The Boys in the Trees

by Mary Swan

• • •

  At his retirement dinner Jenny sat across from him in a new green dress, earrings that caught the light. There were speeches and handshakes and funny stories from former students, catch-phrases repeated to laughter and nods of recognition, although he’d had no idea that he was known for them. There were serious notes too, men in suits with Brylcreemed hair telling how Mr. Robinson had inspired them, how he had turned their lives around. Eaton put his hand over his glass when the waiter came around; he thought he must be a little fuddled by drink, listening to the speakers and wondering who they were talking about.

  His own speech was short, and he hoped gracious, and he joked about writing his memoirs with the engraved gold pen, as if his days would suddenly become just time that needed to be filled. He even thought about it one rainy afternoon, thought about leaving a record for his children, something they would one day be glad to have. He supposed they would, but he also remembered teenaged eye-rolling at the dinner table, looks exchanged in the backseat of the car whenever he said, Did I ever tell you about … He remembered too the way he usually carried on anyway, the sound of the story, of his own voice telling it, somehow more important than the fact that no one wanted to hear it, that no one was even listening.

  Instead of a memoir, he thought of working out a family tree, thought of all the names, the straight lines drawn on thick vellum paper. He had his mother’s Bible somewhere, the pages at the front covered in faded spiked or flowing script that could be deciphered with strong light and a magnifying glass, now that he had time. But he realized that his father’s side was a mystery, wondered if it was possible that he had simply forgotten so much. He tried to lean back into his mother’s stories, anything she might have said, but could find nothing before the one about the day they had met, sitting on spindly chairs in a stuffy room while a woman folded her hands and sang. He had the idea that there was a farm involved somewhere, and a hard father or uncle, but that was all and even if his mother was still alive he wasn’t sure that she would have told him more. For all that she chattered there were so many things that his mother wouldn’t say, things that disappeared with her, although he supposed that was true of everyone. Once, standing in a doorway, he heard her say, Emden—how I hated that place, and the sentence made sudden sense of the way she’d changed.

  • • •

  It seemed that Jenny had kept everything, every stick-figure drawing, every smudged card, every tissue and pipe-cleaner flower. Stacks of letters tied with different colored ribbons. Even his sons were moved, going through the heavy bottom drawer, and like his daughter they both made piles to take away with them. He wondered if that was the way it always happened, if there always came a time when you took back the gifts you had given, or when they were returned to you. And he thought then of Rachel’s book, a thing he had always kept on his shelves, had never, for some reason, packed away to make space for other things. She had said it was a present for her family, asked him if he would keep it for her, just keep it until Christmas, because there was nowhere to hide things in her own house and she didn’t want the surprise spoiled. And he didn’t think anything of it, that day outside his house when she put it in his hands. A homemade book, not too big, not too heavy, the covers stiff and wrapped with glued-down cloth. He was worried about being late for supper, he remembered that, worried about making his mother cross, and he hurried inside, shoved it into a space on the small shelf in his room, beside the torn spine of Mark Seaworth. He didn’t think anything of it until after she was dead, until he realized that he couldn’t give it back, that there was no one left to give it to and it was all up to him, whatever would happen to Rachel’s book. Plans chased around in his head. He thought of throwing it into the swirling river, of making a fire, of burying it in the heart of Jackson’s wood. He thought of being its uneasy keeper for the rest of his life.

  He hadn’t even looked at the book until after the murders, opening it then in hope of finding a hint, some mention of a scar-faced stranger that would prove that everyone had it wrong. But there was nothing like that. He thought Rachel had said it was instead of a photograph that hadn’t been taken, or hadn’t come out well, but he didn’t remember exactly or know if that was important. The front page of the book said The Story of the Wonderful Whippets in elegant lettering, and the following ones were drawings, some pen and ink, some brushed with paints, most also with writing in Rachel’s neat hand. He looked through the book carefully, every page, but if there were clues he wasn’t clever enough to find them.

  Rachel’s book had been somewhere on a shelf in every place he had ever lived, but it wasn’t something he often thought about. Maybe only when he actually touched it, moving house or packing up boxes so a bookcase could be painted. Years apart, and he was older each time, seeing it differently. Seeing that the drawings, while very good, were still those of a child and not the marvels he had once thought. Noticing places where a word or phrase had been corrected, a piece of matching paper carefully cut and glued down, written over, obvious now that the glue had aged and dried, edges beginning to lift and curl.

  And each time too there was the nagging question: why had she given it to him? Why really? Every house was filled with its own hiding places, something he wouldn’t have thought of at the time. The same way he hadn’t wondered why she had given it to him and not to someone like Miss Alice, why not to Miss Alice? Rachel was someone he knew for a few years when he was a boy, someone he might have played games with, might have talked with about the kind of things that children do. He didn’t remember any closer connection, thought she would probably have disappeared completely from his memory if she hadn’t died, hadn’t died in that way. Like others in the town, others around Miss Alice’s school table. Presences he felt, when he tried to reach back, but could no longer give a name or face.

  Jenny had asked him about the book once, carried it into the kitchen where he was tinkering with a leaky tap. She knew that he’d seen an execution when he was a boy, and he had probably told her that it was a man who had murdered his family, no more than that. But for some reason, with Jenny standing near him in her flowered apron and the steady drip of water on a summer afternoon, he found himself saying more. He started telling her and the words kept coming, so many words, as if it was a story he’d often told himself, beginning to end, although he never had. The open books on the schoolroom table and the terrible weight of the short white coffin, the green of the leaves in the tree and the jerking legs, the black hood sucking in and out. Jenny said, You poor thing, and he started to say, Not me, it wasn’t about me, but he realized that it probably was. Wasn’t everything, in the end?

  Jenny listened, and there were creases between her beautiful eyebrows. As if she knew, isn’t it, she said. A premonition. Or maybe not exactly that, but who knows what goes on behind a closed door? It came out of the blue for all of you in the town, but who knows?

  The tap dripped steadily behind them. Jenny touched his cheek with a hand that smelled very faintly of polish, of things clean and shining. And she knew you would take care of it, didn’t she, she said. Even then there was something about you, something that made her choose you. Thinking of that now, of his own arms wrapping around her, he missed Jenny so much he didn’t think he could bear it.

  • • •

  When his mother married Mr. Parks, Eaton didn’t think much about it, beyond the fact that they seemed well suited. So much had already changed, many things easier between the two of them, and when she spoke of his father, as she sometimes did, it was without the jaggedness around the words, around his name. Partly the way he heard it, as he grew older and farther away, but not just that. Once she even told a story about a man with a boil in an embarrassing place, another about a woman who sang hymns all the time his father was examining her. Things they had laughed about together, long before Eaton was born. It had opened something up, to know that there had been laughter, freed something in his memory of Emden and all that went with it that had always been
wrapped, until then, by the way she had set it so firmly behind them. The only mention coming sometimes when she read out an item from the newspaper, tutted and said, Just like that horrible man Heath.

  He didn’t remember actually leaving Emden, but he was sure that he hadn’t thought it would be forever. Even with his mother’s aversion he might have kept some connection if it was closer to the city, or on the way to some other place they visited. That time might have stayed a part of his life instead of being sealed away by itself, something that would have taken a special effort to pierce. But as things were it took years and then one day, driving himself somewhere to give a speech or attend a meeting, he saw a sign and turned off the main road, followed a narrower secondary road he hadn’t ever been on. Passing through small corner places he’d never heard of, thinking how strange it was that this was the way in, this was the way people came to Emden, this the countryside that had always enclosed it.

  In town he came upon his own house quite suddenly, just as he was trying to remember how to find it. There was a small sign outside, a different doctor’s name, but he thought that otherwise it probably looked much the same. People always said that things from their childhood looked so much smaller, when they saw them again, but that wasn’t exactly what he noticed. What struck him instead, as he sat in the car, was how close together everything was. No distance at all between the market square he had driven through and his old house, the Barnes’ next door where he went to school and the river that had seemed such a journey to reach, the line of trees that marked the start of the wood. All the parts of his life, the whole wide world he had lived in—on this blue day he felt he could almost take it in with the span of his arms.

  From where he had stopped the car he could also see most of Will’s house, the gloomy red brick, maybe even the same dull green door. For some reason he thought of Ophelia, a painting of Ophelia, floating with sodden flowers, and he tried to puzzle it out. Will’s mother, that must have been the connection, although she hadn’t drowned herself. An overdose of laudanum, maybe an accident, something he hadn’t realized that he knew. He thought of the painting and something shivered as he understood that he must have seen Mrs. Toller in her coffin, must have seen her floating on the satin lining, flowers clutched in her dead hands.

  The sky had darkened but no lights showed in Will’s old house, no lights, he realized, in any of the houses around him. The entire landscape of his childhood seemed to be uninhabited, the only sound a tree branch somewhere, creaking in the wind. He had imagined himself strolling along the main street, maybe sitting down for a cup of coffee, even running into someone who remembered him, anyone at all. There had been a hazy idea that he would run into someone on the main street who would tell him the rest of the story, how things had turned out for everyone he had known, but suddenly that was the last thing he wanted. There was the sound of a door closing, and a gray-haired woman turned from the Barnes’ front door, tucking a furled umbrella under her arm. He wondered if it could possibly be Miss Alice, and he thought that he could get out of the car, walk over and introduce himself; he thought what a wonderful thing it would be to see recognition come into her eyes. But even as the thought came he was turning the key, releasing the brake, the figure shrinking behind him as he pressed harder on the gas, no real thought again until he was back on the main road.

  It couldn’t have been the same day, but he wondered if his brief visit to Emden was connected to another memory, one that was so enclosed, so without any kind of context, that it might even have been a memory of a dream. He was in a car again, maybe the same car, driving through open country on a day filled with misty rain that wasn’t really falling, but still saturated the air. He was in a car, driving through a pale, sodden day, and he was suddenly overwhelmed. Eased the car onto the shoulder, pulled the brake, opened the door, all those sounds registering, but without meaning. Then he was walking through long grass, the air around him filled with more water than it could possibly contain. He stopped in the misty field, his eyes on the far-off, hooded trees, and he felt as if he was trying to fill himself up, to somehow fill himself up through his eyes, through all his senses. It might have been a very long time that he stood like that, long minutes before he noticed that his eyelashes were beaded with water, before he became aware of his soaking feet, the unpleasant feeling of wet cloth wrapping his shins. He wasn’t quite released, had to make himself turn, his feet slow at first, carrying him back toward the glistening black hump of the car at the roadside, the pale shapes that were the worried faces of his family, pressed against all the windows.

  That was where it ended, this memory that might have been a dream. He believed it real only because it was so quiet, so complete, and because it brought with it a feeling of great peace, everything simply what it was and nothing at all lurking just out of sight.

  • • •

  Brenda came every few days and moved noisily through the house, crashes and bangs and the clatter of broken crockery. She vacuumed and dusted and left casseroles in the oven, did his laundry once a week and he had long since gotten over being embarrassed by things she might see. Before she left she carried in mugs of coffee, sat down in the other armchair with a great sigh. Sometimes they talked about the world but more often her no-good husband, her sons and nephews who weren’t angels, she’d be the first to say, but not guilty of half the things they were blamed for. He told her about a friend he’d had once, said that although he had no idea how things turned out, he always pictured him on a cantering horse, mountains behind and an oiled rope coiled over the saddle horn.

  Sometimes, of course, Brenda’s boys really had done the things they were blamed for. Nothing too serious yet, but she worried all the time about where they were headed. Every day more sullenness, more swagger, their good hearts harder to find. But they’re mine, Mr. R, Brenda always said. I wouldn’t change them for anything, not even if I could. Eaton thought about that, and thought about how it was the kind of remark that might once have slipped into his ears and right out again, only a little niggle as it passed. Something like the pang he used to feel, watching his young sons swing from branches in the backyard, a feeling he thought he’d try to pin down one day, but now that there was time, nothing but time, he was no closer to understanding. No closer to really knowing why he needed to puzzle over it. He only knew that he kept drifting back to Emden, as if there was something there, something that he couldn’t really have forgotten.

  Now that his children had grown into their lives, their own children too, there was no one who needed more than the idea of him, and he thought maybe that was why he had this nagging feeling, this sense that there were things he had to know for himself, only for himself. He knew, of course he knew, that a life wasn’t anything like one of those novels Jenny read, that it stumbled along, bouncing off one thing, then another, until it just stopped, nothing wrapped up neatly. He remembered his children’s distress at different times, failing an exam or losing a race, a girlfriend. Knowing that they couldn’t believe him but still trying to tell them that it would pass, that they would be amazed, looking back, to think it had mattered at all. He thought of himself, thought of things that had seemed so important, so full of meaning when he was twenty, or forty, and he thought maybe it was like one of Jenny’s books after all. Red herrings and misdirection, all the characters and observations that seemed so central, so significant while the story was unfolding. But then at the end you realized that the crucial thing was really something else. Something buried in a conversation, a description—you realized that all along it had been a different answer, another person glimpsed but passed over, who was the key to everything. Whatever everything was. And if you went back, as Jenny sometimes did, they were there, the clues you’d missed while you were reading, caught up in the need to move forward. All quietly there.

  Sometimes, sitting up in bed beside him, Jenny would close her book with a bang and say, For Heaven’s sake, I knew that on page twenty-three. Or complain abo
ut what annoyed her even more, a twist at the end that hadn’t been prepared for, that made no sense, given what had gone before. The pleasure seemed to depend on a delicate balance, on letting yourself be fooled, so long as in the end you could see how it had been done. He wasn’t as devoted a mystery reader as Jenny had been but he usually finished the ones his neighbor brought from the library. Sometimes there were ancient crumbs trapped between the pages, a sepia stain that might have been from a cup of coffee Jenny had been drinking, years before. Once a hard crust of something that looked like flour and water paste and made him think of the two of them in the kitchen, long past midnight, working on a papier-mâché mountain range someone had to take to school. Their fingers thick with the newspaper mess, and Jenny’s forehead crusted where she kept pushing back her hair. Do you think they’ll even remember any of this? she said.

  His first thought was of course they would, remembering the tears of frustration, the vast relief on the face of the child who had gone sleepily up the stairs. But then he thought of rocking a crying baby to sleep, of plates of brownies and sequins sewn on costumes, stories and walks and the endless unfunny jokes and riddles. Think what you remember, Jenny said. What do you really remember, of when you were five, or eight, or ten. Would it be what your parents thought you would remember? What they wanted you to? And in the paper-strewn kitchen in the middle of the night they talked about how strange it was, that the person you were was perhaps formed most by all that you had forgotten.

  • • •

  He had promised his children that when the stairs became too much he would sell the big house they grew up in, would move into someplace more manageable, or maybe even into Ellie’s spare room; now that he didn’t get around much it didn’t really matter what city he lived in. He had promised them and he might actually do it, although he found it hard to imagine. Maybe instead what he thought of as Jenny’s last gift, the nearly full bottle of pills rolled up in a pair of socks in his top dresser drawer. Maybe he would go to sleep one night deciding that he’d had enough. Fold his hands, close his eyes, and slide into a dream so deep that no sounds, no swaying shapes, would disturb it. He would leave a note on the outside door for Brenda, telling her who to call. Leave a letter for his children telling them not to mind too much. Telling them that he was glad that he had lived; he was glad for his life.