Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (9 page)

When I was swimming this morning, I had a minor apocalypse. Or was it an epiphany? Did you know this: when you swim laps, you are supposed to swim over the painted lines,
not between them? I always thought the painted lines were like the lines on a highway, that they were dividers. Now I discover that they mark the path of the swimmer, and I am thrown into a deep pool of doubt. What else in my twenty-six years have I got slightly wrong? About what else have I missed the finer points, gotten details a little bit off?

For instance: I have some photographs with me. They’re not mine; that is, I own them, but I didn’t take them. Well, I
did
take them, but only in the sense that I took possession of them. What I mean to say is that these photographs are snapshots taken before I was born; they’re of a man and a woman and a little girl. I found the pictures in the attic, when I was little.

For about five years I had terrible insomnia, though I kept it a secret. Like a restless ghost, every night I wandered through the house. That was a bleak time, beginning with Adam’s death, when I was six, and lasting for five or six years, with my father’s disappearance, right up to my mother’s hospitalization. That year she was at Payne Whitney, that year I lived with Gay on Sutton Place; it was a turning point, though I didn’t know it at the time.

No one ever came out and said that I was living with Gay. I just sort of stayed with her for a year. And in that time, I forgot to not sleep. One day I realized it—the sleeplessness was simply gone.

I had a strange time of it, sort of roosting in her frilly guest room, trying to do my homework (it was the entire year I was in seventh grade) on a tiny little makeup table without a good light, lurking helpfully at dozens of cocktail parties, seeing just about every Broadway show. Thinking back on it, I would have to admit that Gay probably had too much to drink on most nights, that it wasn’t very suitable for a kid to live that way. I probably had a glass of milk about twice in that entire time.

Meanwhile, with one foot in this very grown-up world, I was commuting every morning on the subway back to Oxbridge Gardens to get to class at my junior high. The other people on the train who got off at my stop were mostly maids. No one at school ever knew that I wasn’t living at my home address, or there might have been “trouble.” At least that’s what I was told. It was a temporary thing, no one knew how long it would go on. Maybe we were all waiting for my father, waiting for Simon Rose to show up. Most likely, Gay didn’t have any intention of discussing her daughter’s suicidal depression with anyone, especially not poorly dressed public school teachers in Queens, on the grounds that it wasn’t their business and might reflect badly on her.

Why do you suppose I colluded in that? I told no one. I had few friends in those years. I was painfully shy. If you were in my class, you probably wouldn’t remember me. Really. From time to time I did go by the house, in order to get a book or some clothes, and to sort through the mail for bills Gay would have to pay. Always, I looked for a letter from my father. Otherwise, the house just sat there in its dust. My old cat, Tobermorey, had died by then, and we never did have any houseplants, so there wasn’t anything else left that could die. (I came home from school one day, in fifth grade, and my mother had left a note for me on the kitchen table, saying she had gone to the store and that Tobe had died.)

So, the pictures. I removed them at some point in that year, so I could have them to look at back on Sutton Place. I had discovered them long before that, in my nocturnal wanderings. I used to go up to the attic in the middle of the night and visit those pictures; they were a family that I felt I knew. I would leave them as I had found them and discover them all over again each time. The man in the pictures was my father. Was Simon Rose. Truly. I recognized him in this other life. He had another wife, another little girl. This is for real, Benedict,
stay with me. I know it seems wild; I worried, sometimes, up there in the attic in the middle of the night, with all those old photographs spread out on a blanket, that I was going crazy.

I know these things because the night we had the call from the hospital in Paris telling us that my father had died, which was just a few weeks into my first semester at Cooper Union, I asked my mother if he had ever been married before. I had never raised the question before that moment, though I guess I already did know the answer, in a way. (When I think about it, the question was as much a test to see if
she
knew as it was a quest for solid information.)

At first she automatically said no, but then she hesitantly told me the story, in fits and starts. He had made her promise she would never tell me, or anyone, but given the circumstances of his death—in a hospital in Paris, where we didn’t even know he was living, mysteriously and with typical obscureness registered under the name Leon Rose—maybe she felt obligated to offer me some little explanation of the unknowable man who was my father.

He was married, at a young age, to a fellow radical he met on a picket line. Her name was Audrey Friedman, and she worked for a union. They had a little girl. Her name was Ellen. Ellen Rose. They lived in Larchmont. Audrey was pregnant with a second child when she and Ellen were both killed in a car accident. They were on their way to the birthday party of a child who was in Ellen’s second-grade class.

I don’t know where my father was that day. I don’t know what happened next, what happened to the house in Larchmont. I don’t know anything about the Friedmans, where they came from, if any of them were ever in touch with Simon later on (doubtful, as he told my mother he always felt that they blamed him for Audrey’s death). All traces of this first family in my father’s life were carefully eliminated—according to my mother, he only told
her
about it when they were already married,
and she was pregnant with Adam, and he had become irrational about her driving in the car alone.

But there was another reminder of the existence of Audrey and Ellen (who would, I guess, be in her thirties if she had lived, while I wouldn’t exist at all): the money. Simon apparently received a substantial insurance settlement because the driver of the other car had been to blame for the accident. Which explains why, despite the vagaries of the Christmas-light business, there was always money. And I don’t mean from Gay. We were, as they say, comfortable. (An elderly man collapses while walking along the beach in Miami. As he’s being loaded into an ambulance, one of the attendants hovering over him asks, “Sir? Sir? Are you comfortable?” He sits up on the stretcher and says, “Well, I don’t make a bad living.”)

Our house, my mother told me that day, as we packed Simon’s old suits into boxes for the Salvation Army, had been paid for with that money. Blood money. Interestingly, my mother had never seen their faces, knew nothing of the existence of those attic snapshots. She didn’t want to see them then, either, and still hasn’t.

Why do you suppose I never asked anyone about those pictures? I was only ten or so when I found them. I sensed forbiddenness, perhaps. I knew they had been hidden. And I wanted to keep them a secret, keep them for myself. And why do you suppose I’ve kept them a secret from you? Maybe I was afraid of scaring you away with all the weirdness, the history I drag around with me by the sackful.

So. How did I get here? Right: about being a little bit off. Which I was: it never occurred to me that the people in the pictures didn’t exist somewhere, living their lives. Not only did I imagine their existence, I assumed my father preferred them to us, that they were his real family and we weren’t.

I look at those pictures all the time here. I want to show
them to you. I’m using them in some of my new work, too. Oh, the past is always present.

Later. Too much sun, again. Anne seems distinctly bothered about something that has to do with Victor (not that there is anything that does not have to do with Victor), but I can’t tell if it’s very large or very small, or like a biscuit box. I’ve written so much in my enormous Journal/Letter to You about all this, and I wonder if any of it is coherent. I begin to wonder if my being here has strained things between them. I don’t think Victor likes me. Why should he? I can hardly abide him.

Oh, it’s so hard to think. For some reason I keep returning to Gay. I wish she were alive. Not alive the way she was at the end, but really alive. I wish you had known her. Anne just barely got in the door—I took her to Sutton Place for a couple of not entirely relaxed or successful audiences—before “the dwindles,” as Gay called them, got the better of her. (At the end of that first visit, Gay took me aside and said, “Your friend Anne has hair-colored hair and a face-colored face. She needs to go see Mr. Edward. Make an appointment for her.”)

If only she could see Anne now. Anne and Gay together would be lamenting
my
unglamorousness. Where the hell is Gay? It’s not possible that she doesn’t exist anywhere.

Her slide into senility was actually quite swift, a matter of months. I had hoped that her death would allow me to forget the way she had become at the end, like some great mad baby. But I keep going over in my mind those last days, the moment I told the doctor I wanted her to have a good death and that she wasn’t to have intravenous hydration or tube feeding or anything. She was suddenly completely senile, and ninety-five, and her refusal to eat or drink anything at all seemed like a kind of declaration of intention that should be honored. My
overwhelmed-by-life mother, with no one else to lean on as an only child (she was squeezed in somehow between more amusing diversions and marriages), couldn’t bear to see Gay so diminished, couldn’t deal with the details, and turned to me to organize it all in the end.

Now, my mother can just manage to navigate through her days and weeks and months, but there are no margins, there isn’t any leeway, if you follow me. Ruth Rose has made a success of simulating a real person having a real life, but only to a point. When you’re a Payne Whitney retread, any first straw always has the potential to be a last straw. Don’t get me wrong—I let myself be put in charge of Gay at the end; I wanted to do it. My mother needed to stay away; I couldn’t stay away.

So why do I feel responsible for allowing Gay to die? All I did was arrange to do nothing; fail, by design, to do something. The poor soul had no past, and no future, and I told the doctor that as her present moments were all she had left, they shouldn’t feature a needle in the wrist or a tube in the nose or any other discomforts. And the doc was very neutral about it and ordered the nurses to offer her frequent opportunities to drink something and otherwise let her be. So she died in her own bed in that elegant apartment on Sutton Place.

You’ve heard the funny stories about the funeral (though I haven’t told you about Peggy Gordon getting drunk and trying to tell me that my father had once been a lover of Gay’s), and about Gay’s old friends having a party in her honor at the Cosmo Club, and all the rest.

But there’s a part I’ve left out. I’m always leaving things out. Sometimes I feel that no matter how hard I try, whether it’s describing something with words or making a photograph, I’m always leaving things out.

The last time I saw my grandmother, when I was sitting at her bedside, Maggie, the Irish nurse who had been with her during the days for the last couple of months, was on duty. Gay was clearly dying. (It was Maggie who had solemnly reported to me, near the beginning of her tour of duty, when Gay was still capable of some madcap scenes, that all the place mats from the dining room had mysteriously begun to disappear, and she had finally caught Gay in the act of hiding the last place mat under her mattress. “She’s got an asphyxiation on them place mats, the old sweetheart has,” Maggie told me.) Maggie was, on this last occasion, trying to get her to drink something.

“Gay, will you take some water?”

No response, as had been the case for the previous five days. Gay mostly just stared off, and her eyes were at this point rolling around in some sort of neurological twitch, owing to the total deterioration of every system in her body, caused by this benevolent starvation. She was beyond thirst.

Maggie held a smeary Waterford tumbler of water to my grandmother’s lips and tipped some into her mouth. Gay reacted violently, spitting, pushing Maggie away with surprising strength, and she croaked out, “No.”

Making what I meant as a mild joke, for my own amusement and to calm Maggie, who was desperate to do something for Gay, of whom she had grown quite fond, I interjected, “Well, then, how about a vodka and tonic?”

Gay seemed to focus for a moment. “Yes!” she said clearly, a flicker of recognition sparking the old animation, before dropping back on the pillow and closing her eyes. (That was, in fact, her last word.) I went to her bar and found what I needed to mix up one last stiff vodka and tonic. I brought it back to her bedside and tried to get her attention.

“I apologize for the lack of lime,” I said, mostly to myself, and held the glass to her caked mouth. When I tipped a little
bit in, she seemed to smile, and she swallowed a sip. It was the last thing to pass her lips. A moment later, though, as if to say, Okay, Harriet, you’ve had your fun, and now let’s get this show on the road, she screwed up her face and folded up her mouth like nothing I have ever seen and refused anything more.

Maggie whispered to me, “Somebody’s going to D-Y-E, you know. I think it’s today.” I left perhaps a half hour later, and she died a few hours after that.

I know that everything I have just described might seem wonderful and just right to you, and I thank you for that, but I cannot help wondering if I helped push her along with that drink, just as I cannot help but wonder if I had approved some sort of tube feeding, whether she would have pulled out of that final slide, elected to stick around awhile longer.

Senility is a cruel thing. When did she actually die? When was she gone? Was she still intact in some hidden way, and did I deprive her of the last bits of her life to which she was entitled? How do we know when a person has had enough, under those circumstances? In other words, did I assist, or did I merely interfere? I will never know.