The Web of Denial : Family secrets, Buried pain and the Hidden History of War

I AM NOT FREE OF THE CONDITION I DESCRIBE HERE. I cannot be certain how far back in human history the habit of denial can be traced. But it is at least as old as I am. In our common history, I have found it in the legends surrounding the battle of Troy, and in my own family I have traced it three generations back, to that recent time past when there had been no world wars, and my grandparents were young. All that I was taught at home or in school was colored by denial, and thus it became so familiar to me that I did not see it. Only now have I begun to recognize that there were many closely guarded family secrets that I kept, and many that were kept from me.

When my father was a small boy, his mother did something unforgivable. It was a source of shame, as many secrets are, and kept hidden from my father, and eventually, from me. My great-aunt would have told me this secret before she died, but by that time, she could not remember it. I have always sensed that my grandmother’s transgression was sexual. Whatever she did was taken as cause by my grandfather and his mother to abandon her. They left her in Canada and moved to California, taking her two sons, my father and his brother, with them.

My father was not allowed to cry over his lost mother. Nor to speak her name. He could not give in to his grief but instead was taught to practice the military virtue of forbearance and to set an example in his manhood for his younger brother, Roland. In this way I suppose my grandfather hoped to erase the memory of my grandmother from all of our minds. But her loss has haunted us.

How old is the habit of denial? We keep secrets from ourselves that all along we know. In 1945, during the war, the public was told that old Dresden was bombed to destroy strategic railway lines. There were no railway lines in that part of the city. But it would be years before that story came to the surface.

I do not see my life as separate from history. In my mind my family secrets mingle with the secrets of statesmen and bombers. Nor is my life divided from the lives of others. I, who am a woman, have my father’s face. And he, I suspect, had his mother’s face.

There is a characteristic way my father’s eyelids fold, and you can see this in my face, and in a photograph I have of him as a little boy. In the same photograph there is a silent sorrow mapped on his face, and this sorrow is mine, too.

I am beginning to believe that we know everything, that all history, including the history of each family, is part of us, such that, when we hear any secret revealed, a secret about a grandfather, or an uncle, or a secret about nuclear weapons, our lives are made suddenly clearer to us, as the unnatural heaviness of unspoken truth is dispersed. For perhaps we are like stones; our own history and the history of the world embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that history is sung.

In some way I knew of the terrors of the concentration camps and Hiroshima before I read about them in history books. Am I trying to write off the sufferings of my own mind and of my family as historical phenomena? Yes and no. We forget that we are history. We are not used to associating our private lives with public events. Yet the histories of families cannot be separated from the histories of nations. To divide them is part of our denial.

How many small decisions accumulate to form a habit? What a multitude of decisions, made by others, in other times, must shape our lives now. A grandmother’s name is erased. A mother decides to pretend that her son does not drink too much. A nation refuses to permit immigrants to pass its borders, knowing, and yet pretending not to know, this will mean a certain death. The decision is made to bomb a civilian population. The decision is made to keep the number of the dead and the manner of their death a secret.

But wherever there is a secret there is a rumor. For deep in the mind we know everything. And wish to have everything told, to have our images and our words reflect the truth.

I go to look at my face in the mirror. I have my mother’s jaw, but my father’s eyes, those lids with a double fold. My father died at the age of 49; crossing a street, he was struck by a car. It was just at sunset and the light was blinding. I do not honestly think he meant to die that way. But the event has haunted me with the knowledge of a despair he always carried within him, a despair covered over with a smile, an outward cheer.

Before his funeral, friends told me not to look at the open casket, and so I waited at the back of the church while everyone else filed by him. A funeral director, proud of his work, urged me to join the other mourners, saying that the body had been repaired and was as good as new. Though I would not look, inadvertently he had brought home to me the violence of my father’s death. Even today, my body tenses with fear every time I cross a street. What one refuses to see at one time never vanishes but returns, again and again, in many forms.

The word secret has an erotic edge, as if in hiding everything, a story, a weapon, a piece of candy still wet from the mouth and clinging to the flannel lining of a pocket, one moves closer to a sequestered sexual body at the core of being. During my childhood, the absence left by all the secrets my parents and the other adults kept from children was numinous and hot. There was the war that had just occurred and beneath those images of heroism, unspeakable whispered horrors. There was my mother’s drinking, just like her father’s before her, the flashing sight of her wild laughter and then rage, before my father pulled her out of the hallway and into the privacy of their bedroom. The secret process of atomic fission, the secret mechanisms of missiles. All these secrets migrated into one space in my imagination, a geography of lost and missing pieces.

I AM THINKING OF THE WIND AND ALL IT CARRIES. A BOY RIDES HIS HORSE through the hills, down into the valley, through thick brush. As the horse makes its way through the brush it struggles and sweats as if moving against an invisible weight. The boy goes to bed ill. His head is aching. His skin has broken out. He is nauseous. In the morning the horse is dead. The boy learns that just on the other side of the mountain, in the direction of the wind, several bombs have been detonated. In a few years he, too, will be dead.

It is a decade before the boy rides his horse through those hills. There is no perceptible wind in the laboratory. Men in overalls have worked for days to make large piles of graphite and uranium. They do not know the meaning of what they do. Enrico Fermi is about to create the first chain reaction. The general has asked him if there is any danger that the chain reaction will go on forever, blowing up Chicago, destroying Illinois, North America, the world. Fermi tells him the risk is negligible. He has designed certain safety measures. A mechanical apparatus will insert a rod to still the reaction after just a few moments. During those moments, some of the scientists present will fear the reaction is going to be infinite. But should the mechanical apparatus fail, Fermi has assigned a man to stand with an ax next to a rope that has the rods suspended from it. And if the ax should fail, two other men stand nearby with buckets of a chemical that will also stop it. The experiment is successful. At Enrico Fermi’s bidding, a chain reaction is started, and then it is stopped.

It is Thursday the 12th of July, 1945. Many objects are taken out of the laboratory at Los Alamos, N.M., and moved along a secret road to a site simply labeled “S.” In that place, the many objects are assembled into one, and this is moved to a stretch of desert known as Jornado del Muerto, tract of the dead. There it is hung on a scaffolding high up toward the sky. On July 14 and 15, heavy thunderstorms break out over Los Alamos.

It is 5:30 a.m., July 16, and very silent. Enrico stands just more than 5 1/2 miles from the scaffolding. He is holding two pieces of paper, one in each hand. A white light brightens the earth. It stuns the surrounding hills and swallows the sky. Enrico Fermi lets the pieces of paper fall from each hand. A ball of fire appears and grows larger and larger. And then there is a sound so loud it seems to be force itself. But Fermi does not hear this sound. He is watching the paper fall, looking to see how far the paper, in its trajectory toward the earth, is moved off its course by the ensuing wind. In this he hopes to guess the power of the explosion.

There are conversations that go on wordlessly with the dead, with animals, with the very young, or very old. It is years ago in Italy in the life of a boy not yet 14. This boy had a brother closer to him than air to skin, and this brother has just died. The two boys had spent hours alone together building electric motors, drawing designs for the engines of airplanes, the movements of their hands, their minds inseparable.The grief of the living boy is great. But now Enrico Fermi trains himself to walk past the hospital where his brother has died, without crying. To console himself he immerses his mind in the study of science.

There are events in our lives that we cannot understand because we keep a part of what we know away from understanding. War is one of those events. And there are other, private events that mystify us, as if there were no explanation for them except nature itself. That we are mystified becomes a habit passed from one generation to the next. My father suffered from the silence of his father, and I suffered from his.

In the steady continuum of history we meet a divide between public and private events. Shifting from one to another, the discourse changes. Even the tone of voice, when entering the world we call private, slows down, drops a scale, and perhaps softens. This is partly why we seldom associate military repression with the unnatural silences of childhood.

The troubling nature of censorship is more clear when it falls on the very young. A certain kind of silence, that which comes from holding back the truth, is abusive in itself to a child. The soul has a natural movement toward knowledge, so that not to know can be to despair. In the paucity of explanation for a mood, a look, a gesture, the child takes on the blame, and carries thus a guilt for circumstances beyond childish influence.

There was much that Enrico Fermi could not tell his wife. She heard rumors. A sleepless patient at a hospital awake in the early morning hours sees a strange light. A blind girl sees a flash of brightness. A newspaper speculates that a hidden ammunition dump exploded. One day all the men at Los Alamos disappear together with no explanation. When they return they do not say where they have been. What does she think? It is wartime. There is much that is unexplained. And this creates a chasm of speechlessness between her and the man she has married.

There is a party at the Fermi home. This party is held after Fermi has created the first chain reaction. But none of those present speak of this event. And the hostess, Laura Fermi, does not know the reason for the celebration. Later, she is to write a history of these events, which she saw but did not witness.

What do the guests at this party do? Because the husbands know something the wives do not, is the atmosphere strained? Or is the party like so many others, where the husbands congregate in another room and hold a separate conversation, speaking as usual about things the wives never know? Do they dance?

Later, when Fermi is alone with his wife, do they undress together, their bodies become suddenly so innocent, simple, unclothed, being naked, and undisguised as truth, do they lie down together? Does he open his mouth to her . . . hearing her cries, does he also cry, even from someplace unwilled in him, his flesh, the cells washed, as if by light, or life, with pleasure, and a more pure sense of being, and at the same time, his skin like a cloud diffusing into her skin, through her flesh, the room, the bedroom curtains, the horizon? At this moment, where is his secret? Does he let it go, believe it never happened? Bury it deeper inside himself, in a wordless place, in a place described only by formula and the vocabulary of science, a vocabulary he keeps apart from all the words he uses at home: breast, leaf, river, doorbell, cup, child, love. Fermi. Does he ever tell his secret to himself in this plain language?

HIROSHIMA IS ON AN INLAND SEA. AND THERE ARE SEVERAL ISLANDS IN ITS harbor. One of these is a famous shrine, some say to an ancient female deity. Another, Ninoshima, was the site of a quarantine station for homecoming soldiers during the Russo-Japanese War. After the atomic bomb was dropped over Hiroshima, many of the most severely wounded were taken to this island to die. Few buildings in the city itself were left standing. On the island, the old hospital was still intact, though its corridors and rooms were almost empty. There were few doctors or medical supplies. Those who were very badly burned were taken there by rowboat. The trip took two hours. Often the dying crawled into the woods or back into caves and tunnels. Even today bodies are still discovered there.

I went by ferry to Ninoshima. The trip across the water was brief. It was November and just beginning to turn cold. The sky was gray and white. The water waved, shimmering with a silver reflection of muted light, a green darkness beneath. I stood on the deck watching as we made our progress toward the island, remembering suddenly my ferry trip to another island earlier that year--Grand Manon, Nova Scotia, the island of my father’s birth.

That day, though it was midsummer, the sky was gray and white and there was light on the water. And it was there on that water, in the midst of the reverie of travel, that I found in myself a feeling of urgency, under the calm surface, and beneath that an indefinable pain, sharp as a bud. This island of my imaginings was real. And so then were the stories I had heard. The water we navigated became then like the water of legend, between one kind of knowledge and another.

Even the trees, green and orange, growing over the hills of Ninoshima, reminded me of Grand Manan. And here, too, legend sprang to life as if time had stopped and the dying who had two hours of agony looked to this island for hope and refuge, who lay near the water or crawled into caves or forests, were still there, in suspension for a moment from physical pain, without weeping or admonitions to heaven, the air itself pregnant with the breath of words impossible to speak or hear or, even, to forget.

Perhaps every moment of time lived in human consciousness remains in the air around us. Mitsukuni Akiyami, who was a schoolboy at the time of the blast, has written of the moment that the bomb exploded. He felt an eerie silence. Sound and color stopped. Then it was as if an instant of time had frozen and within that instant--”a fraction of a thousandth of a second,” he called it--he said that “an unimaginable number of incidents took place.” He looked toward the city. In this instant it had disappeared. And before the instant had passed the boy had already prayed, “Please let this all be a bad dream.”

There is a territory of the mind, vacant and endless as the miles and miles of rubble the city of Hiroshima had become. One enters this territory as one speculates, for instance, over a disaster. If I had traveled a different road, would there have been no accident? A life can be gone in an instant. To grasp the meaning of the explosion of one atomic weapon at Hiroshima would take more than one lifetime. One would have to hear every story, and take in the memories too, how the vanished repeat themselves in the minds of the living. The telephone ringing in the early morning. The sound of feet on a certain staircase. Echoes resounding for years in the experience of each woman, each man, each child who survived.

I went to the island of Ninoshima to hear a man tell his story. He was a boy of 12 when the bomb exploded. His father had died of illness earlier in the war. With his younger brother and sister he tried to get back to their house. His mother must have died instantly there. They lived close to the center of the explosion. The great mass of those fleeing, injured severely, skin hanging from arms, legs, faces, stunned, silent, moved out of the city and toward the hills. They found themselves in a crowd walking toward Yaga, three kilometers away. Soon Ota had to be carried. He was burned over half of his body, his back, legs, arms.

When there is death, even one death, time seems to stop, as if perhaps, in stopping, the dead could be called back into life, or events could be erased before sinking irrevocably into knowledge. He did not know at what hour they finally arrived. People hovering between life and death were spread out everywhere, lying on the grass where he, too, would rest.

We sat together almost 40 years later, circling a low table, Ota; Mr. Masako, a reporter who, like me, wanted to make a record of this story; Becky, who interpreted for me, and Mr. Kikawa, director of this school, once an orphanage for children cast into a state of abandonment by the explosion of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. The island of Ninoshima had to be cleared of corpses to make way for the children, several weeks after the bombing. Years later, mass burial sites were still being discovered. “Now to speak of it,” he told us, “is almost unbelievable.”

They lay there, Ota and the others who were wounded and dying, endlessly, day after day. A list of names was posted. Each time someone died, another name was struck from the list. Many vomited blood or lost hair. Bodies were swollen. These are symptoms of radiation poisoning. Burns became infected and filled with pus. Maggots grew in the open, unhealing wounds. Ota told me he believes he survived only because his younger brother picked the maggots from his body every day. Those with no one to do this died. Because of his burns, he lay on his left side. In this way, as it healed, his ear was fixed to the back of his head, as it still is today.

How did he bear the pain? Everyone was in the same pain, he said. At times they would cry out together. The most severely injured could not cry. Over time, it was better for all of them to lie there quietly. Then, the pain was felt, not as if in one body alone, but in all bodies at once. Together they floated in a timeless element, suffused with agony, ringed with death, held in one another’s presence.

After an immeasurable period of time he was taken away into the home of strangers in the country. Here he would be cared for, for a few weeks. From that time, until the spring of the next year, when he could once more walk, he was moved from one house to another so that the burden of his care could be shared.

The day that he gained sanctuary in the countryside, he lost his brother and sister. A few years later he was able to find his brother again. He believed that his sister had died. He did not ask about her. There were so many dead, and for each the same question was held mute within, Where? Even if you have witnessed a death, this is not a question that can be answered.

Thirty-two years later, when he was a grown man and teaching children in the same school he had attended as a child, he saw a woman’s face on television. She had appeared to ask if anyone remembered her, if anyone could claim her as part of a family. She had been so young when she was separated from her two brothers that she did not know her family name. Something about her face seemed familiar to Ota. Her personal name sounded the same, but she wrote it with different characters. She did not immediately recognize him when he visited. In her infancy he was older and gone at school much of the time. She had played with her younger brother. But she remembered that she had two brothers. Slowly the pieces fell together and they were reunited.

His feeling is not easy to describe. Had only 10 years passed their meeting would have been different. He felt sorrow, happiness and confusion at once. He said his heart was filled, that he cried, and he touched his throat and said he was not able to speak.

Knowing how many years had gone, knowing both parents had died, they embraced in silence. A place of quiet had been broken into, in this reunion, as if the sharp edge of separation had only now penetrated what they had taken to be ordinary.

The dimensions of Ota’s suffering, great with the magnitude of that terrible explosion, were beyond my comprehension, except as we who sat in his presence that day were infused with this story, which found a stillness in all of us who listened. Yet still there was something in his story familiar to me. A few months earlier I, too, had found one of my family, someone who belonged to me, but whom I had never met. As that ferry made its way to Grand Manan, I questioned the woman sitting next to me. Did she live there? Had she heard of anyone bearing my family name? She pointed to a man on the other side of the cabin who sat talking with his wife. Full of apprehension, I approached him and told him who I was. “My father,” he told me, “would be able to answer your questions, and he lives just one thousand yards from where the boat docks.”

My daughter beside me in our rented car, I followed him on this short drive. Time was not passing. It had become a more flexible element. I entered the door. At the end of the narrow kitchen, sitting at a small table, sat an elderly man who looked just as my father would have looked today, had he lived. Arnold looked at me in shock, before he assembled himself into cordiality. Later, near tears, he said to me that it had seemed that his mother walked into the room when I entered.

My daughter and I sat in the living room. It reminded me of my great-aunt’s house. We were surrounded by our family, who asked and answered questions. Arnold remembered my great-aunt Alta playing the organ. His son told me where my great-uncle Wesley was buried, and promised to take me there. My sister still had a seascape he had painted on the island. My father’s brother, Roland, they told me, had stayed on the island for a while longer than my father, with another family, until someone was sent to fetch him. He was remembered better than my father. And my grandmother? Her name before she was married to my grandfather, I told them, was Ina Tatum.

“Ina Tatum.” Arnold’s wife repeated her name, and thought. Then, looking at Arnold and nodding, she said to me, “Oh, that would be Ina Benson.” She had remarried. And she was here. On the island. In a rest home. Just up the hill.

Whatever had held me in disbelief for years in this instant vanished. The air in that house, in the graveyard, in the rooms my daughter and I took by the sea, seemed sharp to breathe. As if by a magnifying glass my life was brought into focus. With this new vision, I felt strangely out of balance.

It was dark now. Waiting for the morning hours when the old-age home where my grandmother was would be open for visitors, my daughter and I ate our dinner with another cousin. Robbie, Arnold’s second son, was compiling a history of our family. Each of us had different pieces of the puzzle. Searching through his genealogical charts, I found my father’s name penciled in on the back of a page belonging to my grandmother. The writing was not in her hand but in Robbie’s. Thus she had disowned my father. Only one child was listed for her in her own hand, a daughter, born after my grandfather left the island.

Robbie and I guessed at the reasons for the rupture in my grandparents’ marriage, and why my grandmother’s children were taken from her. Was there a secret affair? A child conceived outside the bonds of marriage? For years everyone on the island has speculated. And no one knows.

That night I lay awake, shaken by how intensely now I wished to see my grandmother. I wept with a strange grief whose source eluded me and which, like Ota’s grief, was mixed with joy, an elation that seemed to move beyond what I had thought to be myself. And inside a child began to weep with bitterness that she had been disowned, not written on the page, in any hand.

Certain voices, certain names remain in the ears long after those whom they recall have died. But my grandmother did not remember my father’s name. I sat on the bed and spoke quietly to her. She was cordial to me and, after a while, asked if I worked there. Then I told her who I was.

Her mind had become ancient, part like a child, part wise, and emptied, in a certain way, of her own past. She accepted me as her granddaughter, though she could not trace the lineage. When my daughter walked into the room, my grandmother looked up to her face with eyes of joy. What she did not know, she knew in another way. The undercurrent of this knowledge held us through this day, as if an old power had risen up finally to claim us.

After some time, I asked her what she remembered. She remembered her mother and father. And Walden, my father? I drew her a chart tracing her marriage to my grandfather, the birth of her two sons, and my birth. I wrote my father’s name in large block letters for her.

I placed the drawing in her hand. She took it gently, stared at it for a while in silence, and then began to praise me for the fine job I had done. I traced the lines I had made with my finger for her, stopping to say each name. Then her eyes rested deeply on the page. For the next few moments she was silent again. My grandmother looked from me to the page and back, and finally, with tears beginning to show in her eyes, she started speaking, almost singing, again, and then again and again, my father’s name. “Walden, Walden, Walden,” she said.

How much do we know or not know in those we love? Love is, in some way, a kind of seeing through which many intricate facts are embraced. What is hidden, kept secret, cannot be loved. It exists in a place of exile, outside the realm of response.

The ferry was soon to leave. I crossed the room. I leaned toward her and then hesitated, but she pulled my face to hers, and when I kissed her, she kissed me back with a passion passed through many years, that now belonged to us both. Then she gestured to my daughter and they kissed goodby. As the ferry pulled into the bay, I walked over its deck back toward the land, and called out over widening water, silently.

What was told to me in Hiroshima I heard in a language I do not speak. Because I could not decipher sounds, I looked at gestures and expressions. A face held down, hands held up as if to ward off force. These were the truths that were mimed before my eyes. Now, looking out toward the bay I live above, I accept this silence. Argument and explanation have faded into stillness, too.

What are the words, the sounds we might whisper to ourselves in this new territory, leaf, river, this place of whistling wind, doorbell, cup, this place of ever-widening concentric circles drawn in the air above us, this strange place we have come to, and witness?