Mortal Memory

SIX

“STEVE, IT’S SEVEN-THIRTY.”

It was Marie calling from downstairs.

I got up slowly, showered, and dressed.

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

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 Instead it was one of those rare occasions when my father and Laura, normally so withdrawn from the rest of us, had talked quite openly at the breakfast table, chatting with a rare spiritedness and candor, as if they were alone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What are you thinking about, Steve?”

I glanced toward Marie. “What?”

“You looked like you were thinking about something.”

“Just something at work,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s me.”

“Who?”

“Steve Farris.”

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

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

“I suppose so.”

“The same place? Around five?”

“Okay.”

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

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

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

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

“I brought a few pictures,” she said.

“Pictures of the murders?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

I didn’t know exactly what part of the room my father had used as his small space. The beds had been removed years before, leaving only a bare floor and a scattering of loose boards. A great many names had been carved on the wooden walls and supporting beams, and for a while I looked for my father’s name among them. I found J. C. Paxton and Monty Cochran and Leo Krantz and a host of other solitary males, but there was no sign of William P. Farris, or Bill Farris, or even W.P.F.

He’d lived there for nearly a year. Each night, from his small window, he’d seen the men in the street below, brooding by their open fires, tossing wooden slats into the flames while they grumbled about the state of things.

Dutifully he’d written home once a week, the letters preserved by his parents, then passed down to him, and finally, because of Mrs. Fields’s second phone call, the one that made him quickly pull on his coat and hat and head for the waiting station wagon, also passed on to me.

They weren’t chatty letters, and they suggested that my father hadn’t felt much excitement about being in New York. They were informative, but little else. In them he mentioned the attic on Great Jones Street, but not that he shared it with a crowd of other itinerants. He talked about the weather, but only in the most general terms, days described as cold or hot, rainy or clear. The word “pleasant” recurred, as did the word “nasty,” but all the more detailed descriptions were left out.

Left out too was the sense of limited horizons that must surely have overwhelmed him from time to time. He’d been a boy of only nineteen, alone in an enormous city, living in a dreary attic with nearly a dozen other people, men probably older than he, broken and displaced men, fleeing shattered homes. At night, he must have listened to their tales of bad luck and betrayal, perhaps from his own dark bunk, too young and inexperienced to join in the talk or to be treated as an equal.

Since Rebecca, I’ve often imagined him in such a posture, lying faceup on his grimy mattress, his pale-blue eyes fixed on the ceiling, the murmur of voices curling around him while he tried to calculate his next move, a man locked in a grim and airless solitude.

But that day months before, as I stared quietly at the photograph Rebecca had placed before me, I saw only an empty-faced young man, a face without a past, almost a fictional character, one whom murder had created.

“I never heard my father talk about New York,” I said. “I never heard him talk very much about Highfield, either.”

Rebecca didn’t press me for more. Instead, she drew the photograph away and revealed the one beneath it, a picture of my mother as she stood beside a low stone wall. She was dressed in a light-colored skirt and blouse, her hair shining in a bright summer light.

“She looks about eighteen,” I said.

“Do you know anything about her youth?” Rebecca asked.

“I can’t even imagine her as young,” I said. “She always seemed so old to me.” I thought a moment, then added, “I think she was probably a very depressed person. Clinically depressed.”

“Why do you think that?”

“She never seemed to have any energy. There was something faded in her, like she needed someone to brush the dust off her shoulders.”

Rebecca nodded toward the photograph. “She seems to have a lot of energy in this picture,” she said. “She looks quite vivid.”

I looked at the photograph again. My mother was smiling very cheerfully at the camera. She seemed not only young, but free, lighthearted, happy. There was a flirtatiousness in the way she leaned back against the stone wall, in the girlish tilt of her head, in the “come hither” look she offered to the camera.

“Who took this picture?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Rebecca answered. “They were among the pictures the police took from your house on McDonald Drive. No one ever claimed them, and so Swenson let me go through them. Most of them had dates and locations written on the back, but this one didn’t.” She shrugged. “I don’t know why.”

My mother’s face appeared to beam toward me, her joy sweeping out like a wave. “I think I know why,” I said quietly. “It was because she knew exactly where and when it had been taken, and knew that she’d never forget that particular moment.”

Rebecca said nothing. Instead she waited for me to continue, to call up some other memory of my mother.

“I don’t have anything else to say about her,” I said after a while. “She never talked about her youth. She never seemed to want to talk about it.”

“Why not?”

“Well, maybe she didn’t want to be reminded of it,” I said, though without much certainty, mere conjecture. “Maybe she didn’t like to compare it to what her life became.”

“Which was?”

“Drudgery,” I said without hesitation, returning now to the woman of my most recent memories, the one in the red house-dress, who piddled in the flower garden and lost herself in romance novels.

Rebecca nodded quickly, then slid the photograph to the side, revealing the one just under it.

It had been taken the day my father married my mother and it showed the two of them outside a small church. My mother stood beneath his arm, smiling brightly. My father seemed to be drawing her closely to his side, smiling, too.

Rebecca tapped my mother’s face gently. “Did he talk about her?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Not to me.”

I was still looking vacantly at the same picture when Rebecca slid another one up beside it, the one taken years later, which showed my mother on the bed, her face and body neatly scrubbed, hands folded, dead.

I realized, of course, that it was the contrast Rebecca wanted, perhaps for the initial shock of it, or perhaps for something deeper, the sense that for “these men” and their murdered families, life had been a long descent from some initial happiness to a murderous despair.

I looked at both pictures for a long time, shifting my concentration from one to the other before finally glancing up at Rebecca.

“What do you expect me to say?” I asked.

She didn’t answer.

I tapped the picture of my father and mother on their wedding day. “They seem happy together, don’t they?”

Rebecca nodded, then looked at me significantly. “Did you know that your mother was pregnant the day she got married?”

My eyes shot over to Rebecca. I was astonished. “She was?” I asked, unbelievingly.

“According to the records, Jamie was born on October 7, 1942, only seven months after your parents were married,” Rebecca told me. “He weighed nearly nine pounds, so he couldn’t have been premature.”

I looked at the wedding photograph again, my eyes concentrating on my mother, the “poor Dottie” of Aunt Edna’s vision, and yet a woman who, in her youth, had done at least this one daring thing. She had slept with a man who was not yet her husband, an act that had seemed beyond the reach of the woman I remembered.

“We never know them, do we?” I said. “Our parents.”

“It depends on what they’re willing to reveal,” Rebecca answered.

I glanced at the photograph, this time settling on the tall, commanding figure of my father. He was dressed in his army uniform, the green garrison cap cocked raffishly to the right. “He must have been on leave,” I said, unable to think of any other comment.

“Do you have his army records?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “Are they important?”

“Well, I like to have a basic chronology of each man’s life,” Rebecca answered.

“I’ll look for it,” I told her, though unemphatically, my eyes still set firmly on my father’s beaming face, on how happy he seemed. “He doesn’t seem to mind the idea that he’s about to be a father,” I said.

“No, he probably didn’t mind that at all,” Rebecca said. “These men rarely do.”

I could see “these men” more fully now. I could see them in their game rooms and their basements, in their trucks and station wagons, standing in their driveways and out beside their glittering blue swimming pools, men with baseball bats and rifles, who later killed their families in inconceivable acts of annihilating violence. Step by step, they were becoming less abstract to me, less headlines glimpsed in newspapers than faces emerging slowly from a pale white cloud.

I shook my head as I studied my father’s smiling face on his wedding day. “I would never have guessed that my father would have ended up as one of ‘these men,’ as you always call them,” I said.

For a moment I stared at the two pictures together, the wedding photo, and next to it my mother’s motionless body, imagining the slow crawl of time that divided them, the invisible span of days and months and years that stretched from the smiling bride to the immobile corpse so neatly laid out behind the closed bedroom curtains. Suddenly, I saw my mother alive again, squatting by the little flower garden in the early evening, digging at the ground with her rusty spade as my father’s brown van pulled into the driveway.

Often during those last weeks, he had not gotten out of the van immediately, but had remained inside, sitting behind the wheel, watching my mother silently while he smoked a cigarette, his light blue eyes piercing through the curling fog as they settled frozenly on my mother like the cross hairs of a telescopic sight.

“I can’t imagine why he did it, Rebecca,” I said.

She looked at me pointedly, but said nothing.

“But I think he knew why,” I added.

I told about the time I’d gone down into the basement not long before the murders and found my father at work on the bicycle. I described his body clothed in gray flannel, his hands working steadily at the bicycle until they’d stopped abruptly, and he’d looked up at me, his eyes eerily motionless and sad, but utterly clear at the same time. I told her about standing on the third step, watching my father silently until he’d finally noticed me, lifted his eyes and held me in his gaze for a long moment before telling me cryptically that “this” was all he wanted.

Rebecca did not write any of it down in the little pad she’d placed at her right hand. She merely listened attentively until I repeated my inevitable conclusion.

“I think my father was very conscious that there was something missing in his life,” I told her. I recalled his face again, the way he’d looked that night, the unreadable sadness I’d glimpsed in his eyes.

Once again my eyes swept down to the photograph, my father’s face shining toward me from the picture taken on his wedding day. There was no doubt of his happiness on that day, of the delight he’d felt. He had the look of a man who believed that he’d accomplished something.

“Something missing,” I repeated as I glanced back up at her again. “Which made him want to kill us all.”

Rebecca’s next question surprised me. “Why do you think he didn’t kill you, Steve?”

“I think he intended to,” I told her, “but that he got scared off by the phone calls.”

“The ones Mrs. Fields made,” Rebecca said. She took a pen out of her briefcase and held it over the blank page of her notebook. “So you don’t think he spared you because he had some special feeling for you?” she asked. “Or maybe even because you were his youngest son.”

“Well, he killed his oldest son,” I said, “so why wouldn’t he have killed me?” I shook my head. “No, I don’t think he intentionally spared me. I think that if I’d come home on time that afternoon, he’d have killed me just like he killed the others.”

She paused a moment before asking her next question. “What’s your most vivid memory of your father?”

I hesitated before answering, though not in an attempt to keep her in suspense, but only because, at first, I wasn’t sure. Finally, I said, “I remember how much my sister loved him.”

Rebecca’s eyes softened, as if this gentle answer had reached her unexpectedly.

“I don’t know what she saw in my father,” I added. “He always seemed so ordinary to me.”

The word “ordinary” appeared to surprise her.

“I mean, he didn’t have any special skills,” I explained. “He wasn’t a great talker, or anything like that. The only thing that ever really interested him was those bicycles of his.”

Rebecca looked at me curiously. “Bicycles?”

I nodded. “He imported very expensive racing bikes from England. Special ones. Rodger and Windsor. They were always red, he sold them in that little hardware store he owned. It was like some kind of obsession. He would assemble them himself, and he was always down in the basement doing that.”

“Down in the basement? Would your sister sometimes go down there?”

I’d never thought of it before, but Rebecca’s question brought it all back.

“Yes, she would,” I said. “I’d sometimes hear them talking together.”

Even at that moment, with Rebecca sitting across from me as evening fell outside the glass windows, I could hear those voices as if they were still lifting toward me, rising like smoke through the floor. They were soft voices, almost in whispers, secretive, intimate.

“Do you have any idea what they talked about?” Rebecca asked.

“I don’t think Laura ever told me.”

I let my mind drift back. I could see Laura moving across the living room, her bare feet padding across the beige carpet, her long dark hair flowing down her back as she headed for the door that led down the stairs to the basement. I could hear my father’s hammer tapping just below me, then the sound of Laura’s feet as she walked down the stairs. It was at that point, as I remembered, that the tapping had always stopped. Stopped entirely, and never started again until Laura had come back up the stairs. The memory produced a faintly alarming realization.

“She was the only one in the family who could draw him away from that obsession he had with bicycles,” I said. “I guess you could say she was the only person who had any real power over him.”

“What kind of power?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, there are only a few kinds,” Rebecca said, ticking them off one by one. “There’s money, of course, and love. Kinship. Desire.” Rebecca stared at me intently. “And duty. These men are always dutiful.”

I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “My father was dutiful.”

As I spoke, I saw him join the ranks of these other men. Like them, he’d been dutiful down to the last second. For a moment, I envisioned him as a ghostly, scooped-out man in gray flannels, trudging wearily up the aisle of the hardware store, his arms laden with tools or boxes of nails. I wondered how often during that long walk up the same dusty aisle he’d searched for some way out of his vast responsibilities, a pathway through the bramble, before he’d settled upon murder. I imagined him making another choice, to live and let us live, going on, year after year, growing old and gray and bent as he sat behind the wheel of the brown van. I imagined my mother aging into a crippled husk, unable to bend any longer over her desolate little flower garden. I saw Jamie fattening into middle age, Laura drying into a parched doll. Had my father seen all that, too? Had he glimpsed the whole dark game, seen it play out move by move in a process so unbearable that he’d finally settled on murder as a way to break the rules?

“Very dutiful,” I repeated. “Despite the way life is.”

“The way life is?” Rebecca repeated, as if puzzled by the phrase.

“You know, the way people live,” I said. “Going to work every day. Sticking to the same job. Coming home at the same time. Day after day, the same rooms, the same faces.”

Rebecca began to write in her notebook. I watched her hand, the slender fingers wrapped delicately around the dark shaft of the pen. I’d heard the strange contempt which had risen into my voice as I’d described the mundane nature of everyday life, and as I watched Rebecca’s pen skirt across the open page of her notebook, I felt that somehow I had exposed myself. It was an uneasy and unsettling feeling, and for an instant I regretted that I’d ever agreed to talk to her.

“You know, sometimes I’m not really sure I can go on with this,” I said.

She looked at me squarely. “You can stop whenever you want.”

But I knew that I couldn’t in the least do that. I knew that I’d become enamored of a mystery, that I wanted to feel the edgy tension and exhilaration of closing in upon a dangerous and undiscovered thing.

For a moment, I let my eyes linger on her as she wrote, her head bent forward slightly, the long dark hair falling nearly to her pen. When she looked up again, I thought I saw a subtle recognition in her face, an uneasiness that made me glance away, my eyes fleeing toward the large glass window to my left and the darkening landscape beyond it. Far away, I could see night descending over the distant hills. It seemed to fall helplessly, out of control, to spin and tumble as it fell.