The Best American Essays 2013 (45 page)

The famous frontispiece to the first edition of
The Children’s Encyclopædia
shows a boy in knickers and girl in bloomers looking into a universe: a system of eight planets, alongside comets, stars, and galaxies, surrounding the sun, which sends a halo of sunbeams out into the darkness. But the inside cover illustration of each volume of
The Book of Knowledge
that I grew up with suggests a similar grandeur with a modern twist. In it, a boy in shorts and girl wearing a skirt stand alert and excited on a red book floating toward an island of worldly wonders, including a telescope, a pagoda, totem poles, a factory, the faces of Mount Rushmore, and a giraffe. Overhead soar a rocket, a dual-propeller commercial airliner, a helicopter, and some sort of futuristic V-shaped spacecraft. “Here is a gift to the nation,” Arthur Mee wrote to the readers of
The Book of Knowledge
. “It is a story that will never fail for children who will never tire; and it is the best of all stories, told in the simplest words, to the greatest of all ends.”

And what is the end? On April 6, 1961, when I was twelve, my mother drove into a park near Deerfield, Illinois, where we lived at the time, and killed herself with a gun. Whatever knowledge she had gleaned from those books, as well as all that was left in her heart and mind of love, joy, sorrow, and agony, was swept away too. The obliteration ripples out from there. My father did not talk about the past, and the subject of my mother rarely came up after my father remarried and the family began anew. I remembered almost nothing of my life or her life before the suicide except a few vivid flashes—images, really—with the rest blown away by her death, and for years I was resigned to my ignorance, and perhaps even content with it. I grew up, raised by a caring stepmother who probably got more than she bargained for when she took on, along with my dad, my brother and me, and I acquired a wonderful older stepsister who socialized me, and we did not dwell on our history. I went to college and married, and when I was in my thirties, my grandmother gave me the letters of my mother, but by then I had a job and a family with four children. I worked hard and was not depressed or suicidal. Why would I want to read the letters of a mother who killed herself before I could even get to know her?

When I turned sixty, I was given a new office at work, and I used that change as an opportunity to discard files, magazines, and correspondence—the stuff that I had accumulated over the years. I threw away books that I thought I would never part with. My wife, Barbara, gave me a rule of thumb: if you feel the urge to sneeze when you open it, toss it out. In the end I threw away or recycled fourteen large plastic bags of junk, and I drove back from the transfer station feeling lighter. But when I got to the boxes of my mother’s letters, I could not throw them away. I held them in my hand—they were dusty and definitely gave me the urge to sneeze—but I could not shove them in a plastic trash bag.

I made a vow that if I kept them, I would read them.

So, at the age of sixty-one, I bought a set of the 1952 edition of
The Book of Knowledge
, like the ones that I’d had as a child, and I read my mother’s letters. Barbara raised an eyebrow when I mentioned
The Book of Knowledge
, a twenty-volume set bound in ten thick books, since she had been trying for several years to weed old books from our shelves at home, just as I had at the office.

“Are you going to
buy
them?” she asked. I think she was making soup or maybe spaghetti.

“They have a set for $350 at Amazon.”

Barbara, poker-faced, just kept stirring the pot.

Eventually I found a complete set available at AbeBooks online for $150 and put in my order. Sheepishly, I promised Barbara that I would keep the box they came in and resell them online as soon as I had finished with them.

When they arrived they were as magnificent as I had remembered, each handsome volume feeling heavy in the hand. Substantial, I thought, cracking open the cover of Volume One. Quotations by the likes of Louis Bromfield, Eleanor Roosevelt, aviation pioneer Captain Harry F. Guggenheim, and Lou Little, the head football coach at Columbia University, added authority to weight.

“The poet Marlowe might have been thinking of
The Book of Knowledge
when he spoke of ‘infinite riches in a little room,’” Mrs. James P. McGranery, a member of the National Executive Committee of the Girl Scouts of the USA, explained.

“There is only one good. That is knowledge,” John S. Knight, the publisher of Knight Newspapers, announced, quoting Socrates while glowering at me from his photograph. He added a stern admonition:

“There is only one evil. That is ignorance.”

We fanned the books out on the floor and began leafing through them, stopping at the colored spreads, Barbara running her fingers over the brightly illuminated pages. The books spoke of a time after the Second World War when knowledge and progress and hope were allies, a time that she and I remembered dimly now as we ended the first decade of the twenty-first century. Barbara found a page that asked, “Could We Ever Travel to the Moon?” and I cringed at the outdated question, but she smiled. “Listen to this,” she said later, reading at random an article in Volume Thirteen called “Government and Taxes,” which argued that simply taxing in proportion to income, as the Constitution says, is unfair. “Taxes should be levied in such a way as to establish equality of sacrifice between rich and poor.”

“Equality of sacrifice,” she repeated, “imagine that.”

Before long she was eyeing the bookshelves we had been hoping to clear. “We’ll make space right there.”

“These books are pretty out-of-date,” I said apologetically, opening a volume and resisting the urge to sneeze.

She was thinking about our new grandchildren.

“They could stand to read this.”

She rapped the book with her knuckle. Decision made.

In retrospect I regret that I waited so long to read my mother’s letters. There were 406 in all, carefully arranged by my grandmother in shoeboxes. Over time, as the family leafed through them, they had gotten out of order and had been placed in different areas of the house before most were carted off to the office. It was not until six months after I finally brought them home that I spread them out on a pool table and put them in order. I boxed them and marked off each of the years with strips of manila cardboard, tickets to the past extending back in time from 1960 to 1945, and one chilly morning in November 2010, some fifty years after my mother’s death, I started to read the entire set through.

My mother’s writing style is direct and friendly, and—since she saw my grandmother as a confidante, especially in the early years of her marriage—often candid. As she got older, and more troubled, she tried to hide her depression, but she had become so used to confiding in her mother that the truth comes out anyway in the letters. As I read about her life, my memories, lying like ashes in me, were sparked. The steady chronology of a letter or two each week allowed me to place the few vivid memories I had left in a context, so that I saw how they fit and understood why they, of all in my lost past, had remained as a glowing remnant. My dad, in that time before I remembered him, came back clearly as well. Most of all, I got to know my mother at last—not the stereotypical fifties mother forced to play an uncomfortable role, though she was that, but the real person with her achievements and flaws and hopes and many, many fears. As she married, left college, moved away from home, and had children of her own, I watched her change and grow, darken and retreat. The return addresses evolved from Bobbie Reinhardt, a young nursing student in 1942 at the University of Kansas Hospital in Kansas City, to Mrs. M. J. Harvey in Dodge City in 1947. By the time the family had moved to New York, she dropped the Mrs. altogether, and in Chicago in 1959 she retreated entirely by writing the return address using my father’s name and title: Dr. M. J. Harvey.

Every letter stood alone—capturing a particular time and, more important, mood—and yet each danced in consort with the others. As my mother married and had children, the mobile of her life grew heavier and more complicated, with many moving parts, and by the time of her death the structure groaned under the weight of accumulated anxieties and regrets. Armed with letters and a children’s encyclopedia, I was determined to know who this woman was and, with luck, claim a legacy of beauty and wonder from a devastating event.

Wonder Question: “Does the earth make a sound as it rotates?”

“No,”
The Book of Knowledge
answers, the “earth spins silently in space. It spins all in one piece, and that means not only the solid earth and the waters but the blanket of air above us as well. All spins round, never pausing.” Like some enormous carny ride, the globe rotates at a thousand miles per hour, and yet the mobile over my shoulder hangs motionless by a thread and going nowhere, expectant and watchful as an acrobat holding a pose. “If the air stood still we might hear the earth whooshing through it,” but the “air is part of the earth and moves with it,” creating the illusion of stillness.

Even if we could step off the earth—like the boy and girl in the illustration for
The Children’s Encyclopædia
—and stand on some promontory separate from the planet and listen hard, we would not hear the earth spinning. The scene would unfold like a slow-motion silent film, the incredible rush of the whirling planet registering on our eyes like the imperceptible motion of the slow hand on a watch and on our ears as a held breath. The other celestial objects would lumber along in mute procession, with vast stretches of nothing at all between them. To hear any sound, “we must have vibrations, or waves, or trembling.” But space is a nearly empty vacuum, and no matter how dark and gloomy and terrifying emptiness may be, trembling requires “something substantial” to be felt.

In space there is “no substance to be set trembling.”

When she was five or six, Roberta trembled beside a toy tricycle that was built to look like a single-prop airplane. My grandparents took a Brownie photograph of her standing beside the new toy, with the shingled side of their house as the background. The front of the trike had a propeller with a circle of pistons behind it, and the tailpiece at the end had numbers stamped in it to make it look authentic. The cockpit swooped down so that the rider could sit down completely and pedal. The toy is large—longer than she is tall—and it is clearly made of metal, with dimples where bolts attach the wheels to the body. The wheels are inflatable rubber tires with shiny metal hubcaps. In the photograph my mother poses proudly, wearing Mary Janes, stockings, a pleated dress, a V-neck sweater, a beaded necklace, and a knit cap. She is dressed for cold weather, and since she was born in June, this is probably not a birthday gift but a Christmas present. A shadow of some sort, perhaps the shadow of a tree, rises like a thin stream of smoke from behind her shoulder and spreads across the shingles of the wall, the adumbration folding ominously, like the black contrail of a plane in trouble, and turning on her. Hurtling through space at a thousand miles an hour, my mother may be trembling a bit from the cold, but otherwise she does not feel the future rushing toward her. She cannot see the crash ahead. The air, after all, is moving too, at one with a planet of rocks and stones and trees and spinning silently in a universe largely without substance. The girl who is my mother leans casually with her open hand on the wing of the toy while a ribbon of black smoke billows across the shingles behind her. Unaware and smiling, she looks directly at me.

Wonder Question: “Why do faces in some pictures seem to follow us?”

“The rule is very simple,”
The Book of Knowledge
says. “If the sitter is looking at the painter or at the camera, then wherever you stand, he will seem to be looking at you.” I lift the photo of my mother beside her new toy and tilt it under the lamp, first to the right and then the left, and her eyes stay on me even though the nose of the airplane seems to bob away and return, the world of the photo turning on the axis of her eyes. And her smile—yes, it also seems to keep smiling at me, no matter which way I turn the stiff and fading image.

But this rule, as stated here, is not so simple as
The Book of Knowledge
likes our wonders to be. There is the word
seem
in the phrase “he will seem to be looking at you,” which is never simple. It drains the ink out of the words around it, appropriating them subjunctively. The little mood shift created by that one word invites supposition, hypothesis, possibility, and desire into the mix, leaving the facts behind. It is the
seem
of what is not, the
seem
of absence and longing and despair that these pictures in the end make me feel, a magical
seem
bringing in its wake the black smoke of an apparent accident that has not happened yet in the photo but has already happened a long time ago in life. Nothing is looking at me in this photograph, although it is smiling broadly into the camera and trembling slightly in the cold, a trembling I can’t feel because of the nothing she is and the nothing between us, and this nothing follows me no matter which way I turn.

Thirty years later, in November 1960, my grandmother “got word” that my mother was in the hospital. I was eleven and we were living in Deerfield, Illinois. The phrase
got word
, taken from notes that my grandmother wrote near the end of her life, is portentous. It means that my mother was in no condition to write to her or call her and that my father, whom my grandmother never trusted, had to break the news. If I grow still and close my eyes, I can imagine the sound of the conversation, him offering up the facts through the mixture of sympathy and complaint he used to calm anxious colleagues, and her, with her Kansas reticence, replying in tight-lipped, staccato phrases. I cannot even begin to imagine their words. She and my grandfather “left immediately by train for Deerfield.” They stayed with my brother and me until my mother killed herself five months later. My grandmother never talked to me about what happened when my mother was institutionalized for depression, but she did talk to Barbara, who wrote letters to her on a regular basis until my grandmother died in 1986, and who was probably my grandmother’s dearest confidante at the end of her life. She told Barbara that when they released my mother from the hospital, the doctors said that they “had done everything that they could” and were still pessimistic. “When she left the hospital, your grandmother knew she would do it,” Barbara said when I asked her about it again this morning. She had told me about the conversation before, but to make her point clear now she put it this way: “When she left
that morning
,” on the day she killed herself, “your grandmother knew she would do it.”