Mortal Memory

by Thomas H. Cook

  Mr. Pinaldi looked at me as if I’d just walked out of the Amazon, knew nothing of the civilized world. “The one with the bright red tie, that’s Joey Santucci,” he said in a vehement whisper. “He’s a button man for the Brendizzi gang. He whacks people, kid. He blows them away.”

  My eyes had reflexively shot toward the customer.

  Joey Santucci was sitting at a round table, with two women on either side, one middle-aged, like Joey, the other much younger, and a large man who was dressed in a dark suit. The older woman was overweight, with flabby arms, and had an enormous white flower in her hair. She had a smoker’s voice, hard and gravelly, and I took her for some old whorehouse madam Santucci had met years before. The second woman sat directly across from Santucci. She was no more than a girl, really, with dark brown hair and an olive complexion. She did not laugh when the others did, and at times, she cast disdainful glances toward the older woman, though always reserving the fiercer and more contemptuous ones for the man with the bright red tie. She was already halfway through her shrimp cocktail when I heard her call him “Dad.”

  There was nothing to distinguish any of them, and I probably would have forgotten them immediately if it hadn’t happened.

  It was very late, and the restaurant was nearly empty. I had just stepped up to take their dessert orders when he came through the door, a short, small-boned, wiry little man with a thin moustache. He had dark, gleaming eyes, quick and feral beneath the slouchy gray hat. He opened the door very wide as he came in, and a whirl of snow swept in behind him, then lay melting on the checkered tile floor as he moved smoothly to the bar.

  I watched him as he propped his elbow up on the bar, then glanced back toward me.

  “I’ll just have a dish of chocolate ice cream,” the young one said.

  I wrote the order on my pad, a quick squiggle of lines, then glanced back toward the bar.

  The little man slid off the stool and now stood beside it, brushing snow from the shoulders of his overcoat as Sandy, the bartender that night, leaned toward him. I saw the little man’s mouth twitch, then Sandy nod, turn around, and pull a bottle of scotch from the shelf.

  A voice drew my attention from him.

  “Just an espresso,” the older woman said.

  The man pulled himself up on one of the barstools, but did not actually appear to be sitting on it. Rather, he seemed to be floating on a cushion of air, his body tilting right and left, while he drew his eyes over to the mirror behind the bar, then focused them with a dire intensity on the reflection of the man in the red tie.

  “Bring me a brandy,” Joey Santucci said.

  I glanced down at the pad, scribbled the order quickly, then looked back toward the bar. The little man had wheeled around on the stool, facing me silently, his hands deep in the pockets of the snow-flecked overcoat. His eyes moved from Santucci to the man in the dark suit, the one who had ordered nothing after dinner, and whom I took for Santucci’s bodyguard.

  I turned, walked around the table, and headed back toward the kitchen. I could see the man at the bar spin slowly around as I passed him, his eyes trained on the mirror again, the four seated figures he could see very clearly in the glass.

  Louie snapped the dessert order from my hand as I came through the double doors. He was grumbling angrily.

  That bunch at table six ever going to leave?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Chocolate ice cream. That fat cow ordered dessert?”

  “The espresso is for her.”

  Normally I would have dropped the liquor order on my way to the kitchen, but I had not done that, I realized suddenly, because something had warned me away, had unnerved me.

  “Well, go get the drink, Steve,” Louie said sharply. “I’ll have the dessert ready by the time you get back.”

  I stepped toward the door, following Louie’s instructions. I walked slowly, haltingly, the air growing thick around me. I made it all the way to the door, then pressed my face up against the little square of glass that looked out onto the dining room. I could not move any farther.

  “What’s the matter, Steve?” Louie asked after a moment.

  I didn’t answer. Through the small square window, I could see the man at the bar, his hands still deep in his overcoat pockets, the untouched drink resting before him, its amber reflection winking in the mirror, the now motionless eyes trained determinedly on the oblivious, unthinking family.

  “Steve?”

  I didn’t look back at Louie. I felt the words form in my mouth, but I’m not sure I ever actually said them: “He’s going to kill them.”

  I began to tremble. I could feel myself trembling. It was a sensation of helplessness, of being something small and delicate before a line of black, rumbling clouds. To the left, I could see the little man as he brought one hand from his coat, stretched his fingers slowly, then returned it to the pocket. A few feet away, the young girl fiddled with her napkin, looking out of sorts, while her mother toyed coquettishly with her husband’s bright red tie.

  “Steve, what’s the matter?”

  It wasn’t Louie’s voice this time, but a young woman named Marie who’d only come to work a few days before. She had reddish-brown hair, very straight, and her eyes were deep-set and dreamy, exactly the kind that in movies the leading man always yearns to kiss.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  I didn’t look at her. I kept my eyes trained on the little man at the bar. “He’s going to …”

  “Who?”

  “I …”

  She saw the order slip quivering in my hand, snatched it from me, then burst through the door and out into the dining room, striding boldly up to the bar, where Sandy took it from her, reaching thoughtlessly over the little man’s untouched glass.

  I was still standing rigidly by the door when she came back into the kitchen. The little man had drunk the scotch in one quick gulp and was heading for the door. A few feet away, Joey Santucci gave his wife a kiss while his teenage daughter looked on sourly.

  I felt myself collapse, as if every muscle had suddenly been ripped from its mooring. I was actually sliding helplessly toward the floor when Marie grabbed me by the arm, drew me over to the small bench beside the cutting table, and lowered me into it.

  “You want me to call a doctor, Steve?” she asked urgently.

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I nodded. “I’m sorry. It was just something that reminded me of …” I couldn’t keep back the words. “… of my father.”

  It was hours later, nearing dawn, and we were in bed in her apartment on MacDougal Street before I finally got the whole story out. I cried and cried, and so she held me through all that sleepless, gorgeous night.

  And twenty years later, she’d walked out of our bedroom and down the stairs, and neither of us had thought to say goodbye.

  I’d been at my desk for no more than an hour when the phone rang.

  “Mr. Farris?”

  “Yes.”

  “Rebecca Soltero. I was wondering if you might be able to meet me for lunch today.”

  “Well, it would have to be a short lunch,” I said. “And near the office.”

  “That would be fine,” Rebecca said. “I’d just like to get a few biographical details before we do the other type of interview.”

  She meant the kind, of course, that would return me to my father.

  “All right,” I said. “There’s a small cafe on Linden, just down the block from my office. It’s called Plimpton’s.”

  “Yes, I saw it yesterday,” Rebecca said. “What time?”

  “I can meet you at twelve-thirty,” I told her.

  She was already waiting for me when I arrived an hour or so later. She was wearing a long dark skirt with matching jacket and a white blouse. Her earrings were plain gold hoops. She wore no other jewelry.

  I nodded crisply as I sat down. “I wasn’t expecting to hear from you quite so soon,” I said cautiously.


  She nodded. “I know,” she said, “but I’m at that point where I need a little background information.” She took a small notebook from her jacket pocket. “Information about you, I mean,” she added. “Biographical details, that sort of thing.”

  “And the other interviews,” I said, “they’ll be focused on my father?”

  “Along with your family,” Rebecca said. “I’d like to have portraits of each of them.”

  “How many interviews do you expect to need?”

  “It depends on how much you remember,” Rebecca answered.

  “Well, how long are you planning to stay in Old Salsbury?”

  She looked at me very determinedly. “I live in Boston,” she said, “but I’ll stay here as long as I need to.” Her eyes returned to the notebook. “I know that you lived with your aunt in Somerset for a while after the murders,” she began. “How long?”

  “Two months.”

  “And that’s when your uncle came to get you?”

  “Yes.”

  As I spoke, I remembered the morning Quentin arrived at Aunt Edna’s house, the old truck shuddering to a stop in her gravel driveway. I’d been stacking dominoes on the carpet in the living room, and when I looked up I saw Aunt Edna part the translucent blue curtains which hung over her large picture window, release a weary sigh, and shake her head, as if the sight of him alone was enough to exasperate her.

  He entered the house seconds later, a large man with a round belly and thick legs. He was wearing rubber boots which rose almost to his thighs, and a gray, broad-billed cap that looked like the type worn by locomotive engineers.

  He hardly noticed Aunt Edna, but strode powerfully over to me, jerked me into his arms, and said, “Well, Stevie, ready to live a man’s life now, are you?”

  From the corner of my eye, I could see Aunt Edna looking at both of us crossly, her arms folded over her chest. “Put him down, Quentin,” she said sternly, “and come on into the kitchen. We have things to talk about.”

  They’d talked about me, as I told Rebecca over lunch that day, a conversation I’d heard from just behind the closed door:

  “As I said on the phone, it’s not working out here, Quentin,” Aunt Edna said. “That’s the long and the short of it.”

  “I told you I’d take him, Edna,” Quentin told her. “I know you don’t want him.”

  “Well, it’s not exactly that I don’t …”

  “Besides,” Uncle Quentin interrupted, “he’s better off with a man.”

  There was a brief silence after that, but finally I heard my aunt say, “All right, take him.”

  And he had, the two of us rattling for hours along well-traveled roads before turning onto the more deserted one that led out to Quentin’s house by the sea.

  “He was an older man, wasn’t he?” Rebecca asked.

  “Late fifties.”

  But he’d seemed much older to me, his hair entirely gray, his face heavily furrowed with deep wrinkles about his eyes and the corners of his mouth.

  “Did you get along well, the two of you?” Rebecca asked.

  We had, but he had brooked no whining, no grieving, no self-pity. The past was past in his book, and only a fool or a coward dwelled upon its scattered ruins.

  “He tried his best to do things with me,” I told Rebecca, “things a father would have done.”

  And so we had camped out from time to time, and fished in the local ponds. In the summer, he took me swimming, snoozing on the shore while I bounced about in the water.

  The problem was his health. My first impression of him had been that he was vigorous and robust. But actually, he was rather frail. In the winter, he suffered from long, dreadful colds, and seemed particularly susceptible to digestive problems. He called whiskey his “medicine” and drank as much as he liked as often as he liked, though in all the years we lived together, I never saw him drunk.

  I don’t think I ever really knew him, as I admitted to Rebecca, but I did remember one incident when I was twelve, something which made me think that there was something deeply wrong with Quentin, something which seethed just below the surface.

  It happened on a fall day, with the sky very low, hanging like a flat gray ceiling above my head. I’d been working on the front porch, mending some of the lobster cages which Quentin had hauled in the day before. It was tedious, uncomplicated work, no more than a matter of hammering in a few loose nails. I’d finished up within an hour or so, and after that I wandered around the house to the backyard. Years before, Quentin had built a small wooden shed there, a ramshackle structure which he used partly as a work space, partly as a storehouse for his fishing supplies. In the fall, he went there to mend his nets, and he’d gathered a huge pile of them together in the corner.

  The shed had a few small windows, and that afternoon I absently walked over to one of them and glanced in. Quentin was sitting on a stubby wooden bench, working to separate two tangled nets. His face seemed very taut and impatient, and I noticed that his fingers were trembling. His face had taken on a reddish tint around the cheeks and his eyes appeared to glisten slightly, as if he were about to cry. Suddenly he threw the nets down, then picked them up again and began to sling them about, whipping them violently at the shed’s skeletal supporting beams. I could see small puffs of dust come from the posts as the nets bit into them and hear the hard slap of the cord as it whipped about furiously.

  In a moment, he stopped, then collapsed, exhausted, onto the spindly wooden stool he’d been sitting on before it all began. His head dropped slightly, and he wiped his mouth with his hand. His shoulders were lifting high and rhythmically, so I knew it had taken almost all his breath to groan the single word he said into the dusty interior of the shed.

  “It was a woman’s name,” I told Rebecca.

  She glanced up from her notebook, her face very still, intense, searching. “A woman’s name?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But I have no idea who she was.”

  She seemed to consider the story a moment, turning it over in her mind. Then she sat back slightly, as if to regain her focus.

  “When did you leave Maine?” she asked.

  “Not until I went to college. Aunt Edna had sold the house on McDonald Drive and put the money in an account for me. That’s what I used to pay for college.”

  “And after college, you never lived in Maine again?”

  “Only for a little while. I went back to take care of Quentin. He was dying by then.”

  Old and frail and drinking far too much, he’d needed me to stay with him during the last weeks of his life, and so, directly after leaving college, I’d returned to the little house by the sea.

  Quentin hadn’t died quickly. It had taken a long time. Nor had he approached death gracefully. Instead, a bitterness and rancor had slowly overwhelmed him, filling his days with mean-spirited discourses on the inadequacies of life.

  For nearly three months, I listened as he lay out on the back porch, staring fiercely at the sea, while fuming against and damning to hell almost everyone he’d ever known. He railed against his own parents, against Edna, against a host of double-dealing business partners. One by one the names passed his lips carried on a curse. Except one.

  “He never said anything bad about my father,” I said to Rebecca. “Not a single word.”

  Rebecca looked surprised.

  “As a matter of fact,” I added, “the only thing he ever said about my father was sort of complimentary.”

  “Complimentary?”

  “One night, he was really having a bad time,” I went on. “He was railing about things, as usual. But all of a sudden he stopped. Then he looked at me, and he whispered, Ah, your father, Stevie, he really took it by the balls.’“

  Rebecca said nothing, but I could see something moving behind her eyes.

  I shrugged. “He died ten days later,” I added. “I never knew exactly what he meant.”

  Rebecca lowered her eyes toward her notebook, wrote something there, and then look
ed up at me. “Did he ever mention the woman again.” she asked. The name he said in the shed that afternoon?”

  I shook my head. “No,” I answered, then smiled lightly. “I guess she’ll always be a mystery.”

  Rebecca did not return my smile. “Like a lot of things,” she said, but with a curious unease and sense of strain, as if it were a fate she was still unwilling to accept.

  FIVE

  IT WAS NEARLY a week before I heard from Rebecca again, and I remember that the days passed slowly, like soldiers in a gray line. During that interval, I often thought about the life my family had lived on McDonald Drive. I recalled how, when I was very small, Laura had taken me out to the swings and played with me for hours. My father had often sat in a small wrought iron chair and watched us. “Don’t swing him too high,” he would caution at those times when Laura’s natural energy would get the better of her and she’d send me hurling skyward, my feet soaring into the summer air.

  There were other memories, too. I could recall my mother piddling about in the garage, moving small boxes from one place to another. She seemed always to be hunting for something small and inconsequential that eluded her again and again, a pruning fork or a spool of thread. Jamie would joke about it from time to time. “Everything she touches disappears,” he once said with a mocking grin.

  There’d been a fireplace in the living room, and I remembered the sounds the fire made in the winter, along with the rhythmic thump of the axe when my father chopped wood beneath the large maple tree in the backyard.

  Smells returned. Laura’s nail polish, the raincoat that Jamie often hung wet in the closet we were forced to share, my mother’s cooking, always bland and unaccented, the smell, I often thought, of little more than boiling water. And last, my father’s hands, the strange odor that always came from them, and which, one night during that week before Rebecca called again, I actually mentioned to Marie.

  “Like soil,” I said suddenly, as we sat at the dinner table one evening. The words had come from nowhere but my own mind. We’d not been talking about my father, or anything even remotely connected to him.