Memoir From Antproof Case (50 page)

It stopped briefly about a hundred and fifty yards north of us, and in the failing light we thought we saw two figures jump from the viewing platform. Why wasn't the locomotive numbered? The switchmen were of the opinion that it had been, but that they'd missed it through some combination of ineptitude, accident, or a trick of the light.

"But I saw the initials on the side of the private car," I said proudly.

"You did?"

"Yes."

"What were they?"

Though I was not tall enough to stand behind the desk and see completely over the windowsill, I had seen, in strange, modernistic lettering, the initials
F.P.F.

Only later did the chief of Ossining's detectives (of which, as I have said, he was the only one) go through the social registers looking for
F.P.F.S
, and he came out with quite a few—Franklin P. Fellows, F. Paterson Ford, Farley Peter Fainsod, and others, all of whom could account not only for their whereabouts that evening, but, more importantly, for the whereabouts of their railroad cars, if, indeed, they owned railroad cars.

It was not the detective but the reporter from the local newspaper who shed the most early light on the crime. The detective took plaster casts of footprints (he was very thorough, but even I knew that my parents had not been murdered by a deer), queried railroad workers about the trains that went through that
evening (ten days later, they had no recollection, as most people would not), and analyzed the characteristics of the bullets, the method of execution, etc. I speak of all this in worldly terms and as if I were a stranger, but as I do I feel the deepest longing for my parents, whom I see in memory as I last saw them, silenced and still.

Unlike the detective, the newspaper reporter was interested in motive. Did my father owe a debt? Neither my uncle nor I were aware of one. Was it something that had arisen from the past? From the war? We did not know. The reporter, however, had a theory—a theory that could be neither proved nor disproved. He was a man who looked much like Theodore Roosevelt, only he hadn't come very far along and he was accustomed to being deferential, as he was often sent to ask questions of people who had just had great success, or who were long accustomed to having their way.

I was hardly one of those people, but he was interested in my story because I was just old enough to keep everything in memory so vividly for the rest of my life that my life would never be my own, no matter how hard I struggled, no matter what I did.

So, at one point—I don't remember when—he took me in his arms when I was crying and could not be consoled, and after a minute or two he put me up on the window ledge and looked at me with astonishing urgency.

"Stop your crying for just a minute and listen," he said gently. "We may never find the murderers of your parents. If the two men who did it, did, in fact, jump from the private car, they were just henchmen, and the question is, who sent them? To know who, we need to know why, and no one can come up with anything. But I have a theory. Though it has no basis in fact, I can't stop thinking about it. I turn it over in my mind again and again. Only God knows if it's true, and He can keep people in the dark forever if He wants. For the past year I've been hearing a rumor that someone—a syndicate, perhaps—wants to build a bridge across the Hudson somewhere around here, and that the value of the land between the road and the river will go up.

"Not all the land ... only where the bridge would come in. Do you have any memory of anyone asking your father if he would sell his farm?"

I had no such memory. If it had happened, I had not known of it. Perhaps, if it had happened, my father and mother had talked of it privately for months, not wanting to upset me. Children don't like to move. Or perhaps my father had kept it to himself.

"You should ask my uncle," I said.

"I've already asked him and everyone else. Think hard."

"No," I said. "He never said that anyone wanted to buy our land."

"We'll have to wait, then. We'll see if someone approaches the estate."

I didn't know what he meant by estate, but he explained.

A year after the estate was dissolved into a trust that had been established for my benefit, my uncle, who was the trustee and who had leased our fields to several neighboring farmers, was approached by a man who said he represented a party interested in purchasing the property. My uncle broached this at one of the near-silent, sad dinners we had after I came to live with him and his wife. I was not a normal child, and no one expected me to be. I spent most of my time alone, and for a long period I said almost nothing: I hurt too much. And when everyone had forgotten what had happened to me, they resented my demeanor and my silence, and then they hated me for it, which hurt even
more, but what could I do? I had a lifelong task, next to which the idea of being liked seemed completely unimportant.

At that particular dinner I had been drinking from a lead-crystal glass, and we were having roast chicken. Used to my alternating outbursts and silences, my uncle, who loved me in his way, nervously, optimistically, and completely innocently announced that a man had inquired if the land were for sale.

All at once I slammed down the glass, tensed my muscles, clenched my fists, and felt my hair stand on end. "Who?!" I shouted, tears coming to my eyes.

"I don't know," my uncle said, startled.

"Who!" I screamed. This was the first time I overturned a table. I loved my uncle: I didn't mean to overturn the table.

I went nearly mad for days, until we knew. I had plans for having every policeman in the state of New York skulk behind the staircase when this gentleman came to call. I tried to build a prison in the root cellar, there to hold and torture him until he revealed the name of his employer. Although I realized that if I killed him I would never know who had sent him, I polished up my single-barrel 20-gauge shotgun until it shone like a piece of Homeric armor. I even polished the shells, and spent hours in mock loading, pointing, and threatening, all in front of an oval mirror in which my mother had once checked her hat and the fall of her cape or coat.

When my uncle found two flat chunks of wood nailed with bent penny spikes into the posts of the root cellar, he called me to explain what they were. A clothesline that had been tied weakly around the bent penny spikes had been intended as manacles. "Why don't we just wait to see what he says?" my uncle asked.

The man whom I was going to put in my dungeon was a miniature old white-haired fellow named Smith. Apart from being as dapper as an ant, he was not distinguished in any way. He had no accent and spoke in no dialect. He did not speak with his hands, or express emotion or enthusiasm. I was sure that behind him stood the murderers of my parents.

He was inquiring, he said, in behalf of the Dominican Sisters of the Sick and Poor. At every stage, I expected that this would be exposed for the mere cover story that I assumed it had to be. When the mother superior came to discuss with my uncle the provision that allowed us to retain farming rights to the land until 1930, I pegged her for an actress and a con woman. When the papers were finally signed, I thought they were a fraud. When the abbey began to rise, I waited for it to become a toll booth. And when the nuns moved in, I assumed that it was all a trick, that they would soon turn around and sell to the tycoon who wanted to build a bridge. But the Dominican Sisters of the Sick and Poor stayed and stayed, and even as I flew on my Newfoundland run, I passed over the abbey, surrounded by fields that were still beautiful and of which I knew every contour, and there, in a ragged glen, I saw my house. It looked like a brick sugar cube, a model that would come with a Swiss train set. In all those years, the trees had grown, but the slate and brick had remained unchanged. Though I could not see the inevitable alteration of detail that, were I ever to go back, would break my heart yet again, it was easy to imagine.

 

When the two figures jumped from the railroad car it wasn't dark, but the sun was low in the sky, its weakening glare filtered through the trees of Teller's Point. The result was a broken pattern that with fading daylight and the background of trees near the rail bed made whatever happened pure shadow.

We had never seen anyone leave a train along this stretch of track, other than train crew hopping on and off. It was exciting
and mysterious to see the shapes drawn into the summer shadows like barely perceptible puffs of smoke. No doubt the birds up the track had been silenced, but we still heard the din of a golden summer evening.

I left at a few minutes before eight and started to make my way home. By the time I approached our field nearest the river I had forgotten the mystery and begun to think about dinner.

But as soon as I burst from the woods I stopped dead. Just at the edge of the field, twenty yards to my left, two men were standing, looking at the house.

I walked toward them, and when I was close I said, too proudly, "This is private property."

"We're sorry," said one. "We're just trying to get to the road. We're tired and hungry."

"Oh," I said.

"I hope we don't have to go back to the tracks. Can we just go through to the road?"

They were dressed for the city—suits, vests, hats, watch chains. It would have been cruel, I thought, to make them march around in the swamp, so I said it was okay for them to pass through to the road.

They were the kind of men who are in terrible health but who by size and weight alone are ten times more powerful than they look, and, perhaps because they were so big, their exaggerated gratitude seemed fitting and, somehow, sincere.

"That's very kind of you," one of them said. "You know the area, don't you? And you're fast: you're a kid. Would you mind running into town to get us something to eat? We've been traveling since yesterday, all the way from Indiana, and we're very hungry."

"I can't do that," I said. "I have to have dinner." I thought it strange that they had been traveling from Indiana, because they had New York accents, they were dressed like Chelsea saloon rats, and their train had come from the direction of the city.

"It would take only a few minutes, and it would really help us."

I shook my head. I was getting uncomfortable, even frightened. I wanted just to run toward the house.

"I'll tell you what," said the one who was doing the talking. "All we need is something to get us going. Is there a place nearby where you can get coffee?"

"Yah," I told him, although it wasn't really nearby.

"Well here then," the talker said, pulling something out of his pocket. "Take this."

He held out a twenty-dollar gold piece. My father tried to save these, and hardly ever could. I understood what it was worth, how hard it was to get, and how harder still it was to hold. I took it.

"And here's two bits," he added, "so's you don't have to break the coin when you get the coffee."

Over the years, many people have told me that I was blameless. I was not even ten years of age. How could I have known what was to happen? But as I ran to buy the coffee, I felt guilt and sorrow. I was hoping that I could do everything quickly enough to freeze the danger in place. If I could do it in a dash, duck out, and hurry back, everything would be all right.

I ran so fast to the Highland Café that when I arrived I was too winded to speak. And yet I couldn't wait to catch my breath, so I slapped the silver down on the counter, pointed to the coffee urn, held up the index and middle fingers of my right hand, and then upended them and walked them across the counter. Soon I had two coffees to go, having dismissed with a wave the usual queries about cream and sugar.

In those days, most restaurants had nesting containers for
outservice. These were made of tin and stacked under a handle, like something you might see in a Chinese dairy. I carried two of these containers, one atop the other, but I had no handle and they burned my hands. Every few strides I would have to stop to put them down and blow on my palms. After a while, when the whole thing was not quite as hot, I held it and ran.

I wanted to get back to the field so I could see the two men. I would slow down only after I had confirmed that they were still there. As I ran, the coffee sloshed out of the containers and scalded my hands. It flowed down my arms and wet my sleeves. My shirt front was soaked with it, and my pants had an oval stain centered on my fly.

Though only half the coffee remained, the gold piece was safely in my pocket and I thought that if the two men didn't like the service I could always give back the money. But before I came to the edge of the field I saw through the trees that they were not there.

As I froze in place, my hands carefully cradling the tin containers of coffee, I feared above all that my parents would think I had betrayed them. My thoughts were half shadow: I knew what was coming, and yet I did not. My father had seen everything. He would be self-contained no matter what his fate. He had once told me that every day of his life made him less afraid of death, and that, at the end, no shock or surprise would be too much to bear. But my mother was different. She always went into everything with a full heart that could be broken.

I threw down the tin containers and started to run. As I neared the house I saw one of the front shutters moving slowly in the breeze. My father would not have tolerated that. He would have fastened it.

I was queasy with fear. At the same time, I was sure that I would be scolded for being more than half an hour late and for having stained my clothes with coffee. I was afraid that my father would be severe with me for accepting money from strangers and leaving the property without reporting their presence, and even for throwing down the coffee before I brought it to them. How embarrassing it would be, I thought, if the two men were sitting in the parlor, waiting for the coffee that had soaked into the ground.

But I was also aware that something totally unknown and far worse might enable me to avoid these lesser catastrophes. The most terrible thing I could imagine, therefore, had its attractions, and even though I sensed that its promise of freedom was entirely false, I was drawn to it. As I ran toward the house I tried to banish my thoughts, but what good is trying to forget thoughts that have already occurred?