Mortal Memory (2 page)

That was something my Uncle Quentin, the tall man in work clothes who picked me up at Aunt Edna's only two months after I arrived there, never did. Instead, he spoke fondly, and even a little comically, of my mother. And so, over the years, as his memories of her surfaced in one story or another, my mother began to emerge as a gentle and somewhat gullible person who, as a child, had always fallen for Quentin's tricks, believed his outrageous lies, and generally served as the butt of his harmless jokes. “Dottie always looked on the bright side,” he told me once. Then added with a helpless shrug: “That was her downfall, you might say.”

What did he mean by that?

He never said, and so I was left with only the vision of my mother as a person so ordinary she seemed featureless, bland, a bubble in a sea of bubbles.

Her school reports, which Aunt Edna had, and which were passed on to me when she died, revealed a similar figure to the one Quentin painted. There was a pattern of C's dotted from time to time with a B or a B – , but nothing higher. Her fifth-grade teacher summed her up: “Dorothy is a very nice child, always kind and friendly. Her work is adequate, and she is always punctual. It is pleasant to teach her.”

Nice. Pleasant. Punctual. Even at their best, these are not the towering virtues. They leave out courage and adventurousness. But more than anything, they leave out passion. There is nothing to suggest that anything ever moved my mother with great force. Perhaps, in the end, that's what Aunt Edna always meant by calling her “poor Dottie,” that she was poor in spirit, that she had no inner will, that perhaps even on that November day, she'd gone to her death like a slave to her quarters, head bowed, arms hung, eyes scarcely noting the black tail of the lash.

But could any life have really been so spiritless and void? After all, at one point, this same “poor Dottie” met a boy named Billy Farris, tall with jet-black hair, and when he asked her on a date, she accepted. Perhaps, on those evenings during the bright Indian summer of 1940, when they'd walked down to the old movie house on Timmons Street, or along the edges of the little stream that ran through the town's carefully tended park, perhaps on those quiet, humid nights, she'd found herself momentarily aglow with something strong, new, irresistible. Isn't it possible that there were moments early on, in the first blush of infatuation, when she had loved my father with the kind of love depicted in those little books they found beside her bed, tales of high romance in exotic places, Fiji, Paris, Istanbul? When his hand first brushed her breast, or drew slowly up her thigh, isn't it possible that even “poor Dottie” lost her breath?

Without Rebecca, I never would have known.

Even so, however, I would have known a little. I would have known that she married Billy Farris and later bore three children. And yet, despite such knowledge, I find that I still can't imagine her on those nights of conception, when Jamie and Laura and I were, in effect, born. I can't imagine her naked beneath a man, or over him, or beside him, as they move together on the bed.

She was on a bed that day, too, lying where he put her, her arms folded neatly over her chest, eyes closed, feet side by side, her stack of romance novels arranged neatly beside the bed, as if at any moment, she might roll over, pluck one from the floor, and immediately lose herself in the soap opera glamour of a beach romance.

It was Aunt Edna who identified her. From the back seat of the detective's plain, unmarked car, I saw two men in black rain slicks lead her down the walkway and into the house. A few minutes later I heard a hollow, wrenching sound come from inside the house. It wasn't so much a scream as a low, painful wail. It was then that the older detective turned and spoke to me, although, until recently, I could not remember what he said.

Aunt Edna was at the blue car a few minutes later, her jaw set, her lips so tightly closed that when the young detective asked if she was “the sister,” she could only nod silently in response.

It would be many years before I saw what Aunt Edna saw that afternoon, my eyes lingering hypnotically on the body of my mother, how it was so carefully and respectfully laid out with perfect formality.

Other pictures showed that the same care had not been taken with my brother.

Jamie Edward Farris, age seventeen.

He was tall and lanky, with glistening black hair. In pictures, he appears rather thin, with a pale face and large, dark, nearly clownish lips. His eyes were a milky brown, like his mother's, with thin eyebrows, and short dark lashes. Like hers, Jamie's face gave the sense of having been composed of various parts selected from other faces, the eyes too dull and faded to go with the glossy black hair, the nose too flat to fit in with the high cheekbones and narrow forehead.

Jamie and I were typical “older” and “kid” brothers. We shared the same room, the same bunk beds. We often annoyed and frustrated each other. In the evening, we listened to music together, always records selected by Jamie, and sometimes played Chinese checkers on a bright tin board. From time to time, he would try to teach me things, the guitar on one occasion, and how to use a cue stick on another.

But despite all that, we were never really close. There was a sullenness in him, a sense of subdued explosion which kept me at arm's length. Wanting a room of his own, resentful that Laura had always had one, Jamie often made me feel unwelcome in his presence, as if I were an unwanted intrusion.

But even more than he resented me, Jamie resented my sister. “Laura gets her own room because she's a girl,” he often sneered at those times when she would return home with some small school triumph. It was a maliciousness and envy of my sister which I didn't share and probably despised. In any event, I don't recall missing him a great deal after his death, certainly not in the way I missed Laura, longed for her and called her name at night.

Still, I do remember Jamie quite well. I remember that he often seemed listless, drowsy, the heavy lids drooping slowly as he sat at his desk, the head following not long after that, nodding almost all the way down to the open textbook before it bobbed up suddenly, and he began to study once again. More than anything, he seems to have been one of those people who feel estranged from their own existence. There were even times when he appeared to dangle above his own life, unable to touch ground, find direction, move in a way that he'd willed himself. Had he lived, I doubt that much would have come of him, for even as a boy, he seemed to have inherited that lethargy and lack of spirit that was so visible in the woman in the red housedress.

Even so, as I must add in a final qualification, he was not entirely inanimate. There were things that truly interested Jamie. He could spend long hours practicing his guitar, despite the fact that there was never any noticeable improvement in his ability to play it. He liked to fish, and he, Laura, and I would sometimes walk to the pond a half-mile or so from our house, cast our bait into the water and wait—usually for hours—before finally returning home with nothing. Even before Rebecca urged me back, I remembered those little fishing trips surprisingly well, the shade of the trees, the small boats that skirted across the nearly motionless water, the bell on the ice cream truck that made three rounds per afternoon, even when the driver knew that on this particular stop, there'd be no customers but the Farris kids.

What else of Jamie?

Only a few scattered items. I remember him rushing to hide something in his desk as I came unexpectedly into the room we shared. I remember him breaking a guitar string and cursing, then, his anger quickly spent, meticulously stringing another.

And finally, there is this, which I remember more vividly than anything else, perhaps because it occurred only two days before he died. I was riding my bike down the block toward home when I saw him standing by the mailbox at the edge of our yard. I waved as I sped by, but he did not wave back. Instead, he continued staring, a little anxiously, up the street. He was clearly waiting for the postman to arrive, but I never learned what he was expecting in the mail. Perhaps it was a letter from a sweetheart we never knew about, or some item from a mail-order house that came three days later. Perhaps it was no more than a signed photograph from a movie star.

Whatever it was, Jamie was waiting for it nervously, and it was there that my mind had chosen to leave him, a figure waiting, tall and gangly, his black hair tangled and unwashed, his languid, nearly lightless eyes fixed expectantly on the road ahead. Better there, than sprawled across the floor of our little room, his face a bubbly mass of shattered flesh, the side of his head blown away, and hanging in a red, glistening flap over his hunched shoulder.

And finally, there was Laura.

As the years passed, I continued to remember her best of all. I remembered her with every sense impression. I remembered the sweet smell of her hair, how soft her hands were when they touched my face, the taste of her skin when I kissed her. I remembered the edginess and restlessness that sometimes came into her voice, rebellion building in her like a wave.

Laura was sixteen. She had my father's black hair, as I do, but with features that were absolutely her own. Her eyes were dark brown, almost black when she walked beneath the shade, and her skin was a glowing white. Her lips were full and when she was cold, or when she cried, as she often did suddenly and explosively, for reasons I could not have fathomed, they turned a soft violet.

Even as a child, I recognized that there were powerful emotions in Laura. Something in her soul was always trembling. She seemed to stand on a ledge, looking down, at times with fear, at times with longing. Had she lived, I have sometimes thought, she might have ended up a teenage suicide. A great-aunt on her mother's side, Quentin later told me, had shot herself in a small cottage in Maine, and when he pulled a dusty family album from its ancestral shelf and pointed the woman out, the resemblance between the lost aunt and my sister was astonishingly deep. There was the same nervous tension in her eyes, the corners of the mouth drawn down along the same narrow lines, a certain stiffness and rigidity in the stance, as if rigor mortis were already setting in.

Remembering Laura now, the melancholy that at times consumed her, it's easy to see the ebb and flow of chemistry, to blame everything on the time of life she shared with my brother, he nearing the end of adolescence, she at its scorching core. But I believe that Laura suffered from more than a stage of development. There was something deeply wrong, askew, unbalanced. At night, she would often walk about the house, ghostly and forlorn, like some distraught maiden out of one of my mother's romance novels. To Jamie, it was an annoyance, and often, when he heard her footsteps in the hallway, he would yell at her harshly, demanding that she return to her room, then lean over the edge of his upper bunk, glance down at me, and rotate his index finger at the side of his head, whispering vehemently: “She's nuts.”

Nuts, perhaps, to Jamie, but to me she was the most mysterious person in the world. The nightly rambling that irritated him, enchanted me. I sensed that there were secret regions in her, lost rooms, labyrinthine caverns. I know now that I was in love with my sister, and that the feelings I had for her, and even the way her memory still from time to time overwhelms me, that all of this was part of an early romantic attachment, a longing that I experienced as a natural adoration, something that all boys felt for their older sisters. I have since learned that it was no such thing, that the excitement which I felt in her presence, the way my breath stopped when I heard her pass my closed door, the way I stole glances even at her shadow on the wall, that all of this had its roots in the first inchoate gropings of desire.

I once said as much to Quentin. “I loved my sister,” I told him. “Yes, of course you did,” he said. “No, Uncle Quentin,” I added pointedly, “I
loved
my sister.” He waved his hand and laughed. “You were only nine years old, Steve,” he said, then stood up and headed for the bathroom, something he always did when the conversation suddenly took a turn he didn't like.

But he knew.

I think he always knew that our house, the one with the dark green shutters and neat Tudor roof, held within its prim walls the most primitive and violent hopes, needs, and fears. And so he pulled me away from it, as if it were a whirling saw or an exposed electrical wire, snatched me away, and brought me north to the idyllic sterility of coastal Maine, to a landscape that seemed frozen in a rigid self-control. “You have to keep a tight grip on everything,” he once told me. “Remember what happens when you don't.”

Remember, in other words, my father.

William Patrick Farris, age forty-four.

What I could never fathom was how much Laura loved him, how powerfully she was drawn to him, how much she craved his admiration. Often, in her nightly wanderings, she would move down the stairs to the small solarium which led off from the living room. My mother had placed a few plants there, mostly indistinguishable green vines, along with two white wicker chairs and a glass-topped table. I remember seeing the two of them together in that room, sitting silently opposite each other in the early hours, light gathering outside, while their eyes remained steady, their faces nearly motionless, as if after hours of struggle, they'd finally come to a grave understanding. At those moments, they seemed to share a peculiar exhaustion, their eyes glassy from lost sleep, their skin pale, muscles limp from too much strain.

Even as a young boy, watching them secretively from my place at the top of the stairs, I had felt a mysterious connection between them. Their voices at such moments were always soft, and when they touched each other, it was with an eerie grace.

Later, I imagined that it was at these dawn meetings that she must have revealed herself to him, told him all those secrets she would never have told me.

And so, even before I came to hate my father for what he did to my family, I had envied his relationship with Laura, the whispery conclave the two of them shared, a society that excluded and infuriated me. I wanted to know exactly what kind of power he had over her, break the code by which they spoke to each other, usurp his place in her esteem.