Personal History (48 page)
Authors: Katharine Graham
Then, just as Phil began to get a little better, my father began to deteriorate, adding to my deep concerns. In his early eighties, he was declining sharply. He was also increasingly a problem for my mother, who looked to Phil and me to help her with him. She was having a hard time concentrating on her work, because he was often in a dark and difficult mood, and she poured out her heart in a letter to me, saying that more and more she was anxious over Dad’s state of mind, and she thought we ought to know “how precariously he is poised between stability and neuroses.” She continued:
I actually get frightened about the future. When he was strong, I could fight back. That is out of the question now. He conquers through weakness and I am helpless. The only people who can help me, therefore, are you and let’s admit it, especially Phil, who can say anything because he is the one person who can do no wrong.
For the next two years, as she struggled with Dad’s increasing debility, she relied on us, especially me, more than ever, keeping up her trips and leaving us in charge of him. One day I was surprised to read an interview with her in a New York paper in which she discussed the role of women—about how a woman could have her own work but always had to take care of her husband first. She actually said that before she left on trips she always arranged to have my father kept busy and kept company. The “arrangement,” of course, consisted of calling me and asking me to lay on bridge games and companions. Since I was extremely busy by this time and had no secretary (which she did), not to mention being consumed by Phil’s illness, I was indignant.
As Mother became even more absorbed in her work and in herself, we became my father’s mainstay, and he too became increasingly reliant on Phil and me. He would come over in search of company, and occasionally lean on us about his problems, often complaining about my mother’s drinking. When his adored older sister, Rosalie Stern, died, we told him the news. He was devastated and broke into tears. After Phil’s breakdown, it became harder for me to be there for my father always. In protecting Phil, I unfortunately never shared with my father—or anyone else—what was wrong. I wasn’t embarrassed; it was just something very private—something we both still assumed he’d get over. And there was the stigma of mental illness. Phil once said to Don, “This means I can never be in the Cabinet.”
Dad must have been puzzled and worried by Phil’s health, but luckily he died before things with Phil came to a crisis; he was so devoted to Phil that it would have been an unbearable blow for him. I believe there were three main people on whom my father had bestowed his love and affection and respect—his brother Edgar and his partner Gerald Henderson (both of whom died young), and Phil. My father’s feelings for me were very strong, but I couldn’t fill the role any of those three played in his life. Phil reciprocated his feelings and showed it in almost all of their encounters and relations. He expressed them in a birthday letter he wrote to my father a few days after his breakdown. I can imagine how much strength he would have needed to summon up, just to put pen to paper: “I have no aversion to friends and in fact I have a group, which while not multitudinous
is more of a host than I need or deserve. Of all these I want to say that none is as close or as integral as you.”
E
ARLY IN
1959, Phil and I decided to take the children to Europe for a couple of months during the summer. Lally would be sixteen and Don fourteen, and we thought it was about the last time we could take these older two on a sightseeing tour. One day that spring I had seen my father cough up blood, after which he shook his head and said to me, “Not good.” I didn’t then know exactly what he meant, but he must have known it suggested a tumor on his lung. His condition affected me deeply, for I realized he must be slowly dying. It was utterly shattering and left me with a gnawing grief and constant anxiety. I was terribly torn about leaving him at that time, and still don’t understand why I did. The trip had seemed like a good idea in the planning, and I didn’t have much will of my own. It was hard to foresee how long my father’s decline might go on, but his doctor felt that his condition was pretty stable and that the decline probably would be slow but steady, conceding, of course, a surprise always possible. Even my mother put her imprimatur on my going by writing me:
Do not worry about me. Dad is so patient, so philosophical that it is exalting to be with him. When Adlai was here and felt sad for me I said firmly, “I am not to be pitied. I am to be envied.” That’s the way things are, darling. Throw yourself into every experience, knowing that all will be for the best over here.
I was somewhat reassured when Phil stayed behind to finish some business and to be with Dad.
Phil took us to New York and the four children and I set off for Paris on June 24. I thought about my father all the time, particularly when I received a letter from Mother saying that my brother Bill’s son would be bicycling in France, and adding: “So the third generation spreads its wings just as the man who, unknown to them, has provided them with security is getting ready to fold his wings forever.”
Despite my remorse about not being home, the whole time we were in Europe I felt I had been transported to another world. As I wrote Phil, “I feel so remote that I can’t even in my imagination get back to Crescent Place—R Street.” Phil, at home, was attending to my parents’ needs, relieving Mother of some of the tension of visiting Dad at the hospital, where he had gone when he had taken a turn for the worse. Phil reported on one lunch he had with my mother that “reminded me of some of your experiences. To keep it going I mentioned Lally’s asking me about Zen
Buddhism. Wham! It turns out that definitive, seminal, etc. discussion of this is in Aggie’s Chinese art book. Thought you’d be glad to know.”
One letter Phil wrote to me from Glen Welby in that interlude before he joined us in Europe still gives me profound pleasure and comfort. What followed in the next several years—all the illness and chaos and heartache—left me so confused about what Phil truly felt that I like to think it was this letter from the distant past that reflected his true feelings. It was written at a moment when the depression was subsiding and he seemed to be nearing a balance, when the old Phil emerged again, the one I knew and loved.
This is such a curious curious place alone. All places are but this most and R St next. A couple of hours ago I thought of J Alsop on that Sunday afternoon in our house just a week ago and his saying [about] his loss of not having a family. Then I gave it no credence, that is, none of the heart, and to the mind only that sort of loss doesn’t seem so much. When the heart gets working along with the mind then that is when you imagine which is why imagination is probably one of the biggest human capacities.
It’s not all clear to me how much J Alsop feels the loss but it is certainly clear that no one can feel a loss who hasn’t first had a family as much as the feeling gets to be to one who has. Loss is a pretty inaccurate blown-up word for a few days’ absence. Absence doesn’t come close to what I’m thinking. What am I thinking? Reminder I believe is the point. A home to reverse the madam’s phrase is not a house but a great big store of memories and if that is why a home is good it is also why a home alone is almost unbearable.
Just before sunset, to take one example, the softing light was ending so surely and so gently that no one could afford to ignore it, to lose it unnoticed in a house. And also there were our friends [the dogs]. So, I tossed me up a large beaker of scotch and ice and whistled them up and banged out the front screen down the gate to the dusty driveway where they headed at once toward Lake K. “No,” I called, “No, no” and I whistled them back, “we’re going up the drive to the gate as Mummy does.” And we swung along, George all tired until on the curve by the woodmill he saw a rabbit and dashed clear to the bridge with the speed of wind (unsuccessful once again). As we neared the dip in the drive near the bridge I could see you heavy and sad the way I saw you over a year ago as I stood down at the barn and watched you walking alone and heavy with cares in a similar dusk. Those cares caused by me. Can I wash them away; can I tidy them up like a month’s end bank
account by saying, ah, but there were my cares, too, heavy and also having cause. Oh no my memory will not go away nor will it cancel out nor does it bear me down in the facile lament of
mea culpa
. Those cares you walked along so heavily burdened with, they are memory too. Part of the long story. As I knew when we reached the bridge and the three of them hurled their hot selves through the weeds into the cool pool of the run. That bridge was memory too, a thousand memories, and one especially of a dark dark night when I was as dark as the night was and sat on that bridge and talked to my good red dog.
Just beyond the bridge the edge of the woods was bright with the bloom of day lilies and they leaped across the drive and started again around the foundation of the old tenant house where they were joined by brilliant red hollyhocks and just then three separate quail called from the quiet of the woods behind me and I said to myself you must remember every bit of all you saw and tell Kay.…
What did we do. Glorious dinner last night—Vicky’s and Nicky’s [Friendly] 13th birthday—with Erlene’s fried chicken, Susiebelle’s cake, and your champagne! Then bridge. Then today a bit of baking tennis and then Agnes down for lunch. Really too hot for her to walk to Lake K but she and I paced up and down under the front elms in a great breeze while the F’s swam. Then chairs and a drink table under the front elms in the breeze and Jean [Friendly] worked the Waring mixer and rum and we ate a chicken salad the chef sent down and Erlene’s hamburgers and more of the cake and ice cream. A good day for Ag till 3:30 and then more bridge till 5:00 when the F’s left and then I thought what if Kay did say not to be here alone. I’d rather be lonely here than in town so my pearls and I jeeped to Lake P and tried some dull fishing but too hot and then came back and then as I said saw the sun setting and walked into it. So I’ll sleep here and rise earlyish and drive up for breakfast in town.
Next Sunday’s sunset I shall see with you in Paris—also from a bridge if you will kindly arrange that.
Until then, my dearest, I hope you will accept this which is meant to be—by God, it is!—a love letter.
Your burden and your sustainer,
And always yours—in love, Phil
T
HE CHILDREN LOVED
the vacation from beginning to end. In Paris, they often explored alone. The four of them went together to the roof of
the Arc de Triomphe, took horse-and-buggy rides and bus rides, on one of which Donny got shut in the door, and when she came to his rescue Lally was saved by an Englishwoman from an altercation with the bus driver. The children and I had a warm, familial time, interspersed with raucous moments, like Don going off to the races at Saint-Cloud by himself, returning a big winner.
When Phil arrived in Paris to meet us, he reported that my father had gone home and then back to the hospital. Mother had tried to run a hospital of sorts for him at Crescent Place, but, as Phil pointed out, she had neither the temperament nor the competence for the job. Everyone had convinced her that my father was better off in the hospital. Phil was certain we had done the right thing by carrying on with our trip. Despite some alarms, the situation was the same, he thought—i.e., slow deterioration. Company was now almost meaningless to my father, and Mother had Bis, Bill, and Ruth there to help. I felt, with good reason, horribly torn. Today I can see that the summer was wonderful for the children but wrong for me. I can hardly bear to think that I left my father’s side when he was dying.
From Venice, Phil wrote a moving letter to my mother:
At 5:45 this morning I awakened thinking of you and these last weeks and I decided I had from now on to call you by your name, which I think you will understand.
Kay was wakeful too a little later and we talked of you so warmly in the dark with the morning canal noises just beginning as a background below our windows.…
It seems to me that love comes very hard for you (it probably does for all of us; and to most of us never comes and never even missed)—has always come hard for you.
And now it is with you, a powerful shaking terrifying beautiful love for that gallant old man. You say poor words about “having a job to do” and “being able to stand anything” and you are right to obfuscate because the true words are too seismic.
But he knows what is in you and it is the fulfillment of his life. His cup runneth over. And mine too in pangs of joy for both of you.
We left Venice for a simple hotel at the beach resort of Forte dei Marmi, and there we received word that my father had taken a real turn for the worse and we should return at once. Phil and I left the children with the college girl who was traveling with us and flew back to New York and on to Washington, which took sixteen hours. The thought of being there at his death disturbed me so deeply that I was torn between wanting
to see him and hoping it had already happened. He died two days after we got back, but he knew I was there.
People react in such complicated ways to any death, but particularly to the death of a parent, because a lot of what one feels is about oneself and the sense that nothing now stands between that self and dying. You have now become the older generation. I believe that the closer and more loving the relationship is, the deeper but simpler the grief. Of my father’s children, my brother had the hardest time with his death, perhaps because their relationship was difficult to begin with and very ambivalent; through no fault of either of them, they had never been close. My mother was so complicated emotionally to begin with that his death was very hard for her. She had chafed under the burden of his aging, but when he died she sank into a deep depression. It was as if she had been leaning against a door that had suddenly burst open.
There was a private service for my father at Crescent Place, and a more public memorial service at the nearby All Souls Unitarian Church—one he had never attended. I suppose it was hard to hit on an appropriate spot for a nonreligious Jew. My parents’ friend Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered a eulogy, which I think was written by Sidney Hyman. Rudolf Serkin played with his quartet. The whole thing was simple and moving. And I couldn’t believe he was gone.