So, ‘the light falls differently’ on memories each time we return to them. Big surprise. Yet, Kay is bothered by this. She says it adds to her general unreliability.
I tell her that if she is writing to be seen as reliable, then this is the wrong project. She is worried about the ‘changing light’ of her memories, but there is a more fundamental problem. As soon as a memory involves another person – which it nearly always does – we are in difficulty. Kay is not Jake; she is not Audra. She cannot possibly know how Jake or Audra might remember a particular car journey across Michigan, a memory that Kay has, herself, called unreliable!
And what about the times before or outside her memory? Kay was not there for the nearly half-lifetimes her parents lived before her. In Kay’s memory, Jake and Audra were never children. In Kay’s lifetime, however fiercely she longs to know them, her parents were never crying babies, children at play, or youths who grew to be physical, attractive, and sporting. Jake was not a high school basketball star. Audra never had a dog she loved to play with in the snow. They were never single adults, as yet unmarried, out there looking for love. They were never people who did not know a world war was coming. Jake was never a soldier. Audra was never a singer. These and millions of moments passed long before Kay arrived. Yet Kay says these are the Jakes and Audras she wants to find most. The ones before her. The ones without her. The ones before and without one another. The hidden ones. “Why won’t they come to me, those two young people before they were lovers, before they were husband and wife, and parents?” she pleads. “Come out, wherever you are,” she sings plaintively. An old Sinatra song loved by Audra.
I smile indulgently. The little girl who believed the town erected a statue of her father has not fully departed, making it easy for me to remind Kay that we bring our earlier lives with us. Look upon the face of any person and you will see, whether you know it or not, all their ages inscribed there. Part of remembering our parents is to sense – rather than know – the presence and persistence of earlier lives in the two people as we found them, later. Kay is in the habit of sniffing a near-empty bottle of cologne that Audra left behind. She holds it beneath her nose and breathes in Audra. I tell her Audra is a scent, rather than a fact. And in that scent, much can be found or recovered.
As for that old problem of unreliability, I tell Kay that no one will hold it against her if she fails to understand Jake and Audra. If she fails to say what they might wish us to know. If she says things they would not wish us to know. Because in truth, this can never be Jake and Audra’s story, even though we may well title it Jake and Audra. It can only ever be Kay’s story of Jake and Audra. This may make it unreliable, but it does not mean that truth is absent. Nor is it a betrayal of those who are gone. Writing memoirs of his father and mother, Richard Ford gave a helpful reminder:
“Incomplete understanding of our parents’ lives is not a condition of their lives. Only ours. If anything, to realize you know less than all is respectful, since children narrow the frame of everything they’re a part of. Whereas being ignorant or only able to speculate about another’s life frees that life to be more truly what it was.”
Nor is it so terrible, I tell Kay, to admit that we will – more often than we wish – tilt their story toward our own. This is not a denial of them. It is simply an understanding of what we can and cannot do. It is, at the very least, to give them a powerful presence and importance most often denied the parents of the world. On this point, Ford draws sustenance from Auden:
“I have always admired Auden’s poem La Musée des Beaux Arts for its acute wisdom that life’s most important moments are often barely noticed by others, if noticed at all. Auden’s poem considers Brueghel’s famous painting, The Fall of Icarus, in which Icarus is shown floundering in the sea, following his plummet – his fate unobserved by ploughmen tilling their fields on a nearby shore. ‘Everything turns away,’ Auden writes, resignedly. Both poem and painting offer their combined visions – rimed with pathos and irony – as an enduring truth of life: the world doesn’t often notice us.
“Our parents’ lives, even those enfolded in obscurity, offer us our first, strong assurance that human events have consequences. Here we are, after all. The future is unpredictable and hazardous, but our parents’ lives both enact us and help distinguish us. My own belief in life’s final lack of transcendence always turns me to thoughts of my parents. In difficult moments, long after their deaths, I often experience the purest longing for them – for their actuality.”
I repeat all this to Kay. I tell her not to give up. I tell her Jake and Audra have departed, taking all their ages with them. She may not find them, exactly as they were. But she will most certainly find signs of life.
Richard Ford’s Between Them: Remembering My Parents was published in 2017 by Bloomsbury.
Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are (1944) was written by Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne.
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