Red Leaves

SEVENTEEN

The next night, after Meredith and Keith had already gone to bed, I quietly made my way to the basement. It was a gray metal filing cabinet, the one in which my father had kept his records and which Warren and I had removed from the little house my father had lived in before I'd finally convinced him to take up residence at the retirement home.

I'd taken him to Shelton Arms on a snowy January day, then returned to the house and helped Warren pack up Dad's belongings and transport them to the basement where they'd rested undisturbed until now.

My father's old rolltop desk stood beside the cabinet. I opened it, pulled over a plain metal chair, took out a stack of files from the top drawer of the cabinet, and began to go through the yellow crumbling papers I found inside, the records of my father's many failed enterprises along with his increasingly desperate attempts to salvage them.

But that was not the history I was looking for. I didn't care that my father had failed, that his business dealings were shadowy, that he'd squandered thousands of dollars to keep up appearances, joined expensive clubs at the very time my mother was scouring local thrift shops in order to keep her children clothed.

None of that mattered because I wasn't looking for evidence of bad business decisions or foolish investments. I was Peak and Kraus, my gaze, like theirs, focused by suspicion, looking for evidence of a crime.

It emerged slowly, like a body rising through layers of accumulated silt, the excruciating details of my father's ruin. The decline began in the late sixties as his real estate holdings were decimated by soaring interest rates. Steadily, for five years, he defaulted on one mortgage after another, his banker friends no longer willing to extend further credit, so that he lost both residential lots and commercial properties, his wealth dropping from him like petals from a wilting rose.

By the fall of 1974, he had nothing left but the family house, itself mortgaged to the gills, literally sinking in a slough of debt. I was twelve years old that autumn, now attending the expensive private school my father had denied Warren, a little boy dressed in his school uniform, complete with navy blue blazer with brass buttons, the crest of Saint Regis embroidered on the breast pocket.

Each night, I returned to a house that was disappearing, though I didn't know that at the time. Warren stayed in his room most of the time, and Jenny had begun complaining of terrible headaches. My mother made increasingly modest meals, which she served at a table my father hardly frequented anymore. "He's in New York," my mother would explain, "on business."

The disastrous nature of that business was apparent in the papers I rifled through that night, applications for loans and their subsequent denials, threatening letters from lawyers and creditors and even local tradesmen, all of them demanding payment ... or else.

Under such a barrage, men have been driven to suicide or simply run away, in either case leaving their families to fend for themselves. But on rare occasions some men take a third, far more drastic, option. They kill their families.

Until that night, it had never occurred to me that at some desperate moment, with the fifth scotch of the evening trembling in his hand, my father might actually have considered this final course.

Then, suddenly, it was there, the terrifying suggestion that he had.

A suggestion, not evidence, and yet it stopped me cold, so that for a long time, I simply stared at what I'd stumbled upon, the real estate section of the Los Angeles Times, dated April 27, 1975, and wondered how this particular section of a paper from a city several thousand miles away had come into my father's hands, and why, halfway down column three, he had drawn a red circle around a particular advertisement, one offering a "neat, clean, studio ... suitable for bachelor."

Suitable for bachelor.

In what way, I wondered, had my father planned to be a bachelor again?

Was it only that he'd considered option one, abandonment?

Or had he considered option three as well, a final, irrevocable break that would truly leave him free?

I didn't know, couldn't know, and yet, in my current state of mind, one the shadowy basement perfectly mirrored, I found that I could neither dismiss the possibility that my father had truly contemplated our murders nor suppress my need to discover if he actually had.

And so I continued through his papers, watching with an ever-deepening sense of desperation as his circumstances grew more dire. As the weeks of that last disastrous year passed, the dunning letters became more threatening and my father's responses increasingly laced with fabrications. He began to invent correspondence with "anonymous backers," to claim sources of revenue he did not have, and to pepper his letters with the names of important people—mostly politicians—who were, he said, "getting in on the ground floor" of whatever wholly fanciful enterprise he was at that moment proposing. The line between delusion and reality appeared to fade, and because of that, I could no longer tell if he was outright lying or if he had begun to believe his own fantasies.

Then, in yet another stack of business correspondence, this one interspersed with yellowing family photographs, I found a letter from my father's sister, Emma. It was dated February 3, 1975, a short two and a half months before my mother's death. One line in particular caught my attention: "As you say, Edward, these current straits are due entirely to Margaret's outrageous spending."

My mother's outrageous spending? On what had my mother spent outrageously? I knew the answer all too well. She had spent "outrageously" on used clothes at the Catholic thrift shop, on bruised vegetables at the market. She'd spent on bent cans and day-old bread. Despite our dwindling resources, she had tried with all her might to keep her children decently clothed and fed. During the year of Jenny's death, she had bought absolutely nothing for herself. Not so much as a hat or an earring.

That my father could blame my mother for his own financial mismanagement was deplorable enough. But the line he'd scrawled in the margin beside my aunt's comment was worse: "Now let her get me out of it."

Me.

Not us.

So what exactly were we—his wife and three children—to my father, I wondered. The answer was implicit in his use of "me." We were nothing.

We were nothing, and so he could go to New York, pick up a copy of the Los Angeles Times, pull out the real estate section, peruse it casually on the train back to Wesley, circle an ad for a neat clean studio, "suitable for bachelor."

And how might he regain his bachelorhood?

The darkest possible scenario immediately unspooled in my mind: my father waiting until deep in the night, then moving silently downstairs to his office, opening the rolltop desk, unlocking a small wooden cubicle, and drawing out the pistol he had always kept there. The very pistol which, as if in some miraculous vision, glimmered darkly before me, still in the cubicle where he'd left it. Had he reached for it, as I now did, then taken it up the stairs to where his family slept, as my family also did, he would have been but three quick shots from freedom.

But if that had ever been his plan, why had he not done it? Others had. Men like my father, ruined in business, in dread of humiliation, men who'd lost everything, and so, on a cool evening had decided to start over in the most profound and devastating way a man can seek deliverance. They had methodically murdered their families. Why had my father refused to take that road? Why had he not even decided on the less awesome route of simply climbing on a plane or train or bus and vanishing into the night?

I knew that his remaining with us had nothing to do with love. My mother's power over him had faded with her beauty. He felt nothing but contempt for Warren. And Jenny, for whom he'd seemed to have a true affection, had only just died. That left me, and so, briefly, I entertained the notion that his hopes for me had provided the one force that held us together. He had, after all, sent me to the best school, and when he talked about my future, it was always in the brightest terms. I would go to an Ivy League college, become a powerhouse in some business or law firm. I would be the son he'd dreamed of, proof of his worth, as much an ornament as my mothers beauty had once been.

But by April 1975, even that dream was surely dying. There would be no money for an Ivy League education, as my father must have known, and without it how could I fulfill his vision of a rich, successful son?

For a moment, I considered my fathers predicament. He was bankrupt, saddled with a family he cared little for, his daughter already dead.

Why then had he stayed with us?

The answer occurred to me instantly. He'd stayed because somewhere in the dark tangle of his business and family relations, he had found a way out.

The single line he'd written in the margin of his sister's letter now returned to me in a sinister whisper. Now let her get me out of it.

In a vision, I put myself in my brother Warren's place on that long ago summer afternoon. I am sitting on the grand staircase, reading a book. The doorbell rings. I answer it. A tall lean man in a dark suit draws a gray hat from his head and stares at me with small, quiet, sparklingly inquisitive eyes. His voice is calm, soothing, like Peak's: No reason to be alarmed. He is from the insurance company, he says, investigating something, that much is clear, though he doesn't tell me what he's looking into. And so I let him in, as Warren did, then go back to the stairs, my book. He leaves after a few minutes. He does not tell me what he was looking for, and the years go by and I marry and have a son and never ask him what he sought that day.

But now I know, and within only a few minutes it is in my hands, buried among other papers, but not deeply. Like a body hurriedly covered with leaves and fallen branches, the lightest digging brings it up, not a policy exactly, but a letter to my father, informing him that the life insurance policy on his wife has been approved in the amount of two hundred thousand dollars.

"Eric?"

I looked up and saw Meredith standing at the bottom of the stairs. I hadn't heard her come down them, the soft tread of her feet muffled by the stormy currents in my own mind.

"What are you doing down here?" she asked in a voice that seemed faintly alarmed, like she'd stumbled upon some oddity in me that called other, once-stable, characteristics into question.

"Just going through some old stuff," I answered.

She peered at the pile of papers that lay strewn across the desk. "What are you looking for?"

I quickly glanced down and noticed a photograph. "This," I said, lifting it from the pile for her to see.

It was a family photograph, the last one taken of all of us together. My father and mother on the front steps of the big house, their three children lined up in front of them, Warren on the left, Jenny on the right, me in the middle.

Who had I been then? I wondered as I glanced at the picture. How much had I known that year? How much had I refused to know? And not just about hidden things, the insurance policy, my mother's grief, but about the most obvious aspects of life in the big house. Had I once considered how cruelly Warren was treated or that Jenny sometimes had headaches and fell for no reason at all, or that my mother often sat silently at the kitchen table, toying distractedly with a crushed napkin? Had I once glanced out the window of the fancy bus that whisked me to Saint Regis each morning, looked out as the big house grew small in the distance, and allowed myself to confront the possibility that something might be wrong?

I looked at my wife, noted the wariness in her gaze, and Leo Brocks words sounded in my mind, the disturbing intimation that all was not well in my own house, either, and that someone out there knew it.

Something wrong.

For a moment, I imagined the source of that discomforting remark, saw a phantom person pawing through my papers as I'd just pawed through my fathers, full of suspicion but with no real evidence. I suddenly felt an annihilating fury at whomever it was who'd phoned the police hotline, a rage that was not in the least calmed by the fact that I could not even be sure that there was such a person. And yet I believed that there was, believed it so powerfully that I instantly imagined the caller's voice as something between a lascivious whisper and the hissing of a snake. The caller's profile emerged no less fully formed—a fat puffy face, with thick moist lips and a day's growth of facial hair. I could even see the outline of his room, dirty and disheveled, littered with grease-stained paper napkins and empty pizza boxes. He was a bachelor, this man, lonely and hateful, someone who'd seen either me or Meredith or Keith and fixed some sullen and resentful part of himself upon us. He had created histories for us, I decided, and ran those histories through his mind, sneering at a family whose imagined perfection he despised.

"You don't want me to see it?"

I came out of my reverie to find Meredith now at the desk, tugging at a picture I had reflexively resisted letting go.

"Of course, you can see it," I said. I released the photograph and watched as Meredith gazed at it expressionlessly.

"Why were you looking for this particular picture?" Meredith asked.

I shrugged. "I don't know," I said. "Maybe because it was the last time everything seemed"—the final word cracked something deep within me—"right."

She handed the picture back to me. "Are you going to stay down here all night?"

I shook my head. "No," I told her. "Just a little longer."

She turned and headed back up the stairs, head bent forward slightly, her hair dangling in dark waves on the side of her face. At the top of the stairs, she stopped and stood on the landing. For a moment, I thought she might come back down to me, take a deep breath and—

Confess?

I stared at her, stunned by the word that had suddenly popped into my mind. What had Meredith done that required confession? And yet, there it was, the idea thrown up from some murky depth inside me, suspicion now flowing into empty space, filling it with a sharp, acrid smoke, so that I felt trapped in a furiously overheated room, flames licking at me from all directions, with no way to douse the ever-rising fire.