The Mansion of Happiness (36 page)

Before my mother married my father, who went to Clark University, she worked at the Milton Bradley Company. I was conceived the year Lennart Nilsson’s “Drama of Life Before Birth” appeared on the cover of
Life
magazine. As a kid, I played the Game of Life. In 1975, I went to Mass and prayed for Karen Ann Quinlan, although I can’t remember, anymore, whether I wanted her to live or to die. I remember only that I was terrified.

E. B. White is the writer who reached through the brambles of my childhood, grabbed me by the pigtails, and yanked. I always wished I could thank him. I once wrote him a letter on my father’s typewriter; I never had the gumption to send it. I owe him more thanks, since. “I finished ‘Stuart Little,’ ” a son of mine wrote when he was six. “I think E. B. White is saying, stick with it until you find it.”

I have never attended a Sex Weekend or slept in a Celestial Bed, and I do not run a Kitchen Efficient, but I did once work as a secretary at the Harvard Business School, for a management-consulting guru; I used to own a breast pump; my parents have lived longer than their parents; and the rules to the Mansion of Happiness hang by the front door of my house, where,
I like to think, they give strangers pause: “Whoever possesses AUDACITY, CRUELTY, IMMODESTY, or INGRATITUDE, must return to his former situation till his turn comes to spin again, and not even
think
of Happiness, much less partake of it.”

I have never frozen anyone. But I did once put someone I love in storage. That, I suppose, is where this book began. She was on her deathbed; I was on an operating table, trying to give birth, fast. She wanted to meet that baby before she died. Every minute mattered. I failed. He was born; she died; she never saw him. I wrote her eulogy from a bed in a maternity ward. Before she got sick, she had been writing a dissertation about
Cheaper by the Dozen
and
The Egg and I
, books she had loved as a kid. She had not gotten very far. When she really liked someone, she would say, “He’s a good egg.” She was a good egg. She bequeathed to me her books; I put them on my shelves. We scattered her ashes. Then I printed out the contents of her hard drive and carried that sheaf of papers to a library, where it was sorted and cataloged and put in an archive-quality box lined with acid-free paper and stored in a cool, dark, humidity-controlled room, a room where a life on paper lasts forever. I have always believed that the past contains the truth, that history explains, that archives save. I am forever meeting dead people in libraries, and they always have a lot to say. I thought: This should work.

Nine years passed. A nine-year-old in my house wanted to be Headless Ted Williams for Halloween. He trick-or-treated wearing a Red Sox uniform and carrying a papier-mâché head. When Halloween was over, he put Ted’s head on top of his dresser. All winter, he left it there.

“How long are you going to keep that thing?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Forever?”

That spring, the tenth birth-and-death day came, and I figured I had waited long enough. I went back to that library and opened that box and read every scrap. And I found out: she is not there. Folder after folder of her papers, and all that shouted out of that box was my grief. I closed the lid, regretted the box, and remembered Ted. And that’s why, days later, I flew to Michigan, to meet a man who freezes the dead, and found myself across the hall from hibernating bats and invisible cats, because I had thought: Maybe he can’t let go, either.

Most of the chapters in this book started out as essays in the
New Yorker.
I don’t know how to thank my editor, Henry Finder, any better than I knew
how to thank E. B. White—for a great deal, but especially for sending me to chase a mouse down the halls of the New York Pubic Library and to drive all over New Jersey, looking for the house where Karen Ann Quinlan used to live, to take a picture of a statue of the Virgin Mary in the front yard, for fact-checking. Dear Mr. Finder, It was good to get out. Gratefully, &c.

“A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided,” E. B. White once wrote, “for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people—people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.” I met a lot of people in libraries while writing this book. Thanks to librarians and archivists all over the place but especially at the American Antiquarian Society; the Baker Library at the Harvard Business School; the Bryn Mawr Library; the Columbia Rare Book and Manuscripts Library; the Connecticut Valley Historical Museum; Cornell Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections; the Countway Library at the Harvard School of Medicine; the Gilbreth Library of Management at Purdue University; the Goddard Library at Clark University; the Gutman Library at the Harvard School of Education; the Houghton Library at Harvard College; the Milton Bradley Archives at Hasbro; the New-York Historical Society; the New York Public Library; the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe; the Special Collections Library at Duke University; Time Inc. Archives; UCLA; the University of Florida, Gainesville; and Vassar’s Archives and Special Collections.

Many thanks, too, to Dan Frank, at Knopf, for encouragement and wisdom and deft suggestions at every turn. And thanks to Tina Bennett, as ever. Thanks to everyone who commented on portions of this work during lectures and seminars at Colby, Columbia Law School, DePauw, Harvard, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Harvard Law School, MIT, Princeton, the University of Chicago School of Law, the University of Connecticut, the University of Massachusetts, and Yale. Thanks, too, to everyone I interviewed, especially Robert C. W. Ettinger. For stints of research along the way, thanks to Molly Morrissey Barron, Heather Furnas, John Huffman, Sara Martinez, Natalie Panno, and especially Emily Wilkerson. Thanks to Latif Nasser, for sharing with me a play he once wrote about an egg named Otto. Heartfelt thanks to friends and colleagues who read drafts of chapters: Elise Broach, Nancy Cott, Amy Kittelstrom, James Kloppenberg, Leah Price, Charles Rosenberg, Dorothy Ross, Bruce Schulman,
Steven Shapin, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Sue Vargo, and Michael Willrich. Adrianna Alty navigated me through rough patches, to say nothing of New Jersey; Denise Webb taught me about redemption; and Jane Kamensky has walked me miles, through woods and around ponds and even over ice. And although everyone in my house hates it when I mention them, for which I adore them, here I must, nevertheless, thank They Who Must Not Be Named by promising that I will never serve Dog’s Vomit on Toast, or, at least, not ever again.

This book is dedicated to John Demos, who once wrote a book about the Puritan author of a book called
The Redeemed Captive
, whose dedication reads, “Sir, It was a satyrical answer, and deeply reproachful to mankind, which the philosopher gave to that question, What soonest grows old? Replied,
Thanks.
” I think, though, that thanks are unaging.

When I came home from Detroit, we put Ted’s head in a blue plastic recycling bin and left it out on the curb. He was pulped and bleached and made, I suppose, into a newspaper, ashes to ashes—or, at least, paper to paper. Since then, I have come around to thinking that archives save only what archives can save, nothing more and nothing less. Most of all, I have come to believe that what people make of the relationship between life and death has got a good deal to do with how they think about the present and the past. Hiding between the covers of this book, then, lies a theory of history itself, and it is this: if history is the art of making an argument by telling a story about the dead, which is how I see it, the dead never die; they are merely forgotten or, especially if they are loved, remembered, quick as ever.