Disaster Falls

by Stephane Gerson

  Fiona: How did you find out he died?

  Everything changed the moment we recovered Owen’s body.

  An hour or more after the accident, one of the guides carried a ducky upstream and retraced the route we had taken through the rapids. Soon afterward, a three-person party crossed the river to search for Owen on the other bank. Its leader was Kris, the thirtysomething guide who had given the safety briefing that morning and then piloted the raft in which Owen and I had ridden until lunch. He had manned the oars and told stories about the dinosaurs that once inhabited the area. He also told us he had run rivers for years, working hard during the summer and decamping abroad with Delma in the winter. South America was next.

  I remember Kris as tall and rugged and lanky, with a pointy nose and a ponytail. Delma had dirty blond hair, a tanned, freckled face, and a stout body. The two of them embodied American archetypes—the trapper and the beach bum—that I had encountered in movies and TV shows while growing up in Brussels. Which is to say that, from my perspective, we had little in common. They moved with agility in this lunar landscape and could talk about rock formations and geological time. I imagined that, after the summer, they returned to a nomadic life in natural expanses that spoke to them in ways people like me could not. In truth, I had no idea what the two of them thought or how they lived their lives.

  The second member of the search party was another vacationer, a fit, middle-aged man from San Francisco who was traveling with a friend. I know nothing else about him, not even his name.

  I was the third member of the party. For a long time, I was convinced that Delma had asked me to join them because she knew that something momentous lay ahead and sensed that the father whose son was missing should be present. But years after the accident I spoke to Alison about this and realized that I had insisted upon going along. As time ticked away, as the guides moved with growing urgency, as the vacationers continued to search for a child they had hardly met in a place they did not know while beginning to consider, as they must have, that things might not end well, I had told Delma I would make the crossing.

  —

  Kris maneuvered the raft across the river without our help. We disembarked and scrambled upstream, climbing where necessary, keeping our eyes on the ground. Kris went first, looking up the hills, searching for Owen behind boulders. I followed, examining the same places but with less confidence that we would find him on land. Couldn’t Owen have been pinned under a rock in the water? Unlikely, Kris said. So voluble that morning, he now kept quiet except for warnings about loose stones. The traveler from San Francisco followed without saying a word. I heard the crackling of our shoes on the dirt and the lapping of the river a few feet away.

  At one point, Kris walked ahead and vanished from view. The other traveler and I continued on our own for a few minutes, until a guide appeared around a bend. I think it was Kris though I am not certain; by that time, other guides may have crossed the river as well. My inability to remember unnerves me. What kind of witness am I bearing if I cannot describe these events with precision?

  —

  The guide said that Owen had been found underwater. Your son is dead, he said.

  This I remember clearly—and also having to catch my breath.

  —

  I crouched on the rocky earth and looked at Owen’s body through the brush and low trees. He lay on a slightly elevated plateau two hundred feet away, his legs stretched out on the hot rock. Kneeling by his side, the guide who had gone upstream was giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Owen had been growing that year, his limbs lengthening, his stomach bulging a little, his cheekbones protruding. But from where I was he seemed small. His white T-shirt made his body seem so bright that it almost sparkled against the vast landscape.

  I saw Owen but also myself, as if I had slipped out of my skin and took in the scene at a distance. Shot from above, the frame included the boy’s body, the guide hunched above, the father crouching behind brush, a man in wet clothes standing a few feet behind, and water flushing down the canyon. Books on grief advise mourners to take a good look at the body of the deceased, but I did not move.

  —

  Why am I not rushing over to Owen? Why am I not holding his body, checking his pulse, kissing his cheeks? Why am I still crouching behind the brush?

  —

  That evening, I told Alison that Owen had looked peaceful. His skin was smooth, without gashes or bruises or bloating. When Alison asked again months later, I added that his eyes were shut and his hair neatly arranged. His face seemed calm, without a trace of anguish. This is what I saw from where I was, I told her.

  —

  At some point, Delma appeared on the other bank and gestured instructions. Someone said we should get going. I took a last look, stood up, and turned around. The traveler from San Francisco walked ahead. After witnessing this unthinkable moment in my life—the life of a stranger—he now had to escort me back to the raft. A death walk with a bereaved father: somehow, there was space in my brain to consider what was expected of him.

  Kris must have been with us as well, although he and I never spoke again. He did not say anything during that walk, or that night in camp, or the next morning on the way to Echo Park, or after the guides broke their embrace by the river. Each time his face pops up in my mind—a regular occurrence during the first year, less so now—his features harden a little. I still do not know if it is shock I saw in his eyes that day, or contrition, or even anger.

  Nor do I know what he saw in mine beyond shock. For a long time, I believed that he did not see anger. But when I first began writing about the river, I omitted Kris’s name and referred to him only as Ponytail.

  —

  As we neared the raft, I saw people setting up camp on the other side of the river. Word must have gone out that we would spend the night on that narrow beach because tents were going up. Alison was now standing by the water. Once we began the crossing and her face came into focus, it became obvious that she knew. She later told me that one of the guides had walked up to Julian and her minutes earlier, as they drove tent stakes into the ground, and murmured that Owen had been found. Soon afterward, Julian went into the tent to cry on his own.

  Once we were close enough, I jumped over the side of the raft and ran toward Alison. We held one another without speaking, hands gripping shoulders with the force of the hugs we would give Owen before he went to sleep. He always requested tight embraces that squeezed his rib cage and took his breath away.

  I wish I could convey with befitting eloquence what a parent feels upon learning that his child has died in such circumstances. All I know is what did not happen.

  I did not feel vital energy seep out of me.

  I did not buckle or collapse, flattened on the dirt.

  I did not sweat or shiver.

  I did not gasp or put my hands to my face.

  I did not look up to the sky or stare down toward the ground.

  The light did not grow dim; the air did not dry up. If I uttered any words, I do not recall what they were.

  —

  So it is not true that everything changed the moment we recovered Owen’s body.

  —

  When Odysseus’s mother believed that her son had died, she pined for him day and night, weeping until death befell her. “Not that illness overtook me—no true illness wasting the body,” her spirit later told Odysseus. “Only my loneliness for you…took my own life away.”

  When Victor Hugo found out that his daughter Léopoldine had perished, he nearly went mad. “For three days I wept bitterly! I wanted to gash my head against the ground,” he wrote in a poem he entitled “At First, Oh! I Was Like a Maniac.”

  When Isadora Duncan learned that her two children had drowned in the Seine (her driver had stepped out of their car without putting on the brakes), she collapsed and then, that night, kneeled to watch over the two bodies until morning. A witness declared: “The grieving mother, eternally frozen in sorrow, remains cloiste
red in her room.”

  When Alison learned that Owen had drowned in a river, she did not weep until death befell her. She did not gash her head against the ground. Nor did she collapse or cloister herself. Alison set up a tent and held me tightly, body upright, feet planted in the sandy earth.

  Delia: I feel sad about Owen’s death and I feel bad for you.

  Owen died and all of our parents, Alison’s and mine, had to cope with the loss of their grandson. They had to mourn Owen while measuring the impact of his death on their own children as well as Julian. During the early weeks in Woodstock, they cleaned the house and prepared meals and welcomed visitors. It sometimes felt as if Alison and I became children again, under the care of relatives who shielded us as best they could from their own pain.

  But the two of us also took on the parental role. The death of a child upends the filial relationship as much as others. When our parents grow old, we observe them with care while anticipating our own dotage. What, however, could they teach Alison and me in this situation? There were no previous experiences from which they might draw, nothing to serve as a road map. Alison and I had to lead the way across a terrain that was as mystifying to them as to us.

  Our parents remained in Woodstock for a few weeks and then left. Back in Brussels, my mother kissed Owen’s photograph every evening and occasionally ate lunch in a pizza joint he had liked. On a corkboard in his home office, my father pinned a note that Owen had given him a year earlier. Alison’s mother assembled photos into a small shrine in her home. Her father emailed us memories of Owen whenever they surfaced. Such snippets were all I knew about their grief, which was interlaced with ours and yet remote. Their ache was palpable, but I lacked the emotional force, the will, the curiosity to ask them how they felt on any given day.

  My mother longed for intimacy around Owen and our common loss. In Woodstock, she once walked from the house to my studio, softly knocked, and just stood there when I opened the door, speechless, offering me her sorrow, waiting for me to clutch her. During those early days, she talked about moving from Brussels to New York to be close to us. I could not clutch her, I could not invite her to join us in the States. I could not bear her pain and did not believe that she could shoulder mine.

  At some point, my mother tried to explain what she had felt when I had called from Utah the day after the accident. You told me to put your father on the line. I asked if everything was okay, but you didn’t answer, you simply told me again to put him on the line. Right then, I knew. As she paused to choose her words, I played out what would follow. She would tell me that she had heard me cry for the first time in years, that she had booked plane tickets in a daze, what she and my father had said to one another (or perhaps what they could not say), at what time they finally fell asleep that night (or perhaps that they never did), and also what they had felt the next morning as they left the apartment for the airport and slowly processed the fact that their son had lost his own son on a river whose name meant nothing to them. I knew what was coming, so I changed the subject. My mother slipped in another sentence—You don’t know how many times I have relived that call—and then I shut her down. Her sorrow was hers, not mine. It was not the same.

  —

  Unlike my mother, my father kept his emotions to himself. I had only seen him cry once, decades earlier when his own father died. This made an impression because I knew so little about his inner life. My mother would take it upon herself to tell my sister and me how much he loved us, how proud he was of our accomplishments, how touched he was when we remembered his birthday. She never explained why my father could not say such things, and I never asked her, not even in my teens, when this began to strike me as a serious limitation. Looking at old birthday cards, I wondered why, under the generic copy, he would write only, Love, Daddy.

  After Owen’s death, my father cried at the funeral, in our house, and during the service on the last night of shivah. During those early days, I invited him to join me on runs to the dump just outside Woodstock. The two of us loaded empty cans and bottles in the trunk and drove to the transfer station. During one ride, I told him that he and my mother could not move to New York, that we should avoid further disruptions in our lives. Most of the time, we talked about mundane matters, which was fine. What we said mattered less than the outing itself.

  As a child, I had cherished my father’s affectionate embraces and boisterous stories. I loved our weekly tennis game and Saturday mornings in his corporate office, when my sister (two years younger) and I sat behind his desk and listened with pride as colleagues and underlings greeted him in reverential tones.

  But the rhythms of our family life fluctuated along with his moods. His temper erupted at a moment’s notice. When things did not go his way, when his authority was contested, or, quite simply, when he lost patience, he exploded, filling the house with dictates, shouts, and insults I had not even heard at school. There was physical violence, too: shoving, grabbing, kicking, occasional beltings. This violence fell upon the children alone. My mother did not know how to protect her children and could not herself escape the verbal abuse. My father’s mix of tenderness and combustibility created an unstable domestic universe in which everyday life could take a frightening turn without notice. Soon enough, things returned to the way they had been—embraces, stories, visits to the office—except that memories lingered, and so did the knowledge that the cycle was bound to resume.

  At the age of twelve, I stopped calling my father Daddy, opting instead for Berl, the Yiddish name that his parents used. He did not object, nor did he ask why. From then on, he signed his cards, Love, Berl.

  The new name stuck—I never called him Daddy again, or even Dad—but it did little against his anger. In my early teens, I did forestall one of his fits of rage by asking him to tell me why he was so angry. This altered the dynamic, but only for a few seconds; the moment at which he stammered words of explanation was also the moment at which he realized that he had been duped. There was little hope of understanding his abrupt shifts in mood or my own conflicting feelings toward a man I wanted to love even if I never felt safe in his house.

  A few years later, I left home for college in the United States. With an ocean between us, my father’s demeanor softened. He sent me letters ending with “big hugs and kisses” and asked me to write back because, he said, he liked to hear from me. The summer after freshman year—which I spent in Brussels—he allowed me to stay home and work on a novel instead of finding a job.

  In his late fifties by then, Berl’s career ended with an unsolicited transfer to Texas—not a demotion, but a loss of status. He enrolled in a continuing education program and sent me descriptions of his courses. Regarding one, on the interpretation of dreams, he wrote, “What if I prefer not to know the meaning of my dreams?” Around that time, he came down with symptoms that doctors could not diagnose: vertigo, weakness in his limbs, lack of energy. Sometimes panic seized him—panic fueled by a fear of dying. “Hold me,” I once heard him implore my mother.

  The symptoms eventually passed, and then Berl retired and moved back to Brussels, where he taught accounting at a local college. Throughout my twenties, I resisted confronting the darker sides of his personality. I sent him Father’s Day cards in which I described him as loving and supportive, an irreplaceable parent and friend. After I embarked on a career as a historian, the two of us would chat about the modern university or European unification. When my first book won accolades, he wrote to congratulate me: “Although you were never interested in commerce, your ability to conceive an idea and follow its implementation is a quality that I sought when hiring people in business.” This was a high compliment. Though he couched it in the jargon of his profession, he was trying to understand my life on its own terms. So it felt to me.

  I sometimes tried to understand him as well. In his home office, my father had hung a photograph of himself and his brother as children, seated around their parents on a sofa. It is a warm scene, the two boys lounging an
d smiling, Berl’s brother and mother wrapped in one another’s arms. But his father sits stiffly in a dark suit, staring at the camera with a closed face and his hands on his lap. Berl is alone to his right, arms crossed and eyes darting toward the center. Looking at this picture, I could feel affection for a boy whose father may have imposed his own severe discipline at home.

  My empathy only went so far, however. Though Berl was no longer physically violent, I retained a muscle memory of his abuse. I remained on guard in his presence, recoiling if he made a sudden motion too close to me.

  I never figured out what he made of my diffidence. During one of my visits to Brussels, he invited me to accompany him to a reception with some of the professors he had befriended. I said yes, then changed my mind, invoking jet lag. The truth was, I did not want to be alone with him in the car and then pretend to be his academic colleague while feeling compelled to make him proud. Berl stood awkwardly in the living room for long seconds, playing with his keys, giving me an opportunity to change my mind without asking me to do so. Then he left and never brought the matter up again.

  —

  There was something unexpected, then, about asking my father to drive with me to the dump. He may have felt this, too. “I’m not good at showing emotions,” he told me after the accident, “but I’m here.” He now deferred to me, out of respect—as I saw it—for an experience he could not fathom. I do not remember him raising his voice in my presence that first year. He grew concerned when, during my first visit to Brussels, I went out one evening and forgot to call by our agreed-upon time. The next day, he came looking for me in the bathroom because I had been there longer than usual.