The Futilitarians Page 8
We also talked about Koestler’s “Night Journey” archetype from that “Belly of the Whale” reading, when the hero undergoes a crisis that plunges him onto the Tragic Plane and he remerges transformed, purified. “[It] may take the form of a visit to the underworld (Orpheus, Odysseus); or the hero is cast to the bottom of a well (Joseph), buried in a grave (Jesus), swallowed by a fish (Jonah); or he retires alone into the desert, as Buddha, Mahomet, Christ, and other prophets and founders of religions did at the crucial turn in their lives.” Koestler talked about how certain cultures symbolically re-create these journeys through ritual as a more communal way to “establish contact with the Tragic Plane.”
Everyone drew a number from a hat, each number corresponding to a different Station of the Cross. We pulled numbers for those of you who weren’t there and will send them along later. The plan is to reinterpret Jesus’s Stations of the Cross in relation to our own Stations of the Crisis, to reflect some of the issues of existence we’ve been talking about over the last few months—personal, philosophical, or otherwise. The evening will be a sort of procession (not a spectacle—some were pretty adamant about that), with each of us choosing a location for our station, anywhere within the neighborhood’s boundaries of Press Street and Poland Avenue, and from St. Claude Avenue to the river. At your station, you should offer up to the group a brief reading, a performance, a piece of art, anything, that speaks to your assigned station and how it relates to the Crisis. Then we’ll end up back at the house for the Last Suffer. Or something. Wear comfortable shoes. See you soon.
When I was a kid, Holy Week was interminable. Days and days of Mass, kneeling, standing, sitting, kneeling, standing, sitting. The worst was Good Friday, which seemed the longest Mass of the year, the reading of the Passion Play, the congregation playing the role of the bloodthirsty crowd, murmuring such lines as “Crucify him! Crucify him!” without much conviction. Then, having to line up to kiss Jesus’s feet, the crucifix taken down from the wall and laid out at the carpeted foot of the altar at Blessed Sacrament, I’d tremble and sweat, and suddenly I was leaning over the bloody spike, painted red rivulets slicking down the metatarsals and phalanges of his toes, the plaster so cold and terrifying, as my mind went white. The priest wiping the feet with a handkerchief after each kiss. It was both similar and worlds away from the sensation of dread and fear, years later, that I had when kissing Rebecca’s forehead in the mahogany-paneled visitation room of the Lake Lawn Metairie Funeral Home. People have long referred to corpses’ cold composure as marmoreal, but the shock that no harder element existed than a beautiful young woman’s dead body seared my lips.
Participating in the Stations of the Cross during Holy Week wasn’t really so bad, though. Among the stained glass and fluted columns and polished pews, the church even more theatrical than usual, a small group of us would shuffle behind the priest, who guided us through the story of Christ’s Passion along the walls where the carved wooden stations were installed, toward something terrible and inevitable. Even though you knew exactly how the story ended, working toward it, communally, scene by scene, suffering by suffering, pausing and praying at each one, was still so emotional. The pacing and the events are already etched into you. As Kierkegaard said, “Repetition is the same movement as memory, but going the other way… repetition is memory carried forward.” (See also: Hope.)
Weekly breakfasts with my mom began when Dad’s hospital stays became more frequent, which coincided with Otto starting kindergarten nearby. Mom would often attend 7 a.m. Mass uptown and then meet me after I dropped Otto off. Taking care of Dad was a full-time job; being treated to breakfast, a brief reprieve embedded into her week. After Dad died, the breakfasts took on a different quality. Uncertainty opens up around a newly widowed person, especially one who’s been married over twice as long as not. After she’d spent the first few weeks of dealing with the social and pragmatic obligations of death, her new life was starting to settle into an amorphous stage of distraction and discovery. With her days no longer centered on Dad’s care, they slackened, but for the first time in her life, she was learning how to pay bills and use a debit card. One morning she told me how strange it was to have suddenly become a widow. It was the word, the label, that bewildered her. She said she had roughly the same reaction when she became a wife. In both cases instantly redefined in terms of her relationship to another person. As a new wife: defined by duty and possibility. But back then, just married, living in Washington, D.C., far from home and where she knew no one, with Dad in law school, she had no models to look to for advice and also no one to judge her, or the way she kept their small apartment in a Capitol Hill brownstone. She could make it up as she went along. As a new widow: defined by the tension between absence and possibility. Only now in the city she was born in, with friends she’s had for sixty-plus years, some since kindergarten, generations of relationships and family, markers and milestones, births and burials, a rich and full life to renegotiate.
I was often concerned by the amount of regret Mom expressed during these breakfasts, and urged her to look ahead, even though she was confronted with the past and Dad’s secretiveness at every turn, opening up surprising letters from the IRS about back taxes (Why did I never ask about finances?), returning calls from old friends from our brief few years in Washington (Why did we ever move back to New Orleans?), dealing with the repairs and bills for the beautiful center-hall house (Why did we “downsize” to such a big place?). She had been earnestly shocked when both the current and previous maître d’s of the Rib Room showed up at the funeral to pay their respects. She had never been and had no idea how much time and money he spent there, what the place meant to him, or to us. (Why wasn’t I paying closer attention?) These questioning regrets regarding her marriage often led her to the painful territory of the twins’ deaths.
I asked her if it was harder to take part in the Via Dolorosa processions after Rebecca and Rachel died and she said absolutely, yes, it was. And Holy Week itself was more difficult. A couple of weeks after Rachel’s death, she was supposed to be a lector on Good Friday, but for the first time, she just was not able to do it; her pain had merged too thoroughly with the intensity of those scriptures, with no immediate hope of resurrection or rebirth to temper it.
Surprisingly, at least to me, she very much approved of the ECRG’s Stations of the Crisis, did not find the idea irreverent or sacrilegious at all. She thought it reflected the true spirit of the ritual, which is to embrace a personal interpretation of the trials and encounters leading to Jesus’s death. When I brought up one supposed origin of the Way of the Cross, that of Jesus’s mother, Mary, retracing the dusty steps of her son’s suffering over and over throughout the rest of her life, a maternal expression of grief, she paused thoughtfully for a moment.
“Mary and the women were there to help take down Jesus’s body,” she said, “to clean and dress it and lay it in the tomb. Watch over it. But after the twins died, you kids took care of everything, dealt with the girls’ belongings, with the funeral homes, the burials, wrote the obituaries. Everyone always wanted to protect me, and I understand that. But in that sense, I missed the ritual part of dealing with their deaths.”
It had never even occurred to me to ask if she wanted to be involved in any of those death chores; we did want to spare her. Following the lead of Dad, we grew up protective of her, the saintly earth mother who was so revered in the community that I once met the mother of a former special-needs student of hers who had literally erected an altar to Mom in their home. But our protection of her sometimes blurred into deceit, outright, self-serving deceit. After all, as siblings, our sins often overlapped.
I apologized to her. Somehow, I had never considered that we were denying her anything by concealing the messy, disturbing truth of the ends of Rachel’s and Rebecca’s lives. While they lived at home, she tried to stay on top of their problems with different schools, different counselors, even tough-love programs. But when they moved out, Rebecca around
sixteen and Rachel around eighteen, they began disappearing into the excesses of adult culture in New Orleans. She lost track. We tried to keep tabs. Her point was that Mary was allowed to witness it all. The crowds, the falls, the succor, the nails and the spear. Mary’s path might not have been easier, but it was clearer. We shielded Mom from as much as we could and years later she’s still trying to determine her own Via Dolorosa. Did she know about Rachel’s drug use in that last year? No. The toxicology reports just reflected a random night of partying to her. Did she know much about Rebecca’s life as a dancer or her life with M.? No. But toward the end Mom didn’t understand anything about Rebecca, and her life seemed hopelessly unreal, muddled and chaotic.
Well, she knows some things now. Telling her some of the details we encountered in our various cleanups did not seem like an act of cruelty, like it once might’ve, but rather one of atonement. And that morning, over coffee and too-rich grits, Mom did retrace some of the steps that led up to their deaths, like she has over many breakfasts and lunches and coffees and car rides over the years. None of these steps led to anywhere revelatory, only to the same places, same questions, and the same tears. Even Mary, whose son was resurrected and would live on in others indefinitely, changing the course of humankind, still maybe needed the Way of the Cross, the Via Dolorosa, to retrace his suffering, making the infinite pain of losing a child more finite.
Mom’s Via Dolorosa leads as far back as the womb. When she is about three months pregnant with the twins, she begins having severe abdominal pain and is taken to the hospital, where they find an ovarian tumor the size of the proverbial grapefruit. Her mother happens to be in the room when the nurse enters and says, “You’re the one who’s expecting,” and that’s how my grandmother finds out Mom is pregnant. Mom usually would send Dad over to her parents’ house to break the news about each new pregnancy, and once again, she’d been too scared to tell my grandmother about the twins, her seventh and eighth children. (Fear of communication apparently handed off wordlessly through generations.) Because she is pregnant, they don’t give Mom general anesthesia when they remove the tumor, but the twilight variety. She doesn’t feel pain, only tugging and things giving way. She listens to the nurse, a bride to be, complain about how difficult it is managing all of the little buttons on her wedding dress. When it’s over, supine and numb, she asks the surgeon if she can see the tumor. He holds it up to her like a prize, a pearlescent globe. She can’t believe the size, this aberration that had been growing alongside the twins, dwarfing them. Years later when problems with Rebecca and Rachel started cropping up, learning disabilities, lack of short-term memory, general behavioral trouble, she wonders if the anesthesia she’d been administered during the surgery had affected their tiny beginnings somehow.
Another station she brought up over breakfast: when the twins are in second grade, doing poorly academically and Rebecca in near-constant trouble—for disrespecting teachers, for convincing Rachel to switch the monogrammed shirts of their Catholic grade-school uniform to confuse the nuns, for threatening to burn the school down—Mom decides to separate them, put them in different schools. Rebecca is the dominant one, smarter, more talented, but sometimes cruel and envious of any attention or accomplishments Rachel earns. Mom wants to give Rachel a chance to grow outside of Rebecca’s influence. Mom makes this decision (and many others) on her own, as Dad is always working, traveling. She will always second-guess it.
At breakfast, as always, I let Mom repeat these scenarios and questions, which have been churning through her for over fifteen years. The schools, the psychiatrists, the mental hospitals, the arrests, the interventions. The brief moments of stability and happiness, of hope. The boyfriends, the unsubstantiated rumors of abuse as adolescents, by a friend’s father, by a worker at a state mental hospital. Police officers to psychiatrists would assure her—you have a nice family, everything will work out. During their short lives, neither twin would ever follow a solid trajectory. They tried to be separate from each other. Rachel became a single mother at nineteen, kept her hair short and practical, wore glasses, and kept trying to find the right man, the right job, the right house in which to raise her son. Rebecca became consumed by the dancing life, a world oppressively controlled by men and money, maintained long bleached hair and wore contacts, her days often spent recovering and preparing for the nights. They wound in and out of each other’s lives, sometimes clashing, sometimes intensely close, but regardless, they called each other almost every night before they went to sleep.
The final stations of Mom’s Via Dolorosa:
Mom is with a friend at an Uptown coffee shop and runs into Rebecca. This will be the last time she sees Rebecca alive. She doesn’t remember the conversation, just that she inwardly judges Rebecca for ordering two extra shots of espresso in her iced coffee, a wall thickening between them as Rebecca babbles about something that Mom neither believes nor understands. She just told so many stories. Mom never thought of them as lies, just stories. To her, Rebecca was still a little girl.
Mom buys Rachel a bathrobe for what would be her last birthday, her twenty-fifth. She wonders, if she hadn’t bought Rachel that bathrobe as a gift, maybe she wouldn’t have found its sash so handy, wouldn’t have gone through with it at all.
This is when I will stare distractedly out the window of the café at those roots of the crepe myrtle tree, which boil over onto the pavement after years of confined growth in that carved-out hole along the curb. And at those errant shoots coming up from the base of the trunk that just needed to be lopped off to improve the shape of the tree.
How often has our conversation inevitably led to this moment? Or, even more often, started with this moment, in the way the suicides’ final acts can come to define them, become the starting point of their lives’ narratives, everything moving backwards from there. I asked Mom if she knew that centuries ago, the Stations of the Cross would begin with Christ’s death and proceed toward his condemnation. She said she didn’t, but she was just glad that Pope John Paul II added the fifteenth station—that of the Resurrection. After all, she said, that symbol of hopefulness is the whole reality of the religion. In my head I counted the stations we’d doled out to the ECRG, and the fifteenth, the Resurrection, wasn’t one of them. Maybe we’d gotten it wrong after all. Ah, well.
But I told her I’d read that apparently, groups of pilgrims used to begin at Mount Calvary, the site of Christ’s crucifixion, and then travel the route back toward the ruins of the Ecce Homo arch, where Pontius Pilate condemned Jesus and handed him over to the Jews with great ambivalence. Pilate was a governor, an imperial middleman, manipulated by both Caesar and the people. As a child, I was always baffled by the figure of Pontius Pilate—he didn’t seem evil but he didn’t help either—but as I got older I recognized that he typified a certain dangerous species of adult, those who wield empty authority, the sorry-but-my-hands-are-tied bureaucrats. Pilate knew that Jesus was innocent but also that he had to give the people what they wanted at that moment, according to their custom and also the law of Caesar, since no one else could claim to be king, and he was being proclaimed the King of Jews.
In John’s Gospel, the most poetic of the four, Pilate tries to understand where Jesus is coming from and save him. “Art thou king, then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice. Pilate saith unto him, What is truth?”
Pilate asks the key question, doesn’t get an answer, and is unsettled, tells the crowd he thinks Jesus is innocent. But they still clamor for his execution. After Jesus is beaten, dressed in purple robes, and bloodied by a crown of thorns, Pilate presents him to the crowd: “Behold the man!” Ecce homo. The whole beautiful, terrible point.
The night of our Stations of the Crisis, the person who’d chosen the first station, Christ is condemned to death, was out of town, as were a couple of others. (It was Easter break
, after all.) Our Way of the Crisis would be imperfect and incomplete, like all Ways and all Crises, but we’ve already addressed that first station with Pilate anyway, and can start with the second:
The cross is laid upon him
Ellen showed up at the house looking tough and terrifying in a ribbed white tank top and tightly cinched man-pants. Heavy eye makeup streaked black down her cheeks, evoking a long night that had ended in wet, messy despair, but was actually more Shroud of Turin–esque in its studied application. She led the nine of us down our street toward St. Claude Avenue and the Saturn Bar, where the neighborhood gets a little dodgy. She took us down the dark side alley of a half-renovated house, the de facto aesthetic of much of that particular block, where people seem to run out of money or material or luck or will, and things don’t get finished or fixed.