Mortal Memory (30 page)

Within an instant, she was gone.

For the next few hours, I wandered the house like a man who had awakened in a foreign city. Nothing looked familiar anymore. I heard ghostly, floating voices that seemed to speak to me in a language I had once understood, but which my long neglect had made incomprehensible, a language of connection, of duty, of belonging, a language which spoke of things present, rather than things missing, and as I listened to that language, I yearned for the oldest and most familiar objects in a house that was suddenly brand-new.

I don't remember into exactly what part of that house I had wandered when, hours later, I heard the knock at the door.

Two men were standing on the small porch when I opened it, one younger, bareheaded, one older, with glasses and a large gray hat.

“Steven Farris?” the older one said.

I nodded.

He reached into the pocket of his rain-soaked jacket and brought out a small, yellow badge. “Could you come with us, please?”

I rode in the back of a dark, unmarked car. I don't remember anything being said between the time I got in and the moment when the car finally pulled in behind a large brick building that I didn't recognize. I'm sure they spoke to me, but I can't remember what they said.

It was still raining when the car stopped and the older one turned to me.

“Are you ready, Mr. Farris?” he asked.

I must have nodded, because he got out immediately and opened the rear door of the car.

I followed him up a cement ramp, through a pair of double doors, then down a long corridor which ended at a flight of stairs.

“Just down here,” the older one said.

We went down the stairs together, then into a small, green room where two metal stretchers rested side by side against the far wall.

By the time we reached them, the younger one had joined us. Still, it was the older one who drew back the white sheet that covered what was left of Peter's face.

I nodded. “My son,” I said.

He covered him again, then stepped over to the other stretcher and repeated the same slow movement, drawing back the stiff white cloth.

She lay on her back, stiffly, her arms pressed neatly against her sides.

“My wife.”

The sheet drifted back over her unmoving face.

The older one turned, and I followed him out of the room and back to the car. I took my place in the back seat and rode silently through the darkness, past the winding, unexpected curve that had brought my family to its death.

It was nearly dawn by the time the car pulled into the driveway again, returning me to my empty house. For a moment I continued to sit in the back seat, motionless, unable to move, as if paralyzed. During that interval, I don't remember seeing or hearing anything. Then, as if in response to a signal I couldn't see, the older one turned toward me, his eyes gazing at me softly. “It's terrible right now, I know,” he said, “but in the end, you will find your way.”

You will find your way.

In my mind, I heard those words many times in the days that followed. I heard them as I paced the empty, voiceless rooms of my house or sat beside the covered pool, watching the late fall leaves gather on the dull black tarp. I heard them as Mr. Lowe, by then aware of exactly why my wife and son had been on the road that rainswept night, watched me disappointedly from the small square window of his office.

You will find your way.

I heard the words again and again, but still I couldn't find my way.

Things began to fall apart. I couldn't sleep, and barely ate at all. I burned my “dream house” plans, and sat for long, dull hours in the family room, the dim green eye of the television watching me from its place across the room. All my former occupations fell away. I couldn't read, couldn't draw, couldn't engage in conversation. At work, I sat at my desk, a silent, eerie specter, warily watched by the others as if at any moment I might pull a pistol from beneath my jacket and do to them what they all knew my father had done to my mother, brother, sister. At times, I would see the same, distant apprehension in their eyes that I'd sometimes glimpsed in the eyes of Aunt Edna so many years before, a suspicion that my father's poisoned blood had been passed on to me.

But although my fellow workers at Simpson and Lowe couldn't have known it, they had nothing at all to fear from me. The revenge that was steadily building in my mind was not in the least directed toward them. I'd found another figure upon whom I'd begun to concentrate all my grief and rage.

William Patrick Farris.

During the weeks immediately following what everyone continually referred to as “the tragedy,” I came to hate my father more than I'd ever hated him. I hated him for more than the ancient crime of my family's murder, hated him for more than what he'd done to my mother, Laura, and Jamie. I hated him for what he'd done to me.

Done to me, yes.

For it seemed to me at that time that my father had brought everything to pass, that almost everything could be laid ultimately at his door. Had he not killed my family, Rebecca would never have come to me, and Peter and Marie would still be alive. Even more, however, I blamed him for the poison in my own blood, for what I'd inherited from him, the dark impulsiveness and cataclysmic discontent that had led him to kill my mother, Laura, and Jamie, and which he had bequeathed to me. I thought of Peter and Marie, and went through the steps by which I'd murdered them as surely as my father had killed his own wife and children. It was a legacy of blood, passed down from father to son, and because of it, as I reasoned at last, it was necessary for both of us to die.

Night after night, I went through the packet of papers and photographs Rebecca had sent me by then. I no longer felt them as a link to her, but only as a way to keep alive my hatred, both of my father and myself. One by one, I stared at the photographs or read over the police reports. I savored each blood-soaked image, drank in every word, my eyes heavy in the early morning light, but glaring still at each macabre reminder of the hideously destructive nature I had inherited from him.

I grew bloated on our evil. I could think of nothing else. I lost my job, sold my house, and moved into a cheap hotel, but I didn't drink or sink into madness. That would have dulled the fierce edge I wanted more than anything to retain in what was left of my life. I didn't want to forget what the two of us had done. I wanted to remember every harrowing detail until the time of our executions.

Slowly, the plan emerged. I would track him down by moving through the places he'd moved, looking steadily for some clue both as to how he had been formed and where he might have gone.

As the weeks passed, I journeyed back to the little house in which he'd lived out his solitary youth, then to the hard-scrabble warehouse on Great Jones Street, and finally along the dreary line of small New Jersey towns through which he'd wandered, looking for work, finding none, moving on, in a trail that struck me, even then, as terribly forlorn.

I went through all the papers my Aunt Edna had left me, searching for addresses where he'd lived, references to places he'd been. I went to rooming houses that were now libraries, cafes that were now clothing stores, rural meadows that were now bald, grassless tracks of suburban housing. I traced names: cousins, co-workers, people he'd lent money. I found them living in back rooms, asylums, basements, old hotels. I found them dead, as well, wild boys and dancing girls reduced to names carved in gray stone.

I lost track of time. Hours glided into days, weeks into months. My father's trail, never warm, and mostly fanciful, grew cold, and in the end I was left with a list of names and dates and places that were no more able to guide me to him than the random scribbling I might read from a bathroom wall.

In the end, you will find your way.

It was the older detective who'd said that to me as I'd sat, dazed and unmoving, in the rainy driveway that night. But now, when the words returned to me, I realized that they were carried on a different voice, the one which had guided Rebecca before me, and which, after so many years, so much brutal evidence, still dared to suggest that something didn't fit.

It was easy to find him. Swenson, after all, was not hiding from anyone.

A woman met me at the door. She wore a green dress dotted with small white flowers, and her hair was pulled back into a frazzled reddish bun.

“My name is Steve Farris,” I told her.

It was a name she clearly recognized. She stepped back and eyed me with a keen vigilance from behind a pair of large, tortoiseshell glasses.

“I guess you want to see Dave,” she said.

I nodded. “Is he here?”

“Sure he is,” the woman said. “He can't get out anymore.” She stepped away from the door. “Come on in,” she said. “He's in the back.”

I followed her down a short corridor, then into the shadowy bedroom where he lay. His condition seemed worse than Rebecca had described. Propped up by three large white pillows, he sat in a small metal bed, his lower body covered by a worn, patchwork quilt, the air around him little more than a cloud of medicinal fumes. There was a cylindrical orange oxygen tank at his right, and as I entered, he drew its yellow plastic mask from his mouth and watched me curiously.

“This is Steve Farris,” the woman said.

Swenson nodded to me, then swung his head to the right, as if trying to get a somewhat better look at me.

“You need anything, Dave?” the woman asked.

Swenson shook his head slowly, his eyes still leveled upon me.

The woman walked over to his bed, drew the blanket a little more snugly over his stomach, and disappeared out the door.

During all that time, Swenson's eyes never left me.

“The son,” he said finally in a breathless, ragged voice.

“Yes.”

He motioned for me to take a seat near the bed, then returned the mask to his mouth and took in a quick, anxious breath. The face behind the mask was pale and ravaged, though his green eyes still shone brightly from their deep sockets.

“Rebecca thought you might come by here,” he said, after he'd withdrawn the mask again.

“She did?”

He inhaled a long, rattling breath, lifted the mask again, then let it drop. “She said there were things you might want to know.” His pale skin seemed strangely luminous in the gray light, as if a small candle still burned behind his eyes. But it was the eyes themselves that I could still recognize from that moment he'd turned to face me so many years before, those same eyes settling quietly upon me as I'd sat stunned and silent in the back seat of his unmarked car.

“Smart woman, Rebecca,” Swenson said shakily, his head drifting slightly to the left. “Very smart.”

“Yes, she is.”

The green eyes bored into me, a young detective's eyes, swift and penetrating, but now embedded in a slack, doughy face. “What do you want to know about your father?” he asked.

It was a question which, as I realized at that moment, had never actually been asked of me, and which I'd never actually asked myself. What
did
I want to know? Why
had
I come so far in order to know it?

“I want to know what really happened,” I told him. “I want to know exactly what my father did.”

“That day, you mean?” Swenson asked. The mask rose again, the great chest expanded beneath the patchwork quilt, then collapsed. “November 19, 1959,” he added, as the mask drifted down and finally came to rest in his lap.

He'd said the date not to impress me with his memory, but to suggest how it had remained with him through all the passing years, how he'd never been able to rid himself of his own, gnawing doubt, the persistent and irreducible presence of something in that house that didn't fit. And yet, at the same time, he seemed reluctant to begin, as if still unsure of where it might finally lead.

“My father had planned it for a long time, hadn't he?” I said.

Even as I said it, I saw our lives dangling helplessly over the fiery pit of my father's dreadful calculations. One by one, it seemed, he'd weighed the separate elements of our lives and deaths. Like a Grand Inquisitor, he'd heard the evidence while staring at my red-robed mother from the smoky fortress of his old brown van, or tinkering with his latest bicycle in the chill dungeon of the cement basement. One by one, we'd come before him like prisoners naked in a dock. Day by day the long trials had stretched on through the months, until, in a red wave of judgment, he'd finally condemned us all.

After that final condemnation, as I supposed at that moment, it had been only a matter of working out the technical details. Perhaps he'd considered various weapons for a time, carefully weighing the advantages of knives, guns, poisons, before finally deciding on the shotgun for no better reason than that he'd bought it years before, that it rested quietly in the green metal cabinet in the basement, that it was ready-to-hand.

“How long had he been planning it, do you think?” I asked Swenson, coaxing him forward, as one might nudge a man, ever so subtly, toward the edge of a cliff.

Swenson shrugged. He started to speak, but stopped abruptly, and returned the mask to his mouth. He took in a long breath, then let it out in a sudden, hollow gush. “If he planned it early, then he must have changed his plans,” he said.

I said nothing, but only waited, as it seemed to me I had in one way or another been waiting all my life.

“Did Rebecca think he had a plan?” Swenson asked.

It was odd how far she seemed from me now. I saw her poised over her black briefcase, withdrawing papers in her usual methodical manner, showing me only what was relevant at that particular moment, concealing all the rest. I could recall the tension of my lost desire, but only as something remembered by another man, a story told by someone else, so that now when she came forward in my mind, it was as little more than a messenger sent to me by my father.