Mortal Memory

by Thomas H. Cook

  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.

  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 wi
ndshield 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.