Donald Antrim - The Afterlife - A Memoir

I remember thinking: Books? Wait a minute! What about all the other stuff? But I understood that I was being invited to put myself forward as a serious person. If books become one’s way of looking at and piecing together society and the world, then exchanging books might be an initiation into authentic membership in the world.

It was quickly decided. My sister was enthusiastic and so was I. I even knew what books I desired. I’d seen, in a store in South Miami, an imposing two-volume annotated edition — elegantly boxed, naturally; that was all-important — of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. They became the gift to go after, and for several weeks I dropped hints and made a point of declaring my passion for hardcovers.

Christmas was a time in my family when hopes for happiness got ritualized and, as it were, acted out. The holiday required protection from the discord which ruled our typical existence, and the quieter-than-usual days leading up to it came gradually to seem an end to my parents’ difficulties and the advent of a peaceful era in our lives; and, to that end, actual gifts, particularly my father’s for my mother, had a lot riding on them. My father’s proposal of a book Christmas might have been his attempt to lessen the psychic weight attached to the things placed beneath the tree, though when I think about my mother’s part in such a Christmas, I wonder whether the burden was much reduced. She had many talents, my mother, and, in spite of everything, she had her pleasures, but reading wasn’t at the top of the list. Occasionally I’d see her with something by a writer she and my father knew socially, a university acquaintance with a career as a novelist or poet. However, apart from keeping up with the output of friends from southern academia — and I’m not sure whether she did so more than halfheartedly — she wasn’t what you’d call a reader. She didn’t voice curiosity about whatever might be found in books, and she did not ask questions or make observations relating to books in the world. I never heard her, when I was a teenager, express feelings brought on by something she’d read.

How lonely for him, I thought from time to time when I was growing up. Then I’d wonder: Why did they get married? And a moment later I’d wonder: Why’d they get married twice? The days when I began exploring myself through reading were also the days when I started analyzing the problems in my home, and I suppose I took my mother’s indifference to books as disdain for the communion, through print, between an author and a reader, that inner experience we take from written words. Did she feel contempt for my father, who nurtured this experience in his students?

It’s not a bad question. I didn’t want that boxed Sherlock Holmes set for nothing. The powerful detective is a master of the universe. His deductions release us from the anguish of living in an inexplicable world. I couldn’t unravel the logic of my parents’ marriage, but, reading Arthur Conan Doyle, I could briefly master my feelings of helplessness. Mastery was the aim in acquiring books in sets. Sets promised the triumph of completion. It wasn’t sufficient to read a story or two; I wanted totality. The box housed its separate volumes as interdependent parts of an intact world. To conquer the realm of the boxed set was to acquire strong magic — my father’s magic. I could not have known, at that time, that I was stealing from my father, but I was. I was beginning to study and prepare for writing. I don’t recall what I gave my parents or my sister for Christmas in 1972. I do remember that I got the Holmes stories, though in paperback rather than in the edition I’d fantasized about.

The night before Christmas, my parents fought. My father had violated the provisions of his own proposal, and arranged around the tree a number of elaborately wrapped packages, clearly not books, for my mother. Of course my sister and I didn’t expect him to give her only books. Just the same, seen against our expectation, the abundance was notable.

It was a long and dark night. My mother got falling-down drunk. She had a practice during her bad spells of stopping at the door to my room. She would teeter in the doorway and bellow at me that I was not participating properly in the life of our family, and that she didn’t care about whatever I might or might not want to do — I could act any way I wanted when I got to be eighteen, because then I’d be paying rent around here, but until then I didn’t have rights — and I could just go to hell. Or she might isolate a shortcoming, like my poor performance in school, and attack me for it in a manner that suggested I was the root cause of our family’s misery. Invariably I would be divided in my feelings: I was furious with her, yet worried over whether she might fall. It was a sorry predicament. At some point on Christmas Eve she engaged me. I don’t remember what she said, or whether I ran out into the middle of her fight with my father, out and down the little steps into the living room, where the tree stood with its lights on. I remember my sister pleading with them to stop. At about three or four in the morning, there was a crash. Our mother had fallen into the Christmas tree and brought it down on top of herself. I remember her crying out as if she might die. My sister and I ran into the living room, where our father was struggling to raise her. Our cats were hiding beneath chairs. The floor was littered with glass shards and broken ornaments. Water from the tree stand had splashed across everyone’s presents. My mother was claiming to have broken her arm. But she hadn’t. We got her off the floor and, somehow, into bed, and then, I don’t remember, my father swept up the mess and righted the tree, and a while later the sun came up.

I slept, some. I woke to the sounds made by my sister fixing our parents a special Christmas breakfast. I got up, and Terry was in the kitchen cutting fruit. I doubt we said much to each other.

It was a long time before our parents came out for Christmas morning. My mother needed coffee and time in bed. She may have bruised herself in her fall, but she did not — I suppose because of the occasion — tell us if she was in pain. It was a forgotten incident. She lay against pillows and picked at her breakfast until around eleven o’clock, then hauled herself to a chair near the tree. It took her a while to arrange her coffee cup, cigarettes, lighter, and ashtray on a table near the chair. Once she was settled, we started opening presents. Everyone was quiet. My sister had done everything she could to save Christmas.

We took turns with our gifts. I opened the paperback Sherlock Holmes set, and, later, a few other books, and then some non-book things. Clothing, probably. I remember my father inspecting something from my mother and forcing a grateful, affectionate smile — she’d found just the right thing — a smile meant for us as well as her, and for himself, because he, too, wanted to salvage the morning, along with, I guess, his dignity. Mainly I remember my mother as a captive of the gifts he lavished on her. At the time, she had begun a minor collection of Art Nouveau objets d’art — candlesticks, bud vases, copper bowls, serving trays overlaid with silver — and my father, as I remember, gave her a number of such pieces that year. Again and again, my mother was compelled to put down her cigarette, tear open a package, and smile and plastically exclaim at him. It was hard to watch. She had no control over her alcoholism. She didn’t understand this. And neither did we.

One night when I was ten, in the year before we left town and moved to the farm at the bottom of the mountains, a man carrying a gun knocked on the front door of our house on Lewis Mountain Road, in Charlottesville. My father answered — he’ d been waiting for this visit — and the armed man, a literature professor, my father’s friend and colleague at the university, said hello. My father and mother had until that moment been fighting. It was a bad fight. My father thanked the man for coming and invited him in. The gun, as I remember, was a long-barreled revolver holstered on a coiled western-style gun belt that the man held in one hand. The gun hung at his side, down near his knees. He walked into the house, carrying the gun, and my father closed the door. I watched from above, from the dark landing at the top of the hallway stairs, and could see, looking down between the banister’s white railings, my father and his friend as they crossed the entryway into the living room, where the man said, “Hello, Lou.”