the box Friday, May 9 2008

I have been unable to open the box of letters.

The letters, getting older and more faded, are lovingly tied with ribbon, and rest expectantly in a plastic box — correspondence of love and connection, crossing overseas and back, on an almost daily basis while my father was stationed in Korea.
The letters were sent during 1952, before he was killed, two days after his 21st birthday, 2 months before I was born. He knew Mom was pregnant, before the Marines at Cape Pendleton shipped him out.

* * * * *
The bittersweet legacy of the letters are what I have left; they contain the crux of a story, along with the pile of notes I have filed away, for “one of these days” to write a memoir — “Somebody’s Memoir” — I call it. I have not been in an emotionally stable place to open the letters and to read them, for 15 years. But I promised myself I would do so this summer, after my mother’s death last September.

My parents were high school sweethearts in a tiny town in Texas, giddy with love, tender and intense. Old photographs show them dressed in identical sweaters, leaning into each other next to an old Ford. The Gold Dust Twins. Very young love, when cut short, becomes a legend, a story with no bumps in the road, a story of hope cut off at the quick.

* * * * *

With her gentle hesitance, one day Mother gave me the box of letters, along with paperwork that described the gone-wrong tragedy of his death. These belong to you. It’s okay, isn’t it. Is it okay?

*******
The real story is not the sad sacrifice of a man to his country, like current news reports on the war in Iraq that spin the deaths of young men (and women) slaughtered by “the enemy” into heroic and acceptable events.
The real story is that my father was murdered, in “friendly fire”, in the most horrendous way, while getting ready for church at the unit he was stationed in Korea. An idiot boy who was cleaning his rifle, aimed at my father, thinking the bullet chamber was empty, and fired into my father’s heart, leaving blood on the tiny bible he carried in his pocket. I heard from my mother — the one time she spoke of the incident, even longer ago than giving me the box —that the boy “went crazy” and had to be shipped back to the States, where he was held in the mental ward of a government hospital. Neither one of us cared about that. At least this young man came home alive. As the story goes, she said would be no forgiveness when a priest from the prison called to ask her to help this young man by writing to him. What is his story? I used to be so filled with sad rage that I did not care. Now I wonder how the man’s life unfolded, if he had a life tinged with awful regret, if he is even alive.

* * * * *
My maternal grandmother told me my mother collapsed when the Western Union telegram arrived, lay on the couch with her body turned towards the back of it until I was born. I do not think in her entire life that she ever recovered, even though later she was able to move on when she met my stepfather, who she did love deeply, with an adult love, and with whom she shared a rich life.
Except for the one time she gave my “the box” and told me the real story of my dad’s death, she kept her own counsel on the matter. This was her way. I believe the repression of deep pain is the reason she suffered so many health problems and a numbing “housewife addiction” to painkillers.
There have been studies that infants in the womb experience their mother’s emotions. I still experience the churning water of turbulence within her womb when Western Union delivered the news to her as she sat in the isolated Texas oilfield camp house of her parents. Waiting. I often wonder if this is a major reason for my own mood challenges, the unmentioned terrain of a life that has remained so long unexplored?
I always felt very protective of my mother, even as a child, as if guarding her emotional minefield, not daring to walk across it, should something explode and demolish us both.
At one time, I began to plan a memoir, which would of course involve the letters, and yet I’ve yet to read them. In all this time, I just could not, even though they play a critical role. So whose “minefield” am I really afraid to cross?
Despite circumventing the letters themselves, I have read through the noncommittal words on military stationary and the heartfelt letters from some of his camp friends, about the circumstances surrounding the death. I read about the other young soldier who murdered my father and his nervous breakdown in prison. Every year I told myself that “soon” I will open that box full of letters and begin the journey towards healing. Every year I have been unable to do so.
Several years before my mother died, she asked me to promise that when she died, I would scatter some of her ashes on my father’s grave, a little marble tablet resting in a huge cemetery a couple of hours from where she then lived with my stepfather. This was a “secret” request. I promised to do this.
The day of her memorial, after the ceremony, I took my share of the ashes and made my way to the cemetery on my drive back home. I drove into the cemetery and as if guided by her hand and arrived at exactly the right spot. In the back seat of my car was a funeral-designed pot of yellow mums from the memorial and the car was filled with a pungent sacharine aroma. I took the jar of ashes and walked to the grave. Such a small little stone, with his name and rank: Denton Bishop Woods, U.S. Marines, Lt. First Class. Across the cemetery field was a huge carved dappled brown monument with the name “Strange” engraved in calligraphic script. Strange.
My heart broke and the tears poured from my chest, mixing with the snot from my nose. My chest heaved, the tears would flow until it was time for them to stop. I didn’t hold back. Mother was gone now too. And here he was. The story was over.
Working like a madwoman, I spread ashes around the gravestone, framing it, took several handfuls of ashes and smoothed them over the top, outlining his name and the text. Went to the car, took out the plant and tore at the flowers, scattered the yellow petals randomly over the gravestone, sometimes threw them angrily. With what was left of the flowers, I arranged a careful wreath around the stone’s edges. The torn petals lifted a fresh fragrance into the air, which blew gently in the bone quiet cemetery. A little decoration of fake fall leaves woven onto a wire frame decorated the plant. I pulled this out and stuck it in the ground above the grave.
Someone has come to visit you, I tell him.
Relief. I had completed my promise. The other half of the promise is to scatter some ashes over the tiny, out-of-the-way town, where both grew up, sang in the school choir, and drove around the back roads singing with classmate Roy Orbison.

* * * * *
Someday, I will do that, too. And perhaps I will, someday, read the letters.

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blood & memory: a relative thing Wednesday, May 7 2008

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent. – C. G. Jung

Carl G. Jung, the great Swiss psychoanalyst who pioneered important theories about the unconscious mind, must have meant to say “the unlived life of the ancestors,” not just “the parent,” for certainly we are compelled to create or live out, however unconsciously, what our ancestors did not; they line up behind us like multiple shadows, they have not really died. We resent the burdens this places upon us, especially if it comes in the form of an unresolved genetically-based issue like depression.
In order to explain such a burden to myself, I have told a story, based on what I recall in memory, and what is in my blood to haunt me forever despite the biochemical reprieve offered by the much-maligned psychoactive substance called Prozac, an invention whose magic lies in its ability to tweak the “serotonin uptake inhibitor.” I don’t really care about the technical details, I only know that it did take something up from within in me, and release it.
Here is how the story unfolds:
We are never to know exactly how my maternal grandmother, Marjorie Smith Hancock Woods died, or why. The physical facts explain a sort of “how”: cuticle scissors stuck into her throat, by her own hand. But such raw details are merely the black and white. In a gray area is perhaps a twist of mind that took over as she stared herself down in the bathroom mirror. Or a sudden uncontrollable old-age medicine-induced tremor that shoved the scissors blades awkwardly into the soft flesh above her collar bone.
But the imagined scenario goes like this: It was an early autumn day in West Texas, bright and bare. The leaves on the elm trees out back had crumpled to brown paper, and the grass looked gray. No one had called all day. The candy red pills she took for her heart problem were large, dusty, and hard to swallow. She wore the cranberry-colored nylon robe over brown nylon pj’s. The top three buttons were loose and her breasts swung against the smooth fabric. Sometimes she wore a bra, but lately it didn’t matter. My grandfather Charles was gone to coffee with his old golfing buddies. They hung out at the Kresge’s lunchcounter drinking stale coffee while she, in her tiny bathroom with its red Sears towels, would look at herself in a medicine cabinet mirror bolted to the wall over a thick white porcelain sink that smelled like denture cream and PineSol, look at herself thinking God knows what. In a brief hiatus only available to memory or imagination, she would become Kali, and the small lance of scissors would flash and strike.
A shadow of blood on the dove-colored shag carpet tells a story. It has been scrubbed and vaporized, but little details stain into the roots of the shag, leaving the tell-tale signs that someone lurched one, two steps out the bathroom door, then collapsed, head resting on a pooling blot of red. The house is already releasing its hidden odors: the dusty fragrance of old books and photograph albums, mold of old clothing, oddly detached perfume from heaps of fabric scraps mixed with metallic sewing machine parts, sweatsoured socks, soapscum in the bathtub, faint tinge of whisky, limburger cheese, redskin peanuts and beer. After the funeral, my grandfather makes a flat-tasting cup of Nescafe the color of stale tobacco and scuffles to his room, slippers dragging over the gray shape of chemically-removed blood. Later in the night he will cry out over and over again in agony, begging to be taken from this earth.
Later I would have a look at her in her hospital room, a sight that so scalded my soul that I drew inward sharply, unable to even touch her hand. She stared up at the ceiling, pissed and vacant-eyed. Her hands were bound because she kept trying to yank out the tubes in her throat, and the fingers grasped hopelessly at the white sheets. She glared like a shriveled, trapped bird, all bones and eyes. This was not meant to be, to still be alive. I couldn’t bear to look at her, such overwhelming disappointment emanating from her like steam off a hot pavement, like a bad smell.
At the time this happened, we talked around it. There were so many things to do after Marjorie died three days later: the paperwork, the funeral, arranging a caretaker for my grandfather while avoiding his grief and refusing to talk with him about it, scared out of our wits by this absurdly violent situation. A month later he died, too. Natural causes, heart attack, the one he had been careening towards since his son died in Korea some 57 years before. Now he could do it, just drop dead, in utter misery. It’s a thought that keeps me up nights, that enters my dreams in the form of raging dogs lunging for me as I lie in a bed that begins to levitate. It’s the darkstranger dream that whispers, “C’mere, I’ve got a secret.”
When someone in a family commits suicide, it tests every fiber of our ability to tell the truth. We never told the truth about Marjorie. She was horribly depressed. I can see it in my own eyes when I stare into the bathroom mirror on a bad day.
I wonder if my grandmother was ever happy and I think she was not. As a child she had a strangely mature face, and as a young woman, black and white photographs could not obscure a kind of feral, but restrained, vitality. She was petite, and “stacked” as they said in her day, with curvy chorus girl legs that she was proud to show off into her 70’s. She wore gleaming deep Chinese red nail polish and matching lipstick, and one of her favorite remarks was, “Good Lord, Charles,” drawn out long, drawling, and superior, but never mean-spirited. She affected a sophisticated pose with her cigarette, and pretended to hate to cook the delicious things she whipped up in her small kitchen on Waverly Drive: pot roast, beef stew, baked yams, mince pies. Her backyard was full of birds and “damn cats” that she shoo’d away, and two huge elms that shaded the patio nicely for the informal beer “cocktail hours” during summer months. She often laughed, made her pointed critiques, and rolled her eyes at my grandfather’s antics. But she was never happy, and even as a child I knew it, and finally I can say it now, because the truth is told in memoirs.
Maybe the unhappiness was a direct transfusion from Marjorie’s mother, Florence. Florence was “dark, beautiful, and haunted.” I saw her photograph, taken in a city park somewhere (Kansas? Oklahoma? Missouri?)–lush with flowering bushes and mature oak and mimosa trees, accessorized with wrought iron fencing and a large central fountain that reminded me of a single huge birthday candle in the middle of this birthday cake of a park.
Florence as I remember her was a fragile woman, like one of those dried willow twigs adrift on a West Texas lawn, frail and elegant, bent quaintly as a Japanese bonsai. In some strange way it seemed she did not belong in the environment of dust and endless horizons; and certainly she was not of it, it seemed to me as a child, squeezing my toes into the white shag that carpeted every inch of her tiny stucco home in Midland, except for the green speckled linoleum in the kitchen. Her home was quiet, shadowy, and refined, decorated with a minimum of curving furniture, Japanese artwork and artifacts collected on her trip to see her son Joe, the major, in Japan during the very early 50’s. In her backyard, as she guided me through an exquisite patch of tiny watermelons, she would tell me about the jealous jaybirds and how they robbed the nests of other birds. Her hands were bony, cool, white and soft. Every known thought I had of her was that she was old–beyond old even, ancient. So when I came across her photograph in my grandmother’s cedar dresser after she died, I was astonished at the vibrant, sensuous, dark-haired beauty with her head tilted under a stylish broad-brimmed hat, seated so stiffly in the anonymous park, her children Marjorie and Uncle Joe and Seward (whose plane was bombed down during World War II) gathered round the full, ruffled skirts of her shiny dark dress. That same discovery was followed by a “portrait”–a small headshot, dominated by large, luminous sad eyes, gazing to the side a bit poignantly. She was indeed a beauty, as my grandmother was not, and as I am not. All the same, Marjorie and I inherited something piercing and lonely from Florence, a similar inner restlessness, a reclusive and secretive nature, a tendency to simply “disappear” to back rooms of the house, and an odd snobbery about the most peculiar things, as if girls brought up in flat open places had anything to be haughty about. But it was in Florence’s blood. And so it traveled to ours.
There are other matriarchs on both sides of the family tree whose sepia-tinged faces in old photographs are haunted and grim, captured in the midst of unspoken unhappiness and pain. If memory serves me correctly, I’ve heard it said that despair starts early in the blood, sometimes centuries early. Perhaps these women–Mary Jennings brooding in her dark silences, Martha Annie taking to her bed for days at a time–perhaps they were not pressured by the world around them to “smile,” or “don’t worry, be happy.” Perhaps with no media images pelting them relentlessly with just how happy they should be, they never learned how. But I suspect that it was the Deep Darkness, the one that runs forever in the veins, and in their innocence they did not know how to hide it, or that they “should,” and so they did not.
These are all women who did not like “pills,” who shunned even the easy aspirin. Mary and Martha Annie were respected herbalists in their small communities, treating other people’s ills with potions of sassafras and mint. Florence had to be strapped to her bed in the nursing home for medications to be forcibly administered. Marjorie shuddered at the idea of the ugly red pills prescribed for her heart.
They were strong women and stubborn. Escape from personal misery was not an option at the time, you toughed it out. There was no talking about it, there were no excuses. No Prozac, Zoloft, or other flavors of SSRIs. Straightjackets and asylums were alien and too dreadful to even contemplate. Better to stay in bed, avoid the daylight, slit your throat. The collective weight of psychic darkness had to bend one of us, sooner or later. And so it did.
c 2008

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