Schliemann went on to excavate at Mycenae, a known historical site in Greece. Schliemann decided he had found the grave of Agamemnon. There is no evidence that he did. He found a grave, and he called it Agamemnon’s grave. But there is no evidence that Agamemnon was a real person, either.
The internal psychological pressure to make up a story, to explain the ruins before one’s eyes, is powerful indeed. That was the shock that I felt atop the Pyramid of the Magician, as I watched the morning sun spread across the face of the ancient city. Soon enough I, too, clutched my guidebook and walked through the ruins of Uxmal, pretending that I understood far more than I did.
My Father’s Death
When I was in high school, my mother used to wait up for me until I came home from dates. This is, of course, a time-honored form of parental harassment of young people of dating age. If I asked why she stayed up, she said, “I was worried something might happen to you.”
There was no reasoning with her, no asking why she thought staying up would help in the unlikely event that something had happened to me. It was not polite to question a mother’s love, or her logic.
But I was bizarrely reminded of this on December 27, 1977, when, as I climbed back into the boat after a ninety-foot-deep dive on a paddle-wheel wreck called the Rhone in the British Virgin Islands, the divemaster Bert Kilbride looked at me and said significantly, “Call home.”
“What is it?” I said. My first thought was that my house had burned down. That’s what usually happened in California. And I had known Bert for many years. He’d tell me if he knew.
“I don’t know,” Bert said. “The hotel just radioed to find out if you were on the boat. They said you had a call from home.”
That didn’t sound like a fire.
“Can I call from the boat?”
“No. Better wait until you get back.”
“Won’t the radiophone let me connect through to the mainland?”
“Radiophone isn’t working so good. Better wait until you get back.”
That definitely didn’t sound like a fire.
I tried to think what it could be. It was two days after Christmas, and I was spending the holidays on Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands. Most of my family was at my parents’ home in Connecticut.
When I got to the hotel, I called. My younger sister answered the phone. She said, “Oh, Michael, when are you coming back?”
“What happened?”
“Didn’t they tell you?”
“Nobody’s told me anything.”
“Dad died.”
I started to feel very stupid. Slow and tired and stupid. “Dad died?”
My father was fifty-seven. He was young. He was in good health.
“In his office,” my sister was saying. “He had a heart attack this morning. Kimmy and Dougie have gone to identify the body. When are you coming home?”
I said I’d be home as soon as I could make connections. I would check the airlines. I’d try to be there tomorrow. I said I would call back.
I got off the phone. Loren said, “What happened?”
“My father died.”
“Oh, Michael, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah,” I said, looking around at the hotel, the palm trees. “He screwed up my vacation pretty good.”
Because I was suddenly angry, really angry with him, for having done this thing. Leaving me at such an inconvenient time.
Loren said she’d call the airlines for me. I sat at the bar. I didn’t feel sad, I didn’t feel anything. I just stared around the hotel, at the people coming up from the beach, and the bartender washing his glasses and setting out the bowls of nuts for the afternoon, and I felt annoyed. I wanted to stay here and now I had to leave.
And I thought, Be careful. It’s harder to feel grief when you’re not on good terms. Because my father and I had not had an easy time together. We had never been the classic boy and his dad. And it hadn’t gotten better as we got older. It was no accident that I was down here in the Caribbean, and not at home with my brother and sisters. As far as I was concerned, he was a first-rate son of a bitch. And now he was dead and everything was up in the air. No more conversations, no more irritations, no more hopes for resolutions. Just—bang!—dead. Haven’t got anything more to say to you, Nicko. The end.
Except I had to go back to attend the son of a bitch’s funeral and mess up my much-needed vacation. And all his goddamned friends were going to be there, telling me what a great guy he was.…
Be careful.
I was really angry. I woke up the next day very early, four in the morning, unable to sleep. I was still angry. I stayed angry on the flights home. I got to Connecticut late the next night in a state of fatigue and high irritation. I was really annoyed to have to be here. I wouldn’t say that to the others in my family, because they were all grieving. But I was just plain angry.
I woke up the next morning at four, too. I couldn’t sleep. By now I was so tired it was hard to be angry. There was a terrible exhaustion about the house. People were calling continuously, from all around the country. Everyone was being very nice. And there was a lot to do, a lot of details, flowers and food and so on, and relatives were flying into town. The situation seemed to have all the disadvantages of a huge party with none of the benefits.
I decided I ought to keep busy and do the errands, especially since I was the only one who wasn’t crying all the time. My brother had noticed that, and had said to me, “Listen, I know you didn’t like him, but he was still your father, you know, he was Dad, he did the best he could.”
“Yeah? Fuck him,” I said. That pretty much summed up my feelings. My brother was understanding, which made it worse. But I said that somebody had to remember, in the midst of all these maudlin carryings-on, that the guy had had a really nasty streak in him. And not just with me. Dad couldn’t have been my brother’s favorite, not after some of the incidents I could remember. And what about the time he beat up my sister so badly the doctor was going to call the—
“Yeah, well, whatever,” my brother said, and walked away. He turned back. “Listen, Mike. He’s dead now.”
I understood that my brother had always had a soft spot for everyone. My brother had a sweetness I’d never had. He had forgiveness in him. I didn’t. It’d been hammered out of me years before, as far as this particular subject was concerned.
So I did the errands. It was okay. The only thing was, I was so tired. I could hardly get around. When I pulled up at the florist, it was a huge effort to open the car door, to get out of the car, to close the car door, to walk inside, to remember what I had come for, to talk to the florist in normal declarative sentences, to answer when he asked me how I wanted to pay for this. It was like it was all happening underwater. Or like I had a bad heart and couldn’t get my breath. Slow; painfully, exhaustingly slow.
After I did all the errands, I was really exhausted, and I found myself in the kitchen peeling vegetables with Kim, my older sister, and I said with annoyance, “Listen, I don’t see why I have to be the one who does everything around here, why I have to be the one who holds himself together while you all collapse.”
“Nobody’s asking you to,” she said.
When she said that, I realized she was right—I had imposed this role on myself. So I went to my room and cried.
I cried with complicated feelings, because I was still angry but I was also sad. I was sad for what had happened to my father and me, sad that nothing would ever be resolved, sad that he had lived his life as he had, with the unhappiness that he had felt and concealed.
I was having all these feelings simultaneously on several levels; it was quite peculiar, but it was a distinct relief. I was still angry, but I wasn’t so pent up. And I was able to accept things a little better. There were plenty of trials ahead: the arrival of the relatives, the viewing of the body tomorrow, and the funeral the day after.
I took a sleeping pill, but I still woke at four in the morning, with the feeling that there wa
s something I had to do, something I had to solve. Then I remembered: I couldn’t do anything. He was dead. There was nothing to solve. I couldn’t do anything to make it better for my mother, or anyone else. The whole thing was out of my hands.
There was nothing to do.
It was strange to feel that. There was nothing to do. Just somehow get through it and get yourself back together and keep going. I was crying a lot now, whenever I felt like it, and that was very good. I thought: We have this wired into us, the way we have the ability to give birth. We already know how to grieve. We only screw it up when we get in the way of the natural process.
So, I thought, I was doing the natural thing now. But I was not looking forward to that most awful of rituals, going to the funeral home and viewing the remains.
Even making the arrangements seemed gruesome. I called the funeral home in the morning and they said my father wasn’t ready yet, they were having some problems, and they were a little behind schedule. They were sorry, but would two-thirty be all right?
I said yes.
My mother said, “What did they say?”
I wondered what to tell her. A little late finishing up the body? “Uh, they said they’re very busy and … uh … they won’t be ready until two-thirty.”
She nodded. “They’re having trouble with his mouth,” she said, very matter-of-factly. Apparently my father had died in his chair with his mouth open, and rigor mortis had set in. She seemed so calm about it.
At two-thirty everybody put on coats and grabbed Kleenexes and went to the funeral parlor. I was afraid to go. I had never seen the dead body of anybody in my family, anybody I was really close to. I didn’t know how I would feel. I would have preferred to stay home, but I was the elder son and I had to accompany my mother. So I went.
The funeral parlor was a Connecticut frame house. There was ice on the steps; you had to be careful going up. The sun was shining but it was cold outside.
My mother met her sister in the hallway, and we watched to see if they would be all right together. They were. We all went in to view the remains.
Immediately, as I walked into the room, I had the crazy and unexpected thought, He’s here. He’s still alive.
Meanwhile, my mother had run forward and flung her arms around my father’s body, and was crying and talking to him and kissing him. I was embarrassed, as if I shouldn’t be witnessing this scene between them. At one point she turned to me and said, “He’s so cold.” But she was really in her own world, her own way of handling things, and it was remarkable for its force and directness. She cried, she talked to him, she wiped her tears from his cheek. She was really dealing with it.
I tried to figure out why I had thought he was still here. I checked again: yes, I felt it. He’s here. He’s hanging around this room. He’s confused.
I knew that people had reported these impressions, but I was not one of those who believed that a soul stayed around a dead body, particularly following a sudden death.
So where did the feeling come from? A sensation that the room was warm. A feeling that he was hovering near the ceiling, looking down on all of us, wondering why we were here. Or was it the projection of my own difficulty accepting that my father was really dead? Because certainly I was having trouble accepting it. I kept staring at his chest, waiting for him to take a breath. I was sure he was still alive. I knew he was in this room. I just couldn’t figure out how I knew.
Then I cried some more. Finally my mother kissed my father goodbye, said she was done. On the way out she told the undertaker that they had done a good job, that my father looked very nice. Then we all went outside.
Tomorrow was the funeral.
* * *
The next day my mother announced that she wanted to view the remains a final time, before the funeral. Nobody had much enthusiasm for this, because the previous day’s viewing had been very emotional. But I wanted to confirm my reaction of the previous day, so I said I would go with her.
We went back to the viewing room. As soon as I entered the room, I wondered how I could ever have thought my father was here. He was gone. The room was cold and empty except for a body that once had belonged to my father. My mother looked at it, walked up to it, cried a little, looked at it some more. But she didn’t hug it or kiss it. She just stood there for a while. Then we left and went to the funeral.
My father was an important man, and he had many business friends who came to the funeral. The funeral was very impressive and a nice gesture to his memory. By now I was so confused about my feelings about his being present or absent that I sat in the church service and wondered, Is he here? He wasn’t there. The church service had very little meaning to me.
I noticed that, even though I was on an emotional fast track, being taken for a rough ride by my feelings, I was clear about what made sense and what did not. For example, visitors coming to the house made sense. You just seemed to keep going if you were forced to chat with people for a while. Small talk made sense. It was fine: let’s talk about basketball for a while, or what Jimmy is doing in school. And it wasn’t necessary to say anything about how sorry they were about my father. People always say, “I don’t know what to say.” There isn’t anything to say. Just coming over to the house said everything.
But visitors who cried a lot or who stayed longer than half an hour did not make sense. They were draining.
And food being brought over made sense, but only if it was very easy to prepare, because anything more than heating a dish was an impossibly difficult job.
Viewing the remains made sense. Telegrams and phone calls made sense, even at late hours, since nobody was asleep anyway.
But the religious service in the church didn’t make much sense to me. The church itself seemed dead, full of old rituals and old ways of doing things that had been worn out centuries ago and no longer provided comfort, at least not to me. My emotions were overwhelming; they demanded some genuine response, not this stately ceremony of artifice, the most recent components of which reached back to the nineteenth century. It was nobody’s fault. It was just how it was, for me. Mother was comforted, and important social functions were served by the church service.
Afterward we went out to the cemetery and had the burial service. It was a sunny day, a nice day but cold. Everybody was tired. I looked at the tombstone and wondered if my father was here. By now I was looking for him everywhere. But he wasn’t here in the cemetery. The tombstone seemed small. We got back in the cars, and drove away.
I asked my brother whether he had felt anything unusual in the viewing room that first day.
“Like what?”
“Like Dad being there. Hanging around the room.”
“Oh, you felt that, huh?” he said.
“Yes. Did you, too?”
“No,” he said, “I didn’t. I was just sorry he was dead.”
The next day I went back to California.
Ireland
I am the director of a film called The Great Train Robbery, loosely based on an actual train robbery that occurred in Victorian England. We are shooting in England and Ireland. The cast includes Sean Connery, Donald Sutherland, and Lesley-Anne Down.
A secret, lifelong desire is fulfilled. I am an international film director, shooting in foreign locations with big movie stars! What a thrill! Put on the safari jacket and hang the director’s finder around your neck!
But I am also secretly terrified. This is only my third movie, and I’m not really an experienced director. I’ve never shot in a foreign location. I’ve never made a period picture. I’ve never worked with a foreign crew. And although I’ve worked with good actors, I’ve never directed such big stars.
To direct a movie you must be authoritative, and I don’t feel authoritative at all. On the contrary, I feel isolated and under intense pressure. I am alone in Dublin; Loren is back in America finishing law school. There are only three Americans on the show: myself; the producer, John Foreman; and the stunt coordinator, Dick Ziker. John is
experienced in foreign filming and I rely on his judgment, but in the end I am the director and I must do the job myself. And I’m afraid.
I’ve never known what to do with these fears of new undertakings. There doesn’t seem to be anything to do but live through them, get past them. At least some of the terror of new undertakings is justified; at least some degree of anxiety will actually improve performance. But here in Dublin, I am not exerting my authority well. It just isn’t working. John Foreman has told me the English film crews call the director “governor” or “guv.” Nobody calls me “guv.” Nobody calls me “sir.” They don’t call me anything.
Even though I am thirty-five years old, the crew thinks I am too young to know what I am doing. The company tries to second-guess me, to do things behind my back. I ask for something to be done a certain way, and they go off and do something else. We have lots of arguments.
Then, too, there are many differences between British and American filming procedures. In America, the director plans shots with the cameraman; in England, with the camera operator. Scenes are numbered differently. Technical terminology is different. English crews take four food breaks in a day, but Americans break only for lunch. If you want to work overtime, the British crew has to meet and vote.
Even the most basic signals seem to get crossed. In America, I am considered a laconic director, but the English find my energy level bizarrely high. My assistant director, who is openly critical of me to the point of insolence, finally asks if I am taking something. He means drugs, speed. I am astonished and ask him why he should think so. He says the whole crew thinks so, because I do everything so fast. I assure him I am not on drugs.