Continued, The Correspondent
Rosalie Van Antwerp
Dear Rosalie,
I didn’t tell you Daan wrote, it was back in May, a rather long letter saying a great deal.
I read it again and again. It is a terrible and wonderful letter.
Daan never wrote to anyone, but reading it I wonder why.
Several times I sat down to write him back, but my mind was blank, an event that I cannot recall at any previous time.
Fiona called this morning to say he’s dead.
She was at his side. I never did send him a letter.
The paper with his name at the top and some inadequate babble is started right here on my desk.
I’m looking at it. Oh, Rosalie. My life has felt enormous, but what do I have to show for it?
This morning I walked down to the river and I was thinking about our trip to Lake Saint-Pierre.
I did this on purpose, as punishment, perhaps, self-flagellation, and now I’m making myself write to you about it.
I rarely let my mind go there, Rosalie. If there is a map of the world in my mind, I don’t look there at the border of Canada and the US, but this morning I tried to remember.
I even went looking for photographs of the trip, but I guess I’ve thrown them all away, but what I was trying to remember was how we were before Gilbert died, what was the last way we were—my whole family.
That morning. That week. What was my family like?
Daan had been talking to someone at Boston College about teaching.
I’d forgotten about that, but it came back to me.
It was a position in the school of languages.
In the weeks leading up to the trip there had been heavy tension between us because he wanted to take the position, and of course I was totally unwilling to consider leaving my job, but I do think we’d largely managed to leave that impasse at home and I remember laughing a great deal on this trip.
Do you remember? You were very pregnant and wearing those awful drapey dresses without shape and your ankles were terribly swollen, and I remember being up on the patio with a bottle of whiskey one evening and laughing until we cried over your ankles.
That must mean things were good if I can remember all that laughing.
And the children were at such wonderful ages then.
I made myself think about the day he died.
I went back to the day and put my outfit back together (I could get that far, denim pants, white top) but when I tried to follow myself back down on the dock where I was when he dove into the water, I couldn’t.
It is as if, in my mind, there is a sentry standing outside the locked room of this memory—it won’t let me in.
It’s my memory! He won’t allow it, stands unyielding.
It is like blindness. So that’s as far as I got.
I couldn’t get in. But I know what happened.
He dove into the lake, he hit the rock shelf and snapped his neck.
I have this image in my mind of his back, slick, he’s lying on his side.
It’s his body. Beads of water on his tan back.
They must have pulled him out—who? Did I?
And laid him on his side on the dock. There were two moles on his back and I must have stared at them because I see his tan, wet back, the two moles.
Did I scream for help? Who got him out of the lake?
Was it me? In my memory, it’s all silence.
It has been a long time since I returned to that.
It’s been years. It’s possible it’s been decades.
What do you remember? Suddenly I am hungry for these memories. Write me and tell me what you remember.
Daan’s funeral will be in three weeks, the first Saturday of October, but I can’t possibly attend.
Bruce said he would fly with me. He and the children and Marie will of course attend.
I’ve just been on the phone to Felix, who thinks I should go.
He says you always always go to the funeral, and, of course, in principle, I agree.
Perhaps I will go. I did always want to see where he was from.
Syb
Postscript: I’ve been reading Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, but it’s taking me ages. What are you reading?