A Cure for Suicide (17 page)

It was my idea the following day that if she was strong enough, we should take another walk into town. She wanted to, but felt that we should wait a day. I insisted that it would do her good, that waiting a day might just make her settle into a sort of lassitude from which she would only emerge when we had returned to the city, and then we would have lost the opportunity once more to see the town. We might never come back here again, I said. Oh, we shall come back many times, she disagreed. But, all the same, I forced her out the door, and we made it about a quarter of the way to the town before I realized what an awful idea it had been. She was absolutely overtaxed. She could barely stand. We stood there in a sort of alpine clearing, the path going up on one side and down on the other. Even the vegetation appeared taxed. I can go no further, she said. She didn’t say anything. She would never say that she couldn’t go on. It wasn’t her way. Instead, she sat there and wept soundlessly. That was her way of giving up. I carried her back to the house and installed her again in the daybed. I got her water and some food. Then, I drove down into town to fetch more things, and returned, and made her supper. By the evening, she was feeling better again, although she was weaker than I had ever seen her. She had taken off her clothing. She wore just a loose pair of pants and a shawl. She lay on the bed, her head propped on a pillow. When I entered the room, she smiled. When I came again, with supper, she sat up and, leaving the shawl, came to me there in the middle of the room. She was mad with energy, then, I told the interlocutor. But, as soon as we were finished, she was exhausted again, and I had practically to feed her the supper spoon by spoon.

When supper was through, I told her about my visit to the town. I told her the wineseller had been talking to me about her brother’s death again. She said that he always talks about it. He had a son who was best friends with my brother, and the family took it hard. In fact, the wineseller himself was probably her fifth or sixth cousin, related at some insurmountable distance. I had mentioned this thing, my conversation with the man, as a way of gaining territory. I wanted her to feel that I was conversant with the town and with the past. That even, separate from her, I could navigate the waters of her past and of her family’s past, and that furthermore, to others I was identifiable as someone connected to her. All of this was present when I had said, the wineseller talked more to me of your brother. But, if this statement had the effect that I wanted, I did not see it. Rather, it plunged her into a sadness in which she could think only of her family illness. She wanted to speak of it with me. Now she would tell me about it. The family illness. Before, she hadn’t said anything of it to me, but now perhaps it was good for me to know, and why not from her, rather than from strangers like this wineseller, who, after all, does not know the real account, or the real ideas, but goes along filling in the narrative with his own creations, or so she supposed. You wouldn’t believe, I told the interlocutor, how carefully she laid out these mental objects, the mythology of her family’s illness. She said to me that she had never spoken about it to anyone before, to anyone who had not had complete knowledge about it, and so, she would be clumsy in talking. She was unused to ignorance on this subject, as everyone in her family possessed knowledge about it that predated her own. Still she would try. She told me that her family was known, in the places where they historically had owned land, as a family of effete languishers. They were practically defined by their illness. One after another, for seven hundred years, as far back as the family goes, the illness has struck again and again. The only way out of it, she confided, is to die in some physical accident. Even in this age of medicine, there has been no advancement. And why? Because, she said, it is not worth it for the world at large to put medical resources to work on a problem that affects .000000014 percent of the population. I don’t know if that is the actual number, she said, but if it isn’t that one, it is one like it. During the Renaissance, the family had been wealthy, much wealthier than they are now, and they had employed doctors
specifically to find a cure.
Of course, the state of medicine was such that it was useless. They tried to cure it with alchemy. This was not a joke. Vast wealth had been spent trying to save her family from an illness using alchemy. If it had worked, her brother would still be living. In fact, before that, before her brother’s death, when she allowed herself to think about the illness more often, it had occurred to her, and she had once actually said so to her father, that the money had been ill spent. Ill spent? Her father had not understood. His daughter, eight years old, was standing before him, telling him that their fifteenth-century predecessors had misspent funds. What could she mean, so I told the interlocutor, that’s what she said to me, explaining her father’s turn of mind concerning his young daughter’s statement. I told him, she said, continuing, that if our ancestors had set aside the sum used to employ those doctors, quite a large sum, and set those monies at compound interest for all of the time until now, medicine would have changed, would have become useful, actually useful, as it is now, rather than useless, as it was then, and we would have the money to employ scientists and doctors to find a cure. Her father and mother had enjoyed this idea very much, and had often brought it out as evidence of their daughter’s brilliant impudence, relating it at dinner parties. So often have they told it, so Rana said to me, sitting there in my arms on the daybed, that I tired of it and never wanted to hear the story. But I tell it to you now, as it makes sense to hear it. The other idea that was had, and this was a very good idea—it was had during the nineteenth century, by some woman of the family who went on to be an abbess, who actually left the family to be an abbess. All the same, she had an idea for the family, as a young woman, while still with the family. That idea was: we could benefit from marrying others, and not marrying with the group of ourselves. Breed it out of us, so she said. Although this suggestion was taken very seriously, it could not be effected. Why was that? I asked her. The reason is this: almost no one in my family can tolerate the presence or conversation of those not in my family. Although we are in some sense a populous family, although in each generation there are between seven and ten children,
every house a full house,
she said, still it is true that it remains the same blood. Cousins marry cousins marry cousins. Occasionally sister marries brother. And why? Because we are all so sensitive. We simply cannot bear to speak with or be with other people. Therefore, a feeling grew up in the family, within the family, one never spoken of, that the illness is simply
what we deserve.
She told me this and I told the interlocutor, saying it with the same emphasis she used,
what we deserve.
That my father, for instance, she continued, deserves to die based upon his parents’ inability to tolerate the company of regular people. That my brother deserved to die based upon my father’s inability to tolerate anyone other than my mother. But, what about, I said, you and I have met and we are together. If we were to have children…I don’t think I need to tell you, she said, what the general feeling is in my family about you. It is regrettable, but we shouldn’t hide from it. She laid her head against my neck. It isn’t your fault, she said, but they don’t really want to see you around. They have, you see, certain things that they want to talk about, and they only want to talk about those things, and they only want to talk about them in a particular way. You could imagine yourself, perhaps, now, as we sit here talking, thinking of a way that you could isolate, through careful study, what are the exact things that my parents, and their brothers and sisters, my great-aunts, my great-uncles, the whole clan of them, settled at a long table or beneath an arbor at a gathering, would want to talk about, what those things are and what they are not. You imagine now that you could isolate, she used the word again, these things, and that having done so you could take part, meritoriously, in such a conversation. But, in fact, it just isn’t true. You would begin to say something and immediately you would go awry. You would miss a subtlety of phrasing, and a feeling would spread through the crowd—disdain. It wouldn’t be your fault at all. Darling, I feel that you are their equal, that you are equal to every last one of them, even to them all gathered together. Wasn’t I the one who said, let us go to a foreign city? Didn’t I say it just yesterday or the day before? I did. Yet, you aren’t good enough for them, not in the way that you want. And when I am there, with them, it is even hard for me, much as I champion you, to listen as you put your foot wrong again and again and again. Even when we speak of something like, the last time you came to visit the house, you see now what a thing it has been for me to have you visit, and still, I had you visit again and again and again, don’t you see what that means, well, when you last came to visit—there was said, my father, he told us a story about his work. You remember, he said that he was conducting an examination of the Hruezfeldt dam, along with two of his brothers, who are all amateurs by the way, none of my family has ever professionally done anything, nonetheless they are brought in to consult often on matters of every sort by government, because of their extreme expertise. You recall that he said the problem of the dam was not a physical problem, but an economical problem. The government itself, in its maintenance of the dam, might as well be standing there at Hruezfeldt with its finger blocking the dam. That was the manner in which the Hruezfeldt dam problem was holding back the province at large from taking effective action in any number of spheres. Do you remember what you said then, in response? She remembered, I told the interlocutor, the entire conversation, a conversation I had utterly forgotten. I had to tell her that I did not remember. At that very moment I wanted to be for her a person who remembered everything and who therefore perhaps, beyond all possibility, possessed a chance of earning her father’s respect. But even in that one minor incident of our conversation about a conversation, even there, away from her family, I was forced to capitulate and explain that I could not remember what had been said, so I told the interlocutor shamefully. He looked on, waiting for me to continue.

Could I have a glass of water again, I asked. He nodded, and went out into the hall to fetch it. When he had given me water before, I hadn’t noticed him leave, but perhaps he had. He returned and stood there, handing me the glass. I took it and drank. He sat. I was embarrassed, I said. She had never disclosed any of this before, and now, there in the mountains, I felt we were coming to the heart of my unsuitability. So, I told the interlocutor, there in the daybed, she said to me, in complete seriousness, she said, about my father, in that conversation in our house, three weeks ago, in which he mentioned out loud that darling of his mind, the Hruezfeldt dam, a thing which, to my knowledge he had never done—always before he had called it
the dam
or
the backbone,
already he had been so kind and solicitous in this conversation as to mention the dam by name—and you told him, fiercely, that perhaps a different source of power could be used to replace the dam, you said it loosely, easily, a different source of power, and then the province wouldn’t need to rely on water, on that form of power, which after all was only one of many ways. After all, during your time in the civil corps, you had worked on other forms of energy, so you said. Water was not the final ends and means. You said it matter-of-factly and without rancor, but the offense you gave was enormous and sudden. I remember in particular the callous way you threw in this colloquialism,
ends and means.
The whole table was horrified. My father reeled back in his chair. Make the Hruezfeldt dam, the enormous Hruezfeldt dam, into a sort of architectural folly? Declare the work of our hands, of our fathers’ hands, and of their fathers’ hands, all some sort of mistake? The Hruezfeldt dam? Was I speaking about that dam or about some other? It had been frightening, said Rana, to hear my father spoken to in this way, and indeed, she had never seen him respond in that manner to anyone, never having needed to. You recall that I spoke for you, saying that, of course, we were speaking extremely theoretically about it. We, in the dining room of a house nowhere near Hruezfeldt, some of us never having even been there, never having even seen the dam itself, were
extremely
theoretically discussing it. I told him, she said, that this young man, you, understood the matter was not the Hruezfeldt dam, but the province itself and the political map. Perhaps, I suggested, she told me, perhaps, I said to my father, that an alternate suggestion was to redraw the political map of the province. So she said to me, remembering her interaction with her father, and so I told the interlocutor. Do you recall, she said, how, as soon as my voice, with its known cadence, rose in the family dining room, my father appeared assuaged? Do you recall how as the gentle good sense of my measure, so quickly suggested, washed over him, he fell at peace at once. He merely nodded, and took another bite of his food, the matter forgotten. The only glimmer of it was when we rose from the table and he dismissed himself, he went to bed early. Do you remember it? She pressed my hand, there on the daybed. It wasn’t your fault, she said, but you simply can’t understand him, or any of them. It would be like trying to run a race beneath a road while the rest of them were running upon it. You would always finish last. There we were, sitting in the lodge that her father had bought as a child, and I had learned this truly momentous thing: I would never become a part of her family. Also, I learned a corollary and equally momentous thing: she did not care. We would go away together and never see any of them again. She would make occasional trips back to see them, but I would not be in attendance. There would be no reason for it, she said. She delighted in planning these details of our life. For her, my absolute rootlessness, the fact that I had no family, had little connection to anyone, lived in a boardinghouse, wrote inconsequential ideas in little notebooks, and generally was beneath all notice—for her, that was wondrous. My very nonentity made it easy for me to be assimilated instantly and totally into her plans. She was one, I confided in the interlocutor, who could not speak of something if there was the least chance it was not realistic. She did not want to waste her time in unrealizable projects. For her, she could take no joy in them. All the same, with her family’s vast wealth, many projects that seemed to me from the get-go foolish or impossible, were to her completely sensible, inevitable even. That I could be without a doubt incorporated into her plans made it easy for her to chart with pleasure the things that she would want to do, and made it conceivable that these plans, fleshed out in her mind, could be said out loud to me, and related. I have never before, she told me, planned
with
anyone. Even my brother, whom I loved dearly, and even all my other brothers and sisters, who were already grown when I was a child, even they have never heard me plan. They believe that I have no plans, that I go from day to day planless. Of course, to them, this is sensible. They live extremely coherently within the traditions of our family. You will, I’m sure, meet them all briefly, at one or another family event where you are absolutely required. You will see that they are of a piece. I am to some degree viewed as a wild person. I have had friends, for instance, who are not in the family. This is a liberty my mother never had. Indeed, I went to school outside of the home, another strangeness. You could say that I was a sort of experiment that my father made. It has turned out well, I told her. Yes, very well, she agreed. Shall we go outside, I asked her, for it had begun to rain, and the raindrops were sounding on the porch roof. I helped her to a chair on the porch and we sat there, staring out into the rain. Sometimes, she told me, I feel that we are in the clouds here. Of course, it’s nonsense. We are not that high up, but I sometimes enjoy thinking that we are. I looked out at the clouds, and I felt that she was right. She was right that we were in the clouds, and that we were not in the clouds. This occasioned a small happiness that ran along my spine and out to the cuffs of my shirt. Rana looked at me very seriously, then. That chair was the chair that Seamus Mendols always sat in. He was my father’s rival. He would visit and they would argue, angrily, for hours. Nothing was good enough for him. He was angry at my father for not living up to what Seamus Mendols had expected for him. He was angry at my father for having children who had failed to do things as great as the things that my father ought to have done, the things my father had not done, but that Seamus Mendols had expected of him. Seamus Mendols could drink any amount of liquor and get nowhere near drunk. He could reason like a logician, and he picked apart everything that anyone said, as if it were a necessary function of the conversation, that it be reduced to its barest, most functional essentials. The lessons in logic that we all received, even my father, a so-called finished person, a true gentleman, the lessons we received from Seamus Mendols during the summer months of my childhood, were truly something. Seamus Mendols hated the days of the week. He disliked the base-ten numbering system. He argued against clothing that required zippers or snaps. He was writing a book, had been writing a book forever, the publishing of which, at some point in the future, would be a great corrective. No one but my father had seen this book. He would not speak of it, but sometimes Seamus would say to my father, in passing, as they spoke of something else,
as in 3:12:92,
referring to a passage. Then, my father would nod, and understand, so thoroughly had he read this work of Seamus Mendols. My brother was inadequate. To Seamus Mendols, my brother was a sort of joke. My sisters and brothers who were long grown, but whom Seamus Mendols had watched grow, sitting on that same porch, long before my birth, they were, if anything, richer jokes than my brother was. However rich the joke of my brother was to Seamus Mendols, the sisters and brothers who had preceded him were richer. That so many little beings could issue forth from my father, and none of them, not a one could make any motion to complete
the work that was my father’s to do
was to Seamus Mendols a frightening, sad, and inevitable confirmation of the world’s slothful indifference. Of the world’s impassive, perfect indifference. Its slothful indifference. He could not decide. He would sit in the chair repeating first the one and then the other back and forth. My own arrival, Seamus Mendols greeted with animation. He thought of me as a sort of antidote to the general horror of my family. She is your better, he would tell my father again and again. Of course, it was not true. My father knows everything I know, and then beyond that, he knows other things the existence of which I have not guessed at, and he moves through all of it with ease. I, meanwhile, make my small attempts. Seamus Mendols saw these attempts and rewarded me for them, for each one, with a cheerfulness that was quite rousing. It was his idea that I go to a college, that I be educated in public school. He spoke to my father, and I was their little experiment. When Seamus Mendols died, at the house he kept just up that road over there, my father said, I will never come back. He has not returned to this town since that day. That is how dear Seamus Mendols was to him. My mother, my father could bear. He can speak to her and live with her day in day out. But, I believe the person whose company he most enjoyed was Seamus Mendols. The chair you are sitting in right now is the chair he spent years of his life in. There is no such thing as feeling the effects of that. Seamus Mendols does not linger in that chair. But perhaps you can enjoy the view, and feel the import of it. When I was here as a child, no one but Seamus could ever sit in that chair. My father did not make a rule of this, nor did he enforce it. It was unspoken.