Erased From Memory

by Diana O'Hehir

  “Clear as a bell.” Which is a lie. I don’t believe for a minute that statement about him having strong feelings once and not anymore. I can really recognize strong feelings right here in the present when I sit beside them.

  Chapter 20

  “Well, I don’t understand,” Susie says.

  I agree that it is all kind of peculiar.

  “I have tried to understand. I think Cherie is an absolutely wonderful human being. But Cherie and Rob? Carla, you belong with Rob.”

  Susie is in Berkeley and I am at the Manor. I’m not sure whether that makes her easier to talk to or harder.

  “You and Rob are the perfect couple.”

  I decide not to deal with that. It’s totally untrue; Rob and I were not very well matched. We were barely a couple at all. We disagreed and had power struggles. We had known each other much too long.

  “I don’t know how I would feel about Cherie and Rob if it were not for you and Rob. But Cherie has a friend here in Berkeley.”

  “Is that Susie? There on the telephone?” my father asks. “What is she saying?”

  I tell him in an aside that she is coming down to the Manor and I tell Susie that I’m not interested in Cherie’s boyfriends. What happens between her and Rob is their business.

  “I called you because my dad misses you,” I say.

  “Oh, and I miss him. And I miss you. Yes, of course I will come, and I will talk reasonably and understandingly to Rob.”

  “Susie, please, don’t do any such thing. Come down and don’t stay with Rob, stay here. I’m inviting you . . . And another thing I wanted to ask, this is special: I want you to try to get something for me. A peculiar, hard-to-get movie. Only about four years old, but limited edition.”

  “Oh, I have that friend, Chippy, who has the wonderful video store. I love getting rare movies.”

  “This one is dirty.”

  “Carla, what do you mean ‘dirty’? If you’re saying that it deals with sex, why, sex is a natural aspect of the life cycle; nothing natural can possibly be dirty; of course I will be happy to ask Chippy for it.”

  I am probably imagining that Susie sounds extra-enthusiastic about the dirty aspect of Marcus Broussard’s film. I give her some details while I’m brooding about Cherie’s Berkeley boyfriend.

  “Susie will have lots of things for you to do,” I tell my dad after I’ve hung up.

  He says that she will take him to the museum because she likes the museum and will be distressed to see that he is not still there.

  Here at the Manor my dad’s best friend is Mrs. La Salle, a handsome old lady with close-clipped silver hair. She lives here only half the time; the rest of her life occurs in San Francisco, where she does work that I conjecture to be glamorous. She used to write a San Francisco society column; I suspect her now of doing the anonymous gossip page for the Nob Hill Gazette. She won’t talk about it, possibly to save being exclaimed over by the other Manor residents, who are too admiring. As well as uncomfortably jealous.

  She says, “Something stupid is what I do. I’ll tell you sometime.”

  Susie is thrilled to find Mrs. La Salle in residence. “My favorite person. Except, of course, for you and Ed, who don’t count, being relatives. Daphne is wonderful. So alive! So stimulating! . . . Daphne, my dear”—she zooms in on Mrs. La Salle—“Carla wants me to believe some ridiculous story about you writing for a society paper.”

  “Indeed.” Mrs. La Salle smiles, catlike. She and Susie are diametric opposites who liked each other the minute they met. They unite today around my dad, who sits between them, looking sullen.

  Susie wears nile green and wraps herself in both a red cashmere shawl and a green-striped Chinese shawl. Mrs. La Salle has a trim oyster-beige suit. One lady sits on one side of Daddy, one on the other, like an innovative fashion ad. “I would be perfectly happy,” he says, “if the three of us were together at my museum.”

  “But there is so much to do here,” Mrs. La Salle says quickly.

  “We’ll go outside and look at the mermaid,” Susie offers. (Our mermaid is a copy of the Copenhagen harbor one.)

  “And do Tutankhamen on the computer.” That’s Mrs. La Salle.

  “The library has a new archaeology video,” Susie adds.

  There is a pause while everyone thinks. “Furthermore,” Susie bubbles, “I have brought along an interesting movie. It is an art movie that I got in Berkeley.”

  I’ve been so immersed in my father’s objections that I forgot about the pornographic video. I say, “Susie, darling, not right now.”

  “And why on earth not?”

  “What kind of a movie?” Mrs. La Salle wants to know.

  “Let’s leave it ’til later,” I say.

  My father is suddenly interested. He likes the fact that I’m opposing the idea. “What’s this all about?”

  “It is a pornographic movie,” Susie says brightly. “Some of them are quite good; this one is just interesting.”

  “The object of pornography is to alert the senses.” That’s my father.

  We are in the Manor’s library, a mahogany-paneled, over-furnished retreat walled with bookcases. Most of the books have green and gold bindings. There is a mahogany-housed big-screen TV, a blue-flowered Versailles-type rug, and a lot of gilt-framed paintings of misty women.

  “It would make a change,” Mrs. La Salle approves.

  I try, “I really think . . .” Making faces at Susie has no effect.

  My father says that he is quite interested. “I would like to see Susie’s movie. The pornographic one. Of course, the union of Re and his sister in Egyptian mythic tradition—that is not pornography—oh, no; the ignorant Western observer fails to understand; that is the union of all the natural forces of . . .” He trails off and looks around the library walls. “I would enjoy seeing your movie, Susie.”

  “And you shall. Of course you shall. It is stuffy in here; the environment is encapsulating. That movie is probably exactly what we need. I will go up this minute and get it.”

  I consider sticking my foot out to trip Susie and then sitting on her, but that doesn’t seem like a workable plan.

  “Are you comfortable?” I ask my father. “Is that chair all right for you?”

  “What are you fussing about? Of course it’s a good chair. I know how this arrangement works. She can make the movie appear on that TV screen.

  “This will be interesting,” he predicts, sitting back.

  The opening shots, playing behind the title, “Crashes,” are of mountains, gullies, snow, and a white bird bleeding and dripping. There’s a list of characters (Fineas, Harpy One, Harpy Two, Harpy Three) and a note, “The actors playing these parts are your enemies.” The opening scene shows Fineas, an anonymous blond youth, banging on a splintering doorway. He pushes his way into somewhere. There are dark passageways. And candles. Quite a bit of dark blue film. He stumbles, grunts, curses. A voiceover says, “She was gone; this was the worst.” We arrive in a tomb.

  Or better, a crypt.

  “Oh,” I say.

  The crypt is Egon’s crypt.

  My father announces in a pleased tone that he recognizes this place. “You could say that I have been there. It was better lit. And there were no beetles.”

  This time there are six-inch black beetles and also some rats. Plus three women who wear hoods or masks and black outfits with holes over the bosoms and pubes. One woman in gloves and executioner’s hood approaches Fineas. Her long silver fingernails protrude from the ends of her gloves. She puts her face next to his.

  “Oh, dear,” says my father.

  I say I think we should stop. He says we shouldn’t. Mrs. La Salle makes snide comments about the originality of the material. Susie says it is all natural, if somewhat extreme.

  Fineas gets engulfed in black fabric and laid out on the floor.

  I put up with this for several scenes of wrestling and disrobing until the appearance of a Laborador retriever. Then I get up to turn off the video
player. I don’t like dirty movies with animals.

  “No, don’t,” says my father. “I am noticing something interesting.”

  I stop, because he really does sound interested rather than disturbed.

  “Can you do that bit again? Just before they roll over and the rat runs over his foot?”

  I turn to Mrs. La Salle, who does the mechanical tricks; again we see Fineas engulfed and surrounded, draperies in heaps, the flickering background of the marble crypt.

  “It’s very badly lit, of course,” my dad says. “But there’s something wrong. On the top layer of the sarcophagus. Something scratched. The light had it just right for a minute. Oh, dear. Can you run it again?”

  We do. We run it three times. By the third time I can see that there are some scratched-on hieroglyphic marks along the lip of the top coffin. The one that Egon says he is saving for himself. The marks flicker up for a minute and then they’re gone.

  “I had it for a minute,” my father says. “Part of what it said. I understood it. And now I’m forgetting. I am forgetful these days. Oh, dear.”

  He looks down at his knees. “I am going to my room. My museum needs my assistance.”

  “What will we do with him?” Mrs. La Salle asks, watching the door through which he has just exited. “I could follow to his room and try to read poetry, but he won’t be receptive.”

  “Edward is so intelligent. So complicated,” Susie says thoughtfully.

  “He’s likely to do anything.” Mrs. La Salle is brisk. “Last year he simply left us. Took off.”

  Susie looks sad and says ah, yes.

  “But how would he get there?” Mrs. La Salle asks.

  First Cherie visits. Then Rob calls. And then my father receives a photograph.

  Cherie arrives at my office sounding bubbly, Southern, and distracted. “Darlin’. How are you, sweet one? You can’t imagine, the extent to which—well, dear, I have been thinking of you. Every single minute. Things have been so upset. That place, that museum place. And the goings on there. And things maybe startin’ to come to a head. And dear, I have been talking to Rob. Of course I have been talking to Rob.”

  She is still more or less at the door of my cubicle, where I have been grubbing my way through a stack of bills. Now she comes in and sits in an overstuffed chair. She is a symphony in pink. Her pink stockings have clocks. “Darlin’ Rob and I have talked and talked and talked. And you maybe remember, talkin’ is not Rob’s best thing? That isn’t his primary skill? But, sweetheart, I was determined, and we kept at it, and it was hard; I’d be the last one in the world to deny it, it was hard, because, you know, Rob and I—well, what was so wonderful with us was that we were so different—you’ve experienced that?”

  Cherie is uncomfortable. She crosses her pink-clocked legs and squints at the fake Renoir that Management has supplied for my office wall. “Well, dear one, you know, Rob finds it hard to express his true feelings? That was something with us from the start.”

  There’s a reverent pause while Cherie lets the impact of this statement sink in. And I think, Yes, Cherie, I am beginning to get this. It is more or less going where I always thought that relationship would more or less go. I find that I don’t feel the least bit triumphant and only moderately interested.

  “. . . So Rob an’ I talked and talked,” Cherie continues, “and I jus’ made him stick at it, and it finally came out that our values are a whole lot different, know what I mean? And our life views, and the way we think about world events and how we react to people—especially the latter. Carla, isn’t it amazing how much difference that can make?”

  I think the English translation of this is that Rob found out about Cherie’s Berkeley boyfriend and had a fit. Maybe she told him about the boyfriend.

  “So,” Cherie is saying, “it has been a good encounter, that little thing between me and Rob, and I do not think we hurt anybody, and the main thing I am worried about is that you maybe are mad at Rob. Are you?”

  I stare at her and don’t answer.

  “Because darlin’,” she continues, “if you are, you should know that the whole time—absolutely the whole time—we were together he was lonely for you and was talking about you. And that was one of the things. Well, dear, there were several things. But it was a wonderful relationship. And, Carla, oh, really . . .” She leans forward and essays a kiss on my cheek, not the kind of kiss that the recipient has to return. “Oh, darlin’, us women have to stick together.”

  Cherie, who has an excellent sense of timing, is now rising. She announces in departing that she has remodeled the sheriff ’s office and installed a two-person jail, that she is way worried about those murders at the museum but is collecting meaningful evidence and the crimes are going to be solved, and that she loves my darling dad. And that she thinks about me all the time.

  She doesn’t tell me Rob is all mine again, but I guess that’s the spirit of the encounter.

  After she is gone, leaving behind her a waft of very good perfume, I stare at the spot where she has exited and find that I’m not feeling much. I don’t seem to be really mad at her. Nor at Rob. A line of one my dad’s songs warbles through my head: “Where it all goes, the dear Lord only knows . . .”

  “What are you doing about your father?” he accosts.

  “What am I doing? What should I be doing?”

  “Carla, I say it in all friendship . . .”

  “No, you don’t.”

  Rob is cross and I am cross. “You have not been taking adequate care of him.”

  “And who are exactly are you? To tell me what to do?”

  Rob says he is one of Ed’s oldest friends and I say no, he isn’t; Daddy has lots of friends older than him . . . than he . . . and furthermore he has no rights in this situation anymore.

  To which he says if not, why not, and are you watching him.

  And I hang up.

  I tell my father, who is listening, that it was the Avon lady on the phone and he, to my surprise, seems to remember an Avon lady from somewhere, and says for her to bring him a hairbrush.

  “I have been getting some interesting phone calls,” he says after a few minutes.

  “What kind? Who from?”

  He says he isn’t sure; they are the kind of phone calls that fade out when you think you’re just starting to hear. “Something about a chlorine shot? Do you think I have that right?

  “I was worried by the idea of a chlorine shot,” he continues. “It made me feel insecure. Shots are dangerous. Should I be concerned about the shot that hospital lady is giving me?”

  This starts with Sunshine—our part-time worker, who has a bolt through her eyebrow—coming to my office and saying, “Hey, Mrs. Day?”

  Sunshine is sixteen and I am twenty-six. The difference in age is so vast that she calls me Mrs. “Yes, Sunshine?”

  “Your dad—Dr. Day—I think something’s the matter.”

  It’s 10 A.M. I haven’t seen my father today, which is my fault; I didn’t go in to breakfast, just grabbed a piece of toast on my way by the kitchen. I push aside the pile of bills I’ve been shuffling through and follow Sunshine out.

  Sunshine is underage, of course, and is supposed to work less than full-time. My boss, Belle, likes to save money.

  Daddy is lying in his alcove in that fetal posture he adopts when things are bad. Knees against chest, hands clenched under chin. When I say, “Daddy, what’s the matter?” he doesn’t respond.

  He is squeezing a hunk of paper in his clenched hands.

  “He just lays like that,” Sunshine says appraisingly. “Kinda weird.”

  I approach him and try to undo his bent arms. They are very stiff.

  “I mean,” Sunshine offers, “sometimes I feel like that, but I don’t ever go ahead and do it for a long time, know what I mean?”

  When I get my father’s arms undone, I discover that the paper is an envelope. I pull it loose and open it. There’s a photograph inside. A photograph of a person covered with drapery
and with arms spread-eagled, but standing as if being supported from the back. At first I think it’s a picture from the famous Abu Ghraib torture scenes and then I look at the face, which is exposed enough to be recognizable. The face is that of my mother.

  The figure in the picture has a rope around its neck and another around each wrist. There’s a long metal instrument on the floor.

  I drop the picture. For a minute I’m shaking too much to pick it up.

  “Hey, Mrs. Day,” Sunshine intrudes, “what is it? What happened?”

  What happened is that this picture here shows my mother being tortured.

  Almost right away, on top of my reactions of horror, I understand that this is a fake photo. Somebody got a picture of my mother’s face and pasted it onto another picture. The other picture really is an Abu Ghraib one.

  My mother is perfectly recognizable. It’s her from my childhood. She was—I guess I’ve said this before—a beautiful woman. She had blond hair, which she kept short. She had straight classic features. She never wore makeup.

  If I rack my brain long enough, I can figure out which picture this shot of her was cut from.

  Right now I want to comfort my dad. I tell Sunshine thank you, good work, great of you to be so observant, and send her off to her next client. Then I sit down on the bed beside my dad and start talking. “That was a fake picture, Daddy. Someone made it to be mean. The picture is a lie. Constancia isn’t really there. Constancia is not being hurt.”

  He twitches at my mother’s name, but otherwise doesn’t react.

  “Do you understand, honey? She’s all right. Constancia isn’t there, she’s not the person in that picture. They took a photo of somebody being hurt and they pasted my mother’s face on it. Nobody is doing those things to her.”

  Again, the only part of this speech Daddy reacts to is the name of his ex-wife. I think for a minute and decide that he always called her “Constancia,” not “Connie.” I sit stroking his arm and saying, “She’s all right, really; Constancia is all right.”

  After a while I start singing it. This feels very foolish but I do it anyway. The tune I choose is “The Wheels on the Bus.” “Constancia / is all right, is all right / Constancia is all right.”