Mortal Memory

THREE

THE USUAL BREAKFAST atrocities occurred the Monday morning after we brought Peter back from camp. Peter dropped or spilled nearly everything he touched, and Marie became increasingly exasperated with him, finally screaming at his back as he trudged, hunched and angry, out into the backyard.

Once he’d left, she turned her wrath on me, her eyes narrowing lethally, as if taking aim.

“Why don’t you ever say anything to him?” she demanded harshly. “Why do I have to do all the yelling?”

“I don’t care what he spills,” I told her with a shrug. “It doesn’t matter to me.”

It was a reply which only concentrated her anger by focusing it on me.

“It’s because you don’t have to clean it up,” she shot back. “If you had to clean it up, then you’d care.”

I started to offer something in return, but she whirled around and strode out of the kitchen, tossing a wadded paper towel into the plastic garbage can beside the door.

It was typical of Marie to storm out of a room rather than engage in a longer confrontation. Even our first real argument had been a clipped and stifled affair, again with Marie leaving rapidly, this time from a car, but with the same air of unavoidable flight. Over the years I’d come to think of it as a way of avoiding some invisible line she feared to cross, a form of self-control.

I left around fifteen minutes later, waving to Peter as I headed for the car. He sat, slumped in a chair beside the pool, and as I went by, he waved back halfheartedly, then offered a knowing smile, as if we were allies in some war we waged against the central woman in our lives.

I backed slowly out of the driveway, glancing only briefly toward the house. I could see Marie at the window of our bedroom on the second floor. She’d thrown open the curtains and was standing in the full morning light, her arms folded tightly below her breasts, so that their round upper quarters were lifted and exposed beneath the partly open gown. It was a stance my mother would never have assumed, and I remember thinking, as I pulled out of the driveway, that for “poor Dottie” bedroom curtains were meant to be tightly closed. As for the woman poised behind them, a plain red housedress would do just fine.

There were other differences between Marie and my mother, as well, and on the way to my office that morning, I silently, and almost unconsciously, catalogued them.

Marie was stern and demanding, while my mother had suffered from a general lack of will, one so severe, I think, that it had even prevented her from disciplining her children. Thus, instead of ordering us to do things, help around the house, choose the proper clothes, keep our mouths shut when others were talking, she’d simply allowed us to find our own way through the maze, directionless and uninstructed.

Unlike Marie, who was self-assured and confident in her abilities and opinions, my mother had seemed to doubt her own adulthood, doubt even those of its prerogatives which my father had taken for granted and exercised with full authority.

My father.

The memory that suddenly returned him to me that morning, as I drove to work, appeared ordinary enough at first. It was clear and vivid, the setting laid out perfectly in my mind:

We had all been in the backyard, Laura and I tossing a ball back and forth while Jamie lounged in a small yard chair, leafing through some sort of sports magazine. As the minutes passed, the pitches became wilder and faster, with Laura lobbing the ball toward me at weird angles, or heaving it in a high and uncontrolled arc over all our heads.

Inevitably, one of her throws went way off, the ball crashing down onto Jamie’s magazine, knocking it first into his lap, then onto the ground.

The ball startled and frightened him, and his sudden panic had no doubt embarrassed him as well, and so he leaped to his feet, angrily strode across the yard, grabbed Laura by the shoulders, and started screaming at her. She fought back, pushing him away violently and yelling into his face. I ran over to her, trying to get between the two, and started screaming just as loudly.

We were still going at it when we heard the door open at the back of the house and saw our father step out onto the small veranda which overlooked the backyard. He didn’t say a word, but only stood, his hands holding firmly to the railing of the veranda, as he peered down at us.

All our attention was trained upon him, all our eyes lifted up, as if he were descending from the clouds. A complete silence fell over the backyard as the three of us stood in place, saying nothing, only watching him as he watched us during that brief, oddly delicious instant before he turned and walked away.

What had we felt at that moment?

As a child, it would have been impossible for me to say. But that morning, as I unexpectedly recalled this single incident with all the detail of something that had happened only minutes before, it seemed to me that I had felt the sweet and awesome luxury of a hand that stayed my hand. I had sensed my father’s restraining firmness, and because of it, perhaps because of nothing more than his exercise of it, I had loved him deeply and inexpressibly. The solitary killer who’d crouched beneath that mask of paternal care and responsibility had never appeared to me. Instead, I’d glimpsed only that part of him that was beautiful and grave and unreachable, that figure of a father, steadfast and enduring, that all men wish to have and wish to be.

And so, it struck me that morning that my father’s life had to have been a vast deception, a lie he’d lived in while he’d lived with us, harboring whatever resentment and bitterness it was that had finally boiled over on that day in November.

I was still thinking about him when I got to the office a few minutes later.

The architectural offices of Simpson and Lowe were on the top floor of a five-story cubicle structure made of steel and tinted glass. It was a purely functional design, and no one but Mr. Lowe, the firm’s sole surviving founder, ever liked it. Over the years the rest of us had either resented it or been embarrassed by it, thinking it a rather unimaginative structure, unlikely to impress prospective clients, especially those who might be interested in more innovative designs for their own projects.

But despite all our criticism, Mr. Lowe had remained firm in his commitment to it, stubbornly holding on out of loyalty to its aging pipes and circuits, its squeaky hinges and buckling tile. Wally had been arguing for years that we should move the whole operation to the new business center north of the city, but Mr. Lowe had always refused, shaking his head with that enormous dignity he still maintained despite the palsy that rocked his hands. “Don’t abandon things,” he once told Wally scoldingly at the end of one of these discussions. Then he rose and left the room, knowing that Wally remained behind to mutter against him resentfully, but wholly indifferent to anything he might say, as if all his malicious whisperings were nothing more than a light desert breeze.

Wally was already at his desk, meticulously going over the details for a new office building, when I arrived that morning.

“Another day at the venerable old firm,” he said with a wink as I passed his desk.

I’d worked as an architect for Simpson and Lowe for almost fifteen years by then, and I realize now that it was no accident that I chose architecture as my profession, even though I had no great ability at geometry or drawing or any of the other skills the work requires. Rather, I chose it because it fulfilled an abiding need, appealed to one of the deeper strains of my character, my desperate need for order. For all its creativity, architecture is finally about predictability. It runs on what is known, rather than what is not. In a fully executed building, one knows with a comforting certainty exactly what the materials will do, their durabilities, the precise level of strain which each can bear and still hold on to its essential shape and function. It is a world which has no room for chance, which has doggedly eliminated the speculative and hypothetical from its principal calculations. Reality is its basis. It makes room for nothing else.

Before Rebecca, it was home.

I was working at my desk, when Wally appeared before me, a peculiar expression on his face.

“There’s someone here to see you, Steve,” he said. “Rebecca something. I lost the last name. I think I was in a daze.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Go see for yourself.”

She was in the small waiting room, seated on a dark red sofa, her face very serious as she rose. She put out her hand and I shook it as she introduced herself, her voice deep but not masculine, a fine, somber voice, though somewhat edgy, distant, intensely formal.

“My name is Rebecca Soltero,” she said.

“Steve Farris. Did we have an appointment?”

“No, we didn’t,” Rebecca answered. “I believe in doing things face-to-face. That’s why I didn’t call or write you first.”

She was very direct, a woman with a mission, though I had no idea what it was.

“What can I do for you?” I asked.

“I’ve come about your father.”

She could not have said a stranger thing, nor one more utterly unexpected. It was as if he had suddenly materialized again, magically, in the form of a beautiful woman.

“My father?”

For an instant, I thought perhaps the police or the FBI, or some other agency, had actually begun to look for him again, had, in a moment of unconscious whimsy, assigned an alluring woman to track him down, bring him back, and make him pay, at last, for what he’d done to his family.

“But you must know that my father …”

“Yes. That’s why I want to talk to you,” Rebecca said. “I’d like to hear what you remember about him.”

“Why?”

“I’m writing a book about men who’ve killed their families,” she said.

It was strange, but until that moment, I’d never thought of my father as one of a type, a member of some definable human subcategory. Instead, he’d always come to me as a lone wolf, cut from the pack and set adrift by the awesome nature of his crime. I’d never seen anything in him that suggested a common thread, a link with the rest of us.

“I’ve already done a lot of work,” Rebecca added, “particularly with one of the men who investigated the case.” She stepped back slightly, as if to get a better view of me, or the room, or something else she might later want to describe. “You probably remember him,” she said. “He remembers that you sat in the back seat of the car and that it was raining.”

I could see the silver bird as the rain crashed down upon its outstretched wings.

“His name is Swenson,” Rebecca went on, “and he remembers turning around and saying something to you.”

At that instant, I remembered everything exactly as it had happened that day. I saw the black arms of the windshield wipers as they floated rhythmically over the rain-swept glass, the curling smoke that came from the other one’s cigar, the big, white face as it turned toward me, Swenson’s pudgy pink thumb gently rubbing the lenses beneath a slightly soiled white handkerchief, his voice low, wheezy: One day you’ll be all right again.

“He had red hair,” I blurted suddenly.

“It’s more of an orange-white now,” Rebecca said. “His health is not very good.”

She described him briefly. Despite his illness, he was still large, she said, with very intense green eyes. He had a gentle manner, but she had sensed great reserves of fortitude and courage. She said that he’d looked long and hard for my father, had followed scores of leads, but that finally, after several years, he’d been told to let it drop, that there was no more money to pursue an unsolvable case. He’d retired not long after that, his health failing steadily, so that during her interview with him, he’d sat near an oxygen tank, taking quick breaths through a plastic mask. It was a condition that reminded me of Quentin’s final days.

“My uncle died like that,” I told her. “Some sort of respiratory thing.”

“That would be Quentin Coleman, the man you lived with in Maine?”

That’s right.”

Rebecca said, “I know it’s sudden, the way I’ve just shown up here at your office, but I hope you don’t mind.” She paused, then added, “I’d like to talk to you for a longer time. It’s up to you, of course.”

“To tell you the truth, Miss Soltero,” I said, “I don’t know if I could be of much help to you. I was only nine years old when it happened.”

“But you remember your father, don’t you?”

“No, not much.”

She looked at me very intently. “Are you sure?” she asked.

It was more than a question, and even at that moment I recognized that part of it was a challenge, and part an accusation, the notion that if I didn’t help her unearth my father’s crime, then I was, to some degree, a partner in it, his cowardly accomplice.

“Would you be willing to meet me again, Mr. Farris?” Rebecca asked directly.

She had drawn the line in the dust. Now it was up to me either to cross it or drift back, draw away from her, but even more critically, to draw away from my father, to close the door forever in his ghostly face. There was something in such a grave finality that I couldn’t do.

“Well, I guess we could talk,” I replied, “but I still don’t think I’ll be able to remember much.”

Rebecca smiled quietly and put out her hand. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll call you.”

She left directly after that, and I went back to my desk and began working up a preliminary design for a small library in neighboring Massachusetts.

Within an hour the clouds had broken. From my desk I watched the morning air steadily brighten until it reached a kind of sparkling purity at midday.

I ate my lunch in the park, watching the swans drift along the edges of the pond, until Wally suddenly plopped down beside me, stretched out his thick, stubby legs, and released a soft belch.

“Oops. Sorry, Stevie,” he said. “It’s the spaghetti. It always repeats on me.” He patted his stomach and went on about other foods that had the same effect upon him—popcorn, melon, a vast assortment—until, near the end of a long list, he stopped, his eyes fixed on a figure he saw moving along the far edges of the pond. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said wonderingly. “Christ, that’s her, Steve.”

“Who?”

“Hell, it’s been ten years. I don’t know her name right off.”

“Who are you talking about?”

“That woman, there.”

He nodded, and I glanced over in the direction he indicated. I could see a tall, thin woman as she strolled beside the water. She was wearing a plain, dark blue dress. Her hair had once been very dark, but was now streaked with gray. Her skin looked very pale, almost powdery, as if she were slowly disintegrating.

“Yolanda, that’s it,” Wally blurted. “Yolanda Dawes.”

“Who is she?”

“You kidding me, Steve?” Wally asked unbelievingly. “Hell, man, she’s the evil home-wrecker, the menace on the road.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She’s the broad that killed Marty Harmon.”

I turned toward her as if she were a creature out of myth, the scarlet woman of immemorial renown. She’d reached the far end of the pond by then, the bright midday light throwing a dazzling haze around her as she strolled along its smooth, rounded edge.

Wally had returned to deeper interests, plucking at his nails with a tiny clipper. “Even way back then, she never struck me as something to get all that worked up about,” he said absently. “But she sure killed old Marty Harmon, just as sure as if she’d put a bullet in his head.”

I hadn’t thought of Marty in years, but it was not hard to conjure him up again. We’d come to work for Simpson and Lowe at nearly the same time, and although he was older than I, we’d both been novices at the firm. Because of that we’d socialized together, usually going out for an hour or so after work on Fridays, a custom that neither Marie nor Marty’s wife had ever seemed to mind.

Marty’s wife was named LeAnn. Before marrying Marty, she’d spent most of her life in Richmond, Virginia. They’d met while Marty was in the navy, married, then moved north, where Marty felt more comfortable. By the time he joined Simpson and Lowe, they’d had two children, a boy of eleven and a girl of nine. I don’t recall their names, but only that they were both strikingly blond. By now their hair has darkened. In all likelihood, they have married, and have children of their own. Perhaps, had I kept in touch, I might have been of some assistance to them, since, like me, they were destined to grow up without a father.

As a fellow-worker and, to some extent, a friend, Marty was self-effacing, witty, and very kind. He was not a terribly ambitious man, and he might never have become a partner. But he was highly competent, great with detail, organizational and otherwise, and socially adept enough never to embarrass himself or anyone else by his behavior at office parties or other business functions.

Our favorite place was Harbor Lights, a little bar-restaurant on the outskirts of town. The interior was decked out like the inside of an old whaling boat, complete with oars, coils of thick gray rope, and a few rusty harpoons. For almost two years, we went there at least two Friday evenings out of each month. We talked business and office gossip, the usual end-of-the-week banality. Marty seemed to enjoy the time we spent together, loosening his tie, and sometimes even kicking off his black, perfectly polished shoes. We talked about sports a great deal, and sometimes about our families. Marie was pregnant by then, a child we later lost to miscarriage in its second month, and Marty sometimes fell into the role of the older, more experienced man, warning me of the changes that would inevitably come with fatherhood.

“But all the changes are worth it,” he told me cheerfully, “because being a father, it’s a different kind of love.”

He was always reassuring, and even after the miscarriage he continued to talk about parenthood, clearly encouraging me to try again.

Then, without a word, our Friday meetings came to an end. At first I thought that, after two years, Marty and I had simply come to that point when there was nothing more to discuss and so had drifted in other directions.

I might have felt that way forever if LeAnn hadn’t called me three months later. It was just past midnight on a Friday, and her voice was strained.

“Steve, have you seen Marty tonight?”

“No.”

“You didn’t meet him at that restaurant you go to?”

“No, LeAnn. Why?”

She didn’t say. She never said. But something in the tone of her voice that night suggested to me that the snake which seems to lie coiled at the center of so many lives had suddenly struck out at her.

“LeAnn, has something happened?”

She didn’t answer.

“LeAnn? Are you all right?”

“Yes,” she said, then immediately hung up.

She’d lied, of course. She wasn’t all right. She’d dropped from girlhood into womanhood as if through a scaffold floor. “Boys come to manhood through mastery,” Rebecca would write years later, “girls come to womanhood through betrayal.” So it was with LeAnn Harmon.

The following Monday, I found Marty already at the office when I arrived. He looked haggard, his shoulders slumped, as if under heavy weights, as he shambled toward me.

“LeAnn said she called you,” he said. “What did you tell her?”

“What could I tell her, Marty?”

He nodded helplessly. “I should have mentioned something to you, Steve. I’m sorry you got pulled into it.”

“I didn’t know what to do.”

“No, of course not,” Marty said. “There’s nothing you could have done.”

He walked wearily to his desk, then pulled himself in behind it. He didn’t speak to me again that day, and only rarely after that, as if I’d become a source of embarrassment to him, something he’d rather have been rid of.

For the next month, Marty worked steadily and well, but during those intervals when he wasn’t completely engaged, he looked lost and distracted. At noon, he would wander into the small park across from the office and take his lunch alone. From the window beside my desk, I could see him on the little wooden bench beside the pond, dressed in dark pants and a white shirt, the sleeves rolled up to the elbow, the black-rimmed glasses like a mask over his eyes.

I talked to Marty for the last time about three weeks later. It was at our old haunt, Harbor Lights. I found him sitting alone at a booth near the back. He was smoking a cigarette, his other hand wrapped around a glass of scotch. The jacket of his suit lay in a disordered lump beside him, and he’d yanked his tie down and unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt.

“You know what the trouble with men like us is, Steve?” he asked. “We think we can handle anything.” He leaned forward, squinting in my direction. “But there is a force, my friend,” he said with a sudden vehemence. “There is a force that none of us can handle.”

I never asked him what that force was, and after a while, he finished his drink, took a long draw on his last cigarette, then got to his feet and walked away, giving my arm a quick, comradely squeeze as he headed for the door.

There was a small hotel a few blocks from Harbor Lights. It had a neat mid-Atlantic design, all wood and white paint, with bright red shutters. The door had panes of inlaid glass and the sign which hung beside it showed a teenage boy in Colonial dress, red vest and tri-corner hat, a snare drum hanging at his side.

At 11:15 A.M. the following day, Marty checked into room 304 of that hotel. Twenty minutes later, he shot himself.

Marty was buried a few days later, and only a month after that, LeAnn returned to Richmond with her two blond children. I never saw any of them again.

“Yolanda Dawes,” Wally said again, shaking his head, as he sat on the bench beside me. “Doesn’t look like the black widow, does she?”

I glanced toward her again, my eyes lingering on the wistful, beguiling grace her body had assumed as she made her way along the water’s edge.

Wally smiled. “That’s the trouble with black widows, buddy,” he said, “they never do.” He grunted as he stood up, adding nothing else as the two of us walked back to work.

For the rest of the afternoon, I concentrated on the little library in Massachusetts, then left for home at around five-thirty.

When I arrived, Peter was shooting hoops into the basket I’d nailed to the garage door years before. He hardly noticed as I walked by, merely nodded briefly, fired a quick “Hi, Dad,” and continued with the game. I could hear the ball thudding like an irregular pulse as I went on past the garage and up the stairway that led to the side entrance of the house, the one that opened onto the kitchen.

Marie was in her office down the hall, working at her computer and listening to Brahms’ violin concerto, the only one he ever wrote, a work that Marie liked more than any other, obsessively buying each new rendition as soon as it was released.

“How’d it go today?” I asked.

She barely looked up from her keyboard. “Okay,” she said idly. “You?”

“Fine,” I told her, paused a moment, then added, “Nothing new.”

In that brief pause, I’d thought of Rebecca, considered mentioning her visit to Marie, then decided not to. It had all been done in an instant, a choice made in favor of concealment, even though there’d been nothing to conceal. I realize now that it was a choice made out of a subtle yearning to have a secret in my life, something hidden, tucked away, a compartment where I could keep one treasure for myself alone. The fact that this “treasure” was a woman meant less to me at the time than that it was clandestine and mysterious, a secluded back street I wanted to walk down.

“Go change, then,” Marie said, her eyes still fixed on the monitor. “We need to start dinner.”

I headed upstairs to the bedroom, pulled off my suit and tie, and returned downstairs. Marie and Peter were already in the kitchen.

“Okay, let’s get started,” she said, handing me a wooden salad bowl.

Making dinner together was a ritual Marie had long ago established, a “family time” that was busy and productive, a moment when we had to “face” each other, as she said, without the distraction of a game or television. Over the years it had become routine, something I neither looked forward to nor dreaded, a fact of life like any other, open, aboveboard, beyond the allure of the unrevealed.