Mortal Memory (18 page)

And yet, even as I rolled around that evening, I could sense the emergence of a new state of being, a world that had suddenly sprung into existence, and which floated in the air between Teddy Lawford and my sister. I didn't know what it was, but only that it was something that had been mysteriously created, and that its movements were infinitely fast.

“It wasn't love,” I told Rebecca once again. “But once you'd felt it, you wouldn't want to live without it.”

Rebecca lifted her face slightly. “It was romance,” she said firmly.

“Well, whatever it was, Teddy was in the full grip of it. He came over to our house the very next morning.”

He was dressed in a pair of cutoff blue jeans and a white T-shirt, the sleeves rolled up above his shoulders. I saw him lope across the yard, pause a moment at the little stone walkway that led to our house, then bolt forward, as if, in those few hesitant moments, he'd thought it all over and decided the issue once and for all.

Though it was still early, Laura had been awake for a long time. I'd glimpsed her sitting alone on the screen porch, then later strolling absently in the backyard, making odd, aimless turns, her long hair blowing in the early morning breeze. Despite the chill, she'd gone into the yard wearing nothing but the bottom of her bathing suit beneath a loose-fitting blouse, purposely leaving behind her thin blue windbreaker, the one she'd tightly wrapped around herself while she'd remained on the porch.

“Laura had gone out to attract Teddy,” I told Rebecca. “You might say, to display herself. She was very beautiful that summer, and I'm sure Teddy was completely overwhelmed by that.”

And so, that morning I watched as Teddy bounded down the walkway toward our cottage, not even able to control his stride. I was at the window, and it was only a few feet from there to the door, but Laura was at the door even before I could get to it, answering his knock instantly. A wave of white light swept over her when she opened it, and for a moment, as I watched, she seemed encased in its radiance. She stood quite still, talking to him, her hands toying nervously with the loose ends of her blouse. I can still remember the words that passed between them, so ordinary they seemed to burst in the heated air:

“Oh, hi, Teddy.”

“Hi, Laura.”

“Have you already eaten?”

“No, not yet.”

“There's a little diner down the road. It's not so great, but I go there for breakfast. You want to come with me?”

“Well, my father's still asleep, you know?”

I had come up quite close to them by then, walking very slowly from the window to the door, listening intently as I moved toward them.

Laura looked at me, and I noticed that, despite the chill, small beads of sweat had formed a moist line across her upper lip.

In an instant, she was gone, the two of them disappearing behind a curve in the road. She hadn't asked my father's permission. She hadn't said so much as a “see you later, Stevie” to me. It was as if a mighty wind had picked her up and blown her out the door.

“She was completely swept away,” I told Rebecca. “I couldn't imagine what was going on in her. I couldn't believe that she'd just left without saying anything to my father.”

He woke up an hour later, fully alert, the way he always did, as if, each morning, he returned to himself in a sudden, startling realization. He was dressed in a pair of blue trousers and a checked shirt, and he barely offered a passing wave as he headed for the kitchen. I heard him making a pot of coffee, then, after it was made, I saw him walk out onto the back porch and stare out across the field of high, green sea grass that stretched almost to the beach. The morning light was even brighter by then, and it framed him eerily as he stood, his back to me, peering out toward the bay, the black mug of coffee rising and falling rhythmically before he finally spun around, as if alerted by some sound, and looked at me:

“Where's Laura?” he asked.

“Laura?” I repeated hesitantly, stalling for time, but remembering the look she'd given to me as she'd left with Teddy, a look that had unmistakably commanded me to lie. “I don't know, Dad,” I answered. “I haven't seen her.”

He nodded slowly and lowered himself into one of the rusty metal chairs on the back porch. It was only then that the oddity of his initial question struck me. How had he known that Laura was not in the house, not sleeping in her bed like his wife was? I know that the question rose in my mind that morning, but only in a child's mind, quick, glancing, devoid of further investigation. It was not until I'd related the whole story of that morning to Rebecca that the answer actually occurred to me.

“He had expected to find her waiting for him on the porch,” I told her. “And when he walked out onto the back porch and saw she wasn't there, he knew something was wrong.”

“What did he do?”

“He had another cup of coffee.”

And another and another, while the sun rose steadily and my mother slept mindlessly, and I wandered in the backyard, glancing apprehensively toward him from time to time. Something had gone wrong, and I knew it; some mysterious and confusing element had entered into our lives. I could see it in my father's face. For even though his features remained very still, I could sense that wheels were spinning wildly behind them.

My mother got up at around ten that morning, but she didn't join my father on the back porch. Instead, she mechanically made breakfast for herself, the usual boiled egg and toast, then walked out into the living room and ate it absently, as if it were merely tasteless fodder, fit for nothing but the maintenance of life.

I went out to play in the backyard. Mr. Lawford's spaniel spotted me and ran over for another round of tussling in the grass, and this occupied me fully for quite some time. The strange dread I'd felt vanished in the frolic, and so it was not until I saw my father come to his feet that I even noticed that he still remained on the back porch.

He stood very tall, a lean man with wavy black hair, the checked shirt billowing slightly as he came out into the yard. He didn't notice me at all, but walked directly to the edge of the yard, the place where it began its sharp decline toward the beach.

I walked over to him and stood at his side, looking down, as he did, toward Laura.

“Laura came back about an hour later,” I told Rebecca, “but not by way of the road. She came up the beach instead, and she was alone.”

Alone, because she must have known that whatever lie I'd come up with to tell my father, it surely hadn't included Teddy.

Standing beside my father, I could see her moving slowly, her head bowed slightly, as if she were looking for shells. She was barefoot, her brown leather sandals dangling from one hand, as she waded through the weaving lines of white lacy foam.

“There she is.”

That was all my father said, and it was no more than a whisper, three words carried on a single, expelled breath. Then he returned to the house, without waiting, as I did, for Laura to make the hard climb up the stairs along the sandy hill to our cottage.

She was out of breath by the time she reached me, her long hair slightly moist with sea spray. She wasted no time in getting to the subject:

“I saw Dad up here.”

“He went back into the house.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That I didn't know where you were.”

“Good. Thanks, Stevie.”

“Where were you, Laura?”

She didn't answer me, but only walked directly back to the house and joined my father on the small back porch. While I played in the backyard, I could see them sitting together, their faces gray behind the screen, smoke from my father's cigarette drifting out into the summer air.

A few hours later we all went down to the beach, trudging cautiously through the deep sea grass, my father lugging a huge picnic basket, Jamie dragging along behind, looking as morose as he had the preceding day.

Teddy came bounding down a few minutes later. My mother invited him to have one of the ham sandwiches she'd made, and he accepted without hesitation. For a time, he chatted amiably with us all, although his eyes often fell upon Laura with a deadly earnest. Neither of them gave the slightest impression of having met earlier that morning, but I remember having the distinct impression that my father knew that they had. Perhaps Laura had told him while the two of them sat behind the gray screen. Or perhaps he'd sensed it in the looks that sometimes passed between Teddy and Laura while we all sat together on the blanket my mother had spread over the sand.

It was very hot that day, and not long after lunch, Laura, Teddy, and I all went into the water for relief. My mother, who never swam, gathered everything up and wandered back to the house, leaving my father alone on the beach. He sat there for several hours, his long legs sticking out of a dark blue bathing suit, watching us distantly, with that strange attitude of concentration which I'd only seen in the basement before, and which I associated only with the assembling of fancy European bicycles. And yet it was there on his face, that look of intense study and attention.

It was not directed at me, of course, but at Laura and Teddy as they moved farther and farther out into the sea. Glancing toward them from time to time, I would see hardly more than two heads bobbing happily in the blue water, although I am sure now that my father saw a good deal more.

Rebecca looked at me quizzically. “What more did your father see?” she asked. “I mean besides what was obvious, two teenagers attracted to each other.”

“I'm not sure, but I think it was something about life.” I remembered Rebecca's earlier remark about what she was looking for in these men. “Maybe something unbearable,” I added.

I could see my father's face as it had appeared that day. Although in his youth he'd been a pale, skinny boy, middle age had filled him out a bit. He was still slender, of course, but his face had aged into an unmistakable handsomeness, his sharper features less bird-like, the eyes more deeply set and piercing. His curly black hair framed his face well, and when the wind tossed it, as it did that afternoon, it gave him a wild, curiously appealing look. Because of that, I realized that I'd been completely mistaken in what I'd just told Rebecca. “No, he didn't look like a man about to break,” I said. “He didn't look like that at all.”

I watched her quietly for a moment, certain now that I was following behind her in some strange way, covering ground she'd already covered.

“My father wasn't some little gray man who crumbled under pressure,” I said finally. “Why have I always wanted to think of him that way?”

I instantly thought of the other men Rebecca had chosen for her study. None of them had been inept or inconsequential; none had seemed to lack a certain undeniable dignity.

I saw my father again as he'd appeared that day on the beach, his legs stretched out before him, leaning back slightly, propped up on his elbows, his eyes focused on Laura and Teddy as they bounced up and down in the heaving waves.

In my imagination, his features took on a classical solidity and force, almost the military bearing of one who had chosen to defend the city, no matter what the cost.

I looked at Rebecca, amazed by my own reassessment. “My father had a certain courage, I think.”

It was then that the utter loneliness of my father hit me with its full force, the darkness within him, his long silence, the terrible hunger he carried with him into the basement night after night, and which, I realized now, Laura had sensed as well, and perhaps even tried to relieve from time to time, like someone visiting a prisoner in his cell.

Rebecca looked at me questioningly. “Did something happen on the Cape, Steve?” she asked.

I nodded. “Yes.”

Rebecca seemed almost reluctant to continue, as if she felt herself being drawn down in a world even she was not quite prepared to enter. “Do you want to stop now,” she asked, “or do you want to go on?”

“I want to go on, Rebecca.”

And so I did.

I told her how Teddy and Laura had spent almost all their time together after that first morning, how my mother had remained almost like an invalid, reading her romance novels, how, at last, my father had seized the gray back porch like a conquered province, sitting hour after hour in the little metal chair, his eyes trained on the sea.

Finally, I arrived at the place where I'd been heading all along, that last night on Cape Cod.

“Nothing really strange happened until the end of that week,” I began, “the night before we headed back to Somerset.”

Early that afternoon, it had begun to rain. By evening, it had developed into a full summer storm, with sheets of windblown rain slapping against the cottage's rattling windowpanes. While the rest of us retreated into the house, my father remained on the back porch, still in that same chair, his eyes fixed on the violently churning sea.

“Lost in thought, that's how I'd describe him,” I told Rebecca. “Lost in thought.”

“But you don't know what he was thinking about?”

A possibility occurred to me: “Killing us, perhaps.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Because, over dinner that night, he did something cruel to my mother.”

She'd called him in to a hastily prepared dinner of hot dogs and baked beans, and he'd taken his usual seat. He looked preoccupied, intensely engaged in something within him. He remained silent while the rest of us chatted, mostly about the things that still had to be done before we could leave the next morning. A couple of times during the meal, Laura had tried to engage him, but he'd only answered her in quick, terse phrases, little more than a yes or no, sometimes not even that, but only a brisk nod of the head.

My mother had watched all of this for some time, yet had said nothing. Finally, she got up and headed back to her chair in the living room, inadvertently leaving one of her novels on the table near my father. She was almost all the way out of the room when he called to her suddenly: