Mortal Memory

by Thomas H. Cook

  I could see his slightly hairy thighs, the nest of dark hair into which they disappeared, and finally the long pale shaft that seemed to pierce and then withdraw itself from the body of my sister.

  It was 1959, I was nine years old, and so I’m sure I didn’t know what was happening there in front of me. Still, I knew that it was something powerful, occult, primitive, and at last profoundly private. I felt the need to withdraw, to sink back into the reeds and return to my bed, but something held me there, and for a moment, I continued to watch, shamed perhaps, but also mesmerized by the spectacle before me.

  I don’t know how long I watched, but I do remember that during that time the idea that my father could be anywhere near such a scene completely left me. I remained fixed on the two bodies, as if dazzled by the continually building intensity of their motions, the rising force and deep needfulness I could hear in their breathing.

  Suddenly, my sister arched her back and released a long, luxurious sigh. She shook her head, and her dark hair brushed back and forth along the lower quarters of her naked back. Then she fell forward in a spent, exhausted motion, the wall of her flesh suddenly collapsing so that I could see the green reeds beyond her, and deep within those reeds, my father’s pale blue eyes, motionless and vaguely hooded, with nothing at all in them of the voyeur’s seamy lust, but only staring toward mine in an instant of unspeakable collusion.

  For a few seconds, we continued to stare frozenly at each other while Laura and Teddy hurriedly dressed themselves, took a final, strangely passionless kiss, then rushed away, Laura moving up toward our cottage, Teddy toward his.

  Once both of them were out of sight my father stood up and started walking back to the cottage. I trailed after him, just a few feet behind. He didn’t look back at me. Perhaps he was too ashamed. I will never know.

  Rebecca peered at me unbelievingly. “You mean that he never said anything to you about that night?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Did he seem different after that?”

  “Yes, but not toward me,” I answered. “Only toward Laura.”

  Rebecca’s pen remained motionless above the still nearly blank pad. She’d taken very few notes, but I knew she’d absorbed every bit of my story, every nuance and detail.

  “How did he change toward Laura?” she asked.

  “He got even closer to her,” I answered. I considered it a moment, trying to find precisely the right word. “He became … more tender.”

  For the first time Rebecca looked vaguely alarmed, as if the word had caught her by surprise.

  Still, it was undoubtedly the right word to describe the change that came over the relationship between Laura and my father during the few weeks before he killed her.

  They were very tender with each other after that night on the beach,” I said. They’d always been very close, but they got even closer for a while.” I did a quick calculation in my head. “My sister had seventy-nine days to live.”

  The starkness of the number, the brevity of my sister’s life, shook me slightly, but only slightly, not with the disoriented unease I’d experienced in the restaurant days before.

  Still, Rebecca noticed the reaction. “This is hard, I know,” she said.

  Her eyes were very soft when she said it, and I knew that I wanted to touch her, and that everything about such a grave desire seemed right to me at that moment, while everything that stood in the way of its completion, the whole vast structure of fidelity and restraint, seemed profoundly wrong.

  “Rebecca, I …”

  I stopped, quickly glanced away from her, and let my eyes settle once again on the lake beyond her window. The clouds had parted by then, and the moon was bright against its ebony surface. It gave the sense of a world turned upside down, of the past devouring the future, of all life’s elements twisted and inverted, so that I seemed to be staring down into the waters of the sky.

  TEN

  IT WAS NEARLY midnight by the time I got back home that evening. I’d expected to find Marie either working in her office or asleep. But she was waiting in the den instead, sitting beneath the reading lamp, her face very stern when she spoke to me.

  “Where have you been, Steve?” she asked.

  I looked at her innocently. “What do you mean? I’ve been at work.”

  “You mean at the office?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I called the office,” Marie said. “I spoke to Wally. He said that …”

  “I was doing a site inspection,” I interrupted quickly. “At that office complex on the north side of town.”

  She looked at me a long moment, and I could see the wheels turning, the whole machinery of her suspicion fully exposed in her eyes.

  “A site inspection at night?” she said doubtfully.

  “We began it in the afternoon,” I told her. “Then we had a long meeting in the general contractor’s trailer.”

  For a moment she seemed vaguely embarrassed, as if by her own dark thoughts. “Oh,” she said, her voice less accusatory, though a strained quality lingered in it. Then she smiled faintly. “Well, anyway, I’m glad you’re home,” she said.

  “Me, too,” I told her, though I knew it was a lie, that I wanted to be with Rebecca instead.

  “Any more questions?” I asked half jokingly.

  “I guess not.”

  I offered a quick smile, then headed upstairs. It was a gesture of flight, I recognized, a darting-away from the seaminess of the lie I’d just told Marie, perhaps even a flight from the uneasiness and foreboding I’d felt at the moment of telling it.

  Once alone in the bedroom, I thought of my father, of the way he’d hurled the book at my mother’s chest that night on Cape Cod. I wondered if he’d felt the same restriction I felt now. Had there been some place outside his home that had called to him with an irresistible urgency? Later on that balmy summer night on Cape Cod, as I remembered now, I’d glimpsed him in the yard, standing beside my mother in the moonlight, his arm draped loosely around her shoulder. They’d returned from a long walk, and for a moment, as they’d stood together in the darkness, they’d actually looked like a couple in love. For a moment, he’d drawn her in more closely and kissed her hair. I wondered now if that gesture had been nothing more than part of a vast deception. Had my father really wanted to be with her that night? Had he wanted to be with any of us? Or had he secretly yearned for another life, one in which every moment was filled with challenge and surprise, a life from which we blocked him simply by being alive?

  I thought of each of us in turn. I saw Jamie in his sullen anger and isolation; Laura in her reeling moods, walking the house in the blue twilight; my mother forever locked within the folds of her red housedress; myself, a small, ordinary boy, indistinguishable from any other. Last I saw my father, still distant and mysterious, a figure walking behind us, the grip of the shotgun nestled, almost gently, in his hands.

  I remembered Rebecca’s purpose again, her search for whatever it was in life that these men had been unable to bear, and in my father’s case it occurred to me that the unbearable thing for which Rebecca was still searching might have been nothing more mysterious than ourselves, that we were, each of us, in our own individual lives, unbearable to him, the living proof that his life had come to nothing.

  I walked to the bedroom window, parted the curtains, and looked out. The lights from the suburban street seemed dull and lifeless. For years I’d been able to look out that same window without the slightest sense of disturbance. Now the very look of it made me cringe, for it seemed to me that my life, like all the other lives around me, possessed only the manageable level of risk, and no real jeopardy at all. Lived within its confines, we hunted the appropriate game, settled for the reachable star. We made the roads straight and flat. We turned on the light before we headed down the corridor, and grabbed the railing as we inched cautiously down the padded stairs. We grew old in a world of shallow breaths, feared both gasps and sighs.

  And yet, fo
r all that, the very next morning I went on with my routine as if nothing were changing in my life. I sat at the breakfast table and made small talk with Marie and Peter. Dutifully, I asked about Marie’s latest bid, about Peter’s work in school. But even as I listened to them, their voices sometimes faded, their faces drifted off” into a blur, as if they were becoming mere white noise.

  “Finish up, Peter,” I heard Marie say as she got to her feet, “you’re going to be late for school.”

  I remained at the table while Marie went upstairs to finish dressing and Peter darted to his room to get his jacket. Seconds later, I heard him dash by me. He gave me a quick “Bye, Dad,” then bolted out the door.

  “Are you still here?” Marie said later when she came into the kitchen.

  I looked at her. “What time is it?”

  I could see that the question struck her as odd. “You’re wearing a watch, Steve,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said, then glanced down at it, but didn’t move.

  “Shouldn’t you be leaving?” Marie asked.

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  I got up and went to my car. As I began to guide it out of the driveway, Marie came out of the kitchen and walked toward me. I stopped the car as she came near.

  “You don’t look well, Steve,” she said worriedly. “Do you want to stay home today?”

  I shook my head. “No, I’m fine,” I said with a small, dismissive smile.

  Marie didn’t smile back. “You need to take care of yourself, Steve,” she said in a voice as full of real concern as I’d ever heard, a voice that should have comforted and relieved me, but didn’t.

  I shrugged. “I’m fine,” I repeated, then let the car begin to drift away again.

  She said nothing more, but simply stepped away from the car and watched, without waving good-bye, as I glided down the driveway. Now, when I think of her, I often see her in that pose, standing in the grass, her arms folded over her chest, watching silently as I drifted from her sight.

  Once at my office, I went directly to my desk and began working on the library I’d been designing. But even as I worked, adding lines and filling in details, I felt that I was continually returning to the house on McDonald Drive. Curiously, I no longer dreaded these returns. Instead, I seemed to move back toward that lost place with an increasing sense of rendezvous and complicity. My companion was always Rebecca, and I sometimes felt that I was walking hand in hand with her through the separate murder rooms. I could hear her voice, as if in whispers, pointing out details, the open textbook on Jamie’s desk, my sister’s bare feet. The bodies of my dead family seemed to lie sensually before us, as if we were joined in the rapture of my father’s crime.

  It was over a week before I saw her again, and it seemed an infinitely long time. Each time the phone rang on my desk, I hoped that it would be she, whispering to me with a grave intimacy, as if we were lovers, bursting with breathless communications.

  She called on a Wednesday afternoon, and we met at her cottage the following evening. I expected to exchange a few pleasantries, but Rebecca got right down to business instead.

  She’d gotten some additional information from Swenson, she told me, and even as we began where we’d left off the week before, I sensed that she was holding something back. Even so, I didn’t press the point. By then I’d become quite willing to go at whatever pace Rebecca set. Perhaps I’d even sensed that to know everything Rebecca knew would dull the intensity of the journey we were making together—something I didn’t want to happen. What I wanted was to feel that intensity and peril all the time, to tremble forever at the edge of some sudden, apocalyptic discovery.

  And so I followed Rebecca’s lead, anticipating nothing, merely letting her questions guide me back.

  “You said that things became more tender between your father and Laura after that night on the beach,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “But they’d always had a close relationship, hadn’t they?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But he seemed to pay even more attention to her after that. It was almost as if he were studying her, trying to get an idea of what was going on inside.”

  “And you only noticed this change after you’d returned from the Cape?”

  “Yes.”

  We’d gotten back on a Monday night, Labor Day 1959, all of us crammed into the dark brown station wagon. My father drove, of course, while my mother sat in the front seat, her right shoulder pressed tightly up against the door, her face pale and bloodless as she stared straight ahead. Her eyes seemed lifeless, drained of light, and the sallow skin of the face that surrounded them made her look like a department store mannequin.

  Laura and I sat together in the back seat while Jamie lay crouched up and constantly complaining in the small square of trunk space that lay just behind us. He had absented himself as much as possible from the rest of us during the preceding week, but this last effort at self-imposed exile was certainly his most extreme, a punishing act of ostracism which Laura found ridiculous and contemptible, but which my father, lost in his own thoughts, seemed hardly to notice.

  We’d planned to leave early that Monday morning, but things had gotten scattered and confused during the day, and we’d finally pulled away from the little cottage at nearly four in the afternoon. By that time, the off-Cape traffic had reached its dreadful end-of-season peak, and we’d staggered along toward the Sagamore Bridge at a snail’s pace, inching down the highway one jerk at a time, Jamie groaning uncomfortably with each movement of the car.

  It was nearly midnight by the time we got back to the house on McDonald Drive, but my father didn’t seem particularly tired. He pulled himself briskly out of the old station wagon and immediately began to unload the week’s supplies while my mother staggered wearily into the house, then up the stairs to the bedroom.

  Laura regarded my mother’s bedraggled retreat into the house as nothing more than a way of avoiding the work involved in unpacking the car, and she clearly resented it.

  “Why doesn’t Mom help unpack?” she demanded sharply as my father handed her a large cardboard box. “The rest of us have to work at it.”

  My father did not reply. He simply drew another box from the back of the car while he listened as Laura railed on about my mother.

  “Why is she so special?” she asked hotly. “Why does she get to go up to bed?”

  Once again, my father refused to answer her. Instead, he yelled for Jamie, tossed him a heavy box, and commanded him to take it into the basement. Then, when Jamie was safely out of sight, he turned toward Laura, his eyes staring pointedly into hers. There was a kind of fierceness in his gaze, and I remember being quite drawn by the strangeness of it, as if he were about to pronounce some vital truth that he’d kept to himself all these years, waiting for the right moment to reveal it. But when he spoke, no such great truth emerged. Instead, after he’d settled his eyes on Laura for a moment, he said to her, almost in a whisper, but very distinctly nonetheless, and with that air of unchallengeable authority he often had, “You should know.”

  Rebecca wrote the words in her notebook, then looked at me. “Where were you when your father said that?”

  “I was standing next to Laura.”

  “What did Laura say?”

  “She didn’t say anything.”

  “What do you think your father meant by, ‘You should know’?”

  “I have no idea,” I told her. “But Laura knew what he meant. I know she did, because of the way she reacted.”

  I was standing only a few inches from her. I saw her fire her final question, then heard my father’s reply, his voice neither sharp, nor angry, nor resigned. Instead, it seemed to carry a sense of severe scolding which struck Laura like a slap in the face, so that she shrank back from him immediately and lowered her eyes. Then, almost in the same motion, she stepped toward my father again, placed her hand very briefly on his shoulder, then turned and made her way into the house. She did not come back out to help us unload th
e car, but remained inside with my mother.

  “Actually with my mother,” I told Rebecca emphatically. “In the same room with her, not just the same house.”

  It wasn’t until we’d finished unloading the car that I finally returned to the house. My father and Jamie continued putting various things away in the garage outside, but that was heavy labor, unsuited for a nine-year-old boy, and so I’d left them and gone back inside. It was nearly one in the morning by then, and I was very tired and wanted to get in bed as soon as possible.

  I’d passed the threshold of the stairs and was headed down the corridor toward the room I shared with Jamie when I saw Laura and my mother. It was enough to make me stop.

  “They were together in my mother’s room,” I told Rebecca. “Sitting side by side on the bed. I’d never seen my sister sit that close to my mother. It seemed very strange.”

  They were facing away from me. My mother had changed into her red housedress, and she was bent forward slightly, as if she were about to pick something up from the floor. I could see that Laura had draped her arm over my mother’s shoulder comfortingly, and though I didn’t know it then, the soft shaking motion I noticed in my mother’s body undoubtedly was caused by the fact that she was crying.

  Rebecca looked up sharply from her notebook. “Crying?” she asked.

  “It must have been that,” I said. “I don’t know what else it could have been.”

  “But what was she crying about?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was some sort of delayed reaction,” I said. “You know, delayed from earlier, when my father had thrown that romance novel at her.”