Mortal Memory (11 page)

I was still going over that peculiar remark when I got home a few minutes later. It was still early, and Peter was in the small family room watching some sort of situation comedy on television.

“Where's your mother?” I asked him as I strolled into the room.

“In her office.”

“Did you have dinner?”

“She fixed one of those cheese things.”

I walked out of the room, down a short corridor, and opened the door to Marie's office. She looked up, startled.

“Please don't do that, Steve,” she said.

“Do what?”

“Come in like that. Through the door all of a sudden.”

I laughed mockingly. “What do you think I am, Marie, some crazed axe murderer?”

She did not seem amused. She went back to her work without saying anything else.

I remained at the door, looking at her. She was typing something at her computer, something that was probably businesslike, but uninspired, a bid for the job in Bridgeport, I supposed, a banal proposal for interior design. I compared it to the project upon which Rebecca had embarked, a far more profound investigation of a far deeper interior. Marie's work seemed small and inconsequential compared to that, scarcely more than the busywork of a life that had settled for too little, a life that had been lived … like mine.

Without warning, an odd sense of desolation suddenly overwhelmed me, and I left Marie to her work, walked to the kitchen, snatched the cheese thing from the refrigerator, and ate it pleasurelessly at the dining room table.

When I'd finished, I returned to the family room. Peter was still watching television, and for a few minutes I watched along with him, an action picture of some sort, all car chases and shattering glass.

He went to bed at ten, without speaking, a slender figure in red pajamas padding up the carpeted stairs to a room he had come to consider as his private domain, and which his mother and I had been forbidden to enter without permission.

I remained in the family room, my mind in a kind of featureless limbo until Rebecca's final remark came back into my mind, and I began to think over the cases she'd written about. I saw Harold Fuller leaning on his baseball bat, Gerald Stringer sitting rigidly upright in his big recliner, Herbert Parks slowly walking his two daughters hand-in-hand back into the house, Hollis Townsend beating his breasts beside the bright blue pool. What was it in any of these men that so fascinated her?

Finally, inevitably, I thought about my father, too, asking the same questions I thought Rebecca must be asking: Who was he? Why did he do it? From what dark, volcanic core had so much murder come?

At that early stage, I couldn't have answered any of these questions. Still, I felt the urge to pursue them, to press on toward finding some kind of solution to the mystery of my father's crime. Certainly, part of that urge came from Rebecca, but part of it also came from me, the need to touch the center of something, to reach the final depth … no matter where it lay.

SIX

“S
TEVE, IT'S SEVEN-THIRTY.
”

It was Marie calling from downstairs.

I got up slowly, showered, and dressed.

Marie and Peter were seated at the breakfast table. Peter was chattering on about some atrocity his teacher had committed against another student. As he talked, Marie watched him quietly, nodding from time to time as she chewed a final bit of toast.

When Peter had finished, we all fell silent, and after a moment, I found myself remembering those other family breakfasts I'd had so long ago at the little oval-shaped Formica table on McDonald Drive. Often, we'd all fallen silent, too, sitting for long stretches in a gloomy quiet. But it was not a moment like that which came back to me. Instead it was one of those rare occasions when my father and Laura, normally so withdrawn from the rest of us, had talked quite openly at the breakfast table, chatting with a rare spiritedness and candor, as if they were alone.

Laura had begun it, talking about some report she'd been working on in her geography class. It had had to do with an Oriental country. I don't remember the particular place, but only that my sister had spoken almost mystically about the beauty of the land, the strangeness of the people, all those bizarre landscapes and customs which would have fascinated any sixteen-year-old girl as high-strung and curious as Laura.

In any event, she'd finished by saying that she intended to go there at some point in her life, an ambition, as I noticed, which had spontaneously and very powerfully appealed to my father. As much as I ever saw his love pour out to her, I saw it at that moment in the little kitchen. It was a look of unqualified admiration, but a look that also seemed a kind of plea that she hold forever to this longing for distant things and lost, mysterious places.

Jamie saw it, too, however, and something in it infuriated him.

“You're never going anywhere,” he sneered at Laura. “Who do you think you are, some kind of princess?”

Laura glared at him angrily. “Oh, shut up, Jamie,” she snapped.

“Just big ideas, that's all,” Jamie fired back. “You're not going anywhere.”

“I said, shut up, Jamie,” Laura screamed, “just shut up.”

It continued in this way for some time, both Jamie and Laura growing hotter by the minute, my mother lamely attempting to quell the riot, but with her usual lack of force.

I don't know exactly at what point I became aware that my father had left the room. I hadn't seen him rise, walk around the table, and disappear into some other part of the house. It was as if he'd simply vanished.

The battle continued in his absence, growing more furious and abusive by the moment. My mother left after a time, coughing slightly, as if escaping from a smoke-filled room. I remained in my seat, of course, watching the battle like a child, fascinated by the flames. I was still there when it died away suddenly, and both Laura and Jamie moved out into the open air, Jamie to the basketball hoop, Laura to a chair in the backyard.

Later, coming from the upstairs bathroom, I glimpsed my mother as she lay on her back in the bed, one hand at her side, the other balanced palm up on her forehead, as if she were wiping a line of sweat from her brow.

A terrible silence had descended upon the house by then, one which no one seemed willing to break, as if this sullen, unhappy peace was the only kind of quiet we could know. I remember that in order not to break it, I had actually tiptoed down the stairs.

I was near the bottom of them when I saw my father sitting alone in the solarium. His legs stretched out before him, his arms hanging limply at his sides, he no longer looked like that commanding figure who'd once stepped out onto the balcony and brought all of us to attention.

At that point I might have thought him broken, I suppose, a pitiful shell in gray work clothes, but suddenly he looked over at me, and the man I saw was not weak, nor timid, nor lacking in resolve. Rather, he seemed to smolder with a strangely building purpose, the eyes small, intense, deeply engaged, the jaw firmly set. It was a face I'd seen in old cowboy movies, a man about to draw.

Now, as I sat in the silence of my own kitchen, my eyes moving slowly from Peter to Marie, I wondered if it was at that precise moment that my father had decided that he would bear no more, that he would kill us all.

“These men,” Rebecca would later write, “shouldered all they had been taught to shoulder, until their shoulders broke.”

Until their shoulders broke, and they reached for the pistol, the baseball bat, the pellets encrusted with cyanide. Until their shoulders broke, and they stood on the third step and followed the little watery footprints as they led toward the empty cardboard box … and fired.

Or was it only the slow wearing away she wanted to explore, the long descent toward that explosive second when the shoulders cracked and the savagery began?

“What are you thinking about, Steve?”

I glanced toward Marie. “What?”

“You looked like you were thinking about something.”

“Just something at work,” I said.

Marie took me at my word and didn't press the matter. She went back to her breakfast, and after finishing it, walked upstairs to finish dressing.

I walked to my car and drove to work. Wally was leaning against my desk when I arrived. He handed me a note.

“Phone message,” he said with a leering grin.

I glanced at the message: “Call Rebecca,” and then a number.

“Thanks,” I said to Wally, as I pocketed the note and slid in behind my desk.

Wally continued to stare at me knowingly. “So, is she a nice woman, Steve?” he asked with a quick wink.

“Very,” I told him, but without emphasis, in the same way I might have said it of a business acquaintance.

Wally grinned. “Glad to hear it,” he said, then walked away.

I dialed the number, and Rebecca answered the phone right away. “Hello.”

“It's me.”

“Who?”

“Steve Farris.”

“Oh, Steve, thanks for calling,” she said. “Listen, I was wondering if we might meet again this Friday.”

For the first time, I felt the pull of her voice as something alluring.

“I suppose so.”

“The same place? Around five?”

“Okay.”

Rebecca thanked me, then hung up. I went back to my work, but even as I continued sketching the design for the Massachusetts library, I felt both Rebecca and the task she had set herself lingering in the air around me. It gave a peculiar energy to my thoughts, a direction that hadn't been there before. It was as if, before Rebecca, a space had existed in my mind, empty and featureless, but which I had always felt as an odd, persistent ache. And so, as the days passed, and I went through the routine of work and home, I looked forward to my meeting with Rebecca as a wounded man might have looked forward to the first soothing touch of a doctor or a nurse.

I was relieved to see her when she arrived that Friday afternoon.

She was wearing a white blouse and dark green skirt that fell nearly to the floor. I noticed the skirt most: “It's very beautiful.”

“Thank you,” Rebecca said. She was just that crisp and dismissive, a mode of behavior that her beauty had no doubt taught her, to be distant, restrained, to slap the hand long before it made its first uncertain movement toward her. She opened her briefcase and reached for something inside it, speaking at the same time, though with her eyes averted, focused on the papers her long brown fingers were riffling through.

“I brought a few pictures,” she said.

“Pictures of the murders?” I asked.

A certain wariness came into her face, as if she didn't want to rush me into a terrain that she knew I would find horrible.

“I have those pictures, too,” she said, “but they're not for today.”

I watched her as she placed the pictures in a small stack at her right hand. It was obvious that she'd already arranged them in the order she thought appropriate. She shifted slightly in her seat, and I could hear the sound of her body as it rustled against her dark green skirt. It was a soft but highly detailed sound, crisp and distinct, like the crunch of bare feet moving softly over leaves.

She plucked the first picture from the stack and moved it slowly toward me. It was of my father when he was in his late teens. He was standing at the bus station in Highfield, dressed in blue jeans and a plaid shirt, his traveling case dangling from his hand.

That must have been taken the day he left home,” I said.

“He went to New York, didn't he?” Rebecca asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you know anything about how he came to make that decision?”

At the time, I didn't. But I've learned a great deal since then. There was a box of letters and other papers which he left behind. Aunt Edna had stored them in her attic, and when she died, they came to me. For years they moldered in our basement, but when I finally began to look through them, I discovered, among other things, the world my father had confronted in his youth.

The Depression had been in full swing, of course, so that by the time he'd graduated from high school, he'd had few prospects in a town like Highfield. Because of that he'd gone to New York City, looking for work along with thousands of others, and had ended up in a dingy rooming house on Great Jones Street.

After Rebecca, when I finally visited that place, I found a plain, six-story brick building that had long ago been converted into a drafty, dilapidated warehouse. My father's room had been on the top floor, little more than a converted attic which he'd shared with several other men, a grim hall without a stove or a refrigerator, where the beds were hardly more than bunks, thin mattresses on wire springs.

From the room's dusty window, I could see the same brick street my father must have seen. The man who let me do it, standing in the doorway, watching me suspiciously as he puffed at a stubby black cigar, must have thought it odd that a son would wish to do such a thing, retrace, at such distance, the journey of his father. But he was willing to let me in anyway, escorting me up the stairs, and opening the long-closed door to a musty, unlighted room.