And now I have this whole other problem. I’m about to include Chris in the narrative. He and I started dating a few months after I discovered Jeanne’s picture on the Internet. For the next two years I put my research of Jeanne on hold. Of course those two years with Chris are relevant emotionally, but in terms of my memoir’s arc—those years seem irrelevant on a craft level. How do you tell someone you love: You’re irrelevant on a craft level?
There’s probably a better way of putting that.
And one last thing, which seems somewhat minor: one year before I found Jeanne’s picture, I adopted two cats from a shelter in Manhattan, and I’m not sure where to put them in the narrative. To include them any sooner seemed distracting from the arc. Right now the cats are asleep on my desk. The black cat is Flannery, namesake Flannery O’Connor, on account of her missing a hind leg (think: Hulga from “Good Country People”). The gray cat is Bishop, namesake Elizabeth Bishop.
“I love you too much to write easily of you,” I tell them.
Maybe that’s how I’ll explain things to Chris.
“Did you say something?” he shouts from the other room.
“Just reading stuff aloud.”
DAD
I started dating someone seriously, a poet, a few months after my last hospitalization.
We graduated from the same college, but back then we encountered one another just once, briefly, outside a bookstore off campus. I remember him in a green winter coat with a ripped messenger bag. His friend, a writing classmate of mine, had introduced us: “This is Chris. He did the poetry sequence last year. Chris, this is Jeannie. She’s in the sequence this year.”
We wouldn’t meet again for another four years, at a party in New York.
For our first date, Chris and I went to a poetry reading in Manhattan. Afterward we drank too much in a Brooklyn dive bar and went to see a movie about Keats.
“Do you want to come back to my place?” he asked. “We can read Keats on my roof.”
“This is by far the nerdiest and best date I’ve ever been on,” I told him.
For the first time in my life, I didn’t think: What would my dad say about this one? This is how I knew.
MENTAL ILLNESS
On one of those early dates, Chris asked about my writing, and I mentioned an unfinished essay about my dad’s loss of his left eye to a rare disease and my loss of him, “in addition to some other stuff.” (“Hallucinations” is what I didn’t say.) Abruptly, drunkenly, Chris asked if I was bipolar: “It’s not a big deal if you are.” When asked how he could tell, he said he just could.
“The diagnosis could be wrong,” I told him. “I think the problem is grief. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but you’re dating someone with serious dad issues.”
•
The first couple of years we dated, I continued working at Lapham’s—but my moods increasingly, unpredictably, interfered. Sometimes I’d stay in the office, with my anxiety, until midnight.
I’d snap at Chris when I felt like he didn’t understand. But he tried to understand. His concern was muffled under the onslaught of my static-sounding thoughts.
“Why don’t you just quit?” my mom asked me when I told her how stressful the job was.
“Quit? But what will I do for money?”
“You never used the money that your dad and I saved for your college.”
“I can’t touch that,” I told her.
It was too sentimental.
Chris recommended I apply to a graduate writing program in poetry. I applied to one in Manhattan, was accepted and given enough funding, quit my job, and felt increasingly better.
Soon I moved in with Chris, to Greenpoint, a Brooklyn neighborhood where fonts on restaurant signs mattered, where hair salons and cafés doubled as art galleries, and where a majority of my peers blurred into the same mess of glasses, flannel, skinny jeans, and artful and/or ironic tattoo sleeves.
Our apartment was rent-stabilized, so we overlooked its flaws: narrow rooms, almost no natural light, splinters in the floorboards (the previous tenants had ripped off the linoleum, assuming it hid beautiful hardwood), nightly cameos by cockroaches, and a landlord who micromanaged the recycling and trash. I once disposed of a negative pregnancy test in a garbage can three blocks away, at night when no one could see. But this place was better than my last; there, cockroaches dropped through a crumbling bathroom ceiling, a pipe in the kitchen wall burst annually, and the tenants above fought religiously on religious holidays—“I hate you,” “I slept with your best friend,” “I’ve been stabbed.”
MOM
My mom and I were speaking on the phone about Christmas. If we booked a train ticket early enough, it’d cost a third of what it cost to fly. I offered to visit her in Ohio. She offered to visit me in New York. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, she said: “I don’t understand why your father would have lied to me.”
The remark surprised me. Two years had passed since I told her that Jeanne had died in a car with boys. I hadn’t considered how the detail would affect her.
“He was probably ashamed,” I reminded her.
I moved the conversation back to travel plans.
“It’s so boring here,” she said. “I’ll come to you.”
After we hung up, I returned to Jeanne’s high school memorial page, clicked on the name of Jeanne’s childhood neighbor, Bette, and wrote her an e-mail explaining who I was and asking for any information about my half sister.
Bette responded less than twenty minutes later: “I got goose bumps when I saw Jeanne’s name in the subject line.” We exchanged e-mails and arranged to speak the next morning.
JEANNE
Bette called as planned.
“You’re not going to believe this,” she said. “The house where Jeanne lived burned down last night.”
I wanted to believe it: I wanted to believe that my dad was behind the fire. I wanted to believe in some sort of afterlife, just as I did when I was a child.
“I don’t live in Newburgh anymore,” Bette continued. “I live in Arizona, but after reading your e-mail I called a friend who’s still in Newburgh and I asked her if any of Jeanne’s friends still live there. In her research, my friend happened to hear about the fire and sent me the news article. I’ll e-mail it to you. No one died.”
I thought of it as a sign: My dad wants me to stay away from his past, but I need to find proof that he never lied, that Jeanne didn’t die in a car with boys.
“Fred Warmers and George Drennen,” Bette said. “After dropping the other girl off, they were driving Jeanne home, and that’s when they had the accident. The two boys are linked in the yearbook and class website, though she’s not linked to that accident. I don’t know why.”
“My father said Jeanne was in a car with two other girls and that she was the only one who died. That’s what he told my mother.”
“You can’t imagine how sinful everything was,” Bette said. “You were going to go to hell and burn forever if you rode in cars with boys. You just didn’t do it. Jeanne’s older sister, Carol, she was pregnant when just a senior in high school. She was a cheerleader, very popular and pretty. Her boyfriend, he was a quarterback. The big black shame on the family was her getting pregnant. To follow on the heels of that, not that long after, Jeanne was killed. The reputation the family and girls got from that, you can’t even imagine. Have you contacted your half sisters?”
“Not yet,” I said. “Can you tell me what you remember of Jeanne?”
“Jeanne was sweet, very kind. I could hear her in the backyard a lot, playing with her little sisters and her cats or dogs. I can’t remember which they had. She loved animals. She was a mellow person, happy, very pretty, popular. She had lots of promise.”
“What did she look like? The photo online was so small.”
“She had dark and thick wavy hair, beautiful eyebrows and eyes, an olive complexion. After you contacted me, I looked you up online and found photographs. You look so much l
ike Jeanne it takes your breath away.”
MENTAL ILLNESS
I wanted to call Chris, but he was at his office, where he worked as a development director for an arts nonprofit. He wrote grant proposals to fund music programs in public schools. He organized donor events. He planned concerts. He was busy. I knew he was busy.
Selfish, I told myself as I dialed his work number—you’re being selfish.
“Guess what?” I told him and launched into the story about Bette and her e-mail.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” he asked.
“Why wouldn’t it be? I mean, I understand why you might think researching my dead half sister is a bad idea.”
“I’ll be home early,” he said. “Or wait—do you have class tonight?”
“I don’t think I’ll go. Everybody there hates me. And I’m writing bad poems anyway.”
JEANNE
“Bette said, ‘You look so much like Jeanne it takes your breath away,’” I told Chris as soon as he arrived home from work.
I showed him Jeanne’s enlarged yearbook photo, scanned and e-mailed to me by Bette—the same photo that I had encountered two years ago. Jeanne’s hair looked dark and thick and wavy. Her eyes looked big and dark. Her eyebrows perfectly arched.
“I don’t look like Jeanne,” I said.
“You’re much prettier,” he said.
“Don’t say that,” I told him. “You can’t say that. You’re saying that because you love me. Wait—” I grabbed her photo from him. “This is her senior photo. She was sixteen when she died. She was sixteen years old and a senior?”
According to her yearbook bio, her involvement included “Punchinello,” “Lassies,” “Ushers,” “Fashion,” “H.R. Cashier,” and “Grad Sales.” I didn’t know what all of it meant, but I planned to find out. Seven of her classmates’ photos and bios appeared on the same page. Out of all of them, she was the most involved. But she wasn’t in anything her freshman year. I wondered if that was the year she skipped.
Below her bio, two lines of white space. Then: “Deceased.”
“Now look what else Bette sent.” I handed him the article about the house burning. “The house where my dad lived with his first family caught fire yesterday. Except Bette said it burned down. Actually, only the top floor was destroyed. And my dad was living on the top floor when Jeanne died. Now I know where they lived: 488 Liberty Street.”
I showed Chris my research about the house. According to a realty website, the house, built in 1910, was 4,158 square feet: eight bedrooms, four bathrooms, a garage. The exterior was made of stucco.
“Did you do all this research today?” he asked.
“I’ve known about my dad living on the top floor.”
“What?”
I reminded him: “When Jeanne died, my dad and his first wife were separated already. She was living on the first floor with their daughters. I think a lawyer friend of his was living on the second floor. So then this fire could mean that my dad wants me to stay away from his past, not necessarily Jeanne’s. He wants me to focus less on him and more on Jeanne.”
“I think you need to take a break from all this,” Chris said.
“I can’t.”
DAD
I researched what Newburgh was like when Jeanne was a girl. I found her obituary. She died March 2, 1961—twenty-three years and seven days before I was born. What did March 2, 1984, feel like to my dad? He must have thought about it. What did he think about it? I read self-help books directed toward parents grieving the loss of a child. I read essays by parents who lost a child. I wasn’t interested in what psychologists call “replacement child syndrome,” a condition seen among children born following a sibling’s death.
“Why don’t you take a break from this,” Chris said.
“The ten-year anniversary of his death is approaching,” I said. “I have to keep working.”
“I think you should take a break.”
JEANNE
Bette gave me the name and phone number of my dad’s niece Irene. I’d never heard of her before.
“My mother’s sister was married to your father’s brother,” Irene explained.
Irene went to high school with Jeanne.
“Jeanne was a lot of fun. She didn’t have any airs about her. Tall, thin, nice head of hair. A little bit of protruding top teeth,” Irene said. “Her accident was a nightmare. At that time they had cars that you could sit three people in the front seat. She was sitting in the middle of the front seat between the driver and the other passenger. The driver was trying to pass a car. She tried to get back into her lane but she lost control of her car. Jeanne was thrown from the car. Killed instantly. Fell on a pile of rocks.”
“The driver was a girl?” I asked.
“That’s right.”
“Bette said Jeanne died with two boys.”
“I only heard there were the two girls. One of them is still in Newburgh. I don’t know about the other one. There was another car accident that year. Two boys died.”
“Do you remember how my father reacted?”
“I’ll never forget it,” she said. “When the hospital called him, he took off his glasses and broke them in half. He was devastated, beyond devastated.”
I remembered my dad in his casket, how I’d put his glasses on him.
“It was the worst funeral I’ve ever been to,” she continued. “The girls were unbelievable. They just cried and screamed. Stuck with me for the longest time. I didn’t know her sisters very well.”
I asked if the divorce was at all related to the car accident.
“I don’t believe so. The marriage was not made in heaven. He was young when he married. She was a little older than him. I don’t think he got his chance to sow his wild oats. From what I know, he didn’t run around. He was just flirty. He was funny. He was nice. I knew her because we would go to Jeanne’s house. She was not very friendly to us kids. I don’t know where she is now.”
“Maybe all this seems strange,” I said. “My researching her, I mean.”
“I don’t blame you,” Irene said. “If it was me, I’d want to know about my other sister. His naming you after her was a wonderful thing. I would have done the same thing. If it gave him comfort, why not?”
FIFTEEN
According to an undated journal entry: “I only feel like ‘myself’ when I’m writing. I can’t write. So I’m not myself. I hurt my hand from slamming my fist on the kitchen table because I can’t write.”
I organize my journals, my research, and some relevant scraps of prose from earlier writing projects by placing them in color-coded binders. Their organizing principles depend on patterns: this connects to this connects to this connects to this.
In the “Dad” binder I organized my notes according to alliterative logic. So within “Dad” appear subcategories “Vision” and “Voice.” “Vision” concerns his loss of his left eye. “Voice” concerns his loss of his left vocal cord. Of course then the word “left” became an issue. So within subcategories “Vision” and “Voice” I marked references to “left” with a blue tab (blue was my dad’s favorite color). Later I would address, or try to address, the alternative meaning of the word “left.” One note reads, “What will be left of me when I lose her?” (“her” being my mom).
This brings me to category “Mom.” My mom has lost hearing in her left ear. So within “Mom” it also made sense to add subcategories “Vision” and “Voice.” (I considered adding “Hearing,” but “Hearing” interrupts the alliterative organizing principle. So I included her hearing under “Voice” because I often need to raise my voice when speaking with her on the phone.)
“Your eyesight is still okay, right?” I asked her when organizing my “Mom” binder.
“Yeah, why?” she asked.
“No reason.”
Subcategories “Vision” and “Voice” are deeply relevant in “Mental Illness” because of my voices and visions.
Just as my dad’s ey
e looked real, my voices sounded real—sometimes speaking to me, sometimes about me: You’re stupid and/or Jeannie’s stupid, yes she’s stupid. Journal entries about hallucinating that my eyes had fallen out are placed within subcategory “Vision” under category “Mental Illness.”
JEANNE
I thought about the accident as if I were a reporter.
What was the make of the car?
The time of the accident?
Was traffic heavy?
What was the weather like?
Were there onlookers?
Who alerted authorities? How? This was before cell phones.
Did Jeanne die instantly, like Irene said?
Then I thought about what I could never know.
What were her last thoughts?
Her last words?
What did she last hear?
Did she die with her eyes open or closed?
•
“So your father didn’t lie?” my mom asked.
“The neighbor got it wrong,” I said.
I told her about Irene. I told her about the Associated Press article that I’d found in the Oneonta Star that morning: “Crash Fatal to Newburgh Girl on Rt. 17.”
“It ran on March 4, 1961,” I said. “Jeanne died on March 2.”
I was born in March, and she died in March. How did he feel about that? I wanted to ask my mom if he ever mentioned it, but I let the coincidence hang untouched.
After we hung up, I reread the newspaper article about Jeanne’s death:
MONTGOMERY, N.Y. (AP)—A 16-year-old girl was injured fatally when an auto carrying three teen-aged girls went off Route 17K and crashed in a field near this Orange County community Thursday night. Jeanne Vanasco, of Newburgh, died Friday in St. Luke’s Hospital, Newburgh. Eleanor Flanagan, 17, of Newburgh, who was injured, was reported in good condition at the hospital. The two girls were thrown out of the car. The driver, Ruth Webber, 18, of Plattekill Turnpike near Newburgh, was not injured. State Police said Webber swung out to pass another automobile, saw a car coming from the opposite direction, swung back into the righthand lane and lost control of her own vehicle.
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