Tolstoy and the Purple Chair (12 page)

Anne-Marie was the first of my family to meet Jack. Her animated approval (“You two are like twins, perfect together!”) went a long way with everyone, me included. She walked me through my first labor pains with Peter. Up and down along the Hudson River we paced, Anne-Marie keeping track of the time of each contraction on a piece of paper. Every birthday that followed, Peter got a home-baked cake from her. The best cake was the Lego brick–shaped one, frosted in bright red. I have a photo album of all the cakes she made over the years. In every photo she is leaning toward Peter with a big smile, her baked confection offered with both hands.

The simplest and yet profoundly moving explanation of love came to me through the words of a character in Ernest J. Gaines's
A
Lesson Before Dying
. The novel tells the story of Grant, a young man from the South who, having studied to become a teacher, is roped into visiting Jefferson, a boy sentenced to death row for a murder he witnessed but did not commit. Jefferson's godmother wants Grant to offer Jefferson a modicum of education before he dies, so that he can die like a man, and not like the “hog” his own defense attorney called him. She wants to give her godson the dignity in the end to know “that he did not crawl to that white man, that he stood at that last moment and walked.”

During a visit to the prison, Grant witnesses Jefferson saying to his godmother, “It don't matter. . . . Nothing don't matter
.
” His godmother answers, “It matter to me, Jefferson. . . . You matter to me.”

You matter to me
. Reading those words, I thought my heart would burst. That is the crux of love, one person mattering to another person, one existence that is important among all other lives. One person can count for something individual and special. We are not interchangeable. We are unique in how we are loved.

Desire for a person is not the same thing as having that unique appreciation and need for them, nor is affection. Desire waxes and wanes, and affection can be felt without long-standing commitment. But “You matter to me” means that the long haul is accepted, even willingly taken on: I will carry you, hold you, and applaud you, from here on in. Dependability: I will be here to take care of you. And when you are gone, I will be here to remember you.

A few days before the sudden Facebook message from Andrew, I had gotten a call from Jack. The boys were all home from school and I was just finishing up my book for the day,
The
Age of Dreaming
by Nina Revoyr.

“Meet me at the doctor's office. I'm having chest pains.” One hour later I watched him being taken away on a stretcher, hooked up to monitors and oxygen and God knows what else. I went home to tell the boys nothing, just that I was leaving early for my Improv class and that Peter was in charge of ordering pizza and getting everyone to bed on time. I kissed them all and left for the hospital.

The man at admissions sent me to the cardiac care unit with a wink: “Let me know if things don't work out.” He was hitting on a potential widow? My skin crawled. Tears, held back so far, now came streaming down my cheeks.

Jack, as it turned out, would be fine. I would not be a widow, bad luck for the admissions Romeo. Jack had not suffered a heart attack. All the tests showed normal heart activity, good oxygen levels, and sound health. I spent the evening by his side, reassuring myself that he was okay. By the time the doctor came in for his evening summation, I was more concerned with going out into a dark and desolate parking lot than I was with the health of my husband. We were meant to have many more years together: we
both
had to stay alive. The doctor assured me that the lot was monitored, but he was willing to walk me to my car.

“No, I'll stay just a bit longer,” I answered and returned to holding on to Jack's hand. The last love of my life: I was holding on for as many years as we had together.

My father's first and last love is my mother. He met her at an evening lecture of a philosophy class at the University of Leuven. He'd started medical school there, and she was a literature student. While the professor at the front of the lecture hall went on about Saint Thomas Aquinas, my father sketched my mother's picture into his notebook. He still has that sketch, the notebook kept safe in a drawer by his bed. My mother had plenty of suitors before my father, but never fell in love. Her first marriage proposal was offered by the boy's mother. He himself was too shy to ask. When my mother refused the offer, the shy boy ran off to the French Foreign Legion. As far as I know, no old boyfriends popped up in my mother's life once my parents moved to America, but then her generation didn't have Facebook to deal with.

It isn't Facebook that brings old lovers face-to-face in Nicole Krauss's book
The History of Love
. It is perseverance. The novel is the story of Leo: he “was a great writer. He fell in love. It was his life.” Writing and loving. But war separates him from his first lover, Alma, and she finds a new man, thinking she has lost Leo forever. When Leo finds Alma again, years later, what can she do? She holds on to the words he has written for her—he is a writer, after all—but she tells him to go. He continues to love her, but she loves only the memories she has of him.

Loving my memories of Andrew was not the same thing as loving Andrew. With Alfonso I had even sweeter memories—he never dumped me—but I didn't love him either. The truth was that no matter how good the memories, those guys just had not been there for the long haul. I did not share thousands of moments with them, and there was nothing enduring about my long-ago feelings for them. I had nostalgia for those feelings but I no longer felt them. I had my answer to the question lurking in a Facebook message:
I loved you once
,
but not still
.

“Nothing in the world matters except Love,” an old friend gushes to the narrator of
The Provincial Lady in London
by E. M. Delafield. Her response? “A banking account, sound teeth, and adequate servants matter a great deal more.” I laughed and underlined the words. And suddenly I was reminded of the words used by Jefferson's godmother in
A Lesson Before Dying
: “You matter to me.” It is not the emotion of love, solely and independent, that is important. It is the
people
I love who hold the word steady for me.

Of course there are plenty of little things that do matter in life, like a bank account and sound teeth, and plenty of things that don't matter at all, like the state of my hair or the dust bunnies burrowing under every bed in the house. But amid all the big and the little stuff, the cardiac unit and the Facebook messages and the dust, it is the people I love that matter most of all.

I should let them know just how much they matter, at all times, to me. Words of love will keep us warm, even through the last days of winter.

Chapter 12
The Expansion of Experience

Now that I had taken the pains to learn something about it, I had better ask if I really wanted to know. I did. I needed to know, but I am not glad to know.

WENDELL BERRY,

Hannah Coulter

ON THE NIGHT OF FEBRUARY 13, 1945, MY FATHER SAW
flames and smoke rising from Dresden, five miles off in the distance. Through the dark hours of the night and into the dawning of the next day, he watched in disbelief, his stomach in a knot, as the city was firebombed. He could smell the smoke and he knew there were more than buildings burning. He'd been on the road with thousands and thousands of refugees fleeing the incoming Soviet army. While he had camped in a field, the refugees continued on into Dresden, to join the citizens of one of Europe's most beautiful cities and thousands more refugees.

By the time the bombing was over, Dresden was destroyed and most of its people killed, incinerated or suffocated in their underground bunkers. Estimates of the number of people who died in the two days of bombing range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. My father could have been one of those people if he had not stopped to rest and sleep in a field. My father could have been killed two years earlier when the partisans came to the family farmhouse and killed Sergei, Antonina, and Boris. He lived through the war, or else I wouldn't be reading these books now. But living, like dying, caused ripples to spread through his life, impacts from what he saw, what he suffered, what he knew.

When I began my year of reading, a cousin from Belgium sent me a book titled
The Assault
, written by Dutch author Harry Mulisch. For months it sat on my bookshelf, relegated to a far corner. “But it is a great book,” my cousin insisted. He didn't understand that I was frightened by the book's cover photograph of a dead body lying on a street, and even more by the text on the back cover: “A Nazi collaborator, infamous for his cruelty, is assassinated. . . . The Germans retaliate by slaughtering an innocent family.” I was scared to read the book because I knew it was about war and revenge and hate. I had heard the stories from my father, and I knew what had happened during the war. Did I really want to read about it?

But finally, in late March, I went over to the shelf and pulled the book down. It was my year to experience whatever great books had to share with me, and my own fears couldn't stand in the way.

When I began to read
The Assault
, I did not get up again for three hours. Weaving a story around an actual event, the novel is about the murder of a cruel Dutch policeman during the final days of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and how that one murder had a lasting impact on everyone involved, from the family wrongly blamed for the murder to the German officers who responded with swift and horrible retaliation to the actual killers, as well as to the family of the slain officer.

At the beginning of the novel, a boy named Anton walks beside a canal, fascinated by the waves caused by a passing motorboat: “All across the water a complicated braiding of ripples developed which went on changing for several minutes. . . . Each time Anton tried to figure out exactly how this happened, but each time the pattern became so complex that he could no longer follow it.” As I read further into the book, I realized that this “complicated braiding of ripples” was a premonition of what was coming, the murder of the police officer and the subsequent killing of everyone in Anton's family except for the boy himself. Anton will spend the rest of his life trying to untangle the events of that night of horror, struggling to understand why the Dutch officer was killed, why his family was targeted for vengeance, and where in the puzzle of pain the rest of the players fit.

After the war ends, Anton is taken in by relatives and goes back to school, eventually building a career and falling in love. Moments of happiness and even joy reemerge over his lifetime, as when he has a son, whom he names for his dead brother Peter. But still Anton searches for the full story of that one night, wondering why he survived and his family did not. Survival itself is a “complicated braiding of ripples,” the consequences of war being scars of loss and fear, anger and bewilderment. For Anton, the scars of war are his abiding pessimism and the haunting memory of that horrible night outside his house: “The world is hell. . . . Even if we had heaven on earth tomorrow, it couldn't be perfect because of all that's happened. Never again could things be set right.”

For my father, the consequences of war brought him far from home, and eventually across an ocean, to start over in a new world. My parents tell me I was named after the members of the corps de ballet of the Bolshoi, most of whom were named Nina. They went to see a performance of the Bolshoi just days before I was born. But I also know that my name is another ripple effect of the war, coming from my father's sister Antonina, who was murdered that night in 1943. Much as Anton took the name of his dead brother for his own son, my name is a remembrance of a life lost, of a sibling taken away.

The final chapter of
The Assault
finds Anton, now middle-aged, being swept up in an antinuclear rally. The protesters march against a future war, the war of mutual nuclear destruction. But Anton is not optimistic that a nuclear battle can be stopped. He believes that “everything is forgotten in the end,” and he doesn't mean forgotten as in forgiven, but forgotten as in no lessons learned. He believes the experience of war, in all its horrors, is doomed to be repeated over and over.

Reading in my purple chair, I shrank from Anton's conclusion. Is everything forgotten in the end? Are no lessons ever learned? I thought back to the first book I ever read about war,
Across Five Aprils
by Irene Hunt.
Across Five Aprils
tells the story of the Creighton family from southern Illinois. The family is divided by the Civil War when one brother joins up with the Union army and another son goes south to fight with the Confederacy.

I read the book in 1975, as part of my curriculum in middle school. Our country was coming out of the Vietnam War then, and yet our teacher failed to make the connection between what we were reading, with its descriptions of battles and injuries, families torn apart by war, and a country ravaged by dissension, and what we ourselves were living through. As eighth-graders born in 1962, our entire lives had played out under the shadow of the Vietnam War. We were ready to discuss the parallels between the conflicts of the 1860s and the conflicts of the 1960s and '70s. We would have welcomed the chance to talk about war and make sense of it—or not. Instead our teacher taught
Across Five Aprils
as a historically placed novel that mirrored facts we were learning in social studies, facts we had to learn about for a test and could then forget.

I remember going to church on a Sunday in the early 1970s, a few years before I would read
Across Five Aprils
. The priest gave a sermon condemning all the protests against the war in Vietnam.

“We must give unwavering support to our nation's war against communism and godlessness. I say to you, America, love it or leave it.”

My mother tensed in the pew beside me, her breath suddenly sharp and ragged. When the service ended, she marched out of that church with her jaw trembling and her arms swinging. I don't remember how she began her haranguing of the priest, but I do remember standing beside her on the sidewalk outside the church and hearing the rise and fall of her voice, how it choked with anger and then tears. I held on to her skirt and felt the swell of her conviction.

“Democracy depends on the voices of its citizens, whether supportive or critical of the government! Leave America? No, I choose to try and make it a better country. A country that ends wars, not perpetuates them.”

I felt her outrage that a man of God extolled the waging of war. As Kurt Vonnegut once said, describing his own World War II experiences, “War is murder,” and we better not forget it. The priest at Saint Athanasius had forgotten. My mother hadn't forgotten, nor had my father. We never went back to that church again.

I often find myself at dinner parties arguing over the altruism of human beings. One dinner stands out in my memory, a meal of lobster alongside a pool in East Hampton on a warm summer evening. At a table of eight, I found myself the only one willing to believe that humans are inherently cooperative and productive. I looked around the table at my dinner mates, all products of loving families, solid public educations, and open career opportunities. How could they not grasp that it was the goodness of humanity upon which all of their bounty was based? I laid claim to the fine meal, long-held friendships, and burgeoning families (babies were in tow) as proof of the big and small feats of goodness and selflessness that humans are capable of. But one of the women at the table raised what is always believed to be the trump card in any argument over mankind's goodness:

“What about war? If we're so good, why do we go out and kill each other?”

I couldn't answer Liza. But now I know what I should have told her.

“Read a book,” I should have said, “to find out why we go to war, to experience what it is that drives us to violence.”

We weren't going to resolve the question of mankind's inherent goodness or evil sitting out on a deck on a summer night. But maybe, just maybe, if Liza took a book to bed and read it, really read it, she'd come closer to understanding our own closeted selves, our ambitions and our desires. And the impact that those desires have on our lives, for good and for bad.

The main character in Wendell Berry's
Hannah Coulter
turns to books to understand war. Her first husband goes off to Europe in 1942 and is killed. Hannah marries again, and her second husband, Nathan, is drafted and sent to the Pacific theater. He comes back home having fought in the battle of Okinawa. He never talks to Hannah or anybody else about what he saw there. When he dies, decades later, Hannah finds herself filled with an urgent need to know about the battle, and she looks for answers in books: “I needed to know, but I am not glad to know.”

What she finds out through her reading is that the horrors her husband lived through are unavoidable facts of war. War is “a human storm of explosions and quakes and fires, a man-made natural disaster gathering itself up over a long time out of ignorance and hatred, greed and pride, selfishness and a silly love of power . . . passing like a wind-driven fire over the quiet land and kind people.” Hannah tracks back the consequences of war not only for her husband, but for herself and for their children. She needs to know what his experience of war was to understand how he acted later, as both husband and father. She comes to see that he needed the quiet of their hometown and the encircling of their family and her love to keep his knowledge of war at bay: “He needed to know that he was here and I was here with him, that he had come back from the world of war, again, to this. Reassured, he would sleep again, and I too would sleep.”

Books are the weapon against Anton's lament that “everything is forgotten in the end.” Books allow experiences to be relived, and allow lessons to be learned. Anton's frustration in watching the ripples left on a canal by a passing barge and not being able to “figure out exactly how it happened” is not my frustration. I understood the ripples and their impacts because
The Assault
traces back and exposes the links between that one horrible night and the lives of everyone there. Having read the book, I can imagine and I will never forget the costs of war. I have experienced what Anton experienced, and now I will always remember him.

By reading
The Assault
and
Hannah Coulter
, I experienced—safely, yes, but still with sweat and with tears—war. Just as in other books, like
Alice Fantastic
and
Family Happiness
, I had experienced love and lust. The difference was that I had shied away from reading books about war, from having an experience that was scary and jarring and upsetting. And now I understood why it was important to read these books. Because being witness to all types of human experience is important to understanding the world, but also to understanding myself. To define what is important to me, and who is important, and why.

For Anton, war was proof of man's inherent violence. For Nathan, Hannah Coulter's second husband, that proof was tempered by what he knew of his own family, and of his own quiet place in the universe. My father, like Anton, suffered the loss of family during a murderous act of war. But he did not carry from his experience of war an abiding pessimism about the nature of mankind. He was more like Nathan, both in having witnessed war's devastation and in how he turned inward after the war, building an existence of family and work that protected him. As Hannah describes it, “Our life in our place had been a benediction to him, but he had seen it always within a circle of fire that might have closed upon it.”

I was, along with my mother and my sisters, my father's shield against the past, a buffer zone between him and the pain he'd known. And even more than a protection, we were a promise of better things to come. Now that Anne-Marie had died, there was a rent in the shield, a rift in the buffer, a breaking of the promise. I could patch over the hole, but the bump of repair would always be there, a rough and uneven space marking her absence. As for the promise, I was doing what I could to recover it for everyone in my family. I was reading.

And in reading, I discovered that the burden of living is the uneven and unlimited allotment of pain. Tragedy is conferred randomly and unfairly. Any promise of easy times to come is a false one. But I know I can survive the hard times, taking the worst of what happens to me as a burden but not as a noose. Books mirrored life—my life! And now I understood that all the bad and sad stuff that happens to me, and that happened to the people I was reading about, is both the cost and the proof of resilience.