WHAT’S IN A NECRONYM?

by Jeannie Vanasco

THE I THE NOT TRULY I

“’Tis but thy name that is my enemy.” sixteen, many years before I was born. father had asked him. “You’re not —William Shakespeare, Two other girls were in the car. Jeanne working and my daughter’s dead.” Romeo and Juliet sat between the driver and the other The judge remembered my father passenger in the front seat. The driver and let him go. I. tried to pass a car, hesitated, then tried “Did you know his first wife?” am named after the daughter to pull back into her lane. She lost con- I asked my mother. my father lost. trol and Jeanne was thrown from the “No, he was divorced long before I I remember the day I first car and killed instantly. I met him. All this happened in New learned about her. I was eight. My “Your father blames himself,” my Yor k .” father was in his chair, holding a small mother said. “He can’t talk about it.” I lived in Ohio, where my father white box. As my mother explained “Why?” I asked. and mother met. In my mind, New that he had a dead daughter named “He gave her permission to go out York was made of skyscrapers, taxi- Jeanne, pronounced the same as my t h at n i g ht .” cabs, and car accidents. name, “without an i,” he opened the After Jeanne died, my father “What did Jeanne look like?” box and looked away. Inside was a bought two burial plots next to one My mother said she had never seen medal Jeanne had received from a another, one for Jeanne and one for a photo. church “for being a good person,” my himself. When he and his first wife That spring I painted portraits of mother said. My father said nothing. divorced, she stipulated that he for- Jeanne in watercolor. I titled them I said nothing. I stared at the medal. feit his plot, and he agreed. Soon after Jeanne. My art teacher told me she was Later that day, in the basement, my the divorce, he went to court again, disappointed that such a good student mother told me Jeanne died in a car this time for beating up a bum on the could misspell her own name. From accident in New York when she was street. “Why should you be alive?” my then on, I included an i.

39

Illustrations by Tony Millionaire II. a natural consequence of high birth In their 1989 Dictionary of Supersti- ederico García Lorca insisted that rates and high infant mortality rates. tions, folklorists Iona Opie and Moira F a heightened awareness of death Ludwig van Beethoven, for exam- Tatum offer one reason for the necro- is a requirement for the artist. In his ple, had a brother named Ludwig Maria nym’s decline: many parents feared it 1933 lecture “Theory and Play of the who was born in April 1769 and lived was a murderous curse. Duende,” Lorca attempted to define for only six days. The composer was Another possible curse: the name artistic inspiration, and argued that an baptized on December 17 of the fol- haunts the child for life. artist must acknowledge mortality in lowing year and was likely born the order to produce art with duende, or day prior, given church customs in IV. intense feeling. “The duende,” he wrote, the Catholic Rhine country where he very Sunday as he entered the “won’t appear if he can’t see the possi- lived (no official record of his birth date E church where his father, Theo- bility of death, if he doesn’t know he can exists). Marketed as a musical prod- dorus, preached, Vincent van Gogh haunt death’s house, if he’s not certain igy, Beethoven often felt it necessary to passed a gravestone marked Vincent to shake those branches we all carry, prove his age. In an 1809 letter to his van Gogh. that do not bring, can never bring, friend Wegeler, he asked for his bap- The artist’s brother Vincent was consolation.” tismal certificate: “…take note of the born, and died, March 30, 1852. The The medal, her age, and the car fact that I had a brother born before artist was born March 30, 1853. I re- accident were all I knew of Jeanne, me, who was also called Ludwig, but member being sixteen years old in but those details were enough to sup- with the additional name of ‘Maria,’ the Toledo Museum of Art, staring at ply my imagination. At a state writing and who died. In order to determine his painting Houses at Auvers, when competition in junior high, I wrote a my true age, you should, therefore, first I heard a museum guide say this. story about three girls standing in line find this Ludwig. For I know that other Whether the knowledge affected van for a movie that they have no intention people, by giving out that I am older Gogh—that he shared both his name of seeing. They want to be seen. They than I really am, have been respon- and birthday with a dead sibling— choose to stand next to a movie poster sible for this error—Unfortunately remains unknown, the guide said. that shows a car crashed into a tree. I lived for a while without knowing “Does anyone have any questions?” Two of them chew gum and talk about how old I was.” he asked. boys. The other girl is thinking about “When your dad was a boy,” my My mind filled with loud, hurried her sister who died in a car accident. mother told me, “and this was long thoughts and just as suddenly emp- “Anne wants to lose herself in a movie” ago—you have to remember he lived tied, like a flock of birds scattering is the only sentence I remember. Her through the Great Depression—it wasn’t from a field. sister’s name was Annie. I titled the unheard of to name a child after a dead I was sixteen, the age Jeanne would story “i.” I received first place. relative, especially a dead child.” always be. I told myself Jeanne won. “No questions?” he said, and the tour followed him into another gallery. III. I stayed behind with Houses at Auvers. arsed from the Greek, necronym In the center of the canvas stands P literally translates as “death name.” a white house with a blue-tiled roof. It usually means a name shared with a A long stone wall climbs the canvas dead sibling. Until the late nineteenth from left to right in loose brushstrokes. century, necronyms were not uncom- I remember the gray-blue sky looked mon among Americans and Europe- numb to me. I reminded myself that ans. If a child died in infancy, his or her I was looking at the representation of a name was often given to the next child, white house. I could not open its door

40 and step inside. But when I reminded with triangle roofs, trees, our dogs I sent to you yesterday, thinking it myself that van Gogh was named and birds and ducks) that I then dis- would be a book after your own heart.” after a dead sibling,Houses at Auvers played throughout the house. He would The book he refers to is likely Lau- appeared almost three-dimensional. walk from room to room, contemplate rence Louis Félix Bungener’s Keeping Thinking of Jeanne, I left the paint- my paintings, and always say, “I want Vigil Over the Body of My Child: Three ing and carefully drove home. them all.” Days in the Life of a Father. There Bun- As I sat there at his deathbed, gener describes, in the form of a diary, V. annoyed by its irony (what was a death- how religion helped him through the y father was eighty and dying bed doing in a living room?), my father death and burial of his daughter. First M in what used to be the living opened his eyes and gasped at some published in 1863, when van Gogh was room. His bed was underneath my vision hovering above his bed. I stood ten, it is Bungener’s only book devoted to painting of a tree, a bad imitation of van before the vision, trying to block what- his daughter. For van Gogh to remember Gogh—a high-school assignment that ever it was that was frightening him, but his father reading it, and then to mention my parents had insisted on framing. he looked through me as if I didn’t exist. his own recent visit to the child’s grave, at I was eighteen and quietly reading “Dad?” I said. “Do you see me?” the age of twenty-four,­ shows his over- beside his bed. I was supposed to write I called for a hospice nurse. She and whelming sympathy for his parents’ grief. a paper about Hamlet for my Shake- my mother appeared in the doorway. That he quoted the gravestone word for speare seminar at college. “He saw something,” I told them. word, paired with his repeated use of lit- “He was a man, take him for all in The nurse said that sometimes tle, I find heartbreaking. He ends the let- all,” Hamlet says of his dead father. happens. ter, “Do not think ill of me for writing “I shall not look upon his like again.” “They see the dead,” she explained. to you as I have done, I felt the need to I would write about grief and the “Someone from their past comes to do it.” As far as I can tell, nowhere else question of madness. t h e m .” in the recovered family correspondence I knew that my father “had really Jeanne. is the dead child acknowledged. lost it” after Jeanne died, and I already An awareness of his father’s grief felt myself “really losing it,” too. At VI. clearly persisted in van Gogh. With night I tied nooses, scratched the soles recently combed through van that in mind, I researched the dates of my feet. I heard voices that told me I Gogh’s letters and was surprised to of his self-portraits and found that the I needed to die. I told no one, because find that he mentions his dead brother first surviving one was painted after his it all seemed rational: my father was in a condolence note to a former em- father’s death—as if only then could dying and so of course pieces of my ployer. In the letter, dated August 3, van Gogh become his own person. mind would die, too. He and I were 1877, van Gogh tried to comfort Her- Van Gogh went on to paint more than extremely close. Shortly after I was man Tersteeg, whose three-month- thirty self-portraits, which reveal his born, he retired from his painting job old daughter had died: “My Father has changing technique and psychological at the hospital where he and my mother also felt what you will have been feel- decline. In September 1889, while hos- met. As a child I told him, “I’m going ing these past days. I recently stood pitalized in Arles for what his doctors to be a painter like you.” early one morning in the cemetery called “acute mania with generalized “I was just a maintenance painter,” at Zundert next to the little grave on delirium,” he simultaneously painted he explained. “But you can be a great which is written: ‘Suffer the little chil- two versions of himself. In one, he is painter.” dren to come unto Me, for of such is the thin and pale against a dark violet-blue When I was a small girl, he and kingdom of God.’ More than 25 years background. In the other, he appears I played a game called “Art Museum.” have passed since he buried his first healthy against a light background. Of I painted dozens of pictures (nothing little boy there, in those days he was the portraits, van Gogh wrote to his spectacular: tall, rectangular houses moved by a book by Bungener, which brother Theo: “People say—and I’m

41 quite willing to believe it—that it’s He is buried next to van Gogh in an family overwhelmed by guilt, which difficult to know oneself—but it’s not Auvers cemetery. imposes “a conspiracy of silence.” I am easy to paint oneself either.” That same When I think about Jeanne, I see not a replacement child, according to September, van Gogh painted himself Houses at Auvers, painted the last year the precise definition of the term. Nor one last time, and gave the work, Self-­ of van Gogh’s life. did my father make me feel like one. Portrait Without Beard, to his mother He never mentioned my half sister. for her birthday. VII. If anything, I was left half-haunted. Then came another Vincent van y father is buried underneath My senior year of college, when Gogh. M a tree that looks like the one I was hospitalized for a “mixed epi- In January of 1890, Theo’s wife, Jo, I painted. When I was a child, his sode” of mania and depression (racing gave birth to a boy whom Theo named ex-wife offered him the plot next to thoughts, hallucinations, overdose), Vincent. He chose van Gogh, the boy’s Jeanne; he refused. I told doctors that my father was dead. uncle, to be godfather. “I’m making “I have a family here,” he had said. I told them that my father had lost a the wish,” Theo wrote to his brother, The last time I visited his grave, daughter named Jeanne. “that he may be as determined and as I told the dirt that as much as I thought “He added the letter i to my name,” courageous as you.” (A letter from Jo about Jeanne and how much I wanted I said. to her family, dated the previous June, to be like Jeanne, I spent more time not I tried to explain that her death at reveals that the name had been cho- thinking about Jeanne. sixteen almost destroyed him, and that sen shortly after she became pregnant: In 1964, the psychologists Albert his death was destroying me. “Theo would like ‘Vincent,’ but I don’t C. Cain and Barbara S. Cain coined “This is grief,” I said. attach much importance to names.”) the term replacement child to refer to The doctors said grief operates In a long, congratulatory reply, van a child conceived shortly after the par- differently. Gogh suggested they call the child ents have lost another child. Their arti- My father died and I was not in the Theo in memory of their father, The- cle “On Replacing a Child” describes room with him. Would Jeanne have odorus. “That would certainly give me replacement children as suffering from stayed in the room? Was she the vision so much pleasure,” van Gogh explained. neurosis or psychosis in psychiatric he saw? He then wrote to his mother: “I’d much settings. Born into an atmosphere rather that he’d called his boy after Pa, of grief, the new child is “virtually VIII. whom I’ve thought about so often these smothered by the image of the lost fter I graduated from college, days, than after me, but anyway, as it’s child,” the authors observe. “These A I moved to New York. I remem- been done now I started right away to children’s identity problems [were ber often thinking in those days: I live make a painting for him, to hang in such that] they could barely breathe not far from where Jeanne died. But their bedroom. Large branches of white as individuals with their own char- I didn’t know where she died, exactly. almond blossom against a blue sky.” acteristics and identity.” Fifteen years One Sunday afternoon, in the of- Less than six months later, at thir- later, the clinicians Robert Krell and fice of the literary magazine where ty-seven, van Gogh died from a gun- Leslie Rabkin identified three types I worked, I was editing an essay about shot wound to the chest. According to of replacement children: bound, res- the history of dissection. The essayist Theo, who remained at his brother’s urrected, and haunted. The parents wrote that the English physician Wil- bedside until the end, the artist’s last of a “bound” child may be overpro- liam Harvey dissected the bodies of words were“La tristesse durera toujo- tective physically, but remain emo- his father and sister. At that moment urs” (“The sadness will last forever”). tionally distant in preparation for I felt as if a gust of wind had opened a Theo suffered from syphilis, and after another loss. A “resurrected” child is heavy door. I thought of my father and his brother’s death his health declined treated as a reincarnation of the dead Jeanne. What did his body look like in- rapidly. Six months later, Theo died. sibling. A “haunted” child lives in a side his coffin? What had Jeanne ever

42 looked like? I went online and searched IX. In his 1963 painting Portrait of for “Jeanne Vanasco.” The page of re- alvador Dalí died from gastro- My Dead Brother, Dalí constructed sults asked, “Did you mean Jeannie Va- S enteritis at the age of one year a composite portrait of himself and nasco?” I scrolled down to a link for and nine months. Nine months and his brother with a matrix of dark and her high-school memorial page and ten days later, the artist Salvador Dalí light cherries, where the dark cher- clicked. Someone had posted Jeanne’s was born. ries form the dead Salvador and the photograph. For the first time, I could “I deeply experienced the per­sistence light cherries the living one. His deci- see her face. I tried to enlarge it, but she of his presence as both a trauma—a kind sion to merge his face with his broth- only became more difficult to see: dark, of alienation of affections—and a sense er’s reflects his father’s grief: “When wavy hair cut above her shoulders, head of being outdone,” Dalí writes in his he looked at me, he was seeing my turned slightly to the left, a pearl neck- memoir, Maniac Eyeball: The Unspeak- double as much as myself. I was in lace. I stared at the photograph as if able Confessions of Salvador Dalí. his eyes but half of my person, one looking at her for long enough might Dalí famously exaggerated the facts being too much.” Dalí depicted his allow me to enter the mind and body of of his life, and yet as someone named brother as seven years old, an age his the girl whose death almost destroyed after a dead child, I believe him when brother never reached. In his mem- my father. A week later I was hospi- he says, “I lived through my death oir, Dalí writes, “At the age of seven talized again, for a “mixed dysphoric before living my life.” my brother died of meningitis, three state.” Was it possible that I was grieving He often recalled a childhood visit years before I was born.” Jeanne? But how do you grieve some- to his older brother’s grave, where Maybe he lied unintentionally at one you have never met? his parents allegedly told him that first, but later he still refused to admit “He didn’t even want you to know he was their first son’s reincarna- that he was born nine months after his about Jeanne,” my mother told me. “He tion. They kept in their bedroom, he brother died. Even after Luis Romero thought you might think he compared claimed, a retouched photograph of published a book about Dalí, with you with her, and he didn’t. He simply the dead child. The “majestic picture,” Dalí’s help, that revealed when Dalí’s saw the name as a sign of respect. He he said, hung next to a reproduction brother was born and died, Dalí main- spoke to a priest about the matter, and of Velázquez’s painting of Christ’s cru- tained that his namesake had lived the priest encouraged him to name you cifixion: “the Saviour whom Salvador seven years. I can understand the psy- after her, provided he never compared had without question gone to in his chological need for that distance. And you. ‘I would never do that,’ your father angelic ascension conditioned in me an I can understand Dalí’s need to merge replied. I thought you should know. archetype born of four Salvadors who the image of his face with that of his I didn’t want you to learn about her cadaverized me.” The four Salvadors: brother’s. When I painted myself in some other way. I thought you should Dalí’s father, Dalí’s brother, Dalí, and grade school, I pretended that I was hear about her from us.” Jesus (“savior” in Spanish translates to painting Jeanne. I wanted to make I hope my father never knew salvador). “The more so I turned into myself Jeanne. I wanted to be her for why I studied as hard as I did, why a mirror image of my dead brother.” my father. Of course Dalí needed to I researched the lives of the saints Dalí felt his name transformed him paint Portrait of My Dead Brother. (I wanted a medal from a church), into a lifeless skeleton. In the lower left corner of the paint- why I sat before my bedroom mirror ing, he reproduced the scene from with a notebook and documented my Jean-François Millet’s painting The appearance and what exactly I needed Angelus, in which a man and a woman to fix. I needed to be a smart, kind, recite a prayer over a basket of potatoes. beautiful daughter. A potato fork, sacks, and a wheelbar- I tried not to hear her name when row are strewn around them. In The he said my own. Tragic Myth of Millet’s Angelus, his 1934

43 book devoted solely to The Angelus, I learned that she had died March 2, ‘It’s just a hard day,’ he said. That was in Dalí argues that the peasant mother 1961, twenty-three years and seven April or May. I took that to mean it was killed her son and anticipates being days before I was born. Jeanne’s birthday. You kept crying, but sodomized by her husband before she The more I found out about Jeanne, your father refused to put you down. He cannibalizes him. the more I found myself slipping into was terrified you would hurt yourself.” When Millet completed the paint- some strange state. I lost control of my The morning after that phone call, ing, in 1857, he painted a man and neck and arms and voice. I repeated, I was hospitalized for a “mixed dys- woman praying over a dark coffin-like “Jeannie’s going to die. Jeanne’s dead.” phoric state with psychotic features.” shape. In 1859, after the American who I contacted the cemetery where she “Get into the ground, Jeannie” is commissioned the painting declined was buried. I asked about the plot next what I heard. to take it, Millet painted a basket of to hers, if it still belonged to my father. “Stop,” I told the voices. potatoes over what Dalí insisted was a “Your father bought it, so it belongs But to those around me, I was small coffin (a 1963 X-ray of the paint- to him,” the cemetery worker said. talking to air. ing vaguely supports his argument). “If he’s dead—” I began. “My father died,” I explained to my Not all art historians agree about I said that my father chose to be doctors in the hospital. the coffin’s presence, but they do agree buried in Ohio. Like the doctors before them, they that Dalí’s inclusion of The Angelus in “Did he leave it to anyone in his asked: “When?” his own painting acts as a metaphor will?” “Ten years ago,” I said, “and I visited for his parents’ overwhelming grief for “Not specifically,” I said. “He wanted Jeanne’s grave on the ten-year anniver- their firstborn. everything of his to go to me.” sary of his death.” “That painting by Millet,” van “Then it belongs to you.” “Jeanne?” they asked. Gogh wrote to Theo about The Ange- Next I visited her grave. There, on I tried to explain that I was named lus, “that’s magnificent, that’s poetry.” the gray granite headstone, was an after a dead half sister. I tried to explain Van Gogh reproduced the work in engraved image of the Virgin Mary. the letter i in my name. I felt hot tears 1880 and titled the result The Ange- The Virgin’s eyes looked down toward running down my face. I was held at lus (after Millet). Did he see a connec- Jeanne’s name, which was almost ob- the hospital for a month. tion between the incarnation and his scured by leaves. The shadow of two Before my release, my doctors in- own birth? Did he see a child’s coffin? blank maple trunks cut across the sisted I had to stop researching Jeanne, Neither van Gogh nor Dalí had empty patch of land beside the grave— but stopping felt impossible. I returned children. land that I now owned. to the hospital three more times. I called my mother. Without men- For now, I am done with Jeanne. X. tioning my trip to Jeanne’s hometown, Kristina Schellinski, a Jungian ana- urrounding the ten-year anniver- I asked if my father had ever said any- lyst and self-declared “replacement S sary of my father’s death, I stopped thing more about Jeanne. child,” writes in her 2009 article “Life researching necronyms and started “When you were a little girl just After Death: The Replacement Child’s searching for details about Jeanne. learning to walk,” she said, “our neigh- Search for Self” that guilt may arise I found her childhood address bor Sheila calls me at the hospital. I was from “the fact that the ‘I’ is not truly ‘I,’ and toured what had been her home. still working there, in medical records. that the replacement child is not free to I interviewed one of her classmates Your father was at home with you. ‘Bar- live his or her own life, and may there- and neighbors. I met one of her high- bara,’ Sheila says, ‘you better get home. fore feel a sense of guilt towards his or school friends. Terry is pacing around the backyard, her own self realization.” “You look so much like Jeanne it weeping and holding Jeannie. He won’t Is that why my father added an i to takes my breath away,” her friend told put her down.’ So I went home and gen- my name? To remind me that I was my me. tly asked your dad what was happening. own person? O

44