Mortal Memory Read online

  “Very dutiful,” I repeated. “Despite the way life is.”

  “The way life is?” Rebecca repeated, as if puzzled by the phrase.

  “You know, the way people live,” I said. “Going to work every day. Sticking to the same job. Coming home at the same time. Day after day, the same rooms, the same faces.”

  Rebecca began to write in her notebook. I watched her hand, the slender fingers wrapped delicately around the dark shaft of the pen. I’d heard the strange contempt which had risen into my voice as I’d described the mundane nature of everyday life, and as I watched Rebecca’s pen skirt across the open page of her notebook, I felt that somehow I had exposed myself. It was an uneasy and unsettling feeling, and for an instant I regretted that I’d ever agreed to talk to her.

  “You know, sometimes I’m not really sure I can go on with this,” I said.

  She looked at me squarely. “You can stop whenever you want.”

  But I knew that I couldn’t in the least do that. I knew that I’d become enamored of a mystery, that I wanted to feel the edgy tension and exhilaration of closing in upon a dangerous and undiscovered thing.

  For a moment, I let my eyes linger on her as she wrote, her head bent forward slightly, the long dark hair falling nearly to her pen. When she looked up again, I thought I saw a subtle recognition in her face, an uneasiness that made me glance away, my eyes fleeing toward the large glass window to my left and the darkening landscape beyond it. Far away, I could see night descending over the distant hills. It seemed to fall helplessly, out of control, to spin and tumble as it fell.

  SEVEN

  NIGHT HAD FULLY FALLEN by the time I got home. Marie and Peter were in the kitchen, both of them working at the evening’s dinner, Marie chopping onions, Peter shaping hamburger patties.

  She stopped as I came through the door and looked at me closely. “You look tired,” she said.

  “There’s a lot of work at the office,” I told her.

  “Are you going to be staying late often?”

  “Maybe.”

  She nodded, then returned to the cutting board. “I finished the bid this afternoon.”

  “Bid?”

  She glanced at me, puzzled. The Bridgeport bid,” she said, “the one I’ve been working on so long.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. “You think you’ll get the contract?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe. You never know.”

  I began to set the table, one of the “family time” jobs that had fallen to me. Peter continued slapping at the raw meat, making a game of it.

  “Do it right,” I told him, a little sharply.

  Marie looked at me, surprised by the edginess in my voice. “Are you okay, Steve?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, why?”

  She didn’t answer. Instead, she returned to her work. “I thought it might be nice to visit my parents tomorrow,” she said after a moment. “We haven’t seen them in several weeks.”

  I nodded. “It’s fine with me.”

  “So you don’t have to go in to work tomorrow?”

  “No.”

  Marie smiled. “Good,” she said, “we’ll have a nice day in the country, then.”

  Peter finished making the hamburger patties and handed them to Marie.

  “Good job, Peter,” she said lightly, as she took them from him.

  We ate dinner shortly after that, then Peter went to the den to watch television while Marie and I cleaned up the kitchen.

  “What exactly are you working on now?” she asked.

  “A library for a little town in Massachusetts,” I answered.

  She looked surprised. “And that’s what kept you at the office tonight?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Mr. Lowe has a personal interest in the project. It’s for his hometown, and so I want it to be right before he sees it.”

  The real reason for my being late in coming home swam into my mind, and I saw Rebecca’s face staring at me questioningly. I remembered the request she’d made for more information about my father’s life, the chronology she was trying to construct, her interest in his army records.

  “Do you remember when Aunt Edna died, and we went to her house, and found that box of papers that had belonged to my father?”

  Marie nodded.

  “You took it out of the car when we got back,” I reminded her. “Do you remember what you did with it?”

  “It’s in the basement,” Marie answered. “I wrote ‘Somerset’ on the side of it. I think it’s on the top shelf.” She looked at me curiously. “Why?”

  “I thought I might look through it,” I answered. “I never have.”

  Marie smiled half-mockingly. “You’re not gearing up for a midlife crisis, are you, Steve?” she asked. “You know, trying to get in touch with yourself, going back over things?” The smile broadened. “Reliving your ‘significant life experiences,’ that sort of thing?”

  I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so. I’m just curious about what’s in the box.”

  My answer appeared to satisfy her. She turned to another subject, something about Peter wanting to try out for the school basketball team, and not long after that she joined him in the den. I could hear them laughing together at whatever it was they were watching.

  I walked down the corridor to the stairs that led to the basement. The box was exactly where Marie had said it would be, on the top shelf, the word SOMERSET marked in large, block letters. I dragged it down and carried it back upstairs to my own small office.

  I put the box on my desk and opened it. Inside, I could see a disordered mound of papers. They were all that remained of my father, a scattering of letters, documents, a few photographs. I doubted that there could be anything among them that Rebecca would find useful.

  I started to reach for the first of the papers when I glanced up and saw Marie at my office door.

  She was looking at the box. “Well, you sure didn’t waste any time finding it,” she said.

  “It was where you said it would be.”

  She smiled. “Peter wants you to come into the den.”

  “Why?”

  “So we can all watch his favorite show together.”

  I didn’t move.

  “You got home very late tonight,” Marie added. “I think he sort of missed you.” She stretched her hand toward me. “Come on,” she said softly.

  I rose slowly, reluctantly, and went with her. We walked down the corridor together. In the family room, I watched television with my wife and son, talking occasionally, laughing when they laughed, but only out of duty. The force that had once compelled me to such small acts of devotion was already losing speed.

  We left the house at around ten the next morning. The drive north toward the Massachusetts border was along winding, country roads. Peter sat in the back, working with a portable video game, while Marie leaned against the door on the passenger side, the window open, the rush of air continually blowing through the red highlights in her hair.

  Was she beautiful?

  Marie would insist that I say no. She would insist that I admit that it was beauty which formed the grim core of what happened in the end, her own beauty either faded or familiar, Rebecca’s either new or in full bloom. She would insist that it was desire which drove me forward, desire alone, since, as she would say to me that final night, “It was never love …”

  We arrived at her parents’ small country house only an hour or so after leaving Old Salsbury. It was a medium-sized, wooden house, painted white, with a large, wraparound porch. In his retirement, Carl had taken up furniture making, and in typical style, had overdone the labor, making far more plain wooden rocking chairs than were strictly needed. As I pulled into the unpaved driveway, I could see several of them on the front porch or scattered randomly about the lawn, rocking eerily when a strong burst of wind swept down from the mountains.

  For all the abundance of empty chairs, Carl was sitting on the front steps of the house when we pulled up. Marie had called her mother
earlier that morning and let Amelia know that we were coming, but from the pleasantly surprised look on Carl’s face, I realized that she’d never gotten around to telling him to expect us.

  He rose slowly, pulling himself up by one of the wooden banisters which bordered the stairs, then waved broadly as we all got out of the car. He was a tall man, with narrow shoulders and long, thin legs. He wore a pair of light brown flannel work pants and a short-sleeved checkered shirt. From a distance he appeared to have a thick head of snowy white hair, but up close, his pink scalp easily showed through it. I’d first met him only a month or so after meeting Marie, the two of us driving up from New York City. He’d tried his best to be light-hearted that evening, but even then, he’d had the aging factory worker’s sense of the bulkiness of things, their ironclad inflexibility.

  Marie made it to him first, pressing herself into his arms, then kissing him lightly on the cheek.

  “Hi, Dad,” she said.

  He held her tightly for a moment, as old people sometimes do, never knowing which embrace will be the last. Then he turned to me and shook my hand with his firm, industrial grip.

  “How you doing, Steve?” he asked.

  “Fine.”

  It was Peter’s turn then, and Carl all but yanked him from the ground.

  “You got a girlfriend yet?” he demanded.

  Peter had not had time to answer before Amelia’s voice came booming toward us from above.

  “Don’t ask personal questions, Carl,” she snapped, but in a friendly, joking tone. She shook her head with comic exasperation. “What am I going to do with him?”

  She was a tall, slender woman, with thin arms and a somewhat hawkish face. She seemed to hop down the stairs toward us, nervous and bird-like. Once at the bottom of them, she swept Peter into her arms, then Marie. Finally she turned to me, gave me a quick, no-nonsense hug, then firmly pushed me away.

  In her youth, Amelia had been a great beauty, locally renowned, and I assumed that the glancing, cautious way she had always embraced and separated from me was a holdover from those bygone days when her slightest touch had given too strong a signal to the breathless men who’d flocked around her. According to Carl, these same men, old now, with shaking heads, still spoke of her in the social club downtown. They still can’t get over that I had her every night,” he’d once told me with a wry, self-satisfied grin, then added significantly, “And she was just eighteen years old, Steve. Can you imagine that?”

  Now she was seventy-one, still tall and dignified, like her daughter, but with withered skin, iron-gray hair, and hasty, nervous eyes that glanced about restlessly, as if trying to get a glimpse of where it had all gone.

  We followed her into the house, all of us climbing up the stairs toward the open front door. Carl brought up the rear, pulling himself up by means of the old wooden rail.

  Marie and her mother disappeared into the back of the house while Carl and I sat down in the front room. I looked at him silently, smiling amiably, as I watched him ease himself down into the overstuffed chair by the piano. A mild heart attack had shaken him three years before, and only last summer he’d fallen in the garden behind the house, and, unable to get up, had wallowed in the tomato plants for nearly ten minutes before Amelia had finally spotted him and come running to his side.

  Now, as I watched him, he seemed to age almost by the minute, his hair whitening, his skin wrinkling, his long legs drawing up under the cuffs of his trousers.

  For a moment he remained silent, then he nodded idly toward the piano.

  “You don’t play, do you, Steve?” he asked, a question he had asked me several times before, always forgetting my answer.

  “No,” I said.

  “Amy used to play,” Carl said. He drew in a deep breath and let it out in a quick, exhausted rush, as if the burden of holding in his breath were becoming too much for him. “She played for the Knights of Columbus,” he went on. “At a dance one night when Jimmy Doyle didn’t show up.” He winked boyishly. “She wasn’t that good, but she gave it a good try.”

  I smiled.

  “All you can ask, right?” Carl added. “To give it a good try.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “It’s the same for life,” Carl said. “You can’t do more than give it a good try.”

  I nodded softly, letting my eyes drift away, hoping that with that gesture I could avoid giving Carl any further encouragement toward sharing his philosophy. In the past few years, as old age had overtaken him, he’d become increasingly homespun and folksy, dotting his conversation with empty truisms that annoyed Marie, but which Amelia seemed hardly to notice.

  “I wouldn’t say Amy was at a professional level,” Carl went on. “But she was pretty good.” He pulled a red handkerchief from the back pocket of his trousers and began to wipe his face, his eyes drifting over the room.

  It was a room that Amelia dominated entirely, pictures of her lined up on top of the piano or hanging from the walls, all of them taken much earlier, in the days of her youthful glory. She’d been her father’s favorite, and probably her mother’s, too, and she’d grown up beneath the gaze of a thousand desperately admiring eyes. From that spawning pool of frantically beseeching men, she’d selected a factory worker named Carl. It had been a choice which had baffled, disturbed, and finally embittered her parents. In the end, they’d entirely rejected Carl, an experience he’d never forgotten. “My wife’s parents froze me out,” he told me that first weekend when Marie brought me to his home. “My wife was so pretty, you see. They thought that was her ticket to a brighter future, you know? Then, poor thing, she got tied up with me.”

  It was precisely that brighter future that seemed to shine from the photographs which cluttered and overwhelmed the room, all of them taken during Amelia’s glory days, first as a little girl in her father’s arms, later as an adolescent growing toward a stunning womanhood, and finally as a young woman posing by the lake on that single, breathless day her beauty reached its frail, already fading peak.

  I drew my eyes away from that last picture and toward the woman herself as Amelia suddenly came back into the room. She was carrying a large picnic basket, and Marie and Peter were standing just behind her, both of them holding a few lightweight folding chairs.

  “We thought we’d go on a picnic,” Amelia said. Her eyes swept over to Carl. “What do you think, hon? Just a short walk over to the spring?”

  Carl nodded. “Yeah. I’m up for that,” he said, already pulling himself to his feet.

  I looked at Marie. She was smiling at Carl with great cheerfulness and affection, which were still on her face when she turned to me.

  “Okay with you, Steve?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  The spring was small, and it flowed in gentle curves through a glade of trees. It was no more than a short walk from the house, but Carl’s pace was slow and halting, so it was almost twenty minutes later when we reached the shady embankment Amelia had already designated for the picnic.

  By that time it was early afternoon, the sun still high and very bright in a cloudless blue. Amelia and Marie spread a large checkered cloth over the grass and began to take the various sandwich meats and breads out of the basket. Peter opened the folding chairs and after a while we were all seated comfortably by the water.

  “It’s pretty here, don’t you think?” Amelia asked, though to no one in particular.

  Marie nodded, her eyes on me. “Dad and I used to fish in this little stream.”

  Carl chuckled. “You never caught anything though, did you, Marie?”

  Marie shook her head. “How could I? All I had was that little plastic pole, remember? The one you bought at the dime store downtown?”

  “He bought you that for Christmas one year,” Amelia added, “and you had to wait several months for the ice to break before you could use it.” She glanced at Carl. “I told you it would drive her crazy giving her a thing like that in the winter, a thing she couldn’t play with right away.”<
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  Carl laughed again as he glanced toward Marie. “It did just about drive you crazy, too,” he said. “We went fishing the first day the ice broke up.” He shivered. “It was cold as hell.”

  In my mind, I could see them by the little spring, the winter thaw barely a few days old, a snowy border on both sides of the stream, the trees bare and creaking in the frozen breeze as they dipped their hooks into the icy, Ashless water.

  “You really kept at it, though,” Carl said to Marie admiringly. “We must have stayed out here a couple hours. You just wouldn’t go back in.” He looked at Amelia. “How old was she that year, Amy?”

  “Six,” Amelia answered, almost wistfully. “She was six years old.”

  I looked over at Peter, remembered him at six years old, a little boy with reddish cheeks and gleaming eyes. It was the year I’d taken him to the state fair in Danbury, taken pictures of him as he was led about on a small, spotted pony, fed him hot dogs and cotton candy until he’d finally puked behind a huge green circus tent.

  I laughed suddenly at the thought of it.

  Marie looked at me, a smile playing on her lips. “What are you laughing about, Steve?”

  “I was just remembering the first time we took Peter to the Danbury Fair.”

  I could see the whole day playing through Marie’s memory, sweet, almost delectable, even down to the last unsavory moment. “He threw up,” she said, “behind this big tent.”

  Peter grimaced. “I did?”

  Carl waved his hand. “Everybody throws up,” he said. He leaned back in his chair and lifted his face upward slightly, as if trying to get some sun.

  “Careful there, hon,” Amelia warned. “Don’t tip back too far.”

  Carl waved his hand as he leaned back a bit farther. “A man’s got to take a risk, right, Steve?” he said as he pressed himself back farther, Amelia watching him steadily, growing tense until he bolted forward suddenly and caught her eyes in his.