The Best American Essays 2013 (16 page)

That my father had not fulfilled the academic promise of his early years—that he, unlike the nuclear physicist next door, had not been summoned to Sweden to dance with the queen and receive the Nobel Prize—was old news. I had made my peace with that disappointment long ago, even if he never could. But the idea that love had also eluded him was new, and harder for me to accept.

He had sacrificed his homeland, his health, and his family for his career. If it had gone as well as he’d hoped, I wouldn’t mind as much that his love life had not. Then too, I knew from my own experience what balm relationships could provide. Struggling with my third novel, I had taken refuge in the company of my husband as well as my mother, sisters, and friends. Had my father not had recourse to this solace?

If only I could believe that his failure to love, like his inability to work with consistency, get out of bed every morning, and keep his temper in check, was a matter of faulty brain chemistry. But I couldn’t. Over the years I’d grilled my father’s psychiatrists, internists, and nurses and read clinical texts, scientific papers, and memoirs about manic depression. I knew about the controversies surrounding its diagnosis. I knew the difficulty of understanding how exactly it affects the brain, and the many problems associated with lithium, the most reliable medication currently available. I knew that alcoholism is a symptom, that travel can trigger a manic episode, that studies link the illness with creativity, and that it runs in families. I knew that it could make people say and do things they didn’t mean and hurt themselves as well as anyone else in the vicinity. I knew how Van Gogh walked into one of the wheat fields he had been painting and shot himself in the chest; how Woolf weighted her pockets with stones and waded into the Ouse; how Hemingway pushed the barrel of his favorite shotgun into his mouth and blew out his brains; how Plath stuffed wet towels into the cracks of the doors in her kitchen and her children’s bedroom before turning on the oven and sticking her head into it; how both Rothko and Diane Arbus took barbiturates and sliced their veins with razors; how Anne Sexton put on her mother’s old fur coat, closed the garage door, and started her car; how Kurt Cobain fled rehab, hid out in Seattle for days, and then went to his garage to shoot himself in the chin; how Spalding Gray jumped off the Staten Island Ferry into the East River; how David Foster Wallace hanged himself on his patio, and how the designer Alexander McQueen, taking no chances, overdosed on cocaine and tranquilizers, slashed his wrists, and then hanged himself in his wardrobe with his favorite brown belt.

But nowhere had I heard that manic-depressives can’t love. On the contrary, Andrew Solomon writes that even though deep depression might temporarily impair one’s capacity to give and receive love, “in good spirits, some love themselves and some love others and some love work and some love God.”

If my father had not loved any of his wives or girlfriends, it was a decision he had made. He had opted for isolation. Unexpectedly, when I considered this possibility, what I felt was not grief or even pity but fear.

So I wrote to Ellie’s younger daughter. We had gone to high school together, and though I hadn’t seen her for years, we had reconnected at the memorial service. I asked if she thought that my father had loved her mother. I begged her not to sugarcoat. What I wanted, I told her, was the truth.

Yes
, she wrote back,
I think he did love her. With men, it’s sometimes hard to separate love from pride, and I think he was very proud to have her as a wife
. They had fought a lot, especially over money, but they had enjoyed their church community and loved their trips to Japan.
He was not a simple man and, consequently, a simple happiness was not in his nature
, she concluded,
but I did know him to have moments of simple pleasure and obvious joy
.

She was trying to reassure me, that was clear. But there was truth in what she said. Shoichi had been proud of Ellie. He had always admired large, fleshy women—a hangover, I’d always thought, from the near starvation he had suffered as a boy in wartime Japan—and Ellie had been huge, her flesh straining against seams and spilling out of shirt openings. I’d forgotten that they had argued about money as well as God, but perhaps the good times had outweighed the bad; perhaps pride did equal love.

Yet I didn’t believe it.

I called my younger sister in San Jose. Five years younger than I am, she was just nine when our parents separated—too young, she says, to remember much about our father’s whiskey-fueled rages. They hadn’t been close, but her relationship with him had been less complicated than mine was, and as a teenager she had spent a lot of time with him and Ellie.

“You said you thought he loved Ellie more than anyone else,” I said. “Why?”

For a moment she was quiet. Then she laughed. “Process of elimination.” She was seven months pregnant, glowing and huge, and her laugh sounded happy. She does not look much like our father—none of us do—but she has his grin, sudden and bright. “Think about it. Who else is there?”

“Oh,” I said. “Oh. I thought that maybe you knew something about them. Maybe from when you went on vacation with them, at the beach.”

“I remember—” She stopped.

I pictured her eyes growing distant, as they do when she wants to guard her thoughts.

It took some prodding, but eventually she told me about a fight she’d overheard them having, just a few months after their wedding. From what she could gather, Ellie had been trying to get him to pay a credit-card bill. He had told her that since she, as his wife, was now on his health plan, all of her diabetes-related expenses covered, she had no right to expect anything more. “It went on,” my sister said, “but that was the gist of it. So I’d say that the marriage probably sucked—though maybe less than his other relationships.”

“Maybe things changed,” I said, knowing even as I spoke that they hadn’t. “They had ten more years together after that. That’s a lot of time.”

“Maybe. But it was a bad fight.” She paused. “Listening to it, I thought about what you’d told me about the fights he and Mom used to have, and I was glad I didn’t remember much about them.”

It was with scant hope that I turned to the only candidate left. My mother is an artist and writer, hard at work now on her eighth book, an account based on interviews she has conducted with Japanese veterans of World War II. In this and everything else she has the unflagging support of my stepfather, a smart, well-read business executive whom she has been married to for over twenty years. In England for New Year’s, I went to see her in her study. I told her I wanted to hear about her relationship with Shoichi, and she nodded as if she had been expecting the question. The story unfurled slowly.

“I could see he was special,” she said, “the day he showed up on our doorstep.” He had come to call on her parents at their summer home near the mountains of Karuizawa. He was seventeen, she a year younger. He was stamp-collecting in the area, and since his mother was a distant relative of her father’s, he had decided on impulse to pay them a visit—so what if they had no idea who he was? He had shaggy hair, a balloon of a head, and the easy sophistication of a Tokyo boy. He had been confident, personable, outgoing—“Yes, that really was your father back then,” my mother said, nodding, though I had not stirred—and her parents were much taken with him. He spoke only with them, as if he were an adult, but she eavesdropped on their conversation and heard enough to be impressed.

In the fall he traveled from Tokyo to Nagoya to have dinner at their home. By winter he was a regular guest. My mother, already in love, sought out his company whenever she could. They struck up a correspondence, their relationship progressed, and she thought their future together was assured.

But he held back. Maybe, my mother said, because of a girl he still liked from high school. Then one day he wrote to say he would marry her only if she promised always to obey him. Unnerved, she stopped writing for a while, but he continued to send letters, one containing a proposal without qualifiers. She began writing again, although she held off on a response, and she was there at the airport when he left for Boston in 1958. Another year would pass before she finally said yes.

“So I boarded a plane from Tokyo to Boston,” she said, “a daikon stashed in my purse.”

I nodded. The story of how she had flown halfway around the world carrying almost nothing but the daikon, the white Japanese radish my father had been longing for, was lore in our family, the sweetness of her gesture unsullied and perhaps even heightened by the years of acrimony, abuse, and infidelity that followed.

“We had a few good years in Cambridge and when we first moved to Princeton,” she said. “It was when we lived in Japan for those two years that he began to lose his mind.” She said that Shoichi woke her up one night and told her to alert the authorities. He needed five hundred soldiers to come and surround the house: the enemy was coming and they were prepared for attack. He was an alien, a prince who had fled from another world in a small computer. But the alien enemy had found him at last, and hiding was no longer an option.

Shoichi became angry when she refused to call the police. All night he kept talking about the enemy; every time my mother fell asleep he would jerk her awake. He stayed at home in this state for three days, until finally she had to call the authorities.

This was in the early ’70s; I was seven. I didn’t think I remembered any of it when my mother first began speaking, but as she continued there was a flicker, a memory of my father standing on a table, backlit by the Tokyo sunset, and yelling as my sisters and I scurried around on the ground and cried.

When she went to visit him in the hospital after he was committed, he greeted her with a look of polite confusion. Then his face cleared. “Oh, I know you,” he said. “You have three daughters, don’t you.”

To reassure herself more than him, she reached out to touch his hands. They were so cold that for a moment she wondered if he was in fact an alien.

They would stay together for seven more years. He would take to wandering outside the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, saying that he had important secrets to impart to the emperor. She would fly out to Italy to rescue him when, instead of delivering a paper on the levitated superconductor multipole experiment, he ranted to hundreds of stunned physicists from all over the world that he needed to see the pope because he was Christ reborn. He would end up in the hospital again and again, and at his family’s insistence my mother would explain to colleagues and friends that he was there for a heart condition, a lie that would become the truth more than three decades later. We would return to Princeton because she, missing America, put her foot down, something my father never forgave her for, and they would fight and have affairs. At PPL colleagues and former students would shun him and dismiss his ideas, citing his megalomania and illness, and he would drink too much, grow increasingly violent, and become a regular at the local mental institution, and one rainy day in April, when he was away on one of his long trips to Japan, we would pack up and move away, leaving just a note behind.

But it was when he failed to recognize her for the first time that my mother realized that in order to survive, she would have to pull away from him.

“It was hard at first, and then—” Her voice, when she continued, was low. “Then it wasn’t.”

I knew she had been struggling since the memorial service, wondering whether she should have stayed, and if she could have saved him.

“You were right to pull away,” I said. “If you hadn’t left him, you wouldn’t be around now, and who knows where we’d be. You know that, don’t you?”

She brushed aside a phantom wisp of hair and looked down at her hands. In her mid-seventies she is still beautiful, the delicacy of her features undiminished by age. “I know.”

I took a deep breath. “Just one last question,” I said. “Do you think—” Somewhere along the way my eyes had filled. I slashed at them with an arm. “Did he ever love you?”

She glanced at me before looking away again. Then she said the phrase that I thought of as the refrain of my childhood. “He was really sick.”

I nodded. “But that didn’t mean he couldn’t—”

“And he loved physics so much,” she said. “There wasn’t a lot of space left after that.” Her eyes met mine. “So no. No, I don’t think he ever did.”

She spoke without bitterness. It was a long time ago, and she knew as well as I did that if my father had not loved her back, it was his tragedy rather than hers.

I was lugging my suitcase down the stairs on the last day of my visit when my mother called to me from the second floor. I looked up. Her face was flushed, and she was waving a small black book. Back in Princeton, she said, Toshiko-san had given her Shoichi’s address book so she could call family members who needed to be informed of his death. She’d been going through it and had just discovered a current address for Masako-san, the girl he’d liked in high school. “You know, the one that made him reluctant to marry me.”

She had seen her once, she said, at the airport on the day Shoichi departed for Boston. A host of his friends had gathered to see him off. Masako-san had been the only other girl in the crowd, and my mother had known at once who she was.

She was small, smaller even than herself, my mother said, and lovely and poised. She had a Mona Lisa smile, and she had smiled a lot at my father that day, though she had cried too.

She had lupus. Shoichi’s parents had forbidden him to marry her because they feared that his children would inherit the condition. Other Japanese parents would have felt the same, which was why my mother knew that Masako-san could never have married.

She waved the address book again. “Don’t you see, he kept in touch with her,” she said. “He never forgot her.”

I was still, imagining my father bent over a girl even smaller than my mother, a crowd of his friends pressing in on him as the time for his departure drew near. I thought of him writing to her, going to see her when he was in Tokyo, and missing her when he was away.