The Violet Hour Read Free Page A

but was he operating out of some deeper, almost cellular imperative? Does the body have some foreshadowing, some knowledge of its own decline, before the mind does? Did he somehow know?
    In the emergency room at St. Luke’s Hospital, a doctor asks if we want to see the body. I do not want to see the body. I am somehow by this time outside, just through the electric door, in the cold air, the lights of the hospital in my eyes, and my older sister, a psychoanalyst, catches up with me. She tells me it is important to see the body, because if you don’t see the body there is no body. I am not able to take this in, and so I don’t see the body and there is no body.

    When I come home from the hospital, my two-and-a-half-year-old is awake, sitting bolt upright, waiting for me, in order to express her outrage that I have left in the middle of the night without telling her.
    I tell her that my father has died. I tell her what it means.
    I hear myself saying the words, “Sometimes when people get old, their bodies stop working.”
    “Sometimes?”
    I pause. “Well, always.”
    It is a brutal thing to say to a two-year-old; it doesn’t even sound true.
    In the weeks after my father’s death, I’m not functioning at a very high level. I am not, for instance, eating. My father wasthe one who cooked for our family. He baked bread; caught and cooked bass, trout, salmon, bluefish; picked blackberries and made them into jam, pies; cooked giant turkeys and cranberry breads on Thanksgiving; copied out recipes on yellow legal paper in his terrible scrawling handwriting. The morning I came home from the emergency room after a fall, he brought me homemade biscuits, and the day I brought the baby home from the hospital, he brought me servings of boeuf bourguignon and lamb moussaka to put in the freezer; I seem, in this particular crisis, to be waiting for him to bring me something to eat.
    The baby, meanwhile, is going ahead full throttle with the questions. I would like someone to give me a pamphlet on “What to Tell the Baby,” but nobody has given me that pamphlet. “Did Pompa have Band-Aids when he dived?” the baby asks. “What was on his Band-Aids when he dived?” She wants, of course, to hear that he had furry, consoling creatures on his Band-Aids. I think of how Freud once referred to “the painful riddle of death.” A riddle because there remains some question to be answered, some confusion to be cleared up.
    When I was a child I had a turtle called Herman. I named the turtle Herman after my father, in that brief blissful period when my father was the only man on earth. And then the turtle died. I don’t know when I was aware that it died, but at a certain point I knew with horror that it was dead. I kept feeding it, changing its cage, and pretending that it was not, in fact, dead. There was very little the turtle did or loved or cared about, after all; there was not a huge gap between the turtledead and the turtle alive. In the end I took the turtle out to a grassy place and set him free. I told everyone that. That I set him free.
    My father stopped smoking when everyone else stopped smoking, when it became clear that smoking was terrible for you, but unlike everyone else, he didn’t stop. He would sneak out and smoke. I remember the smell of smoke in his hair, the heavy glass ashtrays in his office. He was not the type for secret vices, even small ones, but he kept his smoking secret. This scared me. I had pumped goldfish full of smoke in science class and watched them float to the surface of the water.
    If I am honest, I remember that he was often out of breath at the end of his life; I remember the alarming sound of his ragged breathing, after a couple of blocks, the air running out; I remember how upsetting it was, how I didn’t allow myself to hear it. So why did he secretly smoke for decades and destroy his lungs, after he knew they were being destroyed? Why did Freud, one of my father’s great heroes along with