The Undertaker's Daughter (44 page)

Thanks to an invaluable tip from a veteran, I was fortunate to retrieve one hundred pages of my father’s medical records from the Veterans Administration. The reports and charts compiled by doctors and nurses in France, Belgium, and Germany relayed in clipped medicalese the experiences that so deeply affected my father. They told me the story of what happened to him after the battles he described, the story he withheld from his own family afterward, including my mother.

After the battle on Thanksgiving Day, my father developed a nasty tremor in his limbs. The records state that he woke up panting from nightmares, and the fear of being captured again immobilized him. On Christmas Day, he snapped.

He was suffering from battle fatigue, then diagnosed as “neurosis due to combat.” Drug abreaction was used on “neurotic” casualties, to generate intense excitement by first relaxing the patient to a highly suggestible state and then coaxing him into a frenzy in order to relive the horror and, hopefully, discharge—or abreact—the blocked emotions. Initially barbiturates were used to produce a semidrunk state, but ether was also introduced since it released a higher degree of explosive excitement compared to barbiturates. Ether was considered especially effective on hard-to-crack cases.

My father was administered ether for three days before he began five days of abreaction with sodium amytal. Abreaction was meant to be only one stage in the treatment; the narcotic therapy should be followed by a total integration, both emotionally and intellectually. Nagging feelings of survival guilt had to be dealt with, not to mention lingering rushes of fear and anger. During the abreaction, my father described screaming on the battlefield under shellfire, the terror he’d felt of being captured. He spoke of the mutilated bodies he had stumbled over and cried for the dead he’d left behind without a decent burial. He told the doctor that before Thanksgiving Day he had been as calm as anyone could be in combat. But since then, the fear had possessed him. He shook uncontrollably in a hospital far from home, and he screamed and screamed and screamed.

His breakdown and the effect of the amytal itself necessitated his evacuation to a hospital in Toul, France, for one month. He was never reassigned to his company or to the front line. Doctors
eventually ceased prescribing abreaction therapy—it seemed that reliving the trauma of the battles so soon after the experience made the men’s suffering worse.

My father was then assigned to Belgium, where he became a military policeman. When I began asking my family members to tell me their version of the day my father was shot, which occurred during his service as an MP, no two people told the same story.

The medical records clarified most of the mystery. My father had lied to all of us. The wound that eventually sent him home was inflicted on him in a civilian café in Huy, Belgium, while he was still an MP. At midnight on January 20, 1946, while attending a dance in the café with a few of his buddies, he “engaged in a fight” with a civilian, who shot him in the abdomen with a .25 German automatic pistol. The documents don’t specify whether he was on duty at this time. It is not clear whether the civilian was German or Belgian or who began the fight, what it was about, or if it had anything to do with the war or the military. No one else was shot or harmed. I can only guess and entertain strong suspicions of too much alcohol or an altercation over a woman. Or, more innocently, he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. The first two explanations would be reason enough for him to lie about the wound that eventually led to his return to the States. The third, that it was just his bad luck—not so much. The secret is ultimately his.

I am certain that those two years he spent in Europe dictated the pattern of the rest of his life. I believe he became an undertaker partially because of his experiences on the battlefield; men falling horribly injured around him, my father perhaps trying to save them but impotent to help, stumbling upon the dead and learning to walk respectfully around them, the very thing he
taught me to do. I believe his elder brother, who did not survive the war, made an indelible impression upon him when he expressed his desire to honor the fallen by becoming an undertaker. As soon as my father was healthy enough to work upon returning from Europe, he served his apprenticeship at a funeral home in Lanesboro. When he faced his first body in the embalming room, the embalmer, his mentor, pulled the sheet off the deceased. Lying on the embalming table was a man with one leg. Not having been told in advance, my father had a startling beginning to his career.

At one time I thought my father’s well-concealed alcoholism stemmed from his years in the death business. There may be some truth to that, but he also seemed strangely comfortable around death, happiest when he was busy and the funeral home was teeming with people. Only when I happened upon him when things were quiet did I find him sullen and melancholy, and the stress of the court case at the end of his life made his thirst unquenchable. There is no history of alcoholism in his family, or in ours now. With this knowledge and hindsight, it all began to make sense to me.

Jerry Melnyk, a former marine and a highly respected peer counselor, ran group therapy sessions for veterans for the Veterans Administration in Culver City, California. I met with him to try to understand more about the effects of war upon my father.

“You have right there, in just the little bit that you’ve told me, a classic case of post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s pretty obvious. He’s got everything we need for a diagnosis of PTSD. He had a life-threatening situation in battle and a breakdown. He returns home with remorse and survivor guilt. He’d be asking himself how he escaped when everyone else perished. If you are one of the fortunate ones to survive that event, you go through a
depressive state. Normally, if you have a support network, you would come out of the depression and become angry. You’re then motivated by the anger to assist your move into resolution. That’s the best scenario. There was no help at that time for veterans who came home after the war. The VA dealt with their medical disabilities, but no one ever asked them about their war experiences.”

I asked Jerry if he had any thoughts about why my father might have lied about being shot in the café.

“Of course we can never be sure, but it may be because it wasn’t honorable. It’s only honorable to be shot in battle.”

Along with the alienating and often violent behavior, alcoholism, and drug abuse that results from the repression of traumatic war experiences, my father’s behavior was a shoo-in for the “you’re either for me or against me” polarity that existed in the world of a World War II infantryman. I would hear those words echoed by my father’s eighty-four-year-old army buddy whom I tracked down in North Carolina.

At first, he laughed when I asked him about my father. “Frank had the cleanest, shiniest shoes in the entire army.” He told me my father was the kind of guy who “if he liked you, he liked you, and if he didn’t, he didn’t.” This attitude was the very thing that later led him into disagreements with Jubilee’s elite Old Clan network—especially when he knew he was right. It was also what Miss Agnes found so attractive in him, for she was very much like that herself. They stood united against perceived injustice. In letters to her dying brother she writes of putting on a smile so that the townspeople wouldn’t see the pain that lay underneath. This is exactly what my father did, and, from what I’ve learned, what so many other veterans continue to do.

I squeezed one last conversation out of my mother about life with my father before I felt the shutters close between us, a clear
sign that she’d had enough of my questions and of thinking about the past.

“Isn’t it good to be able to talk about this?” I asked her.

“Well, I just never have been one to air my troubles.”

“I know, but most people have one or two others they can talk to, just to get a little support.”

“I guess I felt like I never needed any.”

“If you had it to do all over again, would you?”

“I probably would.”

“So you also had good times with Daddy?”

“Oh, yes. There were good times. He wasn’t all bad.”

“As fathers go, he was really fun.”

“Sure he was. He didn’t mistreat anybody.”

Of course that isn’t true. He hurt her over and over. But she fought for him and won him back. She was the most faithful of all the undertaker’s women. In spite of everything, she loved him. She never remarried.

My mother lived in Jubilee for fifty years before she moved to northern Kentucky where Thomas and his family made their home. She remains a passionate bridge player.

Today, Thomas is a devoted family man who has a successful career in communications, one that couldn’t be further from the funeral business.

Jemma married an undertaker and has a daughter.

Evelyn is the only member of our family who still lives in Jubilee. One day, midlife, she checked herself into a psychiatric ward. She repeated this several times before she was diagnosed with severe bipolar disorder.

I haven’t seen Noah or Julian since high school.

Fletcher Hamilton died long ago, suddenly, and in a public place.

Rex remained in the funeral business. He continues to be a Southern gentleman of the best kind.

Whenever I passed through Jubilee, I always dropped by Belle’s house, where she fed me pecan pie and kept me informed on all manner of things. She lived into her eighties and died in her sleep.

After years of indulging my wanderlust, I settled in London with my British husband. For many years he designed and sold exquisite men’s clothing to high-profile customers, from his retail premises in London’s West End. I wish my father could have crossed the pond again to play the dandy in a more European way. It is no effort for me whatsoever to imagine him reveling in a softer cut, a finer fabric . . . wearing the kind of suit that only the Europeans have mastered. The quality of the clothes they produce would have fascinated and gladdened my peacock father.

I wish he could see and experience the London I’ve come to know. Perhaps then I could have helped him replace the vision he held of England, which, through the eyes of a terrified teenager, was only a brief stopover on his way to war, the first stage on his journey to an uncertain manhood.

And I wonder what he would have made of the London walking funeral cortege. It doesn’t occur often nowadays, but twice I’ve stood silently on a busy London street to witness a carriage drawn by horses wearing ostrich-plume headdresses. The undertaker who preceded them was dressed as if he’d raided a Victorian costume department. He strode solemnly in his black top hat, eyes straight ahead. Hanging carriage lanterns rattled in the wind, and flowers pressed against the glass sides of the carriage through which a fleeting glimpse of the coffin somehow brought me full circle. I know the sight would have stopped my father in his tracks.

Recently there’s been a
surge in people who seek to demystify death and its history and rituals. Global explorers of death come together at Death Cafés and Death Dinners in social and educational gatherings to persuade the taboo subject out of its darkness. There is a growing desire for green burials and the formation of Natural Death Centers and Societies. Collectors continue to unearth antique and historical items of mourning. Cemeteries and their exquisite monuments are being restored. In the tradition of Bram Stoker and others, vigilant artists in all mediums entertain us with the tantalizing idea of immortality. A Death Movement is out there. I participate with a curiosity and a perspective that is laced with a good dose of life. And so it comes back to my father. . . .

He could have chosen to declare the funeral home off-limits to my childhood. But he didn’t. How fortunate I was that he allowed me to follow him downstairs each day to occupy his world. He welcomed me with open arms to an environment where I learned to explore, observe, and use my imagination in the midst of death. What a generous gift it was. For when it was time to leave Jubilee, I did so with relish, wide eyes, and an eagerness to test the thumping breast of life. For that, I will always be grateful.

 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS