The Violet Hour Read Free Page B

Trollope, continue to smoke against the explicit urging of his physicians? I have a feeling that my father would have smiled if he came across Freud quoting George Bernard Shaw: “Don’t try to live forever, you will not succeed.”

    Is there a last conversation I wish I could have had with my father? I did not have a complicated relationship with him; there were no tangled conflicts to resolve; he knew how much I lovedhim. What was there to say? But there is something. When he died he was worried about my marriage. He had seen things that made him think my husband would not be around for me and my daughter in the ways he would have hoped. I wish I had told him that I was in the middle of leaving. He would have been relieved. He would have stopped worrying. Why does this matter, as dirt is falling on a coffin? It does though. It matters.
    I found in the research for this book that while nearly everyone has a fantasy of a “last conversation,” very few people actually have it. It is the fantasy of resolution, of a final cathartic communication that rarely materializes, because the prickliness or reserve or anger that was there all along is still there, because the urgency of death does not clarify muddiness, or lift obstacles, or defuse conflicts, or force us to talk about what matters, however much we wish it would.
    Mostly, the last conversation doesn’t exist or exists only in parody, in its refusal of meaning, in its Beckett-like embrace of the absurd. Take Philip Roth’s mother’s last words, “I do not want this soup.” We are, most of the time, left with this wild irresolution, this lack of an ending, which may be part of our investment in this mythical conversation, as if things ever end and are not simply cut off.

    I would not have bought the
New York Post
with the dead baby on the cover, but since it is lying on the table at the coffee shop,I am reading the story and continuing on page four. The family had driven in from New Jersey. The father was taking a picture on the promenade outside the sea lion exhibit at the Central Park Zoo, and the mother was holding their six-month-old, Gianna, when a branch fell and killed the baby. When I come to the end of the story I feel like I haven’t gotten enough detail, but what other detail was I looking for? What more detail could I possibly need?
    I had taken my own baby to the Central Park Zoo a few weeks before. I had shown him that giant cuckoo clock with animals and their instruments, the same clock I used to see as a child, on the promenade outside the sea lion exhibit. There is an incantatory quality to reading the
Post
article. Am I telling myself that in a world full of rotting branches on glorious days, my own baby is safely sleeping in a green-painted crib on the bottom floor of my house? Am I trying to prove that this specific tragedy happened to this specific baby and in fact has nothing at all to do with anything that could in any way happen to my baby? As Freud put it, “Our habit is to lay stress on the fortuitous causation of the death—accident, disease, infection, advanced age; in this way we betray an effort to reduce death from a necessity to a chance event.”
    There is, of course, in all of this fascination with death, with extremities, a primitive, ritualistic dividing of the well from the sick, the alive from the dead, the lucky from the unlucky. Susan Sontag wrote about visiting the very sick in a draft for a short story: “making time to drop by the hospital every day,is a way of our trying to put ourselves more firmly + irrevocably in the situation of the well, those who aren’t sick, who aren’t going to get sick, as if what happened to him couldn’t happen to one of us.”

    What was my father thinking in those last weeks, when he seemed so far in retreat? Were those minutes of detachment at a family meal, that not-there-ness he was increasingly projecting, a divesting of interest, a stepping back from life, a renunciation of what