All the Lives We Ever Lived Read online

  Both architects, they spent the coming months drawing up plans. They tore down walls and put up new ones; winterized the basement and made it their bedroom. A new deck ousted the living room, and the old deck became the dining room. The garage was transformed into a studio, the empty lot to the south a garden, and every wall that faced the water became a wall of windows. We devoted our weekends that winter to supervising the renovation. A beastly wind leapt off the basin, slipping through cracks and ripping at the plastic sheets that now stood in for windows altogether. The house then was a skeleton; from the water, it looked like an architectural cross section. We wore winter coats indoors. I spent my time collecting the sawdust that drifted like snow into the corners of rooms—I liked how light and downy and dry it was—and when, come spring, the house was finally finished, I mixed this sawdust with glue, molded it in the shape of a heart, and baked it in the oven.

  That summer my parents planted an olive tree, a dogwood, a Japanese maple, and star magnolias. They put in rose bushes, honeysuckle, and a porcelain vine to soften the deck. They hoped a wisteria plant would gently envelop the trellis over the sunken yard; instead the vine grew freakishly, its weighty boughs promising to fell the structure altogether. My father vowed each summer to rip the wisteria out at its roots, and each summer my mother protested, citing the two glorious May weeks in which it shot forth its cloud of amethyst flowers. There were rolls of sod that steamed in the sunlight—my father carried them from the car, set them down on the soil, and gave them a push, unfurling each one like a long green carpet. For a few weeks they showed at the seams, but then the roots plaited together, and I could no longer tell where one piece stopped and the next began. Something similar happened inside, where the rooms at first were neat and spare: one day I looked around me and realized our expanding lives had filled the gaps. We learned quickly how bleached things become in a house on the water, how exhaustively salt and light leach color, leaving behind pale blues and yellows. The spines of books, the cork-tiled floors, the rugs and prints and bed linens—each became a cheerfully bloodless version of itself. Before my parents were finished they built a dock and then they put down a mooring of their own. There is a photograph of the three of us posing beside this hunk of chain and metal; it was the last time we would see it before sending it down to the bottom of the sea, to settle in the mud and provide a stay against the tides to come.

  The next summer—I must have been about seven—my father and I built a doll’s house. It was a pretty Victorian home with two bay windows, a wraparound verandah, and scalloped trim along the eaves, and it demanded many months of work; I can still recall the care with which we affixed each individual baluster and shingle, the tackiness of the glue we used to wallpaper the rooms. We painted the woodwork in colors reminiscent of our Boston home: dark green, slate blue, taupe, and russet red. In another photograph from that time, the half-finished doll’s house sits at the end of the dining table; through curtainless windows, you can see the lights on the far shore double in the water’s surface. My father is consumed by the application of some fixture or other, and I, wearing a flannel, rose-print nightgown, hair matted, am standing on a chair and supervising. I loved playing with that house when it was finally finished; and yet the greatest pleasure of all was in its construction, in the evenings that my father and I passed together in nearly wordless concentration.

  The divide between week and weekend was extreme then, and when I considered the difference, I thought of something he had told me when we were sailing, as our boat, Mistral, was heeling and the wind filling our throats. In Boston our lungs were black and horrible, he said, but in Rhode Island they were lovely and shiny and pink. It was an image I held on to as I went about my days—days that I filled with pointed yet purposeless tasks (paddling to nearby sand dunes; watering the rock wall moss), much as a cat will suddenly decide that now is the moment she must leap from the window and dash to the couch.

  The specter of boredom gave rise to ingenuity, I think, which is how I came to clomp down the beach in my roller skates, and make the acquaintance of a horse-shaped boulder I named Star, and build a nest beneath the billiard table, and run barefoot up and down the street; by mid-July, I could stick sewing needles deep into my heels without sensation. I loved beachcombing best, though—every day I spent hours wandering the rocky strand at the foot of the seawall, collecting sea glass, broken bits of blue-and-white china, lady’s slippers, conch shells, the forsaken skeletons of horseshoe crabs, and, once, a rusty key chain from the Stone Bridge Inn, a hotel a mile down the road that had shuttered twenty-five years earlier. When I’d gathered enough shells, my father took me to the hardware store to buy a diamond drill bit—the only tool strong enough, he said, to bore into the lady’s slippers and make a necklace for my mother. It was years before I noticed the peculiar quality of light the days here possessed, how on afternoons and evenings the house would flood with lemon heat, or how the reflection of the water outside, at once blue and gold and glittering, would throw itself against the ceiling, transforming the rooms into a string of tide pools. But from the very beginning, I felt that light within my lungs.

  * * *

  “IF LIFE HAS a base that it stands upon,” Virginia Woolf wrote in “A Sketch of the Past,” her longest and most abundant memoir, “if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills—then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory. It is of lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery at St Ives. It is of hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then breaking, one, two, one, two, behind a yellow blind….It is of lying and hearing this splash and seeing this light, and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive.” This brilliant, sea-filled nursery belonged to Talland House, the nineteenth-century home in Cornwall where Virginia, her parents, and her seven siblings spent every summer until she was thirteen. She called this recollection “the most important of all my memories,” and, much like the schism between my own childhood weeks and weekends, its radiance was in sharp contrast to her impressions of her family’s London home, a dim, narrow six-story townhouse in Kensington where “busts shrined in crimson velvet, enriched the gloom of a room naturally dark and thickly shaded,” and where, in the words of her sister Vanessa, “faces loomed out of the surrounding shade like Rembrandt portraits.”

  Talland House—its light, its cresting water—would be consecrated in Virginia’s imagination, saturating not only To the Lighthouse but also Jacob’s Room and The Waves. “To go sailing in a fishing boat,” she waxed in her late fifties, “to scrabble over the rocks and see the red and yellow anemones flourishing their antennae; or stuck like blobs of jelly to the rock; to find a small fish flapping in a pool; to pick up cowries; to look over the grammar in the dining room and see the lights changing on the bay….All together made the summer at St Ives the best beginning to life conceivable.” The tumbling passage conveys the lasting vigor of these memories; as Hermione Lee notes in her terrific biography of Woolf, Talland House “is where she sites, for the whole of her life, the idea of happiness….Happiness is always measured for her against the memory of being a child in that house.”

  When Virginia’s mother died of rheumatic fever in 1895, the Stephens’ visits to Talland House abruptly ceased. “Father instantly decided that he wished never to see St Ives again,” she recalled. “And perhaps a month later Gerald [Duckworth, Virginia’s half brother] went down alone; settled the sale of our lease to some people called Millie Dow, and St Ives vanished for ever.” Some thirty years later, this sudden, devastating break—the actual and figurative end to Virginia’s childhood—would spark the plot of To the Lighthouse, in which she transposed Cornwall’s Talland House, seemingly in its entirety, to the Hebrides, a cluster of islands off the coast of Scotland to which she had never been. (“An old creature writes to say that all my fauna and flora of the Hebrides is totally inac
curate,” she wrote to Vita, and to Vanessa: “there are no rooks, elms, or dahlias in the Hebrides; my sparrows are wrong; so are my carnations.”) This house and its story are, quite literally, at the novel’s center, as vital to it as the Ramsays and their friends; which is why, during a trip to England to celebrate my grandmother’s ninety-ninth birthday, I made a St Ives pilgrimage: I wanted to see what the Cornish landscape might teach me, not just about To the Lighthouse and its author but also about those homes by which we measure happiness.

  It was a clear afternoon in June when I boarded the train in my grandmother’s village; sipping wine, passing through Tiverton—the namesake of our Rhode Island town—I was feeling as dreamy as Virginia about the coming journey. “This time tomorrow,” she wrote in 1921, “we shall be stepping onto the platform at Penzance, sniffing the air, looking for our trap, & then—Good God!—driving off across the moors to Zennor—Why am I so incredibly & incurably romantic about Cornwall?” My train pulled in at half past eight, but the sun was still high above the houses, and I thought I could see through the gaps in the buildings the white stripe of Godrevy Lighthouse. Then, suddenly, I turned a bend and St Ives Bay unveiled itself, the same view, more or less, that causes Mrs. Ramsay to stop short, exclaiming aloud at its beauty. “For the great plateful of blue water was before her,” we first hear of the novel’s beacon, “the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst; and on the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them.” I had read those words a hundred times, and the image they had always conjured was of a seascape much nearer and brighter than this one; for here the lighthouse stood no taller than a matchstick upon its little pile of black rock, and I had to squint to see the thin green lines of land.

  But I liked this readjustment of my vision; in fact it was an enlargement, the gentle pop of a jigsaw puzzle fitting together; and then again when I took a wrong turn after dinner and the cobblestone path curved round and up to reveal a vast sandy beach, with regular waves coiling and crashing in rows of four. The last bit of light shone through between the clouds, and the water beat against the sand—I would hear it all night through my bedroom window—and I knew then what Virginia meant when she wrote, addressing Cornwall’s pull for her, of “old waves that have been breaking precisely so these thousand years,” and when she wrote, in her original notes for To the Lighthouse, that “the sea is to be heard all through it.” As much as anywhere I’ve ever been, the sea is the lifeblood of St Ives.

  The following morning, I made my way to Talland House. I didn’t have a house number, so I relied on Woolf to help me find it. “A square house,” she said, “like a child’s drawing of a house; remarkable only for its flat roof, and the crisscrossed railing.” When, at the end of a cul-de-sac, it finally materialized, I felt a stab of disappointment. Its ivory walls were streaked with rust, and a tangle of exterior metal staircases, providing access to second- and third-floor flats, crept up the rear. A Ford Focus was parked in the driveway. I was still debating my approach when a beefy young man in blue sweatpants walked out with a Rottweiler—the epitome of a Virginia Woolf fan, in other words. “Yeah?” he asked, suspicious.

  “I’m just looking at the house,” I said. “You know Virginia Woolf lived here?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Is it okay if I look around?”

  “Yeah,” he said again, gesturing toward a snarl of vegetation. “There’s a lawn round back if you like.”

  I thanked him, wondering how many seekers had appeared at his door, then plunged into the upper garden. I knew the grounds were greatly changed; much of the land had been sold off, and a parking lot replaced the orchard. But I could still see what Leslie Stephen had meant by “a garden of an acre or two all up and down hill, with quaint little terraces divided by hedges of escallonia.” A stepping-stone path led off to the left and I followed it down into a clearing with a tiny pond, hidden from the house above. My heart beat faster with the thrill of trespassing, and perhaps because this was itself a childhood feeling, I had a strong sense of how much fun it would have been to be a child in this garden, with its climbing trees and secret hollows; I thought of Cam, the Ramsays’ youngest daughter, picking flowers and tearing villain-like across the bank.

  Then, throwing off the cloak of greenery, stepping onto the main lawn, I finally met the Talland House I knew from pictures. The ivy had been stripped from its façade, and its railing replaced by an addition, but I recognized the two sets of French doors that opened onto steps leading down to the grass—there’s a photograph of Henry James perched here, reading—and, above them, the wrought iron verandahs that feature in one of Virginia’s earliest memories: her mother emerging “onto her balcony in a white dressing gown” as passion flowers spilled from the walls. All morning the scraps of text had been surfacing, all morning they had blended and echoed; the landscape had been pulling phrases out from deep within my mind, and my head was all a jumble, so that it was Mrs. Ramsay standing on the balcony in a white dressing grown, and Leslie Stephen striding back and forth along the terrace, and even my own mother, stopping, growing grayer-eyed, and saying as she looked across the basin, This is the view my husband loves. And meanwhile I had grown bolder and was peering through the French doors into the drawing room where over a century before the Stephens had sat reading while ten-year-old Virginia looked on, chin in hand, her gaze startlingly curious; and that was when I heard the gardener, crossing the lawn with a stack of severed branches in his arms.

  I apologized, explaining that I was interested in Woolf and her house, adding that I’d come all the way from America. He was in his early forties, friendly, weathered, with strawberry blond hair. “I could show you some pictures if you’re interested,” he said.

  “Oh, yes!” I said, and he raised his bundle of branches: “Let me just put these down and I’ll get them for you.”

  I looked through windows in his absence. One revealed a generous foyer, another a bedroom with a collection of dead-eyed, antique teddy bears. The door to the upstairs apartments was open, and I climbed the narrow stairs toward the attics, which in To the Lighthouse “the sun poured into,” drawing from “the long frilled strips of seaweed pinned to the wall a smell of salt and weeds, which was in the towels too, gritty with sand from bathing.” I had always loved that image—it reminded me of the light and sea smells of Rhode Island—and in fact all descriptions of the Ramsays’ home suggest a space as bleached and weathered as a rowboat, a space that even at the book’s beginning maintains only the flimsiest barrier between the family and the elements. Doors and windows are flung open; the rose-patterned wallpaper is faded and flapping. Ruined by wet, the “crazy ghosts of chairs” drag their entrails all over the floor. This encroachment by nature prefigures “Time Passes,” the novel’s middle section in which the chaos that Mrs. Ramsay has up until then succeeded at keeping at bay begins to penetrate the home. But the attics on the day of my visit were dark and dry, with clean blue carpets and bolted doors that precluded further exploration; and even the rooms facing the bay seemed unusually hermetic, as if they hailed from an altogether different book.

  The gardener came back covered in blood. “I cut myself looking for the pictures,” he said apologetically, holding up three large black-and-white photographs, or rather, photocopies of photographs, encased in rickety frames, ribboned with cobwebs, and now, slightly smeared with red. He assured me he was all right and turned the frames around to reveal their written descriptions. “Family by front door c. 1892,” read one, and another, “Adrian, Thoby, Vanessa, Virginia with dog.” I was struck by Virginia’s fidgety hands, the girls’ heavy skirts, the obvious intimacy between sisters; Virginia leans complacently against Vanessa, who looks as if she’d take a knife to anyone who crossed her strange and visionary younger sister. “You’re welcome to them,” he said, “if you can get them back to America.” Looking
closer, I saw that spiders had attached their egg sacs to the glass, but I accepted the photos gratefully and held out my hand to say good-bye. The gardener hesitated: “I’m a bit bloody, I’m afraid.” We shook with his left instead.

  Before leaving, I paused at the bottom of the lawn and looked one last time at the house. Time passes, I thought, yes, but what does that mean? To the shock and despair of all who have read To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay dies unexpectedly midway through the novel; with her gone, the Scottish property is abandoned, its light extinguished. Swallows nest in the drawing room, plaster falls from the rafters, and then, finally, there comes a tipping point, a moment at which the weight of one feather would result in the house’s total ruin. Mrs. McNab, the housekeeper, eventually intervenes to protect against collapse, but not before Woolf can offer an alternate rendition of its fate: