by Andrew Cominelli
In early 2021, I write a short piece of fiction based on a real-life suicide. In the story, a mother and her middle-aged daughter sit at a table, mostly in silence four decades after the tragic death occurred. The story is about their inability to talk about the dead boy, a brother and son.
“They never even say his name,” the story says.
In this fiction, the daughter does not remember anything about the day her brother died. She was too young, a toddler, when it happened. She sits in silence, wondering where in the house her brother might have killed himself and how.
I revise the story while doing laundry at a friend’s house one day. I ask my friend, Harriet, to print it for me.
“What is this about?” Harriet asks, handing me the printout. She has read it. “Is this based on anything?”
* * *
Jeff Mangum sings, in the Neutral Milk Hotel song “Oh, Comely”:
I know they buried her body with others
Her sister and mother
And five hundred families.
And will she remember me,
Fifty years later?
I wish I could save her in some sort of time machine.
He is singing about Anne Frank. In interviews, Mangum says his discovery of Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl inspired his record, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. He’d been ignorant of Frank and her famous story before happening upon the diary in a secondhand store. The book left him “completely flipped-out” and sparked an obsession that would appear in the music.
“I would go to bed every night and have dreams about having a time machine,” Mangum says in one interview. “And somehow, I’d have the ability to move through time and space freely and save Anne Frank.”
Anne Frank appears on song after song of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea as a spirit with “roses in her eyes” and “wings in her spine” as a “ghost all around” the speaker.
There are few comparisons to draw between my Uncle Daniel and Anne Frank. The circumstances of their lives and deaths are completely different. But the record comes to mean very much to me in 2021. I discover the twenty-three-year-old album just when I need to, just as Daniel’s ghost begins to swirl around me. Mangum’s imagery of time-traveling rescue missions begins to inform strange new dreams and desires. What he sings in lament of his lost spirit, I could sing of my uncle, almost every word applies. For me, the whole album is about Daniel: the dead fifteen-year-old that I never knew, whose presence now seems to gather at the edges of me and penetrate the border between life and death.
* * *
As a kid, I knew him as a name on the headstone that he shares with my grandfather, his father. I knew that my uncle died when he was fifteen, and I remember being young enough to lack any sense of the tragedy implied by that fact. Fifteen, seventeen, twenty: at one point, these ages belonged to the monolithic realm of adulthood, so far off to me that they might have been perfectly natural, normal ages at which to die.
Danny’s headstone is engraved with etchings alluding to boyish activities: a camping tent and a baseball glove with a pair of bats crossed in an X behind it.
Throughout my childhood his name came up now and then, always in solemn tones. The weight his name carried grew as I grew; the silence surrounding it became louder.
On July 3, 2006, my mother forbids me from going to my high school girlfriend’s house. I am to stay home and have Sunday dinner with my family.
When I protest, things take a turn: My mother’s voice rises in pitch, trembles.
“Today is the day my brother died.” She says, tears welling in her eyes. All my teenage impulses to argue on behalf of my right to socialize falter in the face of her sudden outburst.
I stay home; I have dinner with my family. But my mother’s plea for me to stay proves to be the only time her brother is mentioned all day.
Our families teach us how to speak; they also teach us complex and layered techniques of silence. At some point, we grow old enough to understand that this silence is gravid with the past. That this vacuum of talk is in fact replete—with old wounds, persisting grievances, dead children.
Only once does my grandmother discuss him with me. She almost never spoke of Danny, and I knew well enough not to bring him up. It is 2013. I’m visiting her at her house in Bridgeport: one of many afternoons we spend together at her kitchen table. During these visits, I want to talk about her past, to know the shape of her life. She is a lively talker, a funny storyteller, and always obliges my interest by divulging her memories.
At some point, she mentions Danny, and I somehow summon the nerve to ask her how he died.
“Oh,” she says. “He took his own life.”
Silence descends. I didn’t know. But the conversation ends here; I am not equipped to ask more questions.
I never ask her anything more about him. She dies in January of 2018.
* * *
On March 3, 2021, a few days after she’s read my short story, Harriet emails me:
Dear Andrew,
I found some information about Daniel in the newspaper archives.
If you want to see the articles I’ll email them to you. Sometimes,
we prefer to leave the past in the hazy ether of the past. It seems best
to ask first rather than hit send without some contemplation.
Harriet has had careers as a journalist and as a historic preservationist; it’s her instinct to look deeper into every new bit of information that comes her way, so this sort of digging is not unusual.
I tell her to go ahead and send me what she’s found.
In her response, she attaches a scanned news report from the Bridgeport Telegraph, dated Sunday, July 4, 1966:
* * *
It is intense to know that it is always there, a latent world of archival text, housing facts that, if uncovered, might change us in ways we cannot fathom. It is intense to know that history lies in wait for its chance to surge forth: reanimated, active, aggressively taking its way. The past is not even close to past but instead somehow encloses and conditions the present moment. I know this now. At certain junctures, a portal can open; the past rushes through it, reorganizing things we’d believed to be stable.
John Ashbery writes of a hidden, unexamined past in his poem, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”:
It may be that another life is stocked there
In the recesses no one knew of; that it,
Not we, are the change; that we are in fact it
If we could get back to it, relive some of the way
It looked…
The old newspaper clipping adds detail to “the way it looked.” In addition to the headstone engravings, and the years of solemn silence attached to his name, is the date of Danny’s death: July 3, a sweltering day in Bridgeport, with a high of ninety-nine degrees according to archival weather data. There is the unsettling, journalistically irresponsible phrase, “the boy was despondent over domestic difficulties.” There is the lurid imagery of the hanging, the special quality all suicides have to inspire our morbid speculation: the lonely decisiveness that carries him to his final moments, the practical details, the mundane trip-ups. I still know almost nothing about this person, this boy who killed himself twenty-three years before he could become my uncle. But the news clipping offers new images, enlivens him with tragic details; it allows me, in Ashbery’s phrase, to “relive some of the way it looked.”
Suddenly, Daniel is more real and more important to me than ever before.
And soon, he is alive to me.
I mean this literally.
* * *
What disturbs me most, at first, about the 1966 report of Danny’s death is the address given: 33 Eastwood Road.
I knew that my mother’s family lived elsewhere in Bridgeport, early in her life: a house on William Street. Years ago, I constructed my own version of the history: Danny killed himself when they lived on William Street, so they must have moved to 33 Eastwood Road shortly after his death as a means of starting over after such a punishing event.
The news clipping obliterates this assumption: Danny hanged himself in the cellar at 33 Eastwood Road. This was the cellar that I would run down into, as a kid, to retrieve a Wiffle ball and bat to play with in my grandmother’s backyard. This was the cellar my grandmother did her laundry in until my brother and our uncle, Danny’s older brother, conspired in 2017 to put a bolt high up on the cellar door to prevent her from risking her ninety-two-year-old frame on the stairs. Here, here, in the house where her second son killed himself, is where my grandmother hosted decades’ worth of our Thanksgivings, Christmases, Easters. I grew up at 33 Eastwood Road almost as much as I did at my parents’ house. Countless sleepovers at my grandparents’ house when I was very young; frequent visits to grandma when I was old enough to drive, when she’d insist on plunking a frozen hamburger into a pan no matter how many times I said I wasn’t hungry, when we sat talking of her childhood in Canada, of the horse-drawn sleigh her father drove through the snow, of the walk through a blizzard with a memorably handsome soldier before she met my grandfather. When I return to them in my mind, the rooms of the house at 33 Eastwood Road glow softly, the walls seem to rise up impossibly high around me, and my senses again rush toward the comfort and quiet closeness which one perhaps only associates with the lost scenery of one’s earliest years. The kitchen and its faded linoleum, the TV running in the den whether anyone was in there or not, the backyard layered with autumn leaves and the front stoop from which my much younger self stares out at the road in a thirty-year-old photograph that has adorned my fridge for many years. The tea-colored band of sunlight slanting into the cellar through a small window, one Sunday morning.
My grandfather went on living at 33 Eastwood Road until his death in February, 1995. It works out to 10,441 days of calling the house where his child killed himself home. My grandmother lived there until leaving for a nursing home in August 2017, at the age of ninety-two: over fifty years, and well over 18,000 days since July 3, 1966.
* * *
In the short story I wrote, before I saw the news report, the mother and the daughter are versions of my grandmother and my mother, respectively. They sit at the table on the anniversary of the boy’s death. The mother talks about the mundane goings-on of her week, while the daughter anxiously imagines how it happened, where it happened. The daughter sits in silence, wanting very badly to know more, but, frustratingly, she is unable to ask—the decades of silence are too thick for her to penetrate.
My mother will tell me, months after I try to dramatize this familial silence, that one of the worst aspects of Daniel’s death was that they never spoke about him. She was sent to a neighbor’s house for the funeral. When it was over, they all tried to go back to normal. It was like he never existed, she will say. Not until her thirties did she talk about it with a therapist. Not until much more recently did she become comfortable even bringing up her second-oldest brother in conversations with friends.
She will tell me how my grandmother seemed angry at her dead son. How she would pounce upon any mention of Danny, pre-empting any ensuing conversation with the customary silence. How one day, in her early nineties, she stood over his headstone, shook her head, and said, “I just don’t know why he had to go and do that.”
Back to 2013. Not long after my grandmother tells me Daniel “took his own life.” She also mentions a poem my grandfather wrote after Danny’s death. She still has it, “somewhere,” she says.
I tell her I’d love to read it.
The next time I see her, she gives me a handwritten copy of the poem, two lined pages filled with her flowing cursive. I read it when I get home. It is the saddest thing I’ve ever read; I begin to cry within the first lines. The sadness is compounded by the knowledge of my grandfather writing it in 1966, by the knowledge of my grandmother keeping the poem locked away for almost half a century before faithfully copying every word down in 2013. Now, in 2021, the sadness compounds again: she sat alone in that house, alone in 33 Eastwood Road, transcribing the poem for her grandson, who would cry in secret to read it, who would show it to no one else.
* * *
Who was he?
He was the only one of my mother’s siblings who had red hair like hers, the same pale skin, the freckles. In the one photo of him I have, I see my mother’s nose, her overbite, on Daniel’s face. Mangum sings, “Brother, see, we are one and the same.”
In the photo he wears a white dress shirt to match his father’s. They stand shoulder to shoulder, filial. It is hard for me, impossible, to look at the photo without speculating upon all they might have been to each other. Upon the bond between them, a fine interlacing of love and pain. How it came undone one day, and how they would lay in neighboring graves. Both of them are tieless here, the buttons of their collars undone as though they’ve just returned from someplace formal and are home now at 33 Eastwood Road and able to unwind. Daniel stands beside his father, thin and gawky, his hands tucked into his pockets. He looks right into the camera, his head tilted. I can stare at the photo forever, into the deep-set eyes that say everything, that say nothing. I can read anything into them. On visits to the cemetery, we used to stand for a silent moment on my grandpa’s side of the headstone, then round the stone and do the same for Daniel. So now, I look from Daniel’s face to my grandfather’s, the latter captured in a moment of profound contentment, as though he’s never been happier than to be standing here beside his son, in matching shirts.
As I look at these faces, the possibility for meaning in them expands to include everything, and then shrinks down to nothing, in a repeating cycle. Who was he? Fifteen years old and the idea maybe twitching already behind those eyes, his own death soon to be articulated by the hands so harmlessly tucked into those pockets. Who was he?
The lyric continues, “Brother, see, we are one and the same, and you left with your head filled with flames.”
* * *
Unlike her fictional analog in my short story, my mother does remember the day her brother died.
It is July 2021. I am home visiting my family; for the first time in over a week, my mother and I have a few hours alone. On some celebratory whim, we drink mimosas and eat breakfast in front of the television.
I fight through my trepidation and take this chance to tell her what I’ve found out about her brother. I tell her that I’ve read the news report, the obituary. That I know, as of three months ago, how he died, and where. I tell her it feels wrong to know these things without her knowing that I know them. I tell her I feel like he’s part of my life, present somehow.
“I remember that day,” she says.
She was about five and a half years old on July 3, 1966. She remembers going to the beach that day with her mother and her sister, who was twelve at the time. She remembers running into Danny’s bedroom, excited and five-years-old, to ask if he’d come with them. She remembers his sullen way of responding to her. In her memory, she tells me, it is only the moody attitude of a teenager that keeps him home that day—nothing any less ordinary.
It is July of 2021. Here is my mother, now sixty, telling me how they came back from the beach that day. She was five; her sister was twelve. How, curious as to their brother’s whereabouts, they both went down the stairs looking for him.
We are both crying as she tells it. This single, devastating moment from her past overtakes us as a clear memory for her, as a feeble approximation for me. That my mother, at age five, found her brother hanging in a cellar is too much to take in. This horrific moment in time seems loosed from its 1966 origin point to race forward through time, speeding like a sunrise over her whole life’s landscape, recoloring all that I know of this woman who has loved and fought and feared for me my entire life.
* * *
In “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” Ashbery describes being intensely moved by a painting, just as the museum is closing. The poem’s speaker has to detach himself, to shuffle back out with the other museumgoers and onto the street. The truth, briefly apprehended, passes with the moment. “You can’t live there,” Ashbery says.
And yet, even as time pulls us forward, yanks us away from our life’s key moments, these moments are somehow absorbed into us; they remain as a shaping force, as forms that “prolong us.”
“Something like living occurs,” Ashbery writes, “a movement / Out of the dream into its codification.”
A revised past, perhaps a dream of the past as only I can dream it, codes itself into my present. I become obsessed with Daniel in 2021. My grandmother stares grimly into a headstone in 2016. My mother walks down cellar steps in 1966.
All of it is also happening right now, as I write this. Each of these moments connects, blends, travels from its respective origin to find its home right here, in the present.
At the end of 2021, I’m home again for Christmas. Driving through Bridgeport, I make a detour.
I have not seen 33 Eastwood Road since my grandmother still lived there, in 2017. I pull the car over, keep the engine running. The house’s new occupants have lined the front walk with tinsel candy canes.
Though I went out of my way, I don’t spend much time here: to do so now feels pointless. But I pause to look at the basement window, inset in the foundation of the house, at ground level. It’s the first time I look at this window with the knowledge of what happened in the basement that day.
Ashbery writes, “If we could get back to it, relive some of the way/ It looked.”—yes, some of the way it looked. Only the way it looked, and never the way it was. Because to commune with the dead is an aesthetic pursuit, an arrangement of details into something like a story, though riddled with inaccuracies that generates the feelings that only you, and never your dead, can feel. One can never go back, but one can dream, in the present, of what it looked like. My desire to save my uncle has nothing to do with my uncle, who lived for only fifteen years and died in 1966, almost a quarter century before I was born. He didn’t know me, he had no concept of me. I had no role in his life.
But it’s also the case that he’s with me right now. It is the case that I wish, somehow, to save him.
* * *
In moments this other reality, one with different temporal rules, makes flickering intrusions into this one.
In late 2021, I walk through my neighborhood. I have just sent in my last assignment for the present grad school semester, a paper on “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” Now I’m enjoying the first minutes of the winter break, the first release from a marathon week of writing and revising.
As I walk, I listen to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. In the album’s last song Mangum sings: “In my dreams, you’re alive and you’re crying.” I start crying.
The desire to save Daniel is intense enough to birth truly surreal moments, moments in which I feel it is possible to go back. In these flashes I believe wholeheartedly, just for an instant, that some miracle can occur, that the portal can open in the opposite direction. Because I can see Daniel sitting on his bed, waiting. I know this room. I know the way the morning light streamed into it, through the two windows: one facing north, one facing west. Eastwood Road. How through the western window the backyard would have seethed greenly in the July heat, how the tall trees that marked the property line would have loomed in that swelter. Ninety-nine degrees was the high. How he might have sat on the edge of the bed, the decision already made. How he would wait for the noise to settle, his little sisters shouting their beach-day excitement, his mother herding the girls out the front door. The door closes, clicks. He sits on the edge of the bed with his mind made up. This is how I see him: on the edge of the bed, his palms flat on his thighs. Rigid. Poised. He listens as the car starts up, idles, backs out of the driveway. He listens as it roars off down the street, beach-bound, listens as the sound of the car is swallowed up again into the silence of Eastwood Road. The silence is what he’s been listening for.
It is July 3, 1966. A Sunday.
Daniel is alone in the house now.
I walk into the room.
Andrew Cominelli’s writing has appeared in Guernica Magazine, the Barcelona Review, Quarterly West, and was included on Wigleaf’s 2024 Top 50 Longlist. He is working on a novel, an excerpt of which was awarded the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society’s prize for Best Novel-in-Progress in 2023.