Mortal Memory

by Thomas H. Cook

  He stood very tall, a lean man with wavy black hair, the checked shirt billowing slightly as he came out into the yard. He didn’t notice me at all, but walked directly to the edge of the yard, the place where it began its sharp decline toward the beach.

  I walked over to him and stood at his side, looking down, as he did, toward Laura.

  “Laura came back about an hour later,” I told Rebecca, “but not by way of the road. She came up the beach instead, and she was alone.”

  Alone, because she must have known that whatever lie I’d come up with to tell my father, it surely hadn’t included Teddy.

  Standing beside my father, I could see her moving slowly, her head bowed slightly, as if she were looking for shells. She was barefoot, her brown leather sandals dangling from one hand, as she waded through the weaving lines of white lacy foam.

  “There she is.”

  That was all my father said, and it was no more than a whisper, three words carried on a single, expelled breath. Then he returned to the house, without waiting, as I did, for Laura to make the hard climb up the stairs along the sandy hill to our cottage.

  She was out of breath by the time she reached me, her long hair slightly moist with sea spray. She wasted no time in getting to the subject:

  “I saw Dad up here.”

  “He went back into the house.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That I didn’t know where you were.”

  “Good. Thanks, Stevie.”

  “Where were you, Laura?”

  She didn’t answer me, but only walked directly back to the house and joined my father on the small back porch. While I played in the backyard, I could see them sitting together, their faces gray behind the screen, smoke from my father’s cigarette drifting out into the summer air.

  A few hours later we all went down to the beach, trudging cautiously through the deep sea grass, my father lugging a huge picnic basket, Jamie dragging along behind, looking as morose as he had the preceding day.

  Teddy came bounding down a few minutes later. My mother invited him to have one of the ham sandwiches she’d made, and he accepted without hesitation. For a time, he chatted amiably with us all, although his eyes often fell upon Laura with a deadly earnest. Neither of them gave the slightest impression of having met earlier that morning, but I remember having the distinct impression that my father knew that they had. Perhaps Laura had told him while the two of them sat behind the gray screen. Or perhaps he’d sensed it in the looks that sometimes passed between Teddy and Laura while we all sat together on the blanket my mother had spread over the sand.

  It was very hot that day, and not long after lunch, Laura, Teddy, and I all went into the water for relief. My mother, who never swam, gathered everything up and wandered back to the house, leaving my father alone on the beach. He sat there for several hours, his long legs sticking out of a dark blue bathing suit, watching us distantly, with that strange attitude of concentration which I’d only seen in the basement before, and which I associated only with the assembling of fancy European bicycles. And yet it was there on his face, that look of intense study and attention.

  It was not directed at me, of course, but at Laura and Teddy as they moved farther and farther out into the sea. Glancing toward them from time to time, I would see hardly more than two heads bobbing happily in the blue water, although I am sure now that my father saw a good deal more.

  Rebecca looked at me quizzically. “What more did your father see?” she asked. “I mean besides what was obvious, two teenagers attracted to each other.”

  “I’m not sure, but I think it was something about life.” I remembered Rebecca’s earlier remark about what she was looking for in these men. “Maybe something unbearable,” I added.

  I could see my father’s face as it had appeared that day. Although in his youth he’d been a pale, skinny boy, middle age had filled him out a bit. He was still slender, of course, but his face had aged into an unmistakable handsomeness, his sharper features less bird-like, the eyes more deeply set and piercing. His curly black hair framed his face well, and when the wind tossed it, as it did that afternoon, it gave him a wild, curiously appealing look. Because of that, I realized that I’d been completely mistaken in what I’d just told Rebecca. “No, he didn’t look like a man about to break,” I said. “He didn’t look like that at all.”

  I watched her quietly for a moment, certain now that I was following behind her in some strange way, covering ground she’d already covered.

  “My father wasn’t some little gray man who crumbled under pressure,” I said finally. “Why have I always wanted to think of him that way?”

  I instantly thought of the other men Rebecca had chosen for her study. None of them had been inept or inconsequential; none had seemed to lack a certain undeniable dignity.

  I saw my father again as he’d appeared that day on the beach, his legs stretched out before him, leaning back slightly, propped up on his elbows, his eyes focused on Laura and Teddy as they bounced up and down in the heaving waves.

  In my imagination, his features took on a classical solidity and force, almost the military bearing of one who had chosen to defend the city, no matter what the cost.

  I looked at Rebecca, amazed by my own reassessment. “My father had a certain courage, I think.”

  It was then that the utter loneliness of my father hit me with its full force, the darkness within him, his long silence, the terrible hunger he carried with him into the basement night after night, and which, I realized now, Laura had sensed as well, and perhaps even tried to relieve from time to time, like someone visiting a prisoner in his cell.

  Rebecca looked at me questioningly. “Did something happen on the Cape, Steve?” she asked.

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  Rebecca seemed almost reluctant to continue, as if she felt herself being drawn down in a world even she was not quite prepared to enter. “Do you want to stop now,” she asked, “or do you want to go on?”

  “I want to go on, Rebecca.”

  And so I did.

  I told her how Teddy and Laura had spent almost all their time together after that first morning, how my mother had remained almost like an invalid, reading her romance novels, how, at last, my father had seized the gray back porch like a conquered province, sitting hour after hour in the little metal chair, his eyes trained on the sea.

  Finally, I arrived at the place where I’d been heading all along, that last night on Cape Cod.

  “Nothing really strange happened until the end of that week,” I began, “the night before we headed back to Somerset.”

  Early that afternoon, it had begun to rain. By evening, it had developed into a full summer storm, with sheets of windblown rain slapping against the cottage’s rattling windowpanes. While the rest of us retreated into the house, my father remained on the back porch, still in that same chair, his eyes fixed on the violently churning sea.

  “Lost in thought, that’s how I’d describe him,” I told Rebecca. “Lost in thought.”

  “But you don’t know what he was thinking about?”

  A possibility occurred to me: “Killing us, perhaps.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Because, over dinner that night, he did something cruel to my mother.”

  She’d called him in to a hastily prepared dinner of hot dogs and baked beans, and he’d taken his usual seat. He looked preoccupied, intensely engaged in something within him. He remained silent while the rest of us chatted, mostly about the things that still had to be done before we could leave the next morning. A couple of times during the meal, Laura had tried to engage him, but he’d only answered her in quick, terse phrases, little more than a yes or no, sometimes not even that, but only a brisk nod of the head.

  My mother had watched all of this for some time, yet had said nothing. Finally, she got up and headed back to her chair in the living room, inadvertently leaving one of her novels on the table near my father. She
was almost all the way out of the room when he called to her suddenly:

  “Dottie.”

  She turned quickly, as if surprised by the sound of her name in his mouth, unsure of the context in which he’d used it, already gathering her red housedress around herself more tightly:

  “Dottie.”

  My mother had already turned all the way around to face him before he spoke to her again. She didn’t answer him, but only stood, very still, as if waiting for his next word.

  My father added nothing else for a moment, and I remember he looked regretful that he’d called her name at all. Still, he had started something which he could not help but finish:

  “You forgot to take your book, Dottie.”

  And with that, he picked it up and hurled it toward her violently, its pages flapping hysterically in the air until it struck my mother in the chest and fluttered to the floor.

  My mother stared at him, stricken, and my father seemed to collapse beneath her broken, helpless gaze. His face was ashen, as if mortified by what he’d done. He stood up, walked over to where the book lay lifelessly on the floor, retrieved it, and handed it to my mother:

  “I’m sorry, Dottie.”

  She took it from him, retreated into the living room, and slumped down in her accustomed position. The book lay in her lap. She made no effort to read it that night. Instead, she remained in her chair, the yellow lamplight flooding over her, her eyes fixed on the small painting that hung on the opposite wall.

  I gave Rebecca a penetrating look as the thought struck me.

  “She knew it was coming,” I said. “From that moment, I think, she knew he was going to kill us.”

  Rebecca didn’t question this. She jotted a note in her black book and looked back up.

  “What was Laura’s reaction to what your father did?” she asked.

  I remembered the look on her face in great detail. She had been sitting across from me, so that the book had flown between us as it hurled toward my mother. Laura’s eyes had followed it briefly, then shot over to my father. What I saw in them astonished me.

  “It was admiration,” I told Rebecca. “Laura looked at my father as if he’d done something gallant, like he was some kind of knight in shining armor.” I released a sharp, ironic chuckle. “All he’d done was throw a book at a helpless woman,” I said. That’s not exactly Sir Lancelot, is it?”

  Then why did Laura look at him that way?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She didn’t seem to believe me. “Are you sure you don’t know?”

  “What are you getting at, Rebecca?”

  Before she could answer, I already knew. It had undoubtedly been admiration that I’d seen in my sister’s eyes, but I hadn’t guessed the nature of what it was she admired until that moment.

  “Action,” I said. “She admired him for actually doing something. It was hostile, and it was cruel, but at least it was something. “

  It was perhaps the same thing Quentin had admired not long before he died, muttering about how my father had “taken it by the balls.” I thought about it a little while longer, remembering the softness in my sister’s eyes, the love she had for my father, the small, almost undetectable smile that had quivered on her lips as she’d glanced over at him that night. It led me to the final moment of my narrative.

  “That wasn’t all my father did that night,” I said.

  Rebecca looked at me thoughtfully. I knew that she could hear the slight strain that had suddenly entered my voice as I began:

  “It was much later that night, and …”

  I’d already been in bed for several hours when I heard someone moving softly in the adjoining room. I crawled out of bed, walked to the door, and opened it. In the darkness, I could see Laura as she headed stealthily toward the back porch, through its creaking screen door and out into the yard. Her posture was different than I’d ever seen it, slightly crouched, as if she were trying to make herself smaller, less easily seen.

  I followed her as far as the back porch, then stood, staring through the gray metal web of the screen. I could see my sister as she made her way across the wet grass, the white folds of her nightgown rippling softly in the wind that came toward her from the sea. In that same wind, her long hair lifted like a black wave, falling softly to her shoulders and down her back.

  I remember that I pressed my face into the screen, as if trying to pass through it bodilessly, like a ghost, and float out toward the tall green reeds into which she had wholly disappeared.

  I stood for a long time by the screen, half expecting Laura to reemerge from the sea grass, perhaps with a shell in her hand, or some article she’d forgotten to retrieve from the beach earlier in the day.

  But she didn’t come back, and so, after a moment, I drew away from the screen and turned back toward the house.

  That was when I saw my father.

  He was sitting motionlessly in the far corner of the porch, his long legs folded under the metal chair, his light blue eyes oddly luminous in the darkness. In the eerie stillness, he looked like a serpent sunning itself on a stone, but entirely inverted, drawing warmth and comfort from the darkness.

  He didn’t speak to me at first, but merely let his eyes drift over to me, hold for a moment, then leap back to their original position, peering out at the wall of gently waving reeds. Then he spoke:

  “Go back to bed, Stevie.”

  “Where’s Laura going?”

  “Go back to bed.”

  His eyes returned to me, and I felt myself shrink back, moving away from him cautiously and fearfully, as if he were coming toward me with a knife.

  Within seconds I was back in my room, but I couldn’t sleep. My mind latched on to Laura, to her white gown billowing in the breeze, and I remember feeling frightened for her somehow. Normally, the fear would have come from the simple knowledge that she was out in the darkness alone. But that wasn’t the origin of my dread. It was him. It was the feeling that he was going to go after her, stalk her in the reeds, do something unimaginable.

  I looked at Rebecca, shaken suddenly by my own unexpected insight. “So I was really the one who knew all along that he was going to kill us,” I told her. “I was the one who sensed it. Not my mother or Jamie or Laura.”

  Rebecca’s face was very still. “Go on,” she said.

  And so I did, relating the story in as much detail as I could recall, reliving it.

  After a time I walked back to the porch, although very stealthily, intending only to peer surreptitiously around the corner of the door to assure myself that my father was still there, that he hadn’t followed my sister into the reeds.

  But he was gone, the chair empty, a cigarette butt still smoldering in the little ashtray he kept beside it. I knew that he hadn’t returned to the bedroom he shared with my mother. I don’t know how I knew this, but it was as clear to me as if I’d seen him disappear into the tall grass or heard the creak of the screen door as it closed behind him. I knew, absolutely, that he’d decided to go after my sister.

  I stood, frozen on the porch, poised between the warmth of my childhood bed and the darkness beyond the house. I don’t know what I thought, if I thought anything at all. Perhaps I was already beyond thought, already operating at a more primitive level, sensing the storm that was building within my father the way an animal lifts its face to the air and senses danger in the bush.

  “What did you do?” Rebecca asked.

  “I went after my father.”

  A curious expression rose in Rebecca’s face. “You weren’t thinking of it as going after Laura?”

  “No.”

  And it was true. Even as I opened the screen door and stepped out onto the wet lawn, I knew absolutely that I was pursuing my father rather than moving to protect my sister, that my intent, shadowy and vaguely understood, was to join him in the tall grass, commit myself to whatever it was he had committed to the moment he’d crushed the cigarette butt into the ashtray beside his chair and headed out into the
night.

  The grass was tall and still wet with rain, and the blades, as they pressed my arms and legs, felt very cool and damp. The ground was soft, and I could feel my feet sink into it slightly with each step. The reeds had parted as my father had moved through them, leaving a wide trail for me to follow, already crouching as I went forward, moving slowly and secretly, as if I already had much to hide.

  The trail led down the hill toward the sea. I could hear the waves tumbling not far away, but I couldn’t see them until the clouds parted suddenly and a broad expanse of light fell over the beach. It was then that I glimpsed my father’s head, saw his tangled black hair and sharp, angular face just for an instant before he sank down, squatting over the wet earth. I could tell by the motionlessness of the grass that he’d stopped, and for a moment, I stopped as well and stood, sinking imperceptibly into the rain-soaked ground.

  For a little while I listened intently, my head cocked like some primordial creature. I could hear only the waves as they tumbled toward shore a few yards away and the wind as it swept through the reeds that surrounded me.

  I don’t know exactly when I began to move forward again, or why, or what I was thinking as I did so. I remember only the sudden desire to penetrate more deeply into the green wall and the inability to draw back once I’d begun to move again.

  I walked slowly, very silently, as if stalking a prey almost as cunning as myself. I remember shifting to the right somewhat, because I didn’t want to come upon my father. I’d glimpsed his position in a wedge of light, and I carefully edged myself away from him as I continued to slink forward through the reeds.

  I didn’t stop until I heard a shifting in the grass, the slow, rhythmic friction of blades rubbing softly against other blades. As I continued forward, I could hear someone breathing, then two people breathing in short, quick spasms.

  I stopped and peered out, gently drawing away the curtain of reeds that blocked my vision. That was when I saw her.

  “Laura,” Rebecca whispered.

  “Yes.”

  At first my sister’s body appeared to me in a blur of white and black, her long hair shifting back and forth over her naked shoulders. She seemed to be rising and falling on a completely separate cushion of pale flesh. I could only partially see the body beneath her, the one which shuddered violently each time my sister rose and fell above it. It came to me only as a headless ghost, white against the dark ground, moaning softly each time my sister lifted the lower part of her body then eased herself down upon him again.