by Rachel Simon
But today, as I was on the phone with my mother, acutely concerned with dates for moving and deadlines for diagnoses and how much time we had, I suddenly fathomed that these lighthouse trips must have upset me more than I’d realized. Why else would I have never asked my mother what appeals to her about lighthouses—a question I would have asked anyone else? Why wouldn’t I want to know? Didn’t I find that when I pushed myself to understand Beth’s ardor for riding city buses—a far more unusual indulgence—I also bridged the distance between us? Have I not been trying to do that right now with Hal?
A few years ago, soon after I’d joined Beth on her buses, I attended a lecture by a man named William Stillman, who has the form of autism known as Asperger’s Syndrome. For an entire day he shared an insider’s understanding of how people with autism experience the world. Among the things he discussed is the tendency of people with autism to have a specific passion, which can range from traffic lights to trains to, in his case, The Wizard of Oz. He noted that people who do not have autism often refer to these passions as “obsessions,” and sometimes try to put a stop to them. His own parents tried when he was a teenager, sitting him down every night for a “talk,” until finally, in tears, he agreed to move his Oz memorabilia into the attic and take up athletics in school. He told the audience, “I would have preferred that they’d cut off my hand.” Then he explained that the way to reach a person is to enter his passion, not try to kill it off. How much closer he would have been to his parents had they tried to enjoy Oz with him.
At the end of William Stillman’s talk, I thought about Beth, and how, although she has not been diagnosed with autism, she has a passion—and that I reached her by entering it. Then I thought about other people, and I saw that almost everyone, with a disability or not, has some kind of passion. William Stillman was speaking a universal truth.
I knew all that. Yet it took me until this renovation to learn about Hal’s world. And it took me until today, when my mother mentioned her next lighthouse trip this fall, to question my tendency of looking down my nose at her passion. As I did, it occurred to me that what I’ve felt is not boredom, but envy. How could she love lighthouses as much as, or even more than, she loves me?
So in the call this morning that I am not telling Hal about, I finally asked Rosalie, “What do you like about lighthouses?”
“Oh, lighthouses are fascinating!” she said, and in a rush, she continued. “They’re a living history.” She told me how the keepers and their families lived in almost total isolation. The wives grew the food, sewed the clothing, schooled the children. The keeper had to work hard, too: twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year, he had to keep the lantern lit, which often meant dragging coal up many steps to the lantern room. But lighthouses were the only warning system that protected ships from hitting the shoals and sinking. Fishermen, travelers—the family never knew when someone might be out there. “That’s what I like. Lighthouses are whole families that protect others from tragedy.”
Her voice was animated and assured. She didn’t need to check her memory with Gordon as she went on, telling me of the vast numbers of shipwrecks that occurred along the American coastlines prior to the construction of lighthouses, whole crews lost to the seas when their hulls smashed into rocks off the Outer Banks or Long Island or California or the Great Lakes. That’s why, she went on, every lighthouse has a story. One that she then mentioned was Ida Lewis, the most famous woman in America in the second half of the nineteenth century. The keeper of the Lime Rock Lighthouse in Newport, Rhode Island, Ida Lewis was renowned for daring rescues, performed whenever she heard the cries of sailors, drunks, and young men who’d capsized. At the sound of their distress, Ida—who inherited the work but not the title of a keeper, after a stroke left her father with too many impairments to carry out his duties—would jump into a small boat, row through wind and waves toward the yells, and haul two, three, even four people inside her boat. She became a celebrity, visited by thousands of fans, including President Ulysses S. Grant. “And she did this,” my mother said, “while keeping the lighthouse, taking care of her father, and after they got sick, her mother and sister. She left them only to do her rescues.”
Now, beside Hal, gazing out at lights sparking through the darkness of the park, I think about Ida Lewis and her need to choose: stay inside to keep the lantern burning for other ships and look after loved ones? Or bolt out into the world to help strangers immediately in need?
Even if I do decide to visit my mother two days before we move, I will not be able to go to a lighthouse with her. None of Florida’s lighthouses is in the landlocked city of Orlando, nor anywhere near the town where she and Gordon live.
But at least I can learn more, so the next day I go to the library. I can simply look up information online, but I feel at home in libraries. Rosalie took us to libraries every two weeks, on the dot, when we were children. She got us library cards within days of our moving to new homes. Libraries continued to be important when I was a teenager, even though Rosalie was falling apart and had ceased taking us there regularly. By then I saw them as citadels of knowledge and contemplation, so when each summer rolled around, I asked if I could accompany her to work every day. I can’t say I did this to mend the friction between us. I just loved spending my days reading random books, writing letters or stories, giving myself topics for research. But those months in the silence of the library were probably the times when I felt closest to my mother. I would watch her answer reference questions, and she would teach me to use obscure indexes. On her break, she’d also take me downstairs into the vast, locked room where the old magazines and newspapers were stored. I’d sit and read and skip lunch, and at the end of the day, when we drove home, we would not fight.
In the library now, I learn about lighthouses. About six hundred historic lighthouses exist in the United States, and they are far more architecturally varied than I knew; some are the familiar cylindrical tower enshrined on a million bath towels, but others are cone-shaped, octagonal, hexagonal, or even squat and round as hoops, or made to resemble Victorian townhouses. They can come in pairs. They can be made of brick, but also stone, wood, concrete, cast iron, and steel. They can rise up from beaches, cliffs, roofs, underwater platforms, forts. They can be as short as forty feet or as tall as three hundred—the height of the world’s most famous lighthouse, the Statue of Liberty. There are at least as many different kinds of lighthouses as there are breeds of dogs. As my mother said, each one tells a story.
But she did not tell me that each one, except for Lady Liberty, is also at risk of dying. Abandoned for more sophisticated navigational technology, not protected by the government that their keepers once served, they fall prey to vandals, beach erosion, lack of interest, wrecking balls, and the elements. I am stunned to discover that there is no reliable public funding to preserve these iconic structures. If their lights, now automated, are needed to help ships, their well-being depends on the Coast Guard. Otherwise, their survival relies on the goodwill of volunteers who raise the funds to keep them from ruin.
I feel an urgency I hadn’t felt until now. Hastily, I leaf through more books, searching for a lighthouse I can see near me, while my mother is still the mother I know. She cannot be in person beside me anytime soon, but somehow it seems of utmost importance to get myself into the presence of something that she cares about so much. I can tell her about my trip afterward, I say to myself, and that will be a bright spot in her day. Though I know that what I really want to do is understand my mother’s passion.
There are a handful of tours within a few hours of Delaware, at lighthouses in New Jersey and Maryland. But it is January, and the tours are closed. I flip through other books, searching for some lighthouse where I can at least wander the grounds. Nothing.
I close the books. It’s a stupid idea anyway, going on my own to look at a tower to get close to a mother who won’t be with me, and who, in many ways, hasn’t been with me for a long time. I cannot believe how ri
diculous I’m being.
Then I remember an afternoon four years ago, right after we got married, and I realized that time was not just love’s friend, but a friend of unimaginable generosity. Hal and I had driven to a town on the Delaware River about fifteen minutes from our house because it seemed like a nice hilly place for a walk. We were about forty-five minutes into our walk when we stopped cold and lifted our gazes high above us, and couldn’t believe what we saw.
“I don’t understand why we’re doing this,” Hal says that Tuesday, after we finish a late-afternoon job meeting with Dan and his new job supervisor, Dave, and return to our cars.
“Because it’ll be fun,” I say.
“But why tonight? Why not in the spring, when it’s warmer? I mean, the sun’s almost down. I have to get to Home Depot for some joint compound. And it’s getting cold.”
“Indulge me.”
“Can’t we just go home?”
“Please? We never saw it in the dark.”
I lead in my car. I know how to get there. I found my way earlier this afternoon, after a long search online: north on the highway, take the exit, wind through the small town, and park at the intersection of, appropriately enough, Lighthouse and Lore. I’d gotten out of the car and almost lost my senses when I saw its height and majestic elegance. I was standing on the edge of a neighbor’s backyard, and within moments she came outside with her dogs and we fell into a conversation. We looked not at each other, but at the sad, boarded-up keeper’s house adjacent to her property, and, in its backyard, where a tool shed might be, the concrete lighthouse, rising a full hundred feet above our heads. “It’s the only four-sided lighthouse in the country,” she said. We cast our eyes toward the sky, and something about the tower—maybe the strangeness of seeing architectural grandeur in the most ordinary of backyards, maybe simply the feeling that we, so small on the ground, were being tended to with the benevolence of something larger—opened us up. I told her about my mother. The neighbor told me she was an artist, recently divorced, and that when she was looking for a place to live, she saw this property with a lighthouse adjacent to the backyard, and just knew it would set things right. “Have you ever been up in it?” I ask. “No, but it’s still in operation. Come back in the dark and you’ll see.”
In the dark, we park at Lighthouse and Lore. When I emerge from my car, Hal comes up behind me, and, as possessed as I was a few hours ago—and am again—he throws his arms around my shoulders and draws me close. “Look,” he says, and in his voice I can hear that his moodiness has left him. I hadn’t planned this. It is not why I wanted us to come here. But now I’m even happier that we did. “Look,” he repeats. “There’s a red light.”
Up high, the top window of what I now know is called the Marcus Hook Rear Range Lighthouse glows red, and above that, emerging from a letterbox-shaped opening, streams a red beam. I now know, too, that it is angled toward another lighthouse, also automated, many miles away. From the Internet I learned that its partner, not visible from here, does not look at all the same, but that together they hold hands across the Delaware landscape, one high, one low, one a steady light, one pulsing, their beacons a navigational warning for ships. Not ships in history, but ships today.
“I’m so glad you insisted we come,” Hal says. “It’s fabulous.”
“And to think they might disintegrate in our lifetime,” I say.
“Is that why we’re here?”
“Not really.”
“Then why? Why did you need to come?”
“Because,” I say, and my voice almost stops. I want to say that I hadn’t understood that my mother loved lighthouses for their history. But the truth is that I hadn’t understood lighthouses because of my history with my mother.
“Because,” I finally say, “it matters to Rosalie.”
For a minute he says nothing, and just holds me in the dark. The red light streams out into the mist of the night.
“I have to see her when I’m down in Florida,” I say finally.
I wait for him to stiffen. I think he might walk away. But he just grabs me closer. “I know,” he says.
F·I·N·I·S·H·E·S
Commitment
But just when it seems as though the rest will be smooth sailing, Hal starts to disintegrate.
I’m slow to catch on. For one thing, I barely see him: I’ve thrown myself back into teaching, as well as packing up the rented house, and every day after work he drives straight to Teacher’s Lane to do carpentry on the third floor until midnight. I’d thought that this relentless labor was purely the result of our financial limitations. But it turns out that Hal has an additional motivation, which I grasp only at the end of January, when he slips in some news during a casual workday call.
“You what?” I say.
In a meek voice, Hal says, “I lost my coat.”
“Your winter coat?”
Very quietly: “Yes.”
“How could you possibly lose your winter coat? In January?”
“I don’t know. I guess it’s my inner blockhead coming out.”
“I can’t believe it!”
I know I sound heartless, but my lack of sympathy does not concern his coat, nor does his embarrassment. The coat is merely the summit of a mountain of mishaps.
They began with diminutive losses. Back in November, days after we completed the stone wall, Hal said offhandedly, “Have you seen my glasses?” I hadn’t, and I immediately worried, because these were the prescription lenses that allow him to read. “Maybe I set them down while I was laying the stones, and they fell into the yard.” We went to the backyard and rooted around. Then we shelled out three hundred fifty dollars for a new pair.
A few weeks ago, when Hal began to put effort into the third floor, he said one day, “Have you seen my notebook?” “What notebook?” “I finally got smart after all these years and have been keeping a notebook with all my notes for this job instead of loose pieces of paper. But I can’t find it.” He also carried it everywhere, including the Home Depot where he bought joint compound and the Borders where he got coffee. We presented ourselves at both places in person. “Sorry,” we were told twice, and returned to the rented house in silence.
The next day, the kitchen cabinets were delivered. When we went over to see the two already in place and to celebrate Hal’s success in sustainability, Dan said, “Look at this.” He ran a tape measure across a countertop he’d just sprung from its packaging. “Thirty inches.” Then he measured the site where that cabinet would be installed. “Thirty-six.” Had the manufacturer misread the drawings? We checked. No; Hal had neglected to specify a crucial dimension. “Dan can install it so the extra inches will be hidden by the microwave,” Hal said, “and I’ll build something to fill up the space.” I thought for the first time in ages about the mug handles waiting ten years for glue. But this kind of oversight is uncharacteristic of him. I said, “Okay.”
“There’s one thing that goes ka-thunk in the bathroom,” he said five nights later, when he returned to the rented house. “They installed the medicine cabinet over where the toilet will be, and the bottom starts here”—he held his hand way above my head—“so you’ll need a ladder to use it.” “How did that happen?” I asked. “Design error,” he said, looking away. “Whose design?” “The architect’s.” He whisked one of the cats aloft and nuzzled her. “And what’s the architect planning to do?” “Install it lower, which will mean making it shallower. I’ll have to saw off the back.” A house of mug handles, I thought.
And, after paint began going up last week, we discovered that Hal’s ability to discern which samples would translate best to walls needed some fine-tuning. He’d accurately predicted that some of the unconventional colors we’d liked for our accent walls—the deep iris called Venture Violet in the living room, the scarlet Red Bay in my study, and the aptly named Butterfield in the front bedroom—would look stunning. But a candy-corn yellow on the vestibule door was garish. Hal said, “Dan can paint it over wi
th a different color,” and we selected a berry purple instead. That wasn’t a big deal, but a few days later, when the accent wall in the dining room-kitchen became a digestively oppositional Pepto-Bismol pink, I pointed out that it would clash with the not-yet-installed red linoleum floor. “Plus,” Hal said, “I can’t stand it.” “Then let’s have Dan paint over this, too.” Hal shook his head. “With eighteen days until we move in, there’s no time.” “But this wall looks like it’s screaming.” “I’ll sponge on another color to tone it down.” “Along with fixing the kitchen and medicine cabinets, completing the third floor, and packing the rented house?” “Yeah.” “O-kay,” I said.
But until the winter coat, I viewed each of these misplacements and miscalculations as isolated bumps in our progress, overshadowed by towering alps of accomplishments. Dan has expressed admiration for the thoroughness of the plans, and Victor has looked in awe at the southern windows in the kitchen and said, “I never would have thought to have done that.” From sustainability to contractor relations, Hal has operated with the attentiveness that clients long for. Yet only people can build a house, and people err, especially when they also have a full-time job.
Now, sitting on the phone during our apparently not-at-all casual call, I understand that some of his time over at the old house has been dedicated to grappling with these slips before anyone—like his wife—would notice. “You’re obviously getting worn down by this,” I say.
