The Storm at the Door

by Stefan Merrill Block

  Frederick, once so intolerant of the musty obligations of fatherhood, now pleaded with my mother to spend long afternoons reading with him in his staled study. When my mother would grow antsy with a thirteen-year-old’s restlessness and ask permission to leave, a watering of her father’s eyes drew that particular tincture of pity, resentment, and guilt—that placater’s feeling—a genetic extract that my mother had inherited from her mother. Frederick had settled, but into this fragile configuration his daughters had never witnessed before.

  Eventually, at my mother’s goading, Frederick joined his daughters on the ice. Before, he had maneuvered his six feet, six inches with assurance; before, his massive size had seemed the corporeal expression of the enormity of his character. But now his body betrayed him. With a few skittish steps onto the ice, Frederick began to teeter. Like a once-proud tower lumbering awkwardly at its implosion, down he crashed. He clutched his sprained ankle, and when finally he uncurled himself to let my mother help him to his feet, his face was moist and red.

  Without the spark that could also set him ablaze, Frederick fizzled. But my grandfather was manic-depressive, and eventually there came a great reversal. When finally his energies began to return, they became, as before, incendiary.

  Frederick found work as a freelance consultant for one paper company after the next. Within a short time, the family moved twice, to Mississippi, then Alabama. The company in Alabama offered Frederick a permanent position, but still he wanted to move, and Katharine, as ever, accommodated. All the moving was dispiriting to my mother and her sisters, as they repeatedly abandoned best friends and boyfriends and any notion of home. But, Katharine and the girls knew, insatiable Frederick needed regularly to free himself from confinements; at least this way he did not also free himself from them.

  To Frederick’s wandering, weary family, a job offer in Singapore in 1967 had been an easy sell. Singapore, in its foreignness, had seemed perhaps just what they needed. And for a time, that rare thing happened: their life in Singapore, more or less, equaled their hopes for it. This was a happy time, by all accounts, my mother and her sisters in the American School, the family wealthy by Singapore’s standards, living in a gated house on a hill ringed by a monsoon drain that resembled a castle’s moat.

  But soon my mother left for college in America, Frederick’s work grew monotonous, and he began drinking more heavily. There, again, were his old voracious cravings: the women, the bourbon, the unreasonable plans. Night after night, Frederick would fail to come home before dawn.

  2

  On Halloween night 1968, Rebecca was in Florida for college, and my mother had just returned to America for her freshman year in Boston. Of my aunts, only Jillian and Louise remember the night, and their memory is much like the rest of our family’s knowledge of Frederick, a few glimpses outlining the absent figure. They remember waking to the ringing of a phone, the in-house line, and knowing, at that hour, that something must be wrong. Louise and Jillian went into the living room to find the police with their mother.

  Mum was crying, Louise said. She told me what happened.

  The closest I have to a precise account of what happened that night, and what led to it, are my mother’s secondhand memories of my grandmother’s story:

  Late that night, Frederick returned to the home’s outer gates. He searched his pockets but could not find the key that interfaced with the gates’ lock. And so he yelled up to the house, at two in the morning, for Katharine to come let him in. For a while, Katharine lay still in bed, not exactly to punish him, she’d later explain, but to let him calm.

  And so, there Frederick stood, at the ten-foot gates, shaking them and calling up to Katharine, who lay there and thought, Let him wait. Years before, she would have been ashamed for him, ashamed for herself that the neighbors might hear. Years before, she would have tried to protect her children from the sounds of his rage. But at the moment it seemed that finally all the masks had come off. They had tried again for happiness. Again, it had seemed so simple. Again, he had failed them. Let them hear.

  Gradually, the ruckus quieted. When Katharine felt assured that his tantrum had passed, she rose from bed, put on her robe, and descended the stairs.

  When she opened the front door, the misty lime phosphorescence of the Singapore night rendered the scene illegible. But then, as her eyes adjusted, the set stage became apparent: the driveway, the gate, the road, her husband nowhere to be seen. She felt for her keys in her pocket, pulled the front door shut behind her, and descended toward the gates.

  The shock she had, my mom has said to me, more than once. Can you imagine that? I wasn’t even there, but I can’t stop myself from seeing it.

  In this moment, it is only a few steps my grandmother takes into a night. A walk down a driveway, a moment that occurs as all moments occur. And yet, for me—not to be born for fourteen years—the scene is mythic, every step resonating through decades.

  There is my grandmother, walking down the driveway. She is at the gates now, her lips pressed firmly as she unlatches the lock. She walks to the street, where the pavement is pale green and empty in both directions. She turns back to the house, but as she nears the gates, she pauses. There, in the ditch to the right of the driveway, is the strange and terrible sight: her husband’s legs jutting from the drainage moat. Frederick’s legs—still, stiff, and perfectly erect—as if he were held in that ditch by the inverse of gravity.

  The sight must have seemed too absurd to be credible. Could she have wondered if he was playing a game? Might she have laughed? Might she have expected him to spring out of the ditch and berate her? Did it seem to her then that, finally, he had completely lost his mind?

  There is my grandmother, calling Frederick’s name, waiting for his legs to move. There is my grandfather, rigid, upended, motionless. Katharine calls and calls to him, but Frederick does not move. And so Katharine walks to the ditch and reaches for his ankle. She tugs at his sock, but upon release, the leg only snaps back into its vertical position, like a tree limb disturbed. She cannot know what has happened to him, but she knows that his body has become something else now, no longer exactly his. The name for what has happened ignites and flames through her; through the flaring of her self, it takes Katharine a long while to see to the plain wick, the word death.

  My grandmother turns, runs up the street, house to house, begging neighbors for a telephone, her first instinct to protect her children from this horror, that word.

  I made a sound then. A primal, deep scream, my mother told me. My mother was a quarter way through her freshman year of college when my grandmother called with the news.

  A heart attack, Katharine told her daughter.

  For the most part, her family and friends accepted this explanation, nodded in grim recognition of the name Katharine gave to the cause of her husband’s death.

  I hate secrets, my mother wrote me in an email a year ago. Mum would always allude to secrets, but she’d never really tell us anything. Like what happened with Daddy’s heart attack.

  One evening, twenty-five years after my grandfather’s death, we sat with my grandmother on the front porch of Echo Cottage. She had slipped on a stone the week before, resulting in a tiny fracture to her tailbone. After this display of her fragility, health was a primary topic of conversation that summer. As we watched the sky just begin to redden over the lake, my mother interrupted a long silence by sharing her decision to go in for an EKG, to make sure she didn’t share her father’s heart defect.

  Oh, Susie, my grandmother said. You shouldn’t worry so much.

  But isn’t it reasonable? Daddy was forty-six when he died. Only a few years older than me.

  Your heart is fine.

  But didn’t he seem fine too?

  You don’t have anything to worry about.

  It seems to me like I might.

  Susie, my grandmother said, rocking forward on her fractured tailbone to lay an emphatic hand on my mother’s leg. Believe me. You have nothing to
worry about.

  An admission that Frederick’s death was something other than a heart attack?

  After Frederick died, the life insurance company refused to pay out on my grandmother’s claim, citing insufficient disclosure of his history of mental illness. Would his psychiatric history be relevant if his death had been caused by a simple heart attack? And then there is the way my grandmother found him there in the ditch, stiffened long before rigor mortis could have set in, which a doctor has told me might be suggestive of head trauma.

  Soon after his death, without any autopsy, my grandmother ordered my grandfather’s body cremated. When the authorities contacted her to deliver his ashes, she had them forward his remains to his mother, in New England. Katharine, of course, had abundant cause for a grief-stricken anger with Frederick. But if it had been a heart attack, if his death was entirely blameless, would she have denied his ashes? Was there, instead, a reason for her to be furious? Or guilty? Had he, perhaps, been calling her for help? Had he cried wolf so often, called out in his despair so many times, that she could not hear his real urgency this time? Or had his cry simply been one last howl at the life he had finally decided that he could no longer bear?

  After Katharine had managed to escape the predations of the creditors who pursued her after Frederick’s death, after she had managed to gather her children and her few things and fly back to New Hampshire, Frederick’s mother one day arrived at Katharine’s door, holding the box of her son’s ashes. My great-grandmother asked her daughter-in-law to help her spread Frederick’s remains in the ocean. Frederick’s mother suggested that a quiet, intimate ceremony might provide Katharine and her daughters with some measure of closure. My grandmother declined, sending her mother-in-law to do with her son’s ashes whatever she wished.

  How could my grandmother—generous and accommodating to a fault—perform this final act of apparent heartlessness? Was it a sort of payback for some other heartlessness, which she had concealed? Had my grandfather allowed himself to commit that profound cruelty, that final selfishness?

  3

  One day, when I was ten years old, I nearly tackled my grandmother.

  It was a February morning of 1993, in our glassy house in suburban Dallas, where my grandmother had come to stay for the winter. I had gotten up from bed early that morning, and my mother had told me she would make a quick run to the grocery, while my grandmother slept upstairs. The sound of the garage door closing, however, woke my grandmother, who soon came down in a panic. When I told her my mother had gone out on an errand, my grandmother declared that she had to go out and find her.

  I don’t think that’s a good idea.

  My grandmother ignored me. Shoeless, in a flannel nightie, she started for the door.

  She’s just gone for a minute. She’ll be back soon.

  I don’t think so.

  I know so, I countered.

  Before, Katharine had been a living archetype of the Doting Grandmother. But now she told me to go to Hell, and swung open the front door.

  Just months before, my mother had been comfortable, while running errands, to leave me in my grandmother’s care. But my grandmother’s was a swiftly progressing form of Alzheimer’s, and now I stood near the door, restraining her with my arms, nearly toppling us both, before she finally capitulated.

  Though she still had moments of clarity, it seemed my grandmother no longer could live on her own. Throughout the next year and a half, her daughters, along with a young woman my family hired in Katharine’s New Hampshire town, took turns looking after her. Katharine spent the summer of 1995, as she had spent nearly every summer of her life, at Echo Cottage. At the summer’s end, she moved in with my aunt Jillian’s family, a half hour to the north of Echo.

  One day early that September, my mother called my grandmother at Jillian’s house. Katharine was fretful, but at a loss for the words to describe her concern. There is something that just isn’t right. There is, I don’t know, something there. And I just worry, you know?

  Even on bad days, when Katharine could not remember her husband’s name, she still spoke in obscure, generalizing ways of trauma and loss. And yet, for the nearly three decades following Frederick’s death, Katharine took no new husband, no new boyfriend.

  A year earlier, Lars Jensen had reemerged again, phoning my grandmother’s house while my aunt Louise was staying with her. Katharine had refused to take his call. Katharine was bereft but wanted no salve for the absence she often could not even name. Still, her anxiety, on the fourth of September, 1995, seemed to my mother different from her ordinary sadness.

  • • •

  There is the sound. From the basement of Jillian’s house—at four in the morning, on the fifth of September—the sound of a falling.

  The sound wakes my six-year-old cousin, who then wakes my aunt Jillian.

  Mommy? I think something fell down the stairs. I think it was Indy. But Indy, the family’s Labrador, lies at the far side of Jillian’s bed, where he cocks his head at the predawn commotion. And so Jillian rises and walks down her hallway. This scene too will become mythic, but now it is just a moment. Jillian walks in her robe as her mother, one night in Singapore, walked in her own robe, but also like a hundred other times Jillian has risen to inspect noises.

  Maybe something fell off a shelf? Maybe a raccoon got in somehow? Could it possibly be burglars, out here in the woods of New Hampshire? The door to the basement is open. The staircase it leads onto is dark.

  Deep within that darkness, at the bottom of the steps, is the sound of struggling breath. My aunt touches the switch, lights the scene, and reveals the fact of what has happened. At first, she feels that she can take it back. She can turn off the lights and turn them on again, and there will be nothing. She can crawl back into bed with her husband and explain that it must have been the wind. But she descends the stairs, and the scene persists.

  Jillian tries desperately to will it away. She says, Okay, you’re going to be okay.

  Already she is imagining her mother’s recovery, the close call, how they will all have to keep a closer eye on her from now on, but that will be it. It will be okay, Jillian tells her mother, and then she yells for her husband to call an ambulance.

  • • •

  Four hours later, I opened my eyes to find my mother, in tears, seated on the corner of my bed, explaining that my grandmother had had a good, long life.

  Likely, my mother told me, my grandmother tripped on something and fell against the door to the basement, into the space beyond. Or maybe she pushed open the door—in the midstages of Alzheimer’s, in the dark—and walked confidently into what she believed to be the bathroom, to discover that the floor had abandoned her. Instead of cold tile under her feet, there was nothing at all. Nothing but blind space, and a falling.

  An accident, a terrible accident, we said at her funeral. We had flown up to New Hampshire. It was the first time I had seen Echo Cottage in the fall, frigid autumnal gusts denuding it, in broad strokes, of its summery magic.

  But at least, this way, her mind was spared. At least, this way, she died still herself.

  • • •

  One morning, three or four months after my grandmother’s funeral, I sat opposite my mother at our kitchen table in Texas, eating the breakfast she had made for us. My mother looked out the window for a long while, her fried eggs coagulating. I asked her what she was thinking. She turned to me, her eyes glassy and narrow, and admitted that sometimes she still wondered exactly why her mother had fallen down the stairs that night. She would never say that my grandmother’s fall was in any way deliberate, and we can’t believe that it was. Still, my mother sensed that her mother, even in her confusion, grasped her situation, understood the troubles her worsening disease would impose upon her family. After all, she knew better than anyone the burdens of her husband’s hospitalization. Perhaps anxious and deliberate Katharine had at last allowed, even courted, recklessness.

  What Mum hated more than anything, my
mom told me, was to be a burden.

  4

  A misstep. Or a pang in the heart. Or recklessness. Or a decision. The unknowable act, and then gravity. My grandparents reduced to bodies, their lives forever reduced to our stories. The full truth of how they lived and died split open and bled away.

  There is my grandfather, his brain sharing his skull with the concrete. There is my grandmother, on an emergency helicopter ride, high over the land in which she was born, grew up, spent most of her life. They have both fallen into some other space.

  That space, just beyond our understanding, like my grandfather’s months at his mental hospital, or the truth of what my grandmother silently endured, or the lost words of my grandfather’s pages: a vacuum punched open, which still draws our compensations that will never quite suffice. That space, like all that Frederick destroyed and all that Katharine concealed, an emptying of our history, which we can only try to fill with something different and new.

  On a July day in 1989, my grandmother looks at the fire she has made.

  This time, she burns all the pages. Simple as that. The paper burns; his words burn. Why should she expect it to be otherwise? Isn’t this precisely the point? Yes. The point is that they are only words. One night, years and years ago, she had read those pages and let herself think that they were something more.

  But, of course, they weren’t enough. He wasn’t enough. Not to hold her, or our family, from the senselessness of what happened.

  She thinks of when she once saw a sparrow fall from a high branch of one of the trees in front of Echo. Down he fell, like overripe fruit, the collision of his tiny head with a rock soundless to her. He spasmed there, and never moved again. The moment happens and then it passes. Simple as that. Living things die. Paper burns. What had seemed timeless ends. He is gone, and now the pages he wrote are burning.