by Joan Wheelis
“Why were you so afraid?”
“Because when the buzzing stopped I knew they were biting me but I couldn’t see them.”
As I tell my son this, I remember that when I was older my mother used to tease both my father and me that this was all about an Oedipal bid for my father’s attention. But whatever the unconscious motivation, I always knew that my father was my hero, my mosquito destroyer.
My father wrote about this too in his novel The Scheme of Things:
At night Oliver wakes to a wailing cry, “Daaa-dee! Daaa-dee!” He struggles up out of sleep, out of bed, peers down the long hall, and there she is at the end, swaying back and forth in her long nightgown, tears on her cheeks. A mosquito is bothering her. He staggers to her rescue, climbs on chairs, on the piano, flaps about with a folded newspaper at an elusive, perhaps nonexistent, prey, until they’re both exhausted. “Pull the sheet over your head,” he tells her. It’s not the biting, she says, but the buzzing that keeps her awake. (p. 45)
Sometimes I wonder whether I am remembering my own life or claiming my father’s stories as my own. It becomes harder and harder to tell.
economy of motion
OFTEN BEFORE A DINNER PARTY OR FAMILY OCCASION, MY father would lay a fire in the living room hearth. When he went to get wine from his cellar, he took down the large basket and filled it with the seasoned wood that he kept in the garage, along with pieces of the wooden wine crates to use as kindling. As with wrapping presents, there was a right way to do it. It never was obsessional, but aggressively precise. The flue was opened. Two individual sheets of the San Francisco Chronicle were crumpled up. It was important not to use any more paper, as it created unwanted ash. Next came small pieces of wood from the wine crates, then slightly larger pieces of wood staggered across the smaller ones, and larger logs on the top, all precisely arranged to allow ideal air flow among the pieces of wood. It was a matter of pride that the proper placement of two sheets of paper, the right amount of kindling, logs and one match would be sufficient to ignite a robust fire. With a single short match he lit the paper in three places, and then tossed the match into the fire before placing the fire gate in front of the hearth. He never stayed to watch whether it caught. He knew it would. It didn’t require anything more, and I certainly never saw my father hovering over tentative flames. He always did it right, and when others offered to help, it made me cringe. Wads of paper, too-large pieces of wood, a flicker of promise and then messy, ashy failure—the attempts at resuscitation by blowing at the dying flames, spewing ash out onto the pale granite hearth and dark parquet floor. My father, though, never said a word at these times, though I suspected that he was critical of these efforts and how they did not obey the principle of “economy of motion.”
My father liked things done without any unnecessary movements. He liked the power of precision. He wrote that way—spare yet rich. And he spoke that way—with his love of clarity, finding just the right words parsed with powerful eloquence. There was never any “uhm,” “hmm,” “gosh,” “you know” in his speech. It was orderly and enunciated with precise diction like the crisp conducting of a symphony orchestra. He approached everything like a chess game, traveling forward in time to consider all factors, small or large, that could affect the execution or influence the outcome.
He loved to watch me work in the kitchen. He felt that my ability to prepare risotto and a rack of lamb and sauté green beans and make a salad dressing and have it all ready at the proper time was the pinnacle of the economy of motion. He sat at the table watching me, describing my actions. “You make it seem so effortless. I see that you have arranged your tasks in your mind and now have things arranged around you in a way that doesn’t require you to move around unnecessarily. You are accomplishing so much, yet there is no frenetic motion. It’s marvelous to watch.”
“Economy of motion?” I teased him. “Right, Daddy?”
“Exactly!”
My father loved that I appreciated this notion too. He taught me how to build a fire, but he never insisted I do it that way. Yet he was so pleased when he saw that I did. Six months before he died, I was visiting in San Francisco with my husband and son, celebrating Christmas. My father had a lot of back pain, and I could tell that he didn’t feel like bending over to build a fire. It was chilly in the room and I told him I would build one. Crouched down on the floor, I could feel his eyes on me as I laid paper and pieces of wood. I lit the match, catching the three points of the two pages of the Chronicle, threw the match in, stood up, replaced the fire grate and turned to face him. The fire caught and my father caught my eye. He smiled and I returned the smile along with a tilt of my head in deference. He didn’t say anything. His smile was fragile and I knew he wasn’t feeling well. But I also knew that in this moment as I turned and looked in his face—in that split second that we caught each other’s gaze—I could see that I had just given him precise acknowledgment of just how much he would be leaving behind of himself in me. If we had had the chance to discuss it, we would have agreed that that moment was the epitome of the economy of motion.
the log, part 2
THE LOG MY FATHER MADE FOR MY MOTHER’S SEVENTY-FIFTH birthday spanned the years 1951 to 1990. He died in 2007, and when I came home for the cremation, one of the first things I did was go to his office to get his appointment book so I could cancel the patients scheduled for the upcoming weeks. In so doing I saw the entire shelf of black appointment books, lined up by year. There was no doubt in my mind they would get packed up, along with everything else from the shelves, in the locked drawers and in the closet. I had no idea, though, of the scope and breadth of what I would find.
So now almost ten years later I am in my office in Cambridge with a box full of his appointment books. I could make another log covering 1990 to 2007, plucking out the details in red ink and in pencil pertaining to the comings and goings of family, travels, dinners, tennis dates, medical appointments, and any other significant event. Type them up and label them “The Log, Part 2.” Do I do that? For what audience? Who cares? Do I really need or want to know? How will I decide? If I don’t, will they stay packed until I die and my son comes upon the box? He will think of how often he said to me that I should throw more things away, that I lived too much in the past. He can throw them away. Why can’t I? If it is gone, it will no longer be accessible. It’s the abandonment of the possibility to know.
After my father died, my mother asked me to take down boxes from the upper shelves of her office closet. Most were filled with photographs. She wanted to tell me what she knew before it was too late. Sometimes together we would write the names or dates down on the backs of the photographs. I noticed once a box labeled “Credit card receipts 1965–1970.” “Mummy, you know you don’t need to keep this kind of thing for taxes. You only need records for seven years.” Her silence was notable. Of course she already knew that. I waited on the chair for further instruction as to what box to bring down. I caught sight of many boxes of credit card receipts. All in five-year increments. I wanted to blurt out, “Let’s get rid of these. Please don’t leave all this for me to do when you are gone.” But I knew it best not to trespass on this order of things anymore.
And soon my mother said, “Bring down those credit card receipts.”
“Which years?” I asked mockingly.
“The one you were just looking at.” The box was labeled in my father’s handwriting. Within it were five years of monthly statements, each with the receipts attached. I marveled at the tidy organization. I handed a year’s worth to my mother.
“It’s so interesting to see what your father and I spent our money on back then,” my mother remarked. “See? We bought the teak dining room table from Danish Imports in 1966. It was expensive. Your father and I debated whether to buy it for a long time. It was around the same time he was buying so much French wine. Here, Connoisseur Wine. See how much he spent on French wine? That was a lot of money then. It’s interesting to remember these things.”
The thing that reminds you of something that might otherwise be forgotten. But if one doesn’t remember it’s there, then it falls to chance whether it will be discovered. And does it matter if I don’t remember? It exists. I asked feebly if I should throw the box away now that we had a look at it. “No, just put it back!” I knew the next time it would come down would be after my mother died when I would then remember looking at it with her. And these thoughts. The thing that activates the reclamation of memory, the rich layering of time and experience. Built like a stone wall. Each rock carefully examined, rotated, and fitted into place. And then it is no longer the individual rock. It is part of the wall. The wall stands. We can always go back and look for a particular rock. But will we find it? Remember where to look? And then one day the wall will fall away too.
So will I make “The Log, Part 2”? Maybe I’ll learn something I didn’t know, or maybe something I don’t want to know. The trail of crumbs through the woods. The birds eating the crumbs. The witch waiting.
spirit
MY MOTHER DIED AN HOUR BEFORE I LANDED IN SAN FRANCISCO. I had left San Francisco only a week before when her doctor said she might last a few weeks or months. I spoke with her on the phone before my plane took off.
“I’ll wait for you,” she said.
“Okay, Mummy, I’m on my way. I’ll be there in a few hours. Hang on for me!” When the cab pulled up to the house where I grew up, I already knew she had died. Her caretaker, Mona, had called me to tell me as I disembarked from the plane.
I climbed the sixty-three steps and unlocked the gate and the two locks to the house. Mona came to the door. “I’m sorry,” she said.
I went upstairs to my mother’s bedroom. She was in a rented hospital bed. Her eyes were closed. Her lips were parted. Her hair was combed back. There was a sheet folded neatly across her chest. She was wearing her favorite nightgown. Her hands were resting on the outside of the sheet. She wore her wedding ring and her favorite green jade ring on her ring finger. Impulsively I lowered the rail and lay down beside her. She was stiff to the touch, with just a hint of warmth in her body. “Oh, Mummy,” I called out. I didn’t know what to do.
Mona came up and told me how peaceful her death had been. “She was listening to a Schubert impromptu, clapping her hands. The windows were open. It was unusually sunny and warm for January. She thought you were here so she let go.”
It was four in the afternoon. “Shall we call the funeral home?” Mona asked.
“No, not yet,” I answered without really knowing what I had in mind. I felt disoriented. I went into her office and sat in her chair. I looked at all the books and sculptures, boxes and lamps, so familiar to me for so many years. I stood up and looked for the skeleton key she kept under the rug by the elevator door. It was comforting that it was still there. I unlocked her inner office, formally a dressing room and bathroom but converted by use into more storage space for financial files, patient records, boxes of photographs, presents, clothes. It was a place I was forbidden to go by myself. Now I stood inside. Rolls of wrapping paper stood in the bathtub, and there were boxes of Christmas cards and ribbons from the Christmas just past. I found a small piece of a log of dark chocolate–covered marzipan wrapped in red foil and a partially consumed box of Calissons d’Aix. She kept such goodies there so she could have a little something sweet to eat between patients without running to the kitchen. I remembered that my mother would at times offer me one, at most two calissons, so that they would last a long time. These almond candies brought to my mother by friends who had been traveling in France were coveted and rare. I ate them all and the marzipan too. I then went to her analytic couch and pulled off the two mattresses and dragged them into her bedroom. I had dinner with Mona and her mother. I don’t remember what we ate or what we talked about. I spoke with my family. Arrangements were being made for them to come. I was exhausted. I got ready for bed and lay down on the mattresses next to my mother. I decided her spirit might leave her body while I was there and I could have a farewell with her as she wanted.
“Good night, Mummy,” I whispered into the darkness. “I love you.”
I sank into a deep sleep, and when morning came I opened my eyes, hoping for a signal that her spirit was present. I wanted to see a bird fly through the window, or hear the call of a dove in the garden. But there was nothing. I got up and dressed and took the two rings off her finger and put them on my own. I called the funeral home.
“When did your mother die?”
“Yesterday. January twelfth at one-thirty p.m.”
“Yesterday?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you wait so long? It’s standard to call within a few hours of death.”
I felt angry at this intrusion.
“Well, my mother wasn’t in any hurry to leave her house.” For that matter, nor was I in any hurry to have her go.
Within an hour the black-suited men had arrived from the funeral home. My mother was put in a body bag and placed upright in the elevator. She rode down to the garage for the last time.
christmas
MY MOTHER LOVED CHRISTMAS. HER VIENNESE PARENTS CELebrated the holiday at home with an evergreen tree replete with metal clip-on candleholders and lit white candles. She associated the holiday with happy times with her parents before the war. She connected Christmas with snow and white flowers, the dark green of evergreen branches, the red berries of holly, a crackling fire, and a goose, stollen and vanillekipferl to eat. As a family, we went together to buy a Christmas tree, debating the pros and cons of Douglas fir and blue spruce, how bushy it was, how tall, how appealing its shape, how difficult it would be to get it up the sixty-three steps to our front door and set it up in the stand in the living room. After dinner on Christmas Eve we decorated the tree. The ornaments were stored in the basement in a large Market Street Van & Storage box with a logo of a cat carrying a kitten. A smaller lidless box contained the strings of white lights and stockings along with colored lights and gaudy metallic balls at the bottom, which were never used but for whatever reason stayed in the box. I never asked about them; I can only imagine my father brought them when he moved to California to be with my mother. Maybe they had been from his mother.
Whatever family and guests had congregated took part in the ritual of decorating the tree. First came the strings of white lights, which had been painstakingly placed back in their boxes from the year before—each light fitted precisely into a separate slot in a plastic tray with the wires collecting in a trough in the middle and slid back into the fraying cardboard boxes. My father would be the one typically to string the lights, the rest of us giving advice as to the placement and spacing. After the lights came the handblown clear glass balls. Twelve of them in a box, each with a loop of twine of different length so as to have maximal flexibility for placement. My mother was forever reminding us to be careful lest they break and to position them so that they would catch and reflect the white light. At the top of the tree my father secured a golden angel with a pipe cleaner around her waist. It was a charming figure cut from an olive oil can with metal shears by my mother’s first husband. It always seemed touching and odd that my father adorned the tree each year with his predecessor’s handiwork. Then came a variety of ornaments, many from Denmark made of wood or cornhusks. There were thin painted red wooden hearts and gingerbread people. There was a handblown glass hummingbird and an angel made of feathers, a metal rocking horse, and a colorful hand-painted silk fish. Each ornament was wrapped in tissue paper and packed in a box labeled by my mother as “Best Ornaments” or “Very Best Ornaments.” We took turns placing them on the tree. As the years went by, my mother began to voice her preference for decorating with the white lights and glass balls only. She said she found it more elegant, but I think decades of the cumulative fatigue of packing and unpacking ornaments became tiresome to her. I found it comforting to open the boxes with the same tissue paper around each special ornament year after year. I never missed a Christmas
in San Francisco with my parents, and typically I was the one to insist that this ritual should stay the same.
After the tree was decorated, we attached our stockings with thumbtacks to the edge of the mantel over the hearth, though not without debate initiated by my mother about how the grown-ups really shouldn’t have stockings. My father’s sister, June, made my stocking—red velvet lined with green satin with my name and a decorated Christmas tree made of sequins. I was three when she gave it to me and was breathless with pleasure when I saw it.
With the stockings hung, we then proceeded to fetch from various quarters of the house our presents, which were not from Santa Claus and not for children, and placed them under the tree. When all was done, we left the room, closing the large glass pocket doors behind us to make our way to our respective beds. As soon as my son and his cousins were tucked in, several of us crept back to the living room, unlatched the living room doors, took down the stockings and began filling them. A concerted effort with multiple Santa Clauses. My mother always put Satsuma oranges at the bottom of each stocking, along with dark chocolates and a few small gifts. My sister-in-law came with large bags of gifts, each thoughtfully selected for a particular person, which filled the stockings and often overflowed onto the hearth. Hilarity ensued between the whispering so as not to wake those really waiting for Santa Claus and the intermittent “Don’t look!” to one another as we placed some item in, on or under a stocking intended for someone standing three feet away. Then the presents for the kids were placed under the tree, usually accompanied by my mother’s concern that there were too many presents, that the children would be spoiled and expect too much and so on. Sometimes my mother remembered she had forgotten something and would take off to her office to find it. It was lively and chaotic. My father typically excused himself from all the commotion to read in bed.
