Mortal Memory

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Scared you, didn’t I?” he joked.

  Amelia’s face relaxed. “He’s always trying to get at me,” she said, her eyes now on me. She began a story about some other occasion when Carl had “gotten her,” as she put it, then followed with another.

  While she spoke, I felt my mind drift away, drift along the shaded stream, as if skating lightly across the glassy surface of the water. I could hear Amelia’s voice, as well as the laughter of the others as she continued with her tale. I heard names and places, dates, weather reports, ages. I could even feel the overall warmth of the moment we were all sharing, its calmness, pleasure, and serenity.

  And yet, I could also feel myself moving away from it, down the softly winding stream, its twin banks gliding smoothly along either side, as if I were being carried on a small canoe. Overhead, I could see the flow of the trees as they passed above me, flowing like another stream, this one suspended surreally above my head. Slowly, almost without my realizing it, the stream became a sleek blue road, winding through a maze of suburban streets, neat lines of houses flowing past on both sides, until, in the distance, I could see the mock Tudor house at 417 McDonald Drive. It was silent, and not at all threatening, and as I continued to drift toward it in my mind, I could feel a grave attraction for it, an excitement at drawing near it, as if it were a place of assignation.

  A burst of laughter brought me back, loud and wrenching as a sudden gunshot. I blinked quickly and stared around me. Everyone was laughing—Marie, Peter, Carl. Everyone but Amelia, who, as I noticed, was staring directly toward me with steady, evaluating eyes.

  “Where were you, Steve?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  She didn’t seem to believe me. Her eyes remained very still, her face framed by the swirling circular maelstrom of her old straw hat. “Just in some other world, I guess,” she said, in a strangely cool and brooding voice.

  I nodded, but added nothing else.

  Amelia returned her attention to the others. Carl was telling some story about Marie as a little girl, and a few feet away Peter was listening very attentively, as if surprised by the fact that his mother had ever been a child.

  I listened attentively too, though from time to time my eye would return to the spring, follow a leaf as it flowed through the dappled shade until it disappeared around the nearest bend.

  Toward the end of the afternoon, we repacked the picnic basket, gathered up the folding chairs, and returned to the house. Carl and Amelia walked in the lead, arm in arm, chatting quietly on the way. I could not make out any of what they were saying to each other, but from the quiet glances they exchanged it seemed one of those intimate, deeply familiar conversations one sometimes sees in older people, the sense of completedness, of everything having passed the trial stage.

  Marie walked along beside me, her arm in mine, her head pressed lightly against my shoulder. She seemed contented, happy with how the day had gone, with the choices she’d made in her life so far, with me as her husband, with Peter as her son. It was the kind of satisfaction that seemed complete in itself, rather than the product of a thinly disguised resignation.

  As we neared the house, Peter shot ahead, running through the tall grass, his blond hair glistening in the sunlight. I felt Marie press her head more firmly against my shoulder.

  I glanced down at her.

  She was staring up at me affectionately, as if marveling at her own contentment. Then she lifted her face toward me and kissed me on the mouth. Bathed in such sweetness and familiarity, the product of such a long and enduring love, it should have been the single most thrilling kiss I had ever known.

  Toward evening, Carl made a fire in the old hearth, and we all sat around it, talking quietly. Marie sat beside me on the sofa, her feet balled up beneath her, her shoulder pressed up snugly against mine. Peter slept next to her, his head resting delicately in her lap.

  “Everything going okay at work, Steve?” Carl asked idly, by then puffing on the white meerschaum pipe Marie had given him the preceding Christmas.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “He’ll probably be made a partner soon,” Marie said.

  Carl looked at her. “How about your business?”

  “It’s fine,” Marie told him. “I put in a bid for a job in Bridgeport last week.”

  I glanced over toward Amelia. She was rocking softly in one of the chairs Carl had made, but her eyes seemed not to move at all as she stared at me.

  “So I guess everything’s okay, then?” she asked.

  I nodded. “Yes, it is.”

  I expected her to smile, or give some sign of satisfaction, but she didn’t. She turned toward the fire instead, and held her eyes there, the light playing on her face in the way of old romantic movies.

  We left an hour later, Peter piling groggily into the back seat while Marie and I said good-bye. Carl hugged each of us in turn, then stepped back to allow Amelia to do the same.

  “Nice seeing you again,” she said easily, then glanced over at me. “Be good, Steve,” she told me in a voice that seemed stern and full of warning.

  Marie sat close to me on the drive home, breathing softly as we drove through the dark countryside. Once back in Old Salsbury, we led Peter to his room, and watched, amused and smiling, as he collapsed onto his bed.

  Later, in bed ourselves, Marie inched toward me, stroking me slowly. We made love sweetly and well, with that correctness of pace and expertise that only custom can attain. After that, Marie moved quietly into a restful sleep.

  Toward dawn I felt her awaken slightly. She lifted her head in the early light, smiled, kissed my chest, then lowered her head down on it again and closed her eyes. While I waited for the morning, I stroked her hair.

  So it was never love, as she would say to me that last night, it was never love … that was missing.

  ***

  Marie was still sleeping in the morning when I got up and headed downstairs to my office. It was smaller than Marie’s, since I’d always done most of my work at Simpson and Lowe, while Marie did most of hers at home. It contained little more than a drafting table, a large light, and a few metal filing cabinets.

  I sat down at the table, pulled out the latest plans for my dream house, and began to go over the details again, searching for places where I could remove yet another enclosed area from what was already an impossibly airy and unreal space. But as I worked, I found myself increasingly unable to concentrate on the plans before me. It was as if the dream house had become, at last, pure dream, nothing more than idle whimsy, an idea for which I no longer felt any genuine conviction. It was Rebecca and her search that seemed real to me now, and I even allowed myself to hope that from time to time Rebecca might sense my presence beside her, silent, determined, armed as she was armed, with the same grisly instruments of night, the two of us equally committed to tracking down “these men,” poking at the ashes they had left behind, closing in on their distant hiding places.

  I remembered the photograph she’d shown me on Friday afternoon. I saw my father standing in the open, his army cap cocked to the side. The smile on his face had seemed absolutely genuine. It had given his face an immense happiness, a joy and sense of triumph that I’d never seen before. Not in life. Not in any other photograph. That day, April 1, 1942, I realized with complete certainty, had been his finest moment.

  Rebecca had already noted that my mother had to have been pregnant with Jamie by then, but it wasn’t the fact of my brother’s technical illegitimacy which struck me suddenly. It was something else, a curious memory of something that had happened when I was eight years old, a year or more before the murders, but which I could now recall very clearly.

  It was a spring day, and my father had been doing some kind of repair work in the basement. He’d asked Laura to bring him something from the garage. Laura had gone to find it, but after several minutes, she still hadn’t come back into the house, and so my father had turned to me.

  “Go get Laura,” h
e told me.

  I went up the stairs, out the kitchen door, and into the garage, expecting to find Laura still searching through the usual disarray to find whatever it was my father wanted. But she was sitting in a far corner instead, her body in a dusky, yellow light. A pile of blue papers was scattered at her feet, all of them spilling out of a small shoe box that had obviously fallen from the shelf overhead. She had one of the light blue pieces of paper in her hand, but she was no longer reading it. She was simply sitting motionlessly, deep in thought, her eyes lifted toward the dark, wooden ceiling.

  I called to her, but very softly. “Laura?”

  She looked at me directly, her body still motionless, except for the way her fingers slowly curled around the blue paper, as if to conceal it.

  “What do you want, Stevie?” she asked stiffly.

  “Dad wants you,” I told her.

  She drew her hands behind her, the blue note disappearing behind her back. “Tell him I’ll be there in a minute,” she said. “I have to clean up this mess.”

  I did as she told me, and for a while my father seemed satisfied that Laura was on her way. But later, with his typical impatience, he finally headed up the stairs and out to the garage. I followed behind him, a dog at his heels.

  Laura was still in the same corner as we entered the garage, the same blue paper in her hand. She tried to hide it again, which surprised me, since I’d never before seen her try to conceal anything from my father.

  His eyes fixed on the paper. “What is that?” he asked.

  Laura didn’t answer.

  My father walked through the dusky light and drew the paper from Laura’s fingers.

  From my place at the front of the garage, I watched as he read it. When he’d finished, he turned to me.

  “Go play, Stevie,” he said.

  I was in the backyard a few minutes later when the two of them came out of the garage. Laura was nestled beneath my father’s arm, and they were walking slowly toward the house.

  My mother came home a short time later. She’d been grocery shopping, I remember, and as she headed up the stairs, her arms around an enormous brown bag, my father stepped out of the house, took the bag from her, and returned it to the car. Then he motioned for her to follow him and the two of them walked past me and over to the very edge of the yard. I was too far away from them to make out any of what they said, but I remember having the distinct feeling that they were talking about the blue papers Laura had found in the garage.

  After a while they walked back toward the house. They were still talking, and as they passed, I heard my mother say, “You told her not to …” She didn’t finish, because Jamie suddenly came rushing around the corner of the house. At the sight of him, both my father and my mother froze, each of them staring at him with such frightened, startled looks that I had sensed even then that the blue papers, and everything that had happened since I’d seen Laura reading them, had had something to do with Jamie.

  During the next few days, however, the entire incident slipped from my mind. Everything returned to its normal pattern, except that my mother seemed even more subdued. There were times, forever after that, when she seemed to flee from any notion of command. Steadily over the next few years, she became more vaporous, slowly giving up the prerogatives of wife and mother so that in the end she seemed more like some distant relative we’d saved from poverty or shame, one who lived with us but had no standing among us, no office or authority, incontestably by then the “poor Dottie” of my aunt’s unforgiving judgment.

  But for the rest of us, nothing seemed to change, and as I sat at my desk that morning, remembering the blue papers, it struck me that I wouldn’t have remembered it at all if something else hadn’t happened, something which I always believed was connected in some way to what had been written in them.

  It was about three months later. My father had recently put a redwood picnic table under the large maple tree that stood beside the rear fence, and Laura and I had begun meeting there to play Monopoly or checkers or some other game. That particular day, Laura had begun to teach me chess. Slowly, with infinite patience, she introduced me to each piece. I had only played checkers before, and it was not easy for me to get a grip on this much more complicated game.

  We’d been at it for nearly an hour before Jamie strode across the backyard and sat himself down on the bench beside me.

  Laura hardly registered his presence. Instead, she continued to concentrate on teaching me the game. Jamie watched sullenly while she did it, as if evaluating each word my sister spoke, each gesture she made, second-guessing and inwardly ridiculing her, at times even smiling snidely when she got something slightly wrong or out of order and had to correct herself.

  As the minutes passed, I could feel the air heating up and turning sour around us. It was as if the peaceful little island that Laura and I created when we were together had been invaded by a poisonous wind.

  Finally, the storm broke.

  “You’re doing it all wrong, Laura,” Jamie snapped. “It’s stupid the way you’re teaching him.”

  Laura didn’t so much as look at him. She picked up the knight, and began to explain its move.

  “You’re going to screw it up, as usual,” Jamie barked.

  Laura’s eyes shot over to him. “You’re not supposed to talk like that in front of Stevie.”

  “I’m trying to keep him from being a loser, Laura,” Jamie fired back. “The way you’re teaching him this game, he’ll play it like a sissy.”

  Laura’s eyes narrowed lethally. “Nobody asked you, anyway, Jamie,” she hissed angrily. “Nobody asked you to come over here and bother us.”

  Jamie leaned toward her threateningly. “I don’t have to be asked,” he said. “It’s my yard, too, you know.”

  For a flaming instant, Laura glared at him with a terrible ferocity. Then she turned her attention back to the game, but not before muttering a single, indecipherable phrase. “Sort of,” she said.

  It had been said under her breath, but loud enough for us to hear it.

  “What did you say?” Jamie demanded.

  Laura didn’t answer. She picked up one of the knights and pressed it toward me. I could see that it was trembling in her hand.

  “What did you say, Laura?” Jamie repeated, only this time in a tone that was more than teenage anger. Cold. Severe. A prelude to explosive rage.

  Laura locked her eyes on mine. “This is the knight,” she said evenly, “it moves like this.” She lowered the knight to the board and demonstrated the move.

  Jamie continued to stare at her with a terrible, quivering hatred. I remember bracing myself, my own mind racing to decide what I would do if he lunged forward and hit her.

  But he did no such thing. After a few more impossibly tense seconds, he simply rose silently and left us, a lean, disjointed figure striding awkwardly across the green summer lawn.

  Laura had resumed teaching me about the knight by the time Jamie had finally disappeared into the house. She went directly to its moves, to various ways of using it. She didn’t try to explain what she’d meant with that angry, nearly whispered “Sort of,” and I never heard her say anything so cryptic to Jamie after that.

  So what had my sister meant that day beneath the maple tree?

  For well over thirty years, it was a question I’d never asked. Then, that Sunday morning, as Peter and Marie slept upstairs and I sat at my desk, with both Rebecca and her mission steadily gaining force in my own mind, I tried to find out. I went to the box I’d brought up from the basement the day before, hoping that the answer might be there.

  Within a matter of only a few minutes, I discovered that it was.

  EIGHT

  THREE DAYS LATER, Rebecca had hardly taken her seat across from me at the restaurant before I handed her the document I’d found in the box. She took it from my hand and began to read it. What I gave her that evening was something she’d already asked for, my father’s army records. After the war, he’d taken a f
ew college classes under the GI Bill of Rights. A short application process had been required, and he’d submitted several forms to prove that he’d been in the army. One of them was a listing of his whereabouts during all that time. It began with Newark, New Jersey, where he’d been inducted in June of 1940, and ended with New York City, where he’d been mustered out on a medical discharge, an injured knee, in May of 1942. All the places my father had lived during those two years of military service were listed in the document, along with all of his official leaves. What it showed unmistakably was that he had lived at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, from July of 1941 until April of 1942, when he’d been given leave to return to New Jersey, and where, on April 1, he’d married my mother in a civil ceremony in Somerset.

  When Rebecca finished reading, she looked up, her face very still. She had instantly put it together.

  “Jamie was not your father’s son,” she said.

  “No, he couldn’t have been. My father was in North Carolina when my brother was conceived.”

  “And so he must have known that he wasn’t the father of the child your mother was carrying. Even on the day he married her,” Rebecca added wonderingly.

  “Yes, he had to have known that.”

  She thought a moment, then asked, “So who was Jamie’s father?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “How could I know? It all happened a long time before I was born.” Then something occurred to me. “Do you have the pictures you showed me last time?”

  “Yes.” Rebecca took them out and spread them across the table.

  I lifted the one that showed my mother posed alluringly against the stone wall and handed it to Rebecca. “I think maybe the man who took this was Jamie’s father,” I said. “I mean, look at my mother, at the way her face is shining.”

  Rebecca let her eyes dwell on the picture as I continued.

  “I think my mother was in love that day,” I said. “She was satisfied in every way. I don’t think my father ever made her feel like that.”