Toward the end of 2005 Tracy began looking for the dress. There were only so many places it could be: the storage room outside the kitchen, the upstairs closet in a plastic bag next to her wedding dress, or my grandmother’s cedar chest at the foot of our bed. She found it in the chest.
Amidst a great company of saints and friends, we baptized Elizabeth Adam at Immaculate Conception Church. The “we” being the whole body of believers at the 9:30 Mass that day—including many young couples with their babies, some of the Latina girls from the school who had written Adam poems when he was sick, a few of the old hands from the daily Mass crowd, Jenny’s entire family up from Charlotte and ours down from New Jersey, as well as twenty or twenty-five friends from the Divinity School who showed up because they believe in baptism and care about us.
Her baptism came not a moment too soon. Jenny had postponed it until the winter because of my hospitalization. Now, with Elizabeth fairly bursting the lace around her neck and forearms, it was time.
The priest led the baptismal party up the aisle to the entrance of the sanctuary and to an enormous piece of granite bubbling with water. It was the same cool stone and restful sound that had comforted us during the previous summer, but now this rock would add its blessing to Jenny and Adam’s child. When I thought of the summer of his dying and those hot afternoons when I slipped into the empty sanctuary to listen to the water, I remembered the story of the Israelites dying of thirst in the wilderness and how Moses struck the rock with his rod and water came pouring out. I stood beside Tracy and Sarah and Paul in the circle of family members as the priest performed the ceremony. He did not strike the rock, but I felt we were all renewed by the water that flowed from it.
When the priest said, “Elizabeth Adam, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” his words threw me into a time warp, and for a moment there I was baptizing my newborn son. The morning of his baptism had been sunny and crisp too, though much colder, and our joy was not tempered by the lethal significance of the sacrament. In 1972 we knew too little. In 2006 we knew too much. My old church’s font was far less imposing than the monolith at Immaculate Conception, but it was water all the same. And Elizabeth Adam wore the same dress her daddy had worn, received the same name, and was marked with the same sign of suffering.
Today this child of earth approaches her father’s realm of light. Both are blessed, anointed, and clothed in white for purity. The earthiness of her second name, with all its intimations of mortality, is taken up into a new and glorious destiny. She will live—she will live. Long live Elizabeth Adam!
He must be so proud.
Nina wasn’t there to voice her approval, so Tracy and I said it for her: “What a good strong name.”
After the water, Elizabeth was anointed with oil. It was the first time her spiked hair laid down properly. She smelled like her father after the incense.
Then the priest invited all the children to come forward to give the newest member of the church a blessing. Cradled in Jenny’s arms, she looked like a china doll with rouged cheeks and finely painted features. The children came and laid hands on baby Elizabeth. Too many hands, as it turned out. She enjoyed it for a while but then, in her beautiful white dress and with her hair and forehead glistening with oil, she began to sob.
After the service an older priest said to me, “It’s the devil leaving when they wail like that.” No, it is not, I thought. She is weeping for all that was lost to her before it was ever found. She is weeping because she understands what has just happened to her.
We virtually drowned her in a history of suffering, its memories bobbing along like debris in a swollen river. With her mom’s help, she will memorize the stories and tolerate our need to tell and retell them. Until the day comes when she carefully takes the dress out of storage and brings her own child to the dangerous waters of this fountain.
On the day of her baptism, we took photographs of Elizabeth, Jenny, and the whole family, as we had done with Adam thirty-three years earlier, though this time with a better camera and more pleasing results. I have since bought a movie camera with which to make a record of Christmases and birthdays and other significant events. The quality of our new movies compares favorably to the faded and grainy Super 8s we have of Sarah and Adam bouncing in their cribs or of Tracy, blond hair flying in the wind, riding her bike in the country with one child on the bar, the other in the basket. I am twenty-nine in these productions, with dark hair, ’70s sideburns, and a white t-shirt. I pick up the little boy and hold him above my head as if he were the Stanley Cup, then flip him onto my shoulders for a run to the lake. These Super 8s do not guard against death, any more than the still-puckered handkerchief with which I blotted his forehead long ago guarantees the benefits of baptism. They don’t even qualify as memories at all, but only as visual aids to people like us who are prone to forgetfulness.
Who were the people in these portraits and what do you imagine these dusty artifacts once meant to them? The question arises whenever I walk into our windowless storage room and notice Sarah’s doll collection or Adam’s dobok hanging on a hook, as if waiting for another ferocious youngster to don it. Against the mutability of everyone and everything we ever loved, who will remember the ninety-five days of a young man’s dying? Who will remember Adam after the few of us who mourn him are gone? Who will remember any of us after the waters have covered the earth again?
It is not a new question. Theoretical physicists have imagined the conservation of “information,” perhaps in another universe where it might be preserved and reconstituted in a new form. But they don’t explain why the universe would want to “remember itself.” More than one of Israel’s poets struggled with the same dilemma and begged God to “remember” the people. But it was the prophet Isaiah who provided a rationale for remembering by making a connection between memory and love: God will remember because God loves. He said God has written the names of his people on the palms of his hands and could no more forget them than a nursing mother can forget the baby at her breast.
The triumph of memory does not entail greater precision about the details of the past, but a deeply felt and enduring love, like the love of a nursing mother for her children. This is the love that sustains the cosmos and nourishes each of us on our journey through it. Not mementos and snapshots that remind us of love, but a love we are willing to risk in new relationships and with a new generation, “even at the cost of pain.”
The many routines of the summer of 2005 are not forgotten, but they have passed into a deeper memory and no longer hold us as their occupied territory. The anointing, therapies, candlelit prayers, the intense days of suffering and preparation—all have given way to happier days of obligation that include swim lessons, playdates, spelling tests, and family outings at the beach. What remains among us is a new way of remembering in our family, something unexpected in 2005, and a love between a little girl and her mother that is something wondrous.
Now when Jenny takes Elizabeth “camping” they set up their tent and sleeping bags on the tiny gondola deck at the top of their house. It is the same platform high in the trees from which Elizabeth’s mom and dad surveyed their future, counted the stars, and made the most of their fleeting summer nights.
Once she has had her bath and dried in the softest towel, she powders profusely, then puts on her plaid flannel nightie and white kneesocks. Her newly brushed strawberry hair hangs to her waist. She trots into our family room in that giddyaphorsey way children have of running and as usual makes a bee-line for the candles. She means for us to light every last one of them—sour apple, cinnamon, and honeydew melon, to name only a few of our flavors—and since she is our guest, we are happy to comply.
She hasn’t been with us long before she lets us know it is time to visit the ancestors, the photographs of the ancestors, that is, arranged in cemetery-like rows on the cabinet beneath the towering bookshelves. We place her bottom firmly on the counter of the bookcase, and she shakes, handles, and rotates every photo with marsupial care. They are all there: great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, aunts and uncles, cousins of every denomination, Baby Elizabeth, Mommy and Daddy. Some of us are dead, some are alive. Some of us she names, including Daddy; some she passes over with either an appreciative remark or a dismissive gesture.
It is twilight, but not a time of gathering gloom or sadness in this house. The sun is setting in the pine trees behind the neighbor’s cabin. It leaves just enough light to do the things that require no light.
Like dancing.
The stereo sits very near the pictures on the next shelf. When she’s finished with the photos, she gestures toward the possibility of music and the probability of dancing.
The woman of the house scoops the child into her arms as they begin to do a slow turn to the Mamas and the Papas. Cass Elliot is singing,
Sweet dreams till sunbeams find you
Sweet dreams that leave all worries behind you
The child likes this velvet voice, and she understands the important words. It’s close enough to bedtime for her to savor her own sweet dreams, which she does luxuriously.
She smiles and opens her arms to the man of the house, and now the three of them are gliding and gently spinning around the hardwood floor while the whole gallery of ancestors looks on.
Stars shining bright above you
Night breezes seem to whisper I love you
The child smells of soap and incense.
The three of them have found yet another way to remember and forget at the same time. Dancing will do that when you dance with someone you love. The music eventually stops, night gently settles, and the ballroom turns to dust. But the dancers take no notice and dance on.
It has been seven years since he became one of the ancestors. That is how long it has been since I kissed his head and thanked him for being my son. I promised him then that his death would not ruin my life. It might have struck him as an odd thing to say, since self-devastation is widely regarded as the highest and most tragic form of grief. What I meant to convey to him was how utterly perverse it would be for a young man so filled with love to become the cause of an old man’s bitterness.
God only knows how much we had left unsaid between us, but I badly wanted this final understanding with him.
At first, Adam appeared puzzled by my comment, and so I attempted to clarify: “Because, you know, the best thing that can happen to a father like me is to have a son like you. I promise you, my love, I will not waste this gift.”
At that, he looked deeply into my eyes and nodded knowingly, but did not smile.