. David and Rebecca asleep in their bed. Ed and Curtis asleep in their bed. Julie asleep in her bed. Jerry and Diane asleep in their bed. Tom and Melanie asleep in their bed. Rick and Andrea asleep in their bed. David and Ann asleep in their bed. Bill and Trish asleep in their bed. William and Paula asleep in their bed. Elizabeth asleep in her bed.

  I woke up, put on the BBC, and stepped out onto the dirt road at five A.M. Crows calling and the scuffle of deer in the direction of the trout pond, hummingbirds at the fuchsia. Gertrude was just returning to the barn. Can you imagine what comprises an owl’s night? Already things I love most every day had happened.

  The Healing Powers of the Western Oystercatcher

  BOB EDWARDS

  Morning Edition, NPR

  12-16-2003

  Bob Edwards, host: Imagine leaving home for the summer and while you’re away, a terrible event occurs in the place you’ve left behind. That was the experience of some Washington neighbors of NPR special correspondent Susan Stamberg. Her Tuesday series, “No Place Like Home,” continues.

  Susan Stamberg: Novelist Howard Norman, his wife, poet Jane Shore, and their teenage daughter spend their summers in Vermont. This year they loaned their D.C. home to an acquaintance and her two-year-old son. This past July, in the dining room of that house, the woman committed suicide and took her little boy with her.

  Jane Shore: At first, I was thinking, and we were all thinking, if we could actually go back home, and if we could actually live in the house, because it had been violated.

  Susan Stamberg: So how was it? How did you then, Howard Norman, arrive at the idea that you, in fact, would go back to the house?

  Howard Norman: I think that happened fairly quickly, actually. We agreed relatively quickly that this was visited upon us. It wasn’t something whose source was our life, and that you don’t let someone else’s demon, if you will, chase you out. I came down a couple of days early, and I will say that it was a powerful feeling, to step into the house. The sense of relief at seeing the familiar life was quite astonishing, really, because one doesn’t always like where one’s imagination goes and the projection of it.

  Susan Stamberg: And so it was so much more terrifying to think about it while you were out of town than to go back to what still was very much your house.

  Truth be told, I scarcely knew Reetika Vazirani, and scarcely knew her son, Jehan, either. So if the word healing is applicable to working through the consequences of an act of unspeakable brutality, it wouldn’t be associated with grieving. Grief is reserved for loved ones. In this situation, healing was about other imperatives, such as reclaiming the violated interior spaces of heart and home, and gaining some perspective, in order to temper, if not erase, the harrowing images of what a person, Reetika Vazirani, suffering the consuming rages and ravages of depression, was capable of doing to her child and to herself, and of visiting upon my house.

  Years earlier, and just days after we’d begun living in that house, I was attaching a mezuzah to the frame of the front door when Monsignor Duffy, of the Church of the Blessed Sacrament, whose rectory was next door—the church itself was across the street—dropped by to ask if I’d give a lecture before his Catholic Book Club on the subject of “both real and delusional guilt in the novels of Graham Greene. I’d like a Jewish writer’s perspective on a Catholic writer’s philosophy, played out in the actions and thoughts of his characters.” I told him that my lack of comprehension of this subject could only fail his book club. He let it go at that.

  The bells of the church rang every fifteen minutes, seven A.M. to seven P.M., and of course more frequently on Sunday mornings, Christmas, Easter, and around weddings and funerals. I soon developed an antagonistic relationship with those bells. A friend described me as being like Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, up in the bell tower clamping his hands over his ears. The thing was, I was trying to get some writing done, needing several uninterrupted hours each morning, but the bells constructed never-changing allotments of time, often imposing a sense of anxiety on potentially meditative intervals. Jehan liked the bells, but they didn’t always let him settle into a good nap, wrote Reetika Vazirani in a journal. Anyway, just now I’m thinking of something my therapist said: “Filicide strikes the deepest chords.”

  I wish I didn’t have this subject to write about; every word will come out awkwardly and not suffice. But the fact is, the medical examiner determined that on July 16, 2003, Reetika Vazirani, a poet and forty years old, stabbed her son in the neck, chest, and forearm, damaging his blood vessels, lungs, and heart. Therefore, this was not, as the Indian poet Kabir wrote, “a gentle transport into the next world.” And at that moment, too, a father, Yusef, lost his son—you wake up, as the Urdu poet Ghalib wrote, to find a demon standing on your heart. Next, Reetika Vazirani, by any definition, more gently transported herself.

  How to talk about such a thing? Here I take as much inspiration as I possibly can from what Yasunari Kawabata wrote: “When speaking of those who take their own lives, it is always most dignified to use silence or at least restrained language, for the ones left most vulnerable and most deeply hurt by such an occurrence can feel oppressed by the louder assertions of understan
ding, wisdom and depth of remorse foisted upon them by others. One must ask: Who is best served by speculation? Who is really able to comprehend? Perhaps we must, as human beings, continue to try and comprehend, but we will fall short. And the falling short will deepen our sense of emptiness.”

  And yet sometimes I could not use restrained language.

  “Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote. Still, I had to subscribe to some initial ways of looking at what had happened. To that purpose, the most incisively spiritual thing I read was a response by the poet Rita Dove to a journalist asking about Reetika Vazirani: “She couldn’t find her way back to herself.” And the most ethically useful thing was offered by David Mamet, who had driven over to our farmhouse in Vermont: “If you are walking down the road and you look up ahead and see a house on fire, if you are a good person you don’t wish for it to be someone else’s house.” The essence of altruism in this felt meaningful, but I said to David that given the waking nightmare of a child murder, and the bewildered sobbing in my farmhouse, it was very difficult to feel much like a good person. He stayed for dinner to talk about it.

  The summer had just been going along. Then on July 16, my family and a friend, Alexandra, had been to Montpelier, a twenty-minute drive from the farmhouse, for dinner at a restaurant. It was a balmy evening, and I remember pulling the car up to the house in dusky light and seeing a kestrel heliotroping over the slope of a dandelion-filled field, halfway between the garden along the stone wall and my writing cabin. Once inside the house, I lingered in the kitchen while Jane and Emma went upstairs to watch a movie. I’d intended to carry coffee and chocolate mints upstairs.

  That’s when I noticed the message light blinking on the telephone on the wall next to the pantry. It was one of those machines capable of archiving far more messages than one would normally receive during a few hours’ absence from home. I pressed the button, put the receiver to my ear, and heard, “You have fifty-three messages.” I got a bad feeling. I immediately poured a shot of Scotch; this could not be good news. Then, after hearing five police messages and one from friends, I went upstairs. Telling Jane, and aware that in the telling I would cause sadness, was like gasping for air. We waited until the next day to sit down with Emma and tell her what had happened.

  Our dear friend Stanley drove up for a visit. Emma’s pal Caitlin flew up and stayed for a week. Many wonderful people called from all over. It was a shocking irony to find out that in Washington, D.C., hearing the early reports of the incident in the distracted way we all take in local television news, a few people thought it was us who’d been murdered. In the face of this, my desperate, stupid joke was, well, if that had been the case, would I have answered the phone? I supposed I wanted to hear the relief in their laughter. But of course we were confused, discombobulated, our lives thrown radically off-kilter, and for weeks and weeks we had terrible, insomniac nights.

  In the days that followed, the quotidian also served as blessed distraction: errands, house projects, Emma’s Shakespeare rehearsals, city friends up for a visit, walks on the dirt road, swimming in ponds, attempting to write, the ten thousand things of daily life. But on some very basic level, an air of eerie if abstract preoccupation pervaded, and much of the emotional dimensions of familiar life had become unfamiliar. We were self-consciously aware of our need day by day to calibrate, adjust, and maintain our equilibrium. We carefully set about doing this. There were friends and laughter on those days and evenings. But at the same time, we held an ongoing vigil against despair, and as resourceful as we were, we knew we were amateurs up against a monstrosity. Falling apart, gathering life together, falling apart, gathering.

  This odd thing happened with television in Vermont. I can far better understand it now, but at the time it was working on an altogether perplexing level. Jane started to watch reruns of Law and Order—mornings, afternoons, nights. These dramatic procedurals provided background visuals and voices (which sometimes felt like voice-overs of our own life, because to hear what the characters were saying, our silence was required) on the second floor of the farmhouse. I’d come and go, taking in snippets of dialogue and becoming generally apprised of plots and able to recognize the principal actors so splendid at portraying sanctimonious and brilliantly analytical detectives and scolds. Years later, when discussing this, Jane said that she was working on hope, and her thinking was that if she relentlessly exposed herself to the sheer plentitude and commonality of murder, it might somehow serve to anesthetize the pain of an individual homicide and “make things a little better.” In episode after episode of Law and Order, the unifying reason for suspension of disbelief was that, with few exceptions, the murder was solved and the perpetrator brought to justice. Yet in messier real life outside of television, there had been the perverse miscarriage of justice in Reetika Vazirani’s taking the life of her son, so as to “save him from a terrible world,” a verbatim quote of the helter-skelter logic she advocated to herself more than once in her notebooks. Jane watched episodes of Law and Order for some time, until she realized that she’d begun to “retraumatize” herself, and so for the most part stopped.

  But Jane wasn’t alone in trying to find some way to invest in the possibility of allegory helping out a little. Over the next six months, I watched at least thirty times the classic cinematic treatise on child murder, M, directed by Fritz Lang and starring Peter Lorre. (I had not thought much about this movie since I was twenty, living in Halifax, when Isador Sarovnik regaled me with stories of his friendship with Laszlo Lowenstein.) But my successive viewings of this German expressionist film only served to transfer the real-death images—for example, those in the police photographs taken in our dining room—to the cinematic depiction of child murder. Not much help there at all, really.

  Emma had turned fifteen in April 2003. A wonderful pleasure to be with. She was a regular teenager, though I also knew her to have a big appetite for life and to be remarkably poised. Naturally, when the murder-suicide took place in July, that poise was shattered, but she got right to dealing with it. The morning after we received the news, she asked to go rowing on East Long Pond; I’d rented a cottage there for the summer. And that’s what we did. She took up the oars and rowed herself and me the mile or so circumference of the pond. And whether consciously or not, she rowed with fierce concentration and at a fast pace, her face flushed with exertion, her arm and leg muscles straining, and I mean without cease, until we returned to the dock. Once we had overturned the rowboat on land and begun to walk up the wooden steps of the cottage, she said, “I won’t develop the photographs I took of Jehan. But they should be developed. That little boy’s family should have them.”

  I felt right then, and feel the same way now, that this seemed entirely consistent with Emma’s dignified comportment, and that it showed a lot of self-knowledge, too. I’d observed Emma at work in various darkrooms and could see she loved knowing her way around them, and that she had already given herself to a kind of parallel life in photography—that is, apart from school and the vexations and challenges of being a teenager. I can’t really say that it was at that age she’d started thinking of herself as a photographer, but I knew that for her photography was definitely a passion. Her photographs of Jehan had originally been a fifteen-year-old’s way of trying to entertain a two-year-old boy—they’d spent less than an hour together, only once, the day he and his mother came to discuss staying in our house—and all of a sudden the photographs had become memorial portraiture.

  And so, driving home from East Long Pond, as we spoke a little more about the photographs—because she wanted to—it became evident to me that Emma knew how to protect herself, in the red-tinged light of a darkroom, from having to see a child’s innocent face float up in a tray of developer. “No way,” as she put it. “No way.” And I thought, My daughter’s going to be okay. In the end, I delivered the negatives to Andrew, one of Emma’s photographic mentors, whom she’d apprenticed to and who had encouraged her
to attend a summer class at the Maine Media Workshops. I told Andrew, at Emma’s insistence, that after he’d developed the negatives, he should not leave the prints around his studio where Emma might see them. Andrew sent the photographs to Reetika Vazirani’s mother and stepfather, who never acknowledged receiving them.

  It is important to say again that I scarcely knew her. I didn’t at the time and don’t now care to be informed about her biographical details. I’ve had quite enough of her life, which so violently intersected with my family’s. We were friendly, but not friends. I admired some of her writing and even published three of her poems in an issue of the literary journal Conjunctions that I edited.

  For a month or so before she took up residence in our house in Washington, Jane had spoken with her on the telephone. My understanding is that Reetika Vazirani had called to ask about teaching jobs, but also indicated that most aspects of her life remained unresolved, including where she might live during the summer. Jane and I had been used to letting writers stay in the house. So it was characteristic of her empathy that Jane suggested Reetika Vazirani and her son Jehan might consider doing just that. No big deal, really. We were going to Vermont anyway, and it would be good to have someone look after things. For us it would be a mitzvah—the right thing to do. Personally, I had spoken with Reetika Vazirani only once before, at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont, and the topic of discussion on that occasion had been restaurants in Middlebury. The second time we spoke was when she stopped by in Washington to discuss housesitting.