The Afterlife: A Memoir

PART VI

At the time when I began trying to draw my father into literary conversations, we were living in a Miami tract development that featured homes whose exteriors evoked a variety of architectural schools. Most were Modernist; several looked like Modernist churches. Ours had a pale green, Bauhaus-style façade, and was settled into an unpruned hammock of overhanging trees and dense, humid-looking flora that appeared as if it might one day advance across the narrow yard and engulf the house. It didn’t matter that the driveway ended in a busy road, or that neighbors were close. A jungle enclosed us. You couldn’t see in, and you couldn’t see out.

The house itself was a single-story rectangle with bedrooms taking up the eastern half, a thin strip of kitchen in the middle, and, looking toward the end opposite the bedrooms, a dining area and a small sunken living room. Sliding glass doors opened from the dining and living rooms onto a screened-in patio and pool out back. My sister and I spent a lot of time splashing in the water, then running into the air-conditioned house for something cold to drink. It was my job, once a week or so, to skim debris off the pool’s surface, vacuum the bottom, and, using a little plastic test kit, check the chlorine. Caring for the pool was dispiriting. The patio, like the property’s front and sides, was surrounded by hardwoods and tall pines, whose branches, arcing overhead, shed decomposing leaves, brown needles, and powdering bark that filtered through the screen and made a scum on the water. The trees blocked much of the day’s light, leaving the pool shaded during the long subtropical afternoons. These factors may have contributed to the algal buildup around the tiles marking the waterline. Algae showed on the bottom, too, and in faintly discoloring streaks that curled down the deep end’s walls. I periodically went at the algae with brushes and chemicals picked up at the pool-supply store by my father on his way home from teaching. We moved into that house in 1972. During the year of our residency there, the algae crept out of the pool and claimed sections of patio, darkly filling the veins and cracks that gave texture to the concrete. I remember dragging aside porch chairs and our glass-topped table, pouring acid over the contaminated spots, then hosing everything down. Sometimes on weekend mornings I got up early and swam a mile’s worth of laps — one of many things I did in solitude — while my parents and sister slept. On afternoons after school, I could often be found lying facedown in the water, staring through a face mask at the light show of refracting shadows cast across the surface by passing clouds and windblown treetops. In anticipation of one day getting scuba certification, I’d begun collecting gear, a piece at a time. I had a tank and a secondhand regulator, and every now and then I’d buckle these on, fasten a weight belt around my waist, plunge into the pool, and sink to the bottom, where, six feet under, I’d sit, breathing.

Out on dry land, I was coming into consciousness of the books on display on my father’s shelves in the living room. In imitation of him, I’d begun collecting and exhibiting my own paperback collection, works by Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Robert Heinlein, Arthur Conan Doyle, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe, along with leftovers from earlier eras of childhood, books about boys’ adventures in crime solving, soldiers’ daring escapades during wartime, and heroic athletes’ triumphs on the playing field. Surely my father had his own era’s versions of books like these lying around his bedroom, back in the days in Sarasota, when he’d first encountered my mother.

Some years before she died, my mother confided to me that during the years of their courtship, both when she and my father were in high school, and after they’d gone to college — he in North Carolina, she in Florida — my grandmother Eliza, my father’s mother, a daughter of old Virginia, had counseled him against his choice, softly discouraging him on the grounds that my mother’s people were from Tennessee, and therefore not ideal. Quiet disapproval had been in the air, my mother told me, even after she and my father had married. It is easy for me to imagine that my mother felt unsure of her welcome in the Antrim family, not because I knew my grandmother to be a snob, though she may have been, but because my mother so often felt maligned in the world. What I mean to say is that her fears about her mother-in-law’s prejudices may or may not have been credible. Either way, they point to her anxiety over her desirability.

His, I suppose, was never much in question. Not too long ago, I began sorting through a collection of color transparencies, Ektachrome slides he took during the sixties and seventies. They’re pictures of our family for the most part, though a number show places we visited, interiors and exteriors of houses where we once lived, old acquaintances of my parents whose faces I recall but whom I cannot name, and cats and kittens we had as pets. I don’t own a projector or a movie screen, so, in order to get a good look at the pictures, I’ve been using a handheld viewer. Pushing a slide into the little black box turns on a hidden light that illuminates the image, which is magnified through the lens. Each slide is stamped with the month and year when it was developed. The slide’s white cardboard frames have faded since MAY 70 and APRIL 71 and JAN 73; they’re brown at the edges now, and beginning to look antique. It occurs to me that the process of loading and looking at them is, like the slides themselves, of another era: it’s entirely manual. Several times I’ve had the feeling, while holding a transparency in sunlight to check, before fitting it into the viewer, for shades and tints that show if it’s upside down or right-side up (a winter sky’s blue, a meadow in green, the sandy white of a Florida coastline) — I’ve had the feeling, dropping the correctly aligned slide into the aperture, easing it down to make the light go on, and staring into the black box, that I am not merely looking at pictures from another time; I am peering into the lost past.

It’s something about looking into a box. Children’s stories are rich with imagined devices that serve as passageways to other worlds. A passageway might be as simple as a mirror or a narrow door at the back of a wardrobe. It could be an abandoned well down which a character falls or, more famously, Alice’s rabbit hole. All that is asked of us, when reading about children who tumble down rabbit holes, is that we not judge too harshly the quality of their encounters with talking rabbits. Otherwise we’ll miss out on an adventure. Both rabbits and children are our guides, and we must follow where they take us. The images on my father’s slides, looked at through the lens of the battery-lit looking glass, might lie opposite a window on a faraway land. This impression is an ocular effect. The exterior perimeter of each slide is delineated by the dark interior perimeter of the box, making it appear as if only a small area (the image) within a larger realm (the unseen world beyond) is actually apparent to us. This effect can be resolved into a question. If we were able to perceive a bit more through the viewer, might this vaster realm, the world of which the slide is one small piece, also come into existence? Do other worlds radiate out into the room in which we sit staring into a box?

If only we could see. Inside the box, images float. Blackness lies around them. Landscapes, houses, animals, people — they all look as if they are meant to appear for a time, then vanish. Which is exactly what they do, the moment the slide is inserted and the light in the box goes on, the moment the slide is removed and the light shuts off. We’ve received a glimpse of something, or of someone: a visitation. Reds — there are in my father’s collection several pictures featuring roses — stand in a curiously forward position in relation to the viewer; they hover above their backgrounds in a way that evokes old 3-D images. People seem full-blooded and alive, yet their features are often hazy. The light around them glows.

A few slides show my uncle Eldridge, my father’s brother, reclining in the stern of a sailboat — my father, for a few years in the 1970s, had an affinity for sailing — drinking a beer on Biscayne Bay. Eldridge’s drinking has not yet overtaken him; he’s in his mid-thirties here, and looks fit and healthy. As always, he wears a beard — it’s tinted red from the sun and is trimmed close to his face, shaped by the razor in the manner in which I, when I wear a beard, trim and shape mine — and, also, as always, he sports a gold chain. He’s tanned and happy. In just a few years, though, he will begin in earnest his retreat from the world. He will disappear from our lives and exist increasingly in solitude, leaving his small Sarasota apartment only to drive across the Siesta Key bridge to his nighttime job as a prep cook at a restaurant on the Gulf of Mexico. Throughout the eighties, as his alcoholism intensifies, and as his weight drops and he becomes sicker, unable to eat, his solitude will turn to isolation, and, eventually, he will die.

But all that takes place later — it’s what’s to come. In the meantime, in the pictures shot by my father, Eldridge looks comfortable and content, stretched out in the back of a boat, beside a dark-haired woman wearing a head scarf, plastic sunglasses, and a yellow bikini. She has her hand in a bag of potato chips. I do not recognize her. Is she my uncle’s companion? Does she call him Eldridge or, as his friends did, Bob? In the distance behind her we see choppy water beneath a bright subtropical sky. This is the sky that I remember from that time, from that place. It is full of dampness and gray-green heat. Storms emerge from it. It appears to be lit from within.

Or has my memory been altered by an effect of the box? Remember that inside the viewer, things really are illuminated from within. That gray-tinted sky appears again and again. It’s there above the pines and in mottled reflections on the pool behind the Bauhaus-style house, and it is there in a picture of my father himself, standing before a palm tree whose green and brown fronds, spreading out to fill the frame behind him, suggest a hugely oversized headdress. Here is my father adorned as tropical potentate, youthful king of some island tribe that will one day disband and scatter to the four corners. He wears sideburns and, as he did through most of my childhood, a mustache. His hair is black. Turned away from the camera, he glares down and back over his shoulder at a photographer who might be crouched beside him — or kneeling, paparazzi-style, on one knee? — in order to capture a pose that will have the appearance of, well, a pose. In this picture, it is difficult to know who is “subject” to whom. My father looks into the camera lens, into the eye of the photographer, and, subsequently, back out of the lens of the black box, out of the light and into the eye, as they say, of the beholder. His expression is guarded, narrow-eyed, furtive; he looks, I think, as if he wants to see but not be seen, or as if, like Alice’s white rabbit, he is in a hurry to get somewhere. But where? The light in the box flickers on, and, just like that, he lets us see that there is something we can’t see. Then he’s gone. We have been warned of his departure — it’s in his eyes — yet it is unclear whether we are invited to chase after him. Who snapped this picture? Was it my mother? Did she kneel at his feet, peer up through the camera lens, and, seduced, ready to follow him, say, “Stop a minute. Stand in front of that palm tree. Come closer. Turn toward the camera. Now hold still”?

And what is it, exactly, that my father lets us see and not see? What is it that he knows?

A literature professor, he made his living thinking and talking about books. I was a teenager in Florida when I began asking him about the titles on our shelves at home. “What about this?” I would say, holding up a collection of Theodore Roethke’s poems or an English novel. Or I’d take down a volume on linguistics — at fifteen I developed a minor fascination with the nontechnical opening chapter of Thomas Pyles’s Origins and Development of the English Language—and say, “Dad?” I remember that he might nod his head and utter a noncommittal word before turning away, as if my curiosity embarrassed him; and I wonder, now, looking back, whether to accept his reticence as part of a Virginia tradition of masculine taciturnity — I think of my father’s father and uncle and those roadside plaster birdbaths — though this likelihood leaves open the question of what my father, standing in our living room thirty years ago, might have been trying without words to tell me about books and their place in his life. Did I somehow know, did I feel, growing up in houses stocked with stories and poems and the correspondences of dead writers — and watching him go to a job that mandated enthusiasm (however guarded) for literature and its study — that books, whose contents could not easily be shared between us, might become the foundation of an intellectual inheritance that could be mine to take pride in, or ignore, or deride, or, years after I’d left home, and when that home was no more, stubbornly invent?

I bided my time. What can I accurately remember, today, about a boy who, in a long-ago time and faraway place, sat on the bottom of a swimming pool, breathing through a tank? What was in his mind?

When I was born, my father was an army lieutenant stationed at Fort Knox. Later he would transfer to Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, where he would have command of a tank battalion, and where my sister would be born. My mother told me that my father was not with her in Sarasota when she had me. She was alone, she said, except for her parents. Because I was crying, she told me, her mother came into the room and, I don’t know, snatched me up and carried me away from her, from my mother. She’d not been able to hold me when I’d been a newborn baby, because her own mother had wrested us apart. “We didn’t get to bond,” my mother told me when I was an adult, and added that she thought that my father, had he been present at my birth, might have intervened and stopped her mother from stealing me from her arms. But my father was in Kentucky. Because of his absence, my mother and I were unable to forge the attachment that a mother must make with her child in order for each not to wander through life longing for the other. That was what she believed, and told me, when I was about thirty years old.

It strikes me now that my mother, in telling that story, was exercising her failing power to ordain my future. In telling me what I couldn’t possibly remember, she hoped to tell me a truth about myself. She wanted me to see matters as she saw them, and stay close to her. There’s nothing unusual in this, I suppose. Our parents’ lives before we are born take place in a kind of mythic realm, a realm of the imagination, and our mothers’ and fathers’ power to shape and interpret our lives, to tell us who we are, even in our adulthood, requires our understanding that, because they inhabited mythic time, and because their existence has brought about our own, they remain for us immortal and all-seeing, just as they were when we were too young to survive without them. In telling me a story about a rift between us at my birth, my mother tells me that I will always search for her, because to me she will never die.

My search through other women began with a girl who took off her clothes and, her hand reaching up to hold mine, lay down on the floor beside my bed. She was eleven and had curly hair. I was twelve. My family was living in Virginia, in the main house on a farm called Fiddler’s Green, thirty minutes west of Charlottesville, where my father was a professor. The girl, G., had come for a sleepover party with me and my sister and my friend Peter. Peter was my junior high school classmate, and G. was the daughter of a colleague of my father’s, a man who, the year before we moved to Fiddler’s Green, had come in the middle of the night to our house on Lewis Mountain Road, in Charlottesville, carrying a loaded gun at his side. Anyway, that night at Fiddler’s Green, sometime after my parents had shut off the lights and the house had gone quiet, G. snuck through the door that led between Terry’s bedroom and mine. Peter was asleep in my room’s other bed. Earlier, G. had been forward during our kids’ game of strip poker, deliberately losing hands. Then it had been bedtime. When she came through the door, she got right under the covers with me, and we began kissing with our mouths closed. She was naked. She held her legs together. Her breasts had just begun to develop. I remember her on top of me. We hugged and kissed and tumbled around quietly. My erection was painful. I kept it hidden inside my pajamas. I recall the bright moonlight that came through the white curtains my mother had put up in my room. There were three windows. Two looked out over Fiddler’s Green’s small formal boxwood and rose gardens. Those roses that I mentioned earlier, the ones which, in pictures looked at through the slide viewer’s lens, seemed to detach from their branches and rise up to meet the eye, grew in the garden beneath my bedroom. In bed that night with G., I could see, in the moonlight, my desk and chair, and some toy racing cars and a strip of track on the floor, and my bongo drums, and the side of the bookshelf separating the two twin beds. I could see Peter, his shape, curled beneath a blanket on the other side of the shelf. It might have been Peter’s movements in bed that caused G. to slide down from the mattress to the floor, where she would not be seen by him if he woke. I gave her one of my pillows, and she reached up to hold my hand. How long did we manage to keep ourselves awake? It seems to me that we held hands even after we’d fallen asleep. By morning, she’d snuck back through the passageway leading to my sister’s room.

The next day, after she and Peter had been picked up and taken home by their parents, I got in the car and went somewhere with my mother. I remember our drive over rolling hills, on roads bordered by white fences. We drove toward, then alongside, the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was summertime, and the car windows were rolled down. Wind stormed around the interior of the car, and, every now and then, smoke and ashes from my mother’s cigarette scattered and flew into my eyes and nose. I began to feel nauseated from cigarette smoke and summer heat and the rising and falling of the car as it passed over the pastured hills.

Or did I feel sick from my adventure with G.? An anxiety came over me, sitting in the car with my mother. I had done something to divide us, and nothing would ever be the same again. We drove through the Virginia countryside, and I leaned partway out the passenger-side window and let the wind blow against my face.

I don’t know what happened to G. after that. She may have children of her own now. It wasn’t long before my family moved away to Florida, first to a house in a large subdivision on what was then the western edge of Miami, then farther south, to the Bauhaus-style house. Eventually I would return to Virginia for boarding school. I recall hearing, around the time that I graduated from Woodberry Forest, or shortly after I’d left home once again, for college in New England, that my old friend Peter had driven his car off the road and crashed into a tree and died. The accident happened, I believe, at night. I don’t know whether he’d been drinking.

But there is another story I want to get to, one that involves books. It takes place in Florida, in the Bauhaus-style house, the house surrounded by palms and tall pines. It was there that I began reading self-consciously, systematically, and acquisitively, which is to say that I began to take notice of myself in the act of reading, possibly because connections between books were becoming apparent and meaningful to me. J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy was enjoying its hippie-era popularity; you had to read it, and I did, in elegant volumes that came packaged as a boxed set. That led to other boxed sets. Many were available in 1972, released by publishers hoping, presumably, to profit from readers’ hunger for experiences that could replicate, or nearly replicate, the Tolkien trip, which was perceived by many people as a vast world-reordering — an end to unjust war and postindustrial tyranny — carried out by barefoot commune dwellers. It wasn’t Tolkien’s argument that sold me on The Lord of the Rings, however. I was attracted, I think, to what might be called the narrative’s spirit, which is expressed technically in the rules and laws that both create and govern Middle Earth’s complex network of societies, each with its own language and history, its codes of behavior and its embattled relationship to good or evil, even its own magic. The awakening in adolescence to systems of social and psychological interdependence, magical and otherwise, was, for me, a quiet revelation. I wanted more multivolume flights into inner space. Books let me in on my own capacity for following connections — the peaceful farmers may live far from the shadows beneath the mountain of death, but they can reach that darkness if they listen to the talking trees; a reader may doubt the legitimacy of worlds not his own, but he can traverse those worlds nonetheless, if he keeps turning pages — and, before long, the connections that mattered were to other books.

One was H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, the story of a mad scientist who uses a remote island as a kind of fortified preserve for his living creations, half human and half animal, the mutilated products of laboratory experiments in the nineteenth-century pseudoscience of vivisection who roam the jungle in states of agony and rage at their master. The Island of Dr. Moreau spoke to me. It came in a set of Wells’s sciencefiction novels, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The Food of the Gods, and so on, each, as far as I was concerned, a fairly thorough rendering in metaphor of some aspect of the human condition. I had C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength, which, as it turns out, are about alternate worlds only to the extent that they are, like the epics of Tolkien, also about Christianity; and I remember, too, a set of truly strange works by E. R. Eddison, a mostly forgotten English writer of sometimes impenetrable medieval-style romances. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros—the title refers to a dragon swallowing its own tail, graphically illustrating circularity and never-endingness — prepared me for The Nibelungenlied, the “Song of the Nibelung,” a reading assignment set for me in the tenth grade by my German teacher as punishment for disrupting class and shirking on homework. Frau Webb thought she was going to stump me, but I was, by then, very conversant with the smiting of heads and quaffing of mead, the aura of celebrated death that can be found in northern European sagas.

I remember a girl named Eileen who sat behind me in German class. I used to turn around in my desk frequently, to look at her legs. School in Miami in the 1970s was an erotic ordeal, because the girls came dressed for the beach. Sometimes when the bell rang I was forced by my erection to stay at my desk for a minute or two before staggering off to the next period. I carried my books in front of my dick.

Anyway, the books. It wasn’t only their interiority that mattered to me. I cared for their materiality. A book of good weight, that opened nicely to reveal clean text on grained paper, functioned satisfyingly as the physical container of its familiar or unfamiliar worlds, making more concrete, more apparently real, the author’s inventions. Many years after the time which concerns me here, after I was grown up, living in New York and publishing books of my own, I visited the Folger Library in Washington, where, in a subterranean vault, I was shown the library’s immense collection of early printed works, including the world’s largest accumulation of first-folio and quarto editions of Shakespeare. For some reason, my guide had no problem with my handling the books, and I walked along the shelves, taking down not only Shakespeare but Chaucer and Sir Philip Sidney I remember opening Sidney’s Arcadia, a massive and dense prose work, a sort of cosmology of Elizabethan love and politics, written for the author’s sister, the Countess of Pembroke. The pages of the volume in my hand showed, in almost stunning relief around each letter, the heavy impressions left by the press. The array of letters shaped into words, words into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs seemed perfect, as if the book’s maker had precisely known the textual disposition most likely to encourage the eye’s movement down the page. Published near the close of the sixteenth century, the Arcadia opens with a dedication to the Countess:

Here now have you (most deare, and most worthy to be most deare Lady) this idle work of mine: which I fear (like the Spiders webbe) will be thought fitter to be swept away, then worn to any other purpose. For my part, in very trueth (as the cruell fathers among the Greekes, were woont to doo to the babes they would not foster) I could well find in my harte, to cast out in some desert of forgetfulness this child, which I am loath to father. But you desired me to doo it, and your desire, to my hart is an absolute commandment. Now, it is done onelie for you, onely to you: if you keepe it to your selfe, or to such friendes, who will weigh errors in the ballaunce of good will, I hope, for the fathers sake, it will be pardoned, perchance made much of, though in it selfe it have deformities ….

I was hooked by the words on the page and by the page itself, pliable and tough, stained, deep in the paper’s weave, with flecks of dark color. The binding was limber. I was breathing quickly. I’d been curious to see the Folger’s books, yet had not anticipated their durability and powerful tactile appeal. They’d existed for such a long time. As my guide and I rode the elevator back up to the main reading room, I wondered who I might call on the phone. To whom could I blurt out the excitement of peering into these books? As I remember, I called my father, who listened patiently while I described the sensation of holding the Arcadia and the Shepherd’s Calendar and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. What I am getting at is the idea that books do not in all cases merely convey the content on their pages; in some fundamental respect, books, especially the most beautiful, shelter and accommodate their contents.

I wanted beautiful books. I wanted to know what my father knew but would not, or could not, standing uncomfortably before the shelves in our sunken living room in Miami, say to me. And so I began to make a library of my own.

One night, a month before Christmas, 1972, we were sitting at dinner in the house in the jungle, when my father made a proposal. His proposal was not directed toward me in particular, yet it contained an acknowledgment of, if not an answer to, the questions I’d been asking him about literature. He offered a Christmas in which he, my mother, my sister, and I would give and receive books. We’d keep things simple and not overspend. We’d have a book Christmas.

I remember thinking: Books? Wait a minute! What about all the other stuff? But I understood that I was being invited to put myself forward as a serious person. If books become one’s way of looking at and piecing together society and the world, then exchanging books might be an initiation into authentic membership in the world.

It was quickly decided. My sister was enthusiastic and so was I. I even knew what books I desired. I’d seen, in a store in South Miami, an imposing two-volume annotated edition — elegantly boxed, naturally; that was all-important — of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. They became the gift to go after, and for several weeks I dropped hints and made a point of declaring my passion for hardcovers.

Christmas was a time in my family when hopes for happiness got ritualized and, as it were, acted out. The holiday required protection from the discord which ruled our typical existence, and the quieter-than-usual days leading up to it came gradually to seem an end to my parents’ difficulties and the advent of a peaceful era in our lives; and, to that end, actual gifts, particularly my father’s for my mother, had a lot riding on them. My father’s proposal of a book Christmas might have been his attempt to lessen the psychic weight attached to the things placed beneath the tree, though when I think about my mother’s part in such a Christmas, I wonder whether the burden was much reduced. She had many talents, my mother, and, in spite of everything, she had her pleasures, but reading wasn’t at the top of the list. Occasionally I’d see her with something by a writer she and my father knew socially, a university acquaintance with a career as a novelist or poet. However, apart from keeping up with the output of friends from southern academia — and I’m not sure whether she did so more than halfheartedly — she wasn’t what you’d call a reader. She didn’t voice curiosity about whatever might be found in books, and she did not ask questions or make observations relating to books in the world. I never heard her, when I was a teenager, express feelings brought on by something she’d read.

How lonely for him, I thought from time to time when I was growing up. Then I’d wonder: Why did they get married? And a moment later I’d wonder: Why’d they get married twice? The days when I began exploring myself through reading were also the days when I started analyzing the problems in my home, and I suppose I took my mother’s indifference to books as disdain for the communion, through print, between an author and a reader, that inner experience we take from written words. Did she feel contempt for my father, who nurtured this experience in his students?

It’s not a bad question. I didn’t want that boxed Sherlock Holmes set for nothing. The powerful detective is a master of the universe. His deductions release us from the anguish of living in an inexplicable world. I couldn’t unravel the logic of my parents’ marriage, but, reading Arthur Conan Doyle, I could briefly master my feelings of helplessness. Mastery was the aim in acquiring books in sets. Sets promised the triumph of completion. It wasn’t sufficient to read a story or two; I wanted totality. The box housed its separate volumes as interdependent parts of an intact world. To conquer the realm of the boxed set was to acquire strong magic — my father’s magic. I could not have known, at that time, that I was stealing from my father, but I was. I was beginning to study and prepare for writing. I don’t recall what I gave my parents or my sister for Christmas in 1972. I do remember that I got the Holmes stories, though in paperback rather than in the edition I’d fantasized about.

The night before Christmas, my parents fought. My father had violated the provisions of his own proposal, and arranged around the tree a number of elaborately wrapped packages, clearly not books, for my mother. Of course my sister and I didn’t expect him to give her only books. Just the same, seen against our expectation, the abundance was notable.

It was a long and dark night. My mother got falling-down drunk. She had a practice during her bad spells of stopping at the door to my room. She would teeter in the doorway and bellow at me that I was not participating properly in the life of our family, and that she didn’t care about whatever I might or might not want to do — I could act any way I wanted when I got to be eighteen, because then I’d be paying rent around here, but until then I didn’t have rights — and I could just go to hell. Or she might isolate a shortcoming, like my poor performance in school, and attack me for it in a manner that suggested I was the root cause of our family’s misery. Invariably I would be divided in my feelings: I was furious with her, yet worried over whether she might fall. It was a sorry predicament. At some point on Christmas Eve she engaged me. I don’t remember what she said, or whether I ran out into the middle of her fight with my father, out and down the little steps into the living room, where the tree stood with its lights on. I remember my sister pleading with them to stop. At about three or four in the morning, there was a crash. Our mother had fallen into the Christmas tree and brought it down on top of herself. I remember her crying out as if she might die. My sister and I ran into the living room, where our father was struggling to raise her. Our cats were hiding beneath chairs. The floor was littered with glass shards and broken ornaments. Water from the tree stand had splashed across everyone’s presents. My mother was claiming to have broken her arm. But she hadn’t. We got her off the floor and, somehow, into bed, and then, I don’t remember, my father swept up the mess and righted the tree, and a while later the sun came up.

I slept, some. I woke to the sounds made by my sister fixing our parents a special Christmas breakfast. I got up, and Terry was in the kitchen cutting fruit. I doubt we said much to each other.

It was a long time before our parents came out for Christmas morning. My mother needed coffee and time in bed. She may have bruised herself in her fall, but she did not — I suppose because of the occasion — tell us if she was in pain. It was a forgotten incident. She lay against pillows and picked at her breakfast until around eleven o’clock, then hauled herself to a chair near the tree. It took her a while to arrange her coffee cup, cigarettes, lighter, and ashtray on a table near the chair. Once she was settled, we started opening presents. Everyone was quiet. My sister had done everything she could to save Christmas.

We took turns with our gifts. I opened the paperback Sherlock Holmes set, and, later, a few other books, and then some non-book things. Clothing, probably. I remember my father inspecting something from my mother and forcing a grateful, affectionate smile — she’d found just the right thing — a smile meant for us as well as her, and for himself, because he, too, wanted to salvage the morning, along with, I guess, his dignity. Mainly I remember my mother as a captive of the gifts he lavished on her. At the time, she had begun a minor collection of Art Nouveau objets d’art — candlesticks, bud vases, copper bowls, serving trays overlaid with silver — and my father, as I remember, gave her a number of such pieces that year. Again and again, my mother was compelled to put down her cigarette, tear open a package, and smile and plastically exclaim at him. It was hard to watch. She had no control over her alcoholism. She didn’t understand this. And neither did we.