THE MEMORY BOX
“He had kept the box hidden for 61 years, the way he kept the memory of his mother boxed up….”
I saw little of my father when I was a girl. He had a prestigious job at Yale University. A hard worker and extremely conscientious, he was hired straight out of college to be assistant to the president, and soon after became secretary of Yale. We lived in a huge purple house on a tree-lined street among other university administrators and their families. Dad was gone before I rose and came home after I’d had dinner. At night he sat in his study signing papers, TV on, gin-and-tonic in hand, ice clinking. Sunday was the only day we ate as a family, in the austere dining room, at the formal dining table.
Many years later, in 1995, in a different house in a different state, that table is where my father spread out newspaper clippings about the tragedy that changed his life six days after he turned 16. The articles told the story of the ocean liner SS Morro Castle, which had set sail from Havana, Cuba, on September 5, 1934, and fatally caught fire off the New Jersey coast at 2:50 a.m. on September 8. In the pitch-black night, as a nor’easter raged and flames engulfed the ship and lifeboats were criminally mismanaged, many passengers, including my father, his parents and his 12-year-old brother, had no choice but to jump into the stormy sea.
I knew about the Morro Castle. My mother, in a hushed voice, out of earshot of my father, had told me about it when I was 10 or 11: the fire, the jumping, my father’s mother washing ashore dead. I was intensely curious and wanted all the details, but my mother didn’t know much because my father never talked about any of it. He literally never spoke about that night or about his mother, even when he spread those clippings on the table in 1995. He just laid them out without a word, and without a word is how my three siblings and I read them.
That’s how my family worked. We were reserved, to say the least. We stayed on the surface. No one showed anger. We rarely touched. Conversation with my father was full of uncomfortable silences. Safe topics for him were duty, good people, food. Feelings—especially negative feelings—were brushed over. Anything too close to an emotion was tucked away. When I got in trouble in my teens—for smoking pot at school, for wrecking the family car—my father didn’t even scold me. When I left home for California, at 17, he took me to the airport without a word.
After he died, just a few months after our silent reading, my mother discovered this box of crumbling, rusted keepsakes at the back of his closet. She realized immediately what it was: the coins, a brooch, the souvenirs from Cuba—they were remnants of the past that had washed ashore along with his mother. He’d kept the box hidden for 61 years, the way he kept the memory of his mother boxed up, too painful to expose. The way he kept himself boxed up.
But sometimes his box’s lid came off. On brief vacations two or three times a year, we’d stay in this or that motel, and the motel pool would turn him playful. He’d dive in and pretend to be a shark, grimacing fiercely, pinching me as I doggy-paddled away squealing with excitement and delight. He’d throw me in the air and I’d splash down overjoyed. When I think of him now, this is the father I picture, joking and smiling, the happy father. It’s ironic that water should have been the thing that brought him so to life when it was water that had taken from him the most precious life of all.
—Mary Holden Thompson
Mary Holden Thompson is writing a novel set in Paris. She has four grown children and is the founder of the Black Mountain College Museum & Arts Center in Asheville, North Carolina. She divides her time between Asheville and France.
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I feel the quiver of deep waters in this poignant story.
I may be different from others, but I think your father had to hide his emotions in order to survive. He did it to protect his family. Why grow up under the shadow of such a tragedy? There is no denying that he was a good father. I love that he does finally share his pain -- but on his timing. Thanks for sharing this wonderful tribute to him. :-)