Mortal Memory

TWO

EVEN NOW, WHEN I return to my dead family, it’s always by way of my father. It’s as if he stands at the gate of my memory, the border guard of a dark frontier.

It was a border I rarely approached during the years that followed the murders, a frontier I almost never entered. It was the “terra incognito” of the medieval maps, the place where “there be dragons,” as the ancient cartographers declared.

And so, over the years, I had not looked back. Because of that, everything had faded—Jamie, my mother, even Laura to some degree. Only my father had remained in stark relief, grim and unfathomable, the ultimate engima.

Of all the questions Rebecca later asked about him, she never asked the easiest one, the one for which my life had provided two different answers: What did your father do?

Until I was nine, the answer came quickly, without that momentary twinge of dread or embarrassment that later accompanied it. I simply replied that my father owned a hardware store.

I could remember the store very well. It was on Sycamore Street, and it had two large windows, which my father stuffed with anything that came to hand: hammers, saws, lengths of rope. In general, he stacked smaller items in the window to the right of the door, and larger ones, like enormous red toolboxes or shiny aluminum ladders, in the one to the left. He took no pains to make the windows attractive, or to display the goods in any particular way. He simply lumbered absently from the back of the store, his arms filled with anything he’d found in reach, and deposited it all neatly, but randomly, in the front windows. As far as I recall, the only regard he ever paid was to the seasons. From time to time he would shove a wheelbarrow into the fall window, the perfect tool for gathering leaves. In winter he would replace it with the snow blower that would remain in the window for the next four months. Beyond that, he seems to have had no theme in mind, no organizing principle.

Inside the store, the usual implements and materials hung from the walls, such things as rakes, shovels, and axes. Smaller items were gathered in wooden bins, nails, bolts, lengths of coiled wire and the like. The only thing I ever noticed in the store that seemed out of place was the single Rodger and Windsor racing bicycle which my father kept in the left rear corner of the shop, cordoned off”from everything else, as if it were only for display. It was a fancy touring bicycle, imported from England, and each time the latest model was sold, my father would replace it, tediously assembling it himself in the basement of our house, then transporting it to the store in the back of his small brown delivery van.

The Rodger and Windsor was the only kind of bike my father ever stocked. It was always red, and it never appeared to matter that he sold no more than three or four of them during the entire year. The fact is, he seemed to love it, or at least to feel for it some kind of strange devotion.

More than anything, I think now, he loved the process of putting it together. It was a difficult and painstaking labor, and he worked at it for many hours without stopping. It was strange to see him alone in the basement, stooped over a disconnected wheel, meticulously tightening each spoke, then turning the wheel, and methodically tightening each of them again. As a working style, it was completely different from his usual habit, which was hasty and sloppy and impulsive, the way he arranged the windows of the store or tossed different-sized nails into a common bin, everything done offhandedly, without a thought.

The look on his face was different, too. Normally, it was rather expressionless, but when he worked on the Rodger and Windsor, it took on a wonderful intensity and concentration, as if he found something rapturous in the process of assembly. Perhaps in this, as in everything else, it was the building rather than the completion which attracted and sustained him.

In any event, I remember seeing him at work toward the end of October. The latest bike had arrived a week before, but he’d been occupied in trying to straighten out some entanglement with the Internal Revenue Service. The woman who’d done the store’s books for several years had left a few weeks earlier, and without her, he’d been entirely at sea as he’d labored to give the IRS the information it had suddenly demanded. Normally, he would have set to work on the new Rodger and Windsor immediately, but because of the government paperwork, he’d been prevented from unpacking the bike for almost two weeks.

When he finally got to it, however, he went at it with the same persistence that he always applied to this task, working many hours at a time, always at night, with nothing but the single, naked bulb which hung above to help him make his hundreds of minute adjustments. I remember seeing him hunched over a length of bicycle chain, tapping at it with a small hammer, while his other hand caressed it with an eerie gentleness and affection. He was wearing his customary gray flannel shirt and trousers, and he had thrown the black sweater he often wore over the bike’s chrome handlebars. It hung there like a dried animal skin while my father continued at his tapping, unaware that I stood not far away, poised, as he would be three weeks later, on the third step from the bottom.

For a long time, he didn’t see me. Then, suddenly, he lifted his head and turned his eyes toward me, his gaze lingering on my face, but very dully, the way Jamie sometimes stared at his open textbook. For a time, his expression remained blank, the face of a mannequin in a shop window, colorless, with dim, unlighted eyes.

“Hi, Dad,” I said.

He didn’t answer at first, but after a moment, he smiled very softly, then said in a low, broken voice, “This is all I want.”

This is all I want.

Neither that evening, as I went back upstairs, nor in the years to come, did I ever give the slightest thought to what he might have meant by that. And yet, almost without my realizing it, it had always suggested to me that on that particular October night, a full three weeks before the murders, my father had already determined that we were going to die, that he was going to remove everything that stood between him and whatever it was he wanted out of life.

What did your father do?

After that day in November, the question took on a completely different significance. After that day, he could no longer be defined by what he “did” for a living. He could no longer be reduced to the man in the hardware store on Sycamore Street. What he “did” was kill his family.

But as I’d watched Mrs. Fields walk to the kitchen door, knock, start to knock again, but grow rigid instead, then return to the car, I hadn’t realized that the strained, tortured look on her face was the same one I would see from now on when I answered the question truthfully. What did your father do? He killed my mother, my sister, and my brother, then waited in the kitchen to kill me.

It was all in Mrs. Fields’s face that afternoon, the world’s response to my father, the dread and horror his image would conjure up forever.

I could see her eyes in the rearview mirror as she wheeled the car into her own driveway, tense, darting, as if desperately trying to avoid her own terrible conjectures. Bobby was bouncing playfully on the seat beside me, the rain blowing against the car window, pounding at it with huge gray drops. Mrs. Fields opened the back door and pulled him out, almost violently, so that he squealed “Mom,” then ran into the house. I looked at her curiously, trying to determine if I’d done anything to cause the strain and alarm I could see in her face. She lifted her hand toward me, the painted red fingernails like little arrows of light in the shadowy interior of the car.

“Come out, Stevie,” she said, still offering her hand.

I took it reluctantly, let it tug me out into the rain, then bolted for the front door of the house. Bobby was waiting for me down the hall. He motioned me into his room. He didn’t bother to close the door, and so I could hear Mrs. Fields on the phone a few feet away. She was clearly distressed. She was calling for help.

For help, but not for the police. She called Mrs. Hamilton instead. I could hear her voice, hesitant, restrained, and although I can’t be sure that I gathered the words in exactly, I know the kind of call it was:

“Hello, Jane? This is Mary Fields.”

“Oh, hi, Mary.”

“Jane, I was just over at Dottie Farris’s house. Stevie is with me, and I was bringing him home. And well … I went to the door, the one at the kitchen, and I saw …”

It was only at that moment, Mrs. Hamilton would say later, that she remembered the three muffled booms that had swept through the sheeting rain that afternoon, the second rapidly following the first, the third coming several minutes later.

Several minutes.

What, during those several minutes, did Mrs. Hamilton, the gray, overweight wife of the town’s only Presbyterian minister, think was going on across the street at 417 McDonald Drive?

Several minutes.

Later, when I began my search, I read those two words in the thick file which the Somerset, New Jersey, Police Department finally allowed me to see: “Witness stated that although the second shot followed closely after the first, there was a duration of several minutes between the second and final shots.”

And then this: “Witness stated that the television program Queen for a Day had just ended, and therefore estimates the time of the last shot at between 3:55 and 4:00 P.M. EST.”

And so, all across the Eastern Seaboard, Queen for a Day, with its bilious host and tacky audience applause meter, had just ended when the last member of my family died.

What did your father do?

Years later, looking at a series of police photographs while two uniformed officers watched me warily from the other side of the room, I tried to reconstruct the grim choreography of my family’s murder:

From them it seemed clear that Jamie had been the first to die. In the pictures, a set of bloody tracks lead from Jamie’s room down the upstairs corridor to Laura’s. She’d probably been near the window when she heard first the deafening roar which came from Jamie’s room, then footsteps moving down the corridor, and last the sound of her own door as it opened toward her. Reflexively she turned toward it, and saw my father standing there, the barrel of his shotgun lowering toward her. Against its blast, she raised her hand, perhaps to shield her face, or perhaps in a pleading motion which he immediately refused.

From Laura’s room, the tracks, still thick with blood, lead directly to the room opposite Laura’s, the master bedroom, the one with the floral curtains. He must have found it empty, because my mother was not killed in that room. There were no spattered walls, no blood-soaked carpet for the police to photograph in that dimly lighted bedroom.

The tracks head back down the corridor, down the stairs, into the living room, and through it to the small solarium, where they move into it a little way, then turn and head out again. It is a line of trajectory which could only mean one thing. That my mother was trying to escape, but witlessly, never thinking of leaving the house, too passive even to make that final domestic break.

The tracks then move back through the living room, a little wider now, for he is searching for her desperately, taking longer steps, perhaps in fear, or rage. Certainly, he is moving faster.

The tracks are seen in the dining room next, then in the kitchen. Still, she eludes him. He wheels around, leaving a slender mark on the tile floor to indicate the fierceness of his turn, how for just an instant, he lifted almost entirely from the ground, whirling on the backs of his heels.

The tracks move again, toward the door that leads to the basement, then down the wooden stairs toward its flat cement floor. At the third step from the bottom, they stop.

Because of the hard rain which had been falling for hours by late that afternoon, water had seeped into the basement, a small lake gathering near the middle of the room. My mother passed through that puddle several times, her watery trail making a bizarre and illogical pattern on the cement floor. Perhaps she ran about, zigzagging in her terror, while he stood on the third step, laboring to bring her into his sights.

At last, she came to rest in a back corner, behind the huge cardboard box in which she stored our Christmas decorations. It was there that he raked her with a third and final blast.

All of this, then, was what my father did.

And in the years that followed, it was to this single horrendous act I had reduced him. All his life had collapsed into a single savage and explosive instant. I couldn’t imagine his life before or after it. My father was frozen forever as he had stood upon that third step, his shoes still glistening brightly with my brother’s and my sister’s blood.

But there had been a life before that one murderous instant. Not a great life. Not a life of high achievement, or even noble failure. But a life nonetheless, the kind that most of us live, plain but sturdy, building day by day a structure that holds up.

My father, as I came to discover, was a country boy. Throughout all his early years, he lived on a small farm in rural New York. Each day, he did the chores common to children on a farm. He gathered eggs, milked cows, cleared the weeds that sprouted intransigently among the neatly proportioned rows of the family garden. In the summer he swam in the great blue lake several miles away. In the fall he went to a country school named for Daniel Webster where he learned to read and write sufficiently to carry out the basic tasks of life. Later, when he was fourteen, he transferred to the high school in the nearby town of Highfield. It was named for a local boy who’d died in the Spanish-American War, and my father graduated from it at somewhere near the middle of his class in June of 1931. In the class photograph, taken at the town ball field on graduation day, he is positioned on the back row, the fifth boy from the left, his black hair greased back, staring at the camera with an ordinary smile. Inside the high school yearbook for that same year, a slender volume made of cheap paper and bound in leatherette, and which I found in one of the boxes I inherited from Aunt Edna, he is said to have been a member of the baseball team. A picture shows him individually, dressed in a flat black suit and bow tie, his nickname printed underneath: Town Crier.

Town Crier. What had his classmates meant by that? Was there something in him that suggested warning and alarm, a sense of being startled from one’s sleep? Had the faces of his classmates ever grown taut as they stared into my father’s youthful eyes? When some of them later read of what he did, were there a few among them who had not been surprised?

I wondered about his parents, too. In photographs they are a sturdy, farming couple, plain in that way that makes plainness seem beautiful, noble, and even a little superior to more sophisticated and elaborate things. At night, when the lights were out, and they lay together in the darkness, had they ever voiced the slightest concern for some odd look or disturbing word they’d noticed in their only son?

During all his early years, my father lived with his parents on the same small farm. It was nestled in a grove of trees, with a broad expanse of field on either side. The house still stands, and only a few weeks before Rebecca, I visited it for the first time. Peter, my nine-year-old son, had spent the summer at a camp in upstate New York, and around the middle of August, Marie and I drove up to the camp to pick him up and bring him back home. I had a Volvo station wagon then, and we piled all his belongings into it and headed back toward Connecticut.

I hadn’t intended to visit the little house where my father grew up, but on the way to the expressway I saw a small sign for Highfield. I recognized the name, although I’d never been there. My father’s parents had died within a year of each other when he was only twenty-five, and evidently he’d never felt the need to visit the farm after that. I don’t think he ever took my mother there, or Jamie or Laura. At his parents’ death, it appeared to have dissolved from his mind.

But it hadn’t dissolved from mine, and according to the sign, it was only twelve miles away. Even so, I continued straight ahead, expecting to turn onto the expressway well before I reached the town. It was Marie who stopped me, looking quizzically in my direction only a few seconds after we passed the sign.

“Highfield,” she said finally, her eyes drifting over to me. “Isn’t that the town your father came from?”

I nodded silently and kept driving.

“He was born there, right?”

“On a little farm right outside it.”

“When did he leave?”

“When he graduated from high school, I think.”

Marie turned back toward the road. She knew about my father, of course, and I think that something in him, his sudden, inexplicable murderousness, had always interested her. Early on, she’d asked a great many questions about what he was like, probing like an amateur, somewhat Freudian detective, looking for the reason, as if there were some twisted secret in his past, which, if unearthed, would bring everything to light.

“Wouldn’t you like to see the house?” she asked after a moment.

“Why would I want to do that?”

“Because he was your father,” she answered.

I glanced in her direction. “I think you’re the one who wants to see it.”

She shook her head. “No. You do.” She smiled. “It’s only natural. Why don’t we drop by?”

I shrugged. “Okay,” I said.

And so I didn’t get on the expressway that afternoon, but headed toward Highfield, then drove through it, searching for the small road that Quentin had long ago described, a road that wound off to the right at the end of a stone wall.

The road came up shortly, looking like little more than a cattle trail through a green field. A narrow sign marked it with the words I’d seen on the letters my father had written to his parents during the brief time he’d lived in New York City: Lake Road.

I slowed as I neared the sign, stopped just before I got to it and looked at Marie. I remember very well the clipped, un-dramatic exchange that followed:

“Should I?”

“Why not? … It’s just a house.”

And so it was. Just a house, run-down a bit, but otherwise as I might have expected. The yard was neatly mowed, and a line of flowers had been planted along the small walkway which led to the front door. Two large trees kept the grounds heavily shaded. It had a gravel driveway, but no garage, and as I got out of the car, I could see an old wooden fence, weathered and dilapidated, which, I suppose, my father had helped build.

I left Marie and Peter in the car, walked up the small walkway to the house and knocked at the door. The woman who answered it was middle-aged, plump, her hair pinned up behind her head. She was wiping her hands with a dishcloth bordered with small red flowers.

“Hello,” I said.

She nodded, neither friendly nor unfriendly, simply curious to know who I was.

“My name is Steven Farris,” I told her.

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“This is a little strange,” I added, “but years ago my …” I choked briefly on the word, but nonetheless got it out. “… father lived here, in this house.”

The woman smiled. “Oh,” she said and, without another word, swung open the door. “I guess you’d like to see it then.”

“Well, I don’t want to disturb you.”

“No, not at all,” the woman said. She leaned out the door slightly. That your family?” she asked, eyeing the people in the Volvo.

“Yes.”

They want to come in?”

“I guess so,” I told her, then turned and waved Marie and Peter toward the house.

We were only there for a short time. Marie engaged the woman in conversation, the two of them finally heading up to the second floor, while Peter sat indifferently in the foyer, lost in one of his electronic games.

And so, for a moment, I was alone in my father’s house. Not alone physically, of course, but alone in the way that I could look at it without distraction.

At first, I wandered into the living room, glancing at the old fireplace, the neatly arranged furniture, the varnished wooden floor. A great number of family photos hung from the walls, sons in uniform, daughters in communion dresses, and later, grown older now, these same boys and girls with strangers at their sides, children on their knees, the boys with moustaches or thinning hair, the girls with wrinkled eyes. Time went forward on the wall, and hair retreated even more, faces grew more slack. The children left their parents’ knees to dress in uniforms and bridal gowns, choose strangers from a world of strangers, have children of their own.

“Steve, you want to look upstairs?”

It was Marie’s voice. She was standing on the staircase, leaning over the rail. “His room must have been up here,” she said.

I headed toward her, walking up the stairs, touring the house now as if it were a black museum, my father’s room cordoned off as Washington’s or Lincoln’s might have been, all the furniture in place, but with an atmosphere altogether different, sinister and grave.

Marie was standing at the end of the short corridor, poised beside an open door, the woman standing beside her, smiling sweetly.

“This must have been it,” Marie said. “There are only two bedrooms up here, and the other one’s big, so it must have been for his parents.”

It was the amateur detective at work again, and as I walked to where Marie stood like a guide waiting for a straggling tourist, I remember resenting how flippantly she had come to regard the story of my father, treating it more as a childhood tale, an imagined horror. Of course, I’d been partly to blame for that, answering her questions matter-of-factly, without emotion, like a reporter who’d covered the story, rather than a child who’d lived it. Perhaps, because of that, she’d come to think that the whole dark history meant little to me, that I no longer felt its grisly power.

And yet, for all that, Marie didn’t go in my father’s room, but remained outside, waiting in the corridor.

I have often wondered why. Was there something in that tiny room that warned her away, the ghost of the black-haired boy his friends had called Town Crier?

In any event, I went in alone, stood on the circular hooked carpet at the center of the room, and turned slowly to take it in. I felt nothing. Everything that might have given me some sense of my father had long ago been removed. His bed was gone, along with whatever he might have tacked to the walls, maps or photographs or pennants. If he’d ever had a desk or chair, they were gone as well. In their place, the new owner had put a small worktable and wooden stool. The table was covered with spools of different-colored yarn, along with an assortment of needles and brass clips. “I make things for the crafts fairs we have up here,” the woman said as she stepped up beside me. Then, glancing about the room, she added, “It makes a nice little work space, don’t you think?” She smiled. “Very cozy.”

She offered coffee and cake after we’d all gone back downstairs, but neither Marie nor I felt inclined to take her up on it. Instead, we thanked her for her generosity, returned to the car, and headed home, the old house growing small in my rearview mirror before it finally vanished behind a sudden curve.

It was dark by the time we reached Old Salsbury. Peter was asleep in the back seat. I took him up the stairs and laid him on his bed, then sat down beside him and ran my fingers through his hair. I had seen my father do the same to me, and certainly he’d done it to Laura and Jamie as well. There had been a gentleness in him, a guardianship and care. That murder might finally flow from such a source seemed inconceivable to me.

I left Peter to his sleep, and walked across the hallway to where Marie sat at her dressing table, applying her nightly oils and creams. I took off my clothes, placing everything neatly on the little wooden valet which stood on my side of the bed, and crawled beneath the covers. The sheets were very cool, as I prefer them, but later Marie drew in beside me, her body heating them, so that I pulled away from her, finally edging myself precariously toward the far side of the bed.

I rarely dream, or if I do, I rarely remember my dreams. But that night I had not so much a dream as what I would call a visitation. It was not a visit from my father. There was no shotgun-toting figure moving toward me from the depths of a smoky corridor, the subject of my childhood nightmares. In fact, there was no one in my dream at all. At least, no one but myself. And yet, it was so powerfully rendered, so elaborately detailed, that I could easily recall it the following morning.

In the dream, I awakened slowly, rather than the way I usually do, with a sudden start. It was a luxurious restfulness from what appeared to have been a state of great exhaustion. The dream gave no hint as to what had tired me so, but only that I had slept a long time, and was now rising with a natural and unhurried rhythm.

The room was very bright, but it was not my room, nor any room in which I’d ever been. It seemed a bit drab, but also strangely atmospheric, so that I felt completely at home in it, as if living there were my natural state. There was a large wooden bureau, the plain metal bed on which I had slept, and a sink. A pair of wrinkled towels hung over each side of the sink, and a slender full-length mirror hung from the wall beside it.

In my dream, I got to my feet languidly and walked toward the window. On the way, I glanced at the mirror. What I saw did not alarm me. I had about a three-day growth of beard, and I was wearing a white, sleeveless T-shirt and baggy brown trousers. I was barefoot, but I could see a pair of old shoes beneath the bed, one set of laces a little frayed, but otherwise in good repair.

At the window, I parted a pair of ragged white curtains and looked out. The sun was very bright, and I remember sensing that it was midday. Beyond the window, there was a large, dusty city, a conglomeration of rust-colored shingled roofs and distant church towers. In the streets below, I could see signs written in a foreign language, and hear men laughing in an outdoor tavern. Over their laughter, I could make out the sound of guitars, strummed softly by men I could not see, and the lilting cry of what I took for a wooden flute.

I awoke while still standing at the window. Nothing at all happened in the dream. And yet, it awakened me, not languidly, but with the usual sense of being startled. Dawn had not broken, and so I felt my way through the continuing darkness until I made it into the hallway. I switched on the light, walked past Peter’s room, then down the stairs to the kitchen. There was a can of soda in the refrigerator, which I opened and poured into the huge mug Peter had given me the previous Christmas, porcelain with German figures on it, smiling milkmaids and old men in lederhosen.

I drank silently, the dream still lingering in my mind, as if it were an afterimage which needed only a bit more time to fade. But as the minutes passed, and I followed the first soda with a second, it still held its place in my mind, all its details fully intact, everything from the tiniest scratches I had seen on the old bureau to the notes I’d heard played on the flute I’d never seen.

I couldn’t finish the second soda, and after a while, I walked back upstairs, crawled into bed again, twisted about uncomfortably for a few minutes, then returned to the kitchen. I switched on the light, and as I did so, my eyes caught on the half-filled mug I’d put in the sink. It sat near the drain, upright, but out of place, just as my father’s unfinished cup of coffee had rested in nearly the same position on that November day, as if waiting still for Mrs. Fields to see it. It was then that it struck me that the dream had come from him, that it was a message—although still cryptic and unreadable—from my father.

What did your father do?

Even that night, after the visit to my father’s house and the dream that followed it, even then, it was still someone else’s question.

It was Bobby Fields’s question when we met the first day of first grade, and to which I’d been able to give the simple reply that I would lose forever in only a few years: “He owns a hardware store.”

It was Jerry Flynn’s question when I was ten, and living in Maine, and when he asked it, he meant Uncle Quentin, whom he assumed to be my father.

It was Sally Peacock’s question when I went out on my first date and had to explain, because there seemed no way to avoid it, that my father had left me years before and so, at the moment, I had no idea what he “did.”

It was Marie’s question that long night we first made love, and I told her in full and ghastly detail exactly what my father had done on that November day.

And at last, as it must always be with sons, it was my question, too.