Mortal Memory

EIGHT

THREE DAYS LATER, Rebecca had hardly taken her seat across from me at the restaurant before I handed her the document I’d found in the box. She took it from my hand and began to read it. What I gave her that evening was something she’d already asked for, my father’s army records. After the war, he’d taken a few college classes under the GI Bill of Rights. A short application process had been required, and he’d submitted several forms to prove that he’d been in the army. One of them was a listing of his whereabouts during all that time. It began with Newark, New Jersey, where he’d been inducted in June of 1940, and ended with New York City, where he’d been mustered out on a medical discharge, an injured knee, in May of 1942. All the places my father had lived during those two years of military service were listed in the document, along with all of his official leaves. What it showed unmistakably was that he had lived at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, from July of 1941 until April of 1942, when he’d been given leave to return to New Jersey, and where, on April 1, he’d married my mother in a civil ceremony in Somerset.

When Rebecca finished reading, she looked up, her face very still. She had instantly put it together.

“Jamie was not your father’s son,” she said.

“No, he couldn’t have been. My father was in North Carolina when my brother was conceived.”

“And so he must have known that he wasn’t the father of the child your mother was carrying. Even on the day he married her,” Rebecca added wonderingly.

“Yes, he had to have known that.”

She thought a moment, then asked, “So who was Jamie’s father?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “How could I know? It all happened a long time before I was born.” Then something occurred to me. “Do you have the pictures you showed me last time?”

“Yes.” Rebecca took them out and spread them across the table.

I lifted the one that showed my mother posed alluringly against the stone wall and handed it to Rebecca. “I think maybe the man who took this was Jamie’s father,” I said. “I mean, look at my mother, at the way her face is shining.”

Rebecca let her eyes dwell on the picture as I continued.

“I think my mother was in love that day,” I said. “She was satisfied in every way. I don’t think my father ever made her feel like that.”

Rebecca returned the photograph to the table. She remained silent.

“Reading all those romance novels, that was the way my mother went back to that time in her life,” I told her. “She never forgot him. She never forgot the way he made her feel.” I glanced over at the picture of my father. “Maybe that’s what my father couldn’t bear, that he was going to live the rest of his life in the shadow of my mother’s first love.”

“Which might explain your mother’s murder, and perhaps even Jamie’s,” Rebecca said. “But what about Laura?”

I had no answer, and after a moment, Rebecca’s eyes returned to the picture of my father on his wedding day. “Even though he must have known about the child, he looks very happy in this picture,” she said.

“He was happy, I think,” I admitted. “It’s the only picture he ever looked that happy in.”

She thought a while longer, then returned her attention to the military document that had revealed everything. “Where did you find this?”

“In some papers my aunt left me,” I said, “but there was something else I couldn’t find.”

I told her about the blue papers, the ones Laura had found in the garage that day, the ones, I felt sure now, that had told her everything about Jamie, that he was only “sort of” a member of our family.

“So Laura knew,” I said when I’d finished, “and she used that knowledge against Jamie at least once.”

I went through the story of the argument beneath the maple tree.

“Do you think Jamie knew what Laura meant?” Rebecca asked.

“I don’t know.”

Rebecca considered everything I’d told her for a few seconds. “What were the blue papers?” she asked finally. “They weren’t documents, were they?”

“No … I think they could have been love letters,” I answered slowly, “from Jamie’s real father. Letters she couldn’t part with.”

“Even at the risk of their being found.”

“Yes.”

And so all my old surmises about my mother had been wrong. “Poor Dottie” had swooned to someone’s touch, had caught her breath, taken a stunning risk, and in doing that had lived for just a moment the life she only read about from then on, in novels piled beside her bed.

Rebecca leaned back in her seat and remained very quiet for a long time. She was still thinking about my mother, I believe, but my mind had shifted over to my father, to the smiling figure in the photograph, triumphant on his wedding day.

“He must have loved my mother a great deal to marry her knowing that she was already carrying another man’s child,” I said.

Rebecca didn’t look so sure.

I remembered the look on my father’s face the night I’d gone down into the basement, stopped on the third step, and watched him work silently on his latest Rodger and Windsor until his eyes had finally lifted toward me. I heard his words again: This is all I want.

“Or maybe all he ever wanted was just a wife and kids,” I said.

Rebecca looked at me. “Except that he killed his wife, and two of his children,” she said sharply, “slaughtered them one by one, in cold blood.”

It was at that moment that the full ruin of my family struck me in all its horror. In a weird, nightmarish vision, I felt myself pass effortlessly through the walls of 417 McDonald Drive as if they were nothing more than stage scrims, solid at one moment, dreamily transparent at the next, so that I could see through the whole house at a single glance, see one day’s death unroll before me in far more grisly and exact detail than I had ever been able to imagine it before.

My father’s old brown van glides into the rainswept driveway, its slick black tires throwing arcs of water into the air behind them. From its gloomy interior, my father’s face stares at me from behind the van’s black, serrated wheel, his eyes glowing from its gray interior like unblinking small blue lights. He does not linger inside the van, but emerges quickly and determinedly, then walks at a measured, unhurried pace toward the side door of the house. Once inside, he slaps his old gray hat softly against the side of his leg, sending a shower of shimmering droplets across the gleaming, checked tile of the kitchen floor. For a single, suspended moment, he stares about the room, taking in its empty, lifeless space, his face a rigid, wooden mask, with nothing moving in it but his eyes. They settle finally on the basement door.

He walks down the stairs to the tall metal cabinet he has always used to store his tools. He opens it in a single smooth, untroubled movement, all indecision long behind him, and withdraws a long object which years ago he had stored away, wrapping it in brown paper and binding it haphazardly with a length of frazzled twine. At the small workbench he had once used to assemble his Rodger and Windsor bicycles, he unwraps the shotgun and lays it out across the wooden worktable. For a few seconds he strokes its wooden stock deliciously, as if it were a woman’s smooth, brown thigh.

Upstairs, each in their separate rooms, those who are about to die continue through the iron motions of their quickly dwindling lives.

Alone in his room, Jamie hunches over his desk, working mightily to keep his attention on the biology textbook the police photographs would later show still open on his desk.

A few feet down the corridor, Laura emerges from the bathroom, her body wrapped up in her long white robe. She enters her own room, walks to the small dressing table by the window, and begins to run a brush through her long dark hair.

Across the hallway, my mother rises from her bed. She stares about wearily, still in the fog of her late afternoon nap. She plucks one of her romance novels from the table by the bed and heads softly down the corridor to the stairs, moving down them slowly just as my father, still in the basement several feet below, presses two red, cylindrical 12-gauge shells into the twin chambers of the shotgun.

Upstairs, Jamie grimaces, shakes his head, closes the text, thinks better of it, and wearily opens it again.

Laura makes a final sweep through her hair, then opens the center drawer of her dressing table. She withdraws a tube of lipstick, pulls off its shiny cap, and leans in closer to the mirror as she brings its dark red tip to her mouth.

Below them, in the basement’s faded light, my father turns and begins his ascent up the plain wooden stairs that lead to the kitchen.

Now on the first floor, clutching at the collar of her red housedress, my mother turns to the right and advances into the living room just as my father reaches the top of the basement stairs. She is in the solarium, easing herself down into one of its white wicker chairs by the time he steps out into the kitchen, the long black barrel of the shotgun weaving as he glances, very briefly, out the window toward the rain.

For a single, breathless instant, I see all motion stop, as if at that final, precipitous moment, my family had been given one more chance. I feel like screaming at them from my great distance: “Stop, please stop! We can find some other way!”

They do not hear me.

They begin to move again.

My father mounts the stairs toward the second floor, his eyes staring toward the upper reaches of the house until he passes the threshold and confronts a dimly lighted hallway and three closed doors.

Behind the first door to the right, Jamie fidgets at his desk. He leans back, peers out the window, finds no relief, and slowly returns to the open book.

Behind the second, Laura remains at her dressing table. She reaches into the dresser again and takes out a light green plastic compact. She looks at it, clearly displeased by its babyish appearance. She opens it anyway, takes the small beige pad from inside, and begins to rub it softly across her cheek.

Downstairs, my mother remains slumped in one of the little solarium’s white wicker chairs. She lets her eyes drift up from the book for a moment, then stares out at the rain as she absently fingers a small green leaf on a hanging fern.

I see my father as he begins to move down the upstairs hallway, his eyes on the first door to his right. He shifts the shotgun into position as he nears Jamie’s door.

Inside the room, Jamie turns as that same door opens seconds later. He stands up as my father enters, moving his desk chair against the back wall as he steps away.

Below, in the solarium, my mother’s body bolts forward with the roar of the first blast. Her lips part as she draws in a startled, unbelieving breath. The book slips from her lap and flutters to the floor.

Above her, Jamie’s body wheels to the left. His face disintegrates as his body lifts from the floor with such force that one of his tennis shoes flies off” and slams against the side of my lower bunk, leaving a small, rubbery mark against its light, pine finish.

In the adjoining room, Laura freezes for an instant, as if locked in place by the horrific tumult she can hear next door. She stands up, stares about wonderingly, and lets the light green plastic compact drop from her fingers, its small round mirror cracking softly as it hits the floor.

Below her, my mother rises, stricken, from her chair. Her shoulder brushes against the curtain of long green vines. Her right hand rises, trembling, to her throat.

Upstairs, my father is on the move again. He strides toward the second door, a cloud of smoke trailing behind him as he closes in upon it.

Another blast shakes the house, and my sister’s body plummets backward, the palm and two fingers of her right hand flying away as her chest explodes in a fine pink spray.

Through the translucent walls of the house on McDonald Drive, I see all that had been denied, diminished, or somehow brushed aside accumulate in the grim mortification of my mother’s face.

Above her, my father breaks open the breech of the shotgun and draws out its two spent shells. In slow motion, I see their slender red cylinders slip from his long fingers and tumble through the thick, powdery air.

The reins which had held my mother in place for so long snap as if cut away by a flying dagger, and she bolts from the solarium and rushes toward the kitchen. Once there, she spins around wildly, unable to focus, too driven by terror to initiate a logical scheme to save her life.

Above her, my father moves from room to room, looking for her in their bedroom, their bathroom, everywhere. Time is passing while he hunts for her, the several minutes that Mrs. Hamilton noticed between the second shot and the last.

Time is passing, while my mother spins like a human top in the kitchen, spins and spins, until her eyes catch on the basement door. She darts toward it frantically, instinctively, an animal’s flight to the underground safety of its earthen burrow.

My father is already coming down the stairs before she opens it. He is already in the solarium by the time she reaches the basement’s cement floor. She is spinning again by the time he closes in upon the kitchen. She has already padded through the basement’s puddled water and taken her place behind the cardboard box by the time he descends toward her from the dark at the top of the stairs. He stops on the third step from the bottom.

There is a third horrendous blast.

Queen for a Day comes to an end.

The vision ended abruptly, and I felt as if I’d been hurled against a bare wall. Reflexively, I jerked backward, my breath coming in quick, wrenching gasps. I could feel long lines of sweat move down my chest and back. A wave of tingling sharpness swept across my body.

In a kind of blur, I saw Rebecca lean toward me, her hand reaching across the table.

“Steve? Is something wrong?”

I shook my head, but fiercely, in a kind of manic up-and-down motion.

Rebecca stood up immediately. “Let’s go outside,” she said, then tugged me to my feet and led me out into the night.

For a moment, I leaned against a wall, still breathing heavily, unable to talk.

“Do you want to stop?” Rebecca asked. “You don’t have to go on with this.”

I shook my head.

“Are you sure?”

I nodded.

“Then let’s go to my place,” Rebecca said. “It’s more private. We can just talk, if you want. About something else.”

She walked me to my car, then pointed to hers. “Just follow me,” she said.

I fell behind her, keeping a close distance, first through the town, then out toward the lake, the yellow beams of my headlights rising and falling as we moved along the wavy, unpaved road. I felt self-conscious and embarrassed, as if I’d cracked under too little pressure. There were moments when I wanted to turn around, to disappear into the darkness. But at the same time I was driven to continue, to follow Rebecca all the way, as if my father were in the car beside her, riding along, his blue eyes staring out into the nightbound trees.

I’d calmed myself down considerably by the time I reached Rebecca’s cottage. It rested deep in a grove of trees, the lake only a matter of yards away, so that as I got out of my car, I could hear its waves lapping softly against the shore, which calmed me even more.

Rebecca didn’t wait for me to join her, but walked quickly to her door. As I approached, moving across the moist grass, I could hear the keys tinkling softly as she drew them from the pocket of her skirt. She faced the door, her back to me, the long dark hair falling to her shoulders as she searched for the right key.

She found it quickly, opened the door, and turned on the small lamp that rested on a table beside it. I followed her inside, then stood silently, watching her as she moved about the room, depositing her things in various places, the briefcase on the table by the window, her small black handbag in a chair by the door. A few feet away, I could see her bed, cluttered and disheveled, through a partially open door.

“Would you like something to drink?” Rebecca asked.

“No, thanks.”

She nodded toward a chair to my right. “Sit down.”

I did, then watched as she took a seat opposite me, drawing her legs up under her in a gesture that seemed casual and unstudied, as if she’d become somewhat more at ease in my presence.

“I’m sorry about what happened in the restaurant,” I told her.

“What did happen, exactly?”

“I saw it all. The murders, I mean. The way he killed them one by one.”

“How much do you actually know about the murders?” Rebecca asked. “How they were done, that sort of thing.”

“Not much, really,” I admitted. “I know he used a shotgun.”

“So what you ‘saw’—I mean at the restaurant a few minutes ago—that wasn’t based on anything you knew?”

“No.”

“You never actually saw any of the bodies, right?”

“No,” I answered. “I never went inside that house again.” I shrugged. “I used to say that I never saw any of my family alive again, but actually, I never saw any of them at all.”

I could remember a few things about that morning, however, and I told Rebecca what they were. I remembered my mother standing at the kitchen counter as I raced by her on my way to school. And Jamie walking far ahead of me, his cap pulled down against the morning rain. And I remembered Laura, the feel of her fingers wrapped around mine as we walked toward school together. “Bye, Stevie,” she’d said, as she’d dropped me off at my school, then moved down the sidewalk, a slender girl with long dark hair, a body disappearing into a net of rain.

“Laura was the last one I saw,” I told Rebecca.

“And she was walking alone? Not with Jamie?”

“They never walked together.”

“But they went to the same school, didn’t they, the one a few blocks from the grammar school where you went?”

“Yes, but they never walked together,” I said. “I always walked with Laura.”

“Who did Jamie walk with?”

“Nobody,” I said. “He didn’t have any …” I stopped, remembering something. I waited until it was clear in my head, then I told Rebecca.

“Someone put flowers on his grave,” I said. “Not my mother’s or Laura’s. Just Jamie’s.”

“When?”

“Just before I left for Maine with Uncle Quentin,” I answered. “Aunt Edna took me over to the cemetery so that I could say good-bye. They’d all been buried side by side, with Laura on one side of my mother and Jamie on the other.”

It had been a cold, snowy day, the wind snarling around us as we’d climbed the low hill that led up to the graves. It had played havoc with Aunt Edna’s long black coat, whipping at it madly while she struggled forward, tugging me along with her, sometimes harshly, so that I’d tripped occasionally and gone facedown into the snow. “Get up, Stevie,” my aunt had kept saying. “Get up! Get up!”

It had taken us almost five minutes to reach the graves, and by that time Aunt Edna was exhausted. She clutched irritably at her coat and glared down at the three snow-covered mounds, each with its own gray stone. My eyes were drawn to the one on the right, to Laura’s grave. A layer of snow nearly covered her name. I could make out only the large, ornate “L” and the faint outline of the final two letters. The date of her birth was completely covered, but I could see the word “Novem ber” carved below it, though the date and year were covered with snow.

Aunt Edna jerked my hands. “Say good-bye, Stevie,” she snapped.

Obediently, I whispered, “Good-bye, Laura,” then repeated the process with my mother and, at last, with Jamie.

“That’s when I noticed the flowers,” I told Rebecca. They were small, blue flowers, and the wind had nearly stripped them, but I could see a few buds, nonetheless. There were no flowers on the other graves, just on Jamie’s.”

“Where did you think they’d come from?” Rebecca asked.

To my surprise, I recalled exactly where I thought they’d come from. “Well, I remember looking at them and thinking to myself, ‘He’s still here.’“ I stopped and looked at her somberly. Even to me, it seemed too bizarre to be true. “I was only nine,” I admitted, “so who else could I have possibly thought might put them there? Who else would have cared enough to do it— and who was still alive—except my father?”

“Did your father care for Jamie?” Rebecca asked directly.

“I think he tried to, yes,” I said.

“You never noticed him showing any particular resentment toward him?”

“No,” I said. “Even now, knowing what we’ve learned, I still don’t remember seeing any great resentment toward Jamie on my father’s part.”

“But they didn’t get along, did they?”

“No, they didn’t.” I thought a moment, then added, “But Jamie was not a lovable person, and he was always after Laura, always belittling her. And since my father loved Laura so much, I’m sure that Jamie’s behavior made it hard for my father to reach out to him.” I glanced toward the window, fixed my eyes on the dark lake beyond it, the wild currents I imagined to be swirling just beneath its black, unmoving surface. “It was getting all tangled up,” I said quietly.

“What was?”

“Us. All of us. We were getting all tangled up in things.”

For a moment, I saw my father as I’d often seen him, standing alone by the fence, smoking. There were times when I’d awakened near dawn, gone to the bathroom down the hall, then returned to bed. As I’d crawled back beneath the covers, I’d sometimes glimpsed him there, a solitary figure, standing in the smoky gray of early morning light, very still and deep in thought, as if he were trying to find a way out.

“Maybe that’s what he couldn’t bear,” I said.

“What were you getting tangled up in?” Rebecca asked.

The answer came to me without hesitation. “In each other,” I said. “All knotted up in each other.” I considered my answer longer, then added, “And in love, or faking it, anyway.”

“Faking love?”

“Yes. Pretending to love, when we really didn’t. That’s the hardest thing in life. Imagine doing it for years.” I saw my father by the fence again, caught in his arctic solitude. “The way my father did.”

Rebecca said nothing, but I could see a growing intensity in her eyes, as if I had alerted her to something.

“The men you’re studying, they were all doing that, weren’t they?” I asked. “They were all faking love.”

Rebecca responded with a question of her own. “If that was true, that your father was faking love, when did that be gin?”

“I don’t know for sure,” I admitted. “But I knew who he loved the least.”

So did Rebecca, and to demonstrate it, she drew another picture from her stack. It showed Jamie’s body sprawled across the floor, his head like an exploded melon, scattered in bits and pieces across the floor and wall.

“Poor Jamie,” I said softly. “He had no idea what was coming toward him.”

I remembered all the times my father had gone out and shot baskets with my brother, how often even that had ended in some kind of brawl, ended with Jamie stomping up to his room, slamming the door behind him. At those times, my father had often lingered beneath the net, the ball bouncing up and down on the cement drive, rhythmic as a heartbeat, while he stared vacantly toward the backyard. I could see the look on his face, an expression of helplessness and bafflement, as if he were lost in a terrible bramble, pricked and bleeding, with no way out.

“My father was confused,” I told Rebecca. “Maybe, in the end, he just wanted to get out of that confusion.” I looked up at her emphatically. “Things were heating up in our house,” I told her. “Tension. Hatred. Maybe he couldn’t find any other way to clear the air.” I considered it a moment. “So he just blasted his way out.”

“A sudden explosion, is that what you’re saying?” Rebecca asked. That your father just blew up one afternoon?”

I nodded.

Rebecca said nothing.

“Maybe Jamie was the focal point of that confusion,” I added after a time, “the center of the storm, you might say, but not the whole thing.”

“Did you ever see them talking?” Rebecca asked. “Jamie and your father?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“So they weren’t faking love anymore?”

“No, they’d gone beyond that point, I think,” I said.

It struck me that perhaps this was the line that my father, and all these men, had finally crossed, the one that divided genuine from counterfeit devotion. Somewhere, they had decided that they would no longer live behind their own paternal mask, that the long masquerade was over.

My eyes drew over to the picture of my father on his wedding day, the luminous smile that adorned his face. “Maybe that’s where the fakery began,” I said as I tapped the photograph softly, “from right here, from the very first day.”

Rebecca watched me silently.

“So that his whole family life was a lie,” I added quietly, in a voice that was even, controlled.

In a rush of images, I saw all the postcard moments of our family life, the holidays spent together, the bloated turkey on Thanksgiving, the lighted tree at Christmastime. I saw all our little celebrations, saw my father as he’d stood beside the blazing candles of countless birthday cakes. Each in turn, I watched him lift us into the uncluttered air, Jamie when he turned five, Laura the day she won the fourth-grade spelling bee, me on the day I first rode my bike without training wheels.

“All a lie,” I repeated softly, my lips hardly parting with the words. “Can that be possible?”

Rebecca’s eyes fell toward the picture of my brother in his ruin, a gesture that gave me the only answer I required at the time.