—How did he find out? I said.
—Mildred.
—If Harriet was raped she’d have told him herself.
—Perhaps.
He stayed quiet. He let me think it through. It seemed normal to be sitting in the kitchen at dead of night talking like this. A moment later it was all very bizarre and disquieting.
—So did he actually say my father killed himself out of shame?
—I couldn’t get a straight answer out of him. I said he had to tell me for your sake but he was vague. I think he may have told him he’d be prosecuted and that’s what—
—That he’d go to prison.
—He’d go to prison. It wouldn’t look good for him, not if it was his word against the doctor’s. Not unless your mother—
He didn’t want to finish his sentences. He wanted me to put it together for myself. But it was too much for me then. I was suddenly exhausted. I could barely stay awake. He followed me into the bedroom and within seconds I was asleep.
Later he said he believed Daddy was trying to tell him what happened, but that frailty of memory and, too, some residual moral revulsion had confused the thing in the old man’s mind.
—It’s tragic, he said. Your whole life all you’ve wanted is your father’s love. Then you discover he isn’t your father at all, and your real father died before you were even born.
All my life I’d been building on quicksand, was that what he was telling me? Unspoken was the question whether I had the resilience to sustain this fresh damage. Daddy threatened my father. He told him he’d go to jail for what he’d done. So my father threw himself under a train. Why couldn’t Sidney grasp the obvious here? Daddy was responsible.
Chapter 6
He took me to Penn Station. He didn’t want me to go to Ravenswood without him but he wasn’t free. There were no cabs so we had to take the subway. We were crushed together among damp irritable New Yorkers hanging on to leather straps being jolted to and fro with every jerk and judder of the train. It was slow and noisy. There was much screaming and grinding of metal on metal. Electricity sparked and flared in black tunnels. It was filthy, too, trash on the floor and graffiti smeared all over the doors and windows. Penn Station was worse. The work of demolition continued unabated, hammers clanging on girders, the roar of heavy machinery, men shouting. It was too much for me. Coils and wires spilling out of walls. The concourse had already been gutted and there was a crane in there now, and almost as bad as the noise was the dust. It got in your eyes, your lungs, your stomach. Sidney said we were being forced to eat Penn Station as a punishment for letting it die. I thought, the hell with Penn Station, who let my father die?
A week had passed. Iris had visited Daddy and returned to the city. Now it was my turn. I’d told Sidney I had to go see the old man because apparently I was killing him. I said I wanted to be around for his last words. I hoped they’d be: Forgive me.
—And you’d say?
He told me he hated how bitter I’d become. He said he wanted his sweet innocent girl back. I said that Daddy had destroyed my innocence by telling me the truth.
—I’d say, forget it!
I told him I just wanted the chance to say good-bye to it all: I wanted a last look at what I was about to lose forever. I said I intended never to return after this visit, it was just to lay a ghost. That wasn’t so far from the truth. I had to find out where he died. I owed it to him. It was the least I could do.
North of Cold Spring there was a fierce chill and the river was icy silver beneath a cloudless sky. I had a manuscript with me and I worked for most of the journey. I left the train at Rhinecliff and found a cab in the station yard. I had the driver take the river road. By the time we turned in to the driveway I was making a conscious effort to keep my breathing steady. I hadn’t called in advance.
I knocked on the front door then stood on the porch for more than a minute. Snow still blanketed the roof and clung to the slates of the tower. Icicles hung frozen from the eaves and there was frost in the upstairs windows. It was like a kind of ice museum, or a mausoleum, or a sarcophagus, and I thought, More than Harriet’s spirit left this house when she died. There’s no heart here anymore. There hasn’t been for years. I wanted very badly to turn around and go straight back to New York.
But there were signs of life. Firewood was stacked on the verandah and the stack was much depleted since Christmas. Wood smoke drifted from a chimney. Tools were propped in the porch, an ax, a saw, and a hatchet. They should have gone back to the barn. Daddy got furious when tools were left out. And the truck was out front although it looked as if it hadn’t been driven in a while. Then the front door opened and Mildred Knapp stood there wiping her hands on her apron. This woman was married to my father. I stared at her with new eyes. I don’t know what I expected to see. She saw nothing.
—He didn’t say you were coming.
Blunt and chilly as ever.
—I didn’t tell him.
The house wasn’t warm. I followed her across the hall and down the corridor. I felt oddly exhilarated, knowing that she didn’t know that I knew who I was. If she did know she gave no sign of it. I tried to find something in her I’d missed before, some kind of connective tissue. Some link. I left my bag at the foot of the back stairs and went into the kitchen. She stood at the counter and poured me a cup of coffee.
—Iris is worried about Daddy, I said.
—Most days he’s like he always was.
She put the cup of coffee in front of me. She was a woman of sinew, lean and weathered in her frame and in her hands, and with a harsh, bony face. The untidy black hair was threaded with silver. She’d moved into the tower soon after Harriet died and she lived up there still, alone with her memories and her secrets. She was my father’s wife but not a word of it had ever passed between us. She was another one who’d kept the truth from me. To her too I was the living embodiment of betrayal. They both hated me. It made no sense. None of us controls the circumstances of our birth. It doesn’t take much imagination to figure that out.
—He doesn’t want to get out of bed. He says it’s too cold. Imagine that, your father afraid of cold weather. He’ll get up when he knows you’re here.
Your father.
—You think you should tell him?
—It’s better if I go up.
She left the kitchen and I thought no, maybe she doesn’t hate me. If she thinks about me at all it’s in connection with Daddy’s welfare. The rest belongs in some archive in her mind stocked with ancient scandals. She visits them at night, then at dawn she locks them away again. She returned to the kitchen a few minutes later.
—He’ll be down soon, she said. It takes him a while, getting washed and dressed.
—You see a big change.
—Like I said, some days he’s himself.
She did something with her face then, a sucking in of the lower lip and a biting down on it, producing a tight pucker round the mouth that to me suggested pain. She loved him in her way. For years he’d looked after her sisters and their children. To her he was a good man. He was the doctor. She hated to see him grow weak. Then I heard his step on the stair, descending.
The change was not as dramatic as I’d been led to expect. He stood in the kitchen doorway much as I remembered him at Christmas, looming and frowning in his cardigan and corduroys. He was thinner than before. There was a prickle of white stubble on his jaw. There was a tremor in his left hand. But more remarkable was what occurred next.
—Morgan, shut the door, said Mildred sharply, you’re letting the heat out.
He entered the kitchen and closed the door behind him. His docility astonished me. It wouldn’t have happened like this even a month before.
—You didn’t tell us, Constance. We didn’t know you were coming.
—It was spur of the moment. Is it all right?
He shuffled toward the table and in his gait I saw an old man. He spoke to the floor in a querulous tone. He reached with trembling hand fo
r the chair at the end of the table. Carefully he sat down.
—Is it all right, she asks me, is there anything to be done about it now? I don’t think so.
His head lifted.
—Mildred, give me a cup of coffee.
Later when we were alone I told him I knew who my father was.
—Oh you do.
We were in the sitting room by the fire. It was getting dark outside.
—Who told you?
—Not you.
He nodded to himself for a while. I’d always avoided confronting him if I could. He was too strong for me. Now I had no choice.
—I thought it might be too much for you, he said.
—You wanted me to think you were my father.
He answered without hesitation. I knew the tone and I hated it. I was angry with myself for having elicited it. It was the clinical tone, and he used it when he spoke of matters about which he felt certain. He told me that yes, he did want that, it was better that way—
He sank back in his chair. I went to the window. I pulled the drapes closed. Away from the fireplace the room was cold but I had to put some distance between us. I asked him why he’d told me at all.
Again the bowed head.
—Daddy, why?
He spread his old hands, palms upward. There was no tremor.
—You have Sidney now.
—Sidney said you told Walter Knapp he’d go to jail and that’s why he killed himself.
He waved this away with weary disdain.
—That boy disrupted the household and I had to get rid of him.
—What do you mean?
—I mean I crushed him.
He lifted his hand and rubbed his thumb against his fingertips. I was standing over him now.
—What are you saying?
He sat back in the chair with his eyes closed.
—Sit down, he said quietly.
I stood there, staring down at him, aghast.
—Sit!
I obeyed him.
—I found them together in the damn boathouse.
—What were they doing?
He was silent.
—Daddy, what were they doing?
Blood from a stone! He opened his pale eyes. They were sparking with contempt. He asked me what I thought they were doing. But I needed to hear him say it! I had to know that this part of it at least was true.
—What did you do?
He shook his head. I felt as though I was trapped in a nightmare, the horror of it the persisting sensation of not being asleep.
—So they were in the boathouse—
—Where you were forbidden to go! I put a lock on it to keep you out but you paid no attention to that, did you, you and your sister? Now do you understand why I didn’t want you in there?
There was nobody else in the house except Mildred, and she’d already gone to the tower. Was he telling me he murdered my father in the boathouse? That that’s how he died? I asked him what happened when he found them.
He was groping in the pocket of his jacket. He produced a small object. It glinted in the firelight. He held it out for me to see. It was a thin, scratched silver ring. Whose ring? He wouldn’t say. Walter’s, I thought. He’d taken it from his body, he’d pulled it from his finger. He’d kept it as a kind of memento mori.
—Here, have it, he said.
When I was a child, and they were talking, Daddy and Harriet, and I came into the room, they’d fall silent and I thought they were talking about me. But I knew now they were talking about my father. That Daddy wouldn’t let it go, that he continued to punish Harriet to the end of her life. That he’d caused her death too.
—At least tell me where he died.
But he was indifferent to me now. I wasn’t his daughter, I was nothing to him. He was panting slightly. I saw him as monstrous.
—I know how you did it, I said. I know what you said to him.
—You know nothing.
He rose to his feet and I followed him to the kitchen. He was exhausted. Spittle was flecked on his lips and chin. His skin was ashen. It was wearing him out, all this drama I’d brought into the house. After we’d eaten he said he was going to bed. There was some clumsy pushing back of the chair as he got up from the table. I stood up and carefully put my arms around him. He allowed himself to be held and then he shuffled to the door. He paused, and turned, and I waited for the words that would shed light on what had just transpired, or at least affirm that love had once existed between us, and perhaps still did, and I asked myself: Is that why I’ve come here? Because it was no good trying to get the truth out of him. He was too old, and for old men there’s no point, there’s no past, there’s only the future, and it bears down on them with inexorable purpose: death in the form of the Albany train, or whatever instrument of termination it chooses for its work—
He told me to be sure the screen was on the fire before I went to bed.
After he’d gone upstairs I got my coat on and left the house by the back door. It had started to snow. I made my way down the hill and across the tracks. The snow came drifting in moist heavy flakes. I stood at the end of the broken dock and watched it melting in the icy water where it lapped at the pilings beneath my feet. Then I turned to the boathouse.
I pushed open the slatted doors. I remembered it as a summer place full of moving shadows and watery echoes, sunlight shafting through gaps in the planks, but that winter night it was dark, and where before it had been romantic now it was sinister. Daddy’s boat was tightly battened under its canvas canopy, green with lichen. The skiff was gone but he’d removed the outboard before he scuttled it and there it still was, clamped to a sawhorse and covered with a tarpaulin. Was it here?
I began to shiver. I felt sick. Then I was pulling the doors closed behind me. High on the bluff above me reared the black mass of the house. Its outline was sharp in definition in the falling snow.
When I returned to the city I told Sidney that Daddy killed my father. But Sidney didn’t take me seriously. He tried to tell me that the old man’s grasp of past events was not reliable, surely that was apparent to me. I couldn’t hold the old man responsible for this ancient tragedy.
I’d been afraid of this. I bowed my head and covered my face with my hands. Then I looked up at him.
—You said you were on my side, I said quietly. It wasn’t a tragedy, Sidney. It was murder. And it wasn’t Daddy who told me.
—Then who did?
—Mildred.
He said he had no more confidence in Mildred Knapp’s version of events than he did in Daddy’s.
—Did she see him do it?
—She didn’t have to.
—No?
—No, Sidney, she didn’t. She’s been living with him since Harriet died. She shares his bed, or she used to.
I told him that in the morning after my conversation with Daddy I’d risen early and gone downstairs to the kitchen and found Mildred at the sink washing the dishes. I told her that Daddy and I had talked about Walter. I told her I knew he was my father. She didn’t turn around. She didn’t move.
—And does he know you know? she said at last.
—Yes.
Then she’d turned. We stared at each other for several seconds.
—Where did he die? I said.
My heart was racing. I knew she’d tell me.
—South of here.
—How far?
—Tillman’s Landing.
I felt a rush of anguished recognition. I cried out. I remembered Tillman’s Landing. A riverside hamlet, four or five houses and a dock. A steep dirt track off the river road that ended at the water. Mildred sat down at the table. She reached across and seized my hand.
—I tried to stop him, she whispered.
—What do you mean?
But she was alarmed now. She couldn’t do it. She pulled away from me. She got up from the table. Then she was standing at the sink with her back to me, furiously pumping water into a saucepan. Our moment of int
imacy had vanished as fast as it came.
—Do you have any photographs of him?
—I burned them all!
—What was he like?
Mildred still didn’t turn around. Her thin back was taut with tension under a cheap black cardigan.
—Ask him, he knows.
She meant Daddy.
—He won’t tell me.
She shrugged. She was a cruel woman, or perhaps she was just a frightened woman, or a guilty woman. I lost patience with her. I was weeping now. I took the keys from the hook by the telephone and got my coat on. I went out to the truck. It was parked by the barn. I climbed in and drove away. I heard a shout from behind me. In the mirror I saw Mildred on the front porch. She was pulling on her overcoat and running down the steps. I backed up. She got in beside me. I had no idea where I was going but then I realized I did know, I was going south on the river road. I was going to Tillman’s Landing and Mildred was coming with me.
The river was placid that day, slow moving, full of ice, silver in places beneath a gray wintry sky. I began to breathe more easily. I loved its steady beauty. I loved its calm. We drove in silence.
Tillman’s Landing was as I remembered it. Nothing had changed here. The road was unpaved and I followed it round a wooded headland and then it opened below us, the cluster of roofs, the railroad tracks and the dock, the station house, boarded up now, whitewash flaking off the bricks, and beyond it the silvering river and the distant mountains under a lowering leaden sky. Telephone poles marched along the railroad tracks. There was nobody around. On the high ground to the south leafless trees stood stark against the sky. I was strongly aware of my father’s presence, or no, not his presence, his influence.
I drove down the hill and parked the truck. We sat staring at the railroad tracks and the river beyond.
—Was it here? I said.
Mildred nodded.
—So what happened?
Something happened. Something brought it to a head. Daddy got suspicious. He got wind of it. Perhaps he came home from work unexpectedly in the middle of the day, or they did something reckless and he saw it. All Mildred would tell me at first was that he found them in the boathouse.
—Where were you? I said.
Constance Page 10
