Mortal Memory

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Would you be willing to meet me again, Mr. Farris?” Rebecca asked directly.

  She had drawn the line in the dust. Now it was up to me either to cross it or drift back, draw away from her, but even more critically, to draw away from my father, to close the door forever in his ghostly face. There was something in such a grave finality that I couldn’t do.

  “Well, I guess we could talk,” I replied, “but I still don’t think I’ll be able to remember much.”

  Rebecca smiled quietly and put out her hand. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll call you.”

  She left directly after that, and I went back to my desk and began working up a preliminary design for a small library in neighboring Massachusetts.

  Within an hour the clouds had broken. From my desk I watched the morning air steadily brighten until it reached a kind of sparkling purity at midday.

  I ate my lunch in the park, watching the swans drift along the edges of the pond, until Wally suddenly plopped down beside me, stretched out his thick, stubby legs, and released a soft belch.

  “Oops. Sorry, Stevie,” he said. “It’s the spaghetti. It always repeats on me.” He patted his stomach and went on about other foods that had the same effect upon him—popcorn, melon, a vast assortment—until, near the end of a long list, he stopped, his eyes fixed on a figure he saw moving along the far edges of the pond. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said wonderingly. “Christ, that’s her, Steve.”

  “Who?”

  “Hell, it’s been ten years. I don’t know her name right off.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “That woman, there.”

  He nodded, and I glanced over in the direction he indicated. I could see a tall, thin woman as she strolled beside the water. She was wearing a plain, dark blue dress. Her hair had once been very dark, but was now streaked with gray. Her skin looked very pale, almost powdery, as if she were slowly disintegrating.

  “Yolanda, that’s it,” Wally blurted. “Yolanda Dawes.”

  “Who is she?”

  “You kidding me, Steve?” Wally asked unbelievingly. “Hell, man, she’s the evil home-wrecker, the menace on the road.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “She’s the broad that killed Marty Harmon.”

  I turned toward her as if she were a creature out of myth, the scarlet woman of immemorial renown. She’d reached the far end of the pond by then, the bright midday light throwing a dazzling haze around her as she strolled along its smooth, rounded edge.

  Wally had returned to deeper interests, plucking at his nails with a tiny clipper. “Even way back then, she never struck me as something to get all that worked up about,” he said absently. “But she sure killed old Marty Harmon, just as sure as if she’d put a bullet in his head.”

  I hadn’t thought of Marty in years, but it was not hard to conjure him up again. We’d come to work for Simpson and Lowe at nearly the same time, and although he was older than I, we’d both been novices at the firm. Because of that we’d socialized together, usually going out for an hour or so after work on Fridays, a custom that neither Marie nor Marty’s wife had ever seemed to mind.

  Marty’s wife was named LeAnn. Before marrying Marty, she’d spent most of her life in Richmond, Virginia. They’d met while Marty was in the navy, married, then moved north, where Marty felt more comfortable. By the time he joined Simpson and Lowe, they’d had two children, a boy of eleven and a girl of nine. I don’t recall their names, but only that they were both strikingly blond. By now their hair has darkened. In all likelihood, they have married, and have children of their own. Perhaps, had I kept in touch, I might have been of some assistance to them, since, like me, they were destined to grow up without a father.

  As a fellow-worker and, to some extent, a friend, Marty was self-effacing, witty, and very kind. He was not a terribly ambitious man, and he might never have become a partner. But he was highly competent, great with detail, organizational and otherwise, and socially adept enough never to embarrass himself or anyone else by his behavior at office parties or other business functions.

  Our favorite place was Harbor Lights, a little bar-restaurant on the outskirts of town. The interior was decked out like the inside of an old whaling boat, complete with oars, coils of thick gray rope, and a few rusty harpoons. For almost two years, we went there at least two Friday evenings out of each month. We talked business and office gossip, the usual end-of-the-week banality. Marty seemed to enjoy the time we spent together, loosening his tie, and sometimes even kicking off his black, perfectly polished shoes. We talked about sports a great deal, and sometimes about our families. Marie was pregnant by then, a child we later lost to miscarriage in its second month, and Marty sometimes fell into the role of the older, more experienced man, warning me of the changes that would inevitably come with fatherhood.

  “But all the changes are worth it,” he told me cheerfully, “because being a father, it’s a different kind of love.”

  He was always reassuring, and even after the miscarriage he continued to talk about parenthood, clearly encouraging me to try again.

  Then, without a word, our Friday meetings came to an end. At first I thought that, after two years, Marty and I had simply come to that point when there was nothing more to discuss and so had drifted in other directions.

  I might have felt that way forever if LeAnn hadn’t called me three months later. It was just past midnight on a Friday, and her voice was strained.

  “Steve, have you seen Marty tonight?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t meet him at that restaurant you go to?”

  “No, LeAnn. Why?”

  She didn’t say. She never said. But something in the tone of her voice that night suggested to me that the snake which seems to lie coiled at the center of so many lives had suddenly struck out at her.

  “LeAnn, has something happened?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “LeAnn? Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” she said, then immediately hung up.

  She’d lied, of course. She wasn’t all right. She’d dropped from girlhood into womanhood as if through a scaffold floor. “Boys come to manhood through mastery,” Rebecca would write years later, “girls come to womanhood through betrayal.” So it was with LeAnn Harmon.

  The following Monday, I found Marty already at the office when I arrived. He looked haggard, his shoulders slumped, as if under heavy weights, as he shambled toward me.

  “LeAnn said she called you,” he said. “What did you tell her?”

  “What could I tell her, Marty?”

  He nodded helplessly. “I should have mentioned something to you, Steve. I’m sorry you got pulled into it.”

  “I didn’t know what to do.”

  “No, of course not,” Marty said. “There’s nothing you could have done.”

  He walked wearily to his desk, then pulled himself in behind it. He didn’t speak to me again that day, and only rarely after that, as if I’d become a source of embarrassment to him, something he’d rather have been rid of.

  For the next month, Marty worked steadily and well, but during those intervals when he wasn’t completely engaged, he looked lost and distracted. At noon, he would wander into the small park across from the office and take his lunch alone. From the window beside my desk, I could see him on the little wooden bench beside the pond, dressed in dark pants and a white shirt, the sleeves rolled up to the elbow, the black-rimmed glasses like a mask over his eyes.

  I talked to Marty for the last time about three weeks later. It was at our old haunt, Harbor Lights. I found him sitting alone at a booth near the back. He was smoking a cigarette, his other hand wrapped around a glass of scotch. The jacket of his suit lay in a disordered lump beside him, and he’d yanked his tie down and unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt.

  “You know what the trouble with men like us is, Steve?” he asked. “We think we can handle anything.” He leaned forward
, squinting in my direction. “But there is a force, my friend,” he said with a sudden vehemence. “There is a force that none of us can handle.”

  I never asked him what that force was, and after a while, he finished his drink, took a long draw on his last cigarette, then got to his feet and walked away, giving my arm a quick, comradely squeeze as he headed for the door.

  There was a small hotel a few blocks from Harbor Lights. It had a neat mid-Atlantic design, all wood and white paint, with bright red shutters. The door had panes of inlaid glass and the sign which hung beside it showed a teenage boy in Colonial dress, red vest and tri-corner hat, a snare drum hanging at his side.

  At 11:15 A.M. the following day, Marty checked into room 304 of that hotel. Twenty minutes later, he shot himself.

  Marty was buried a few days later, and only a month after that, LeAnn returned to Richmond with her two blond children. I never saw any of them again.

  “Yolanda Dawes,” Wally said again, shaking his head, as he sat on the bench beside me. “Doesn’t look like the black widow, does she?”

  I glanced toward her again, my eyes lingering on the wistful, beguiling grace her body had assumed as she made her way along the water’s edge.

  Wally smiled. “That’s the trouble with black widows, buddy,” he said, “they never do.” He grunted as he stood up, adding nothing else as the two of us walked back to work.

  For the rest of the afternoon, I concentrated on the little library in Massachusetts, then left for home at around five-thirty.

  When I arrived, Peter was shooting hoops into the basket I’d nailed to the garage door years before. He hardly noticed as I walked by, merely nodded briefly, fired a quick “Hi, Dad,” and continued with the game. I could hear the ball thudding like an irregular pulse as I went on past the garage and up the stairway that led to the side entrance of the house, the one that opened onto the kitchen.

  Marie was in her office down the hall, working at her computer and listening to Brahms’ violin concerto, the only one he ever wrote, a work that Marie liked more than any other, obsessively buying each new rendition as soon as it was released.

  “How’d it go today?” I asked.

  She barely looked up from her keyboard. “Okay,” she said idly. “You?”

  “Fine,” I told her, paused a moment, then added, “Nothing new.”

  In that brief pause, I’d thought of Rebecca, considered mentioning her visit to Marie, then decided not to. It had all been done in an instant, a choice made in favor of concealment, even though there’d been nothing to conceal. I realize now that it was a choice made out of a subtle yearning to have a secret in my life, something hidden, tucked away, a compartment where I could keep one treasure for myself alone. The fact that this “treasure” was a woman meant less to me at the time than that it was clandestine and mysterious, a secluded back street I wanted to walk down.

  “Go change, then,” Marie said, her eyes still fixed on the monitor. “We need to start dinner.”

  I headed upstairs to the bedroom, pulled off my suit and tie, and returned downstairs. Marie and Peter were already in the kitchen.

  “Okay, let’s get started,” she said, handing me a wooden salad bowl.

  Making dinner together was a ritual Marie had long ago established, a “family time” that was busy and productive, a moment when we had to “face” each other, as she said, without the distraction of a game or television. Over the years it had become routine, something I neither looked forward to nor dreaded, a fact of life like any other, open, aboveboard, beyond the allure of the unrevealed.

  FOUR

  THE LIGHT IN the bedroom was dark gray when I woke up the next morning. Marie had already gotten out of bed. I could see a little sliver of light under the door of the adjoining bathroom. I closed my eyes, heard the toilet flush, then, a few seconds later, the soft scrape of the bathroom door as she opened it.

  “It’s time, Steve,” she said firmly.

  I didn’t open my eyes. I didn’t want to open them. I wanted to sink back into my sleep, but a heaviness in my chest nudged me awake. It was as if someone were sitting on me, looking down.

  “Steve, it’s time.”

  Her voice was more insistent, and I knew that she’d keep at it until she saw me climb out of bed. I opened my eyes and glanced toward her. She stood at the bedroom window, a figure in silhouette, the curtains flung open behind her.

  “Get up, Steve.”

  I pushed the covers aside and got to my feet.

  Marie looked satisfied and headed for the door. On the way she said, “It’s raining. Can you drive Peter to school this morning? I have to see a client in Bridgeport.”

  I waved my hand. “Yeah, okay, I’ll drop him off on my way to work.”

  Marie turned and left the room as I staggered toward the bathroom, then disappeared inside. I could hear her as she moved spiritedly along the corridor, then trotted down the short flight of stairs that led to the first floor.

  My own pace was slower. The heaviness I’d felt in my chest had managed to creep into my arms and legs, drawing me downward like metal weights.

  Peter was already at the table when I finally came downstairs a few minutes later. He’d poured himself a bowl of cereal and was staring at it without interest.

  “Mom’s already gone,” he told me.

  “She had to go to Bridgeport.”

  “So you’re taking me?”

  “Yeah.”

  Peter ate the rest of his cereal while I drank a quick cup of coffee, then went back upstairs. I finished dressing, carefully knotted my tie, gathered up the office materials I’d brought home the night before, and returned to the kitchen.

  Peter was standing at the door that led from the kitchen to the driveway, tall for his age, and slender, as I had been, but with his mother’s straight, determinedly erect posture. Behind him, I could see the rain as it drove down through the trees that bordered the driveway, and against its gray veil he appeared almost ghostly, his large round eyes blinking slowly, like an owl’s.

  It was a floating, disembodied look that reminded me suddenly of Jamie, of the strange vacancy that had sometimes come into his face, lingered a moment, then dissolved into the pinched and irritated expression that was more usual with him. I remembered that during the last months of his life, those oddly resentful features had hardened into a mask of teenage hostility and sullenness, a face my father had finally aimed at directly, then reduced to a pulpy, glistening mass.

  I glanced away from Peter, as if expecting to see his face explode as Jamie’s had, then motioned him out the door, following along behind at a cautious distance, my shoulders hunched against the rain.

  In the car, Peter sat silently, staring straight ahead, his face no longer locked in that strange innocence and helpless doom I had suddenly associated with my murdered brother. I looked at him and smiled.

  “Everything going okay at school?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Good,” I told him.

  Glancing toward him from time to time as I drove toward his school, I could easily remember him as a little boy, warm and glowing, his hair even lighter, a silver sheen. In the mornings he’d had the habit of crawling into bed with Marie and me, inching his head under my arm, then glancing up with a bright, sometimes toothless, smile.

  Strangely, that remembered smile brought Jamie back again, and I recalled the only bit of conversation I’d ever been able to recall between him and my father. We’d all been heading through an indistinct countryside, toward somewhere I don’t remember. My father was at the wheel, I in the middle, and Jamie pressed up against the passenger door. We’d been riding together silently, as we usually did, when suddenly my father had turned to Jamie. “You don’t smile much,” he said.

  Jamie’s eyes shot over to him resentfully. “What did you say?”

  My father appeared to regret having brought the subject up. “Nothing,” he muttered, returning his eyes to the road.

  B
ut Jamie wouldn’t let it go. “What did you say?” he repeated.

  “Just that you don’t smile much,” my father answered.

  Jamie gave him that familiar pinched, irritated look. “I smile,” he said curtly, as if my father had accused him of something he felt obliged to deny.

  “Good,” my father answered quickly, then let the subject drop.

  But not before he’d briefly leveled his two light blue eyes on my brother, aiming them steadily at his face.

  I shuddered, and my hands curled tightly around the steering wheel, as if to bring my body back to the present. It was a tactic that worked so well, I sensed that I’d used it before, but unconsciously, to prevent the emergence of such brief memories, rather than to return from them.

  Once at the school, Peter got out quickly, with a child’s enthusiasm, opening the door before I’d come to a full stop, then dashing through the rain to where a group of other boys huddled together beneath an aluminum awning. The bell was ringing as I pulled away.

  I drove slowly toward my office. The rain grew somewhat lighter, but to the south I could see a line of clouds, low and heavy with rain. It struck me that the clouds lay between Old Salsbury and Bridgeport, and that Marie was probably driving under their low canopy at that very moment. It was then that I remembered that we’d not really said good-bye that morning. I’d heard the scrape of the bathroom door as it opened, then her voice telling me to get up, repeating it when I didn’t. After that, nothing.

  Marie Olivia Farris. Age, thirty-nine.

  I’d met her during my last year in college. I was living in New York then, a small flat in the East Village. At night I worked as a waiter in a restaurant in Little Italy. It was frequented by a well-heeled assortment of mobsters and mid-level show people, whom the owner, Mr. Pinaldi, liked to identify. “You know who you’re serving, don’t you?” he’d sometimes ask fiercely as I passed with a full tray.

  Often I did know, but that particular night I didn’t have the slightest idea and told him so.