Mortal Memory (15 page)

“Go get Laura,” he told me.

I went up the stairs, out the kitchen door, and into the garage, expecting to find Laura still searching through the usual disarray to find whatever it was my father wanted. But she was sitting in a far corner instead, her body in a dusky, yellow light. A pile of blue papers was scattered at her feet, all of them spilling out of a small shoe box that had obviously fallen from the shelf overhead. She had one of the light blue pieces of paper in her hand, but she was no longer reading it. She was simply sitting motionlessly, deep in thought, her eyes lifted toward the dark, wooden ceiling.

I called to her, but very softly. “Laura?”

She looked at me directly, her body still motionless, except for the way her fingers slowly curled around the blue paper, as if to conceal it.

“What do you want, Stevie?” she asked stiffly.

“Dad wants you,” I told her.

She drew her hands behind her, the blue note disappearing behind her back. “Tell him I'll be there in a minute,” she said. “I have to clean up this mess.”

I did as she told me, and for a while my father seemed satisfied that Laura was on her way. But later, with his typical impatience, he finally headed up the stairs and out to the garage. I followed behind him, a dog at his heels.

Laura was still in the same corner as we entered the garage, the same blue paper in her hand. She tried to hide it again, which surprised me, since I'd never before seen her try to conceal anything from my father.

His eyes fixed on the paper. “What is that?” he asked.

Laura didn't answer.

My father walked through the dusky light and drew the paper from Laura's fingers.

From my place at the front of the garage, I watched as he read it. When he'd finished, he turned to me.

“Go play, Stevie,” he said.

I was in the backyard a few minutes later when the two of them came out of the garage. Laura was nestled beneath my father's arm, and they were walking slowly toward the house.

My mother came home a short time later. She'd been grocery shopping, I remember, and as she headed up the stairs, her arms around an enormous brown bag, my father stepped out of the house, took the bag from her, and returned it to the car. Then he motioned for her to follow him and the two of them walked past me and over to the very edge of the yard. I was too far away from them to make out any of what they said, but I remember having the distinct feeling that they were talking about the blue papers Laura had found in the garage.

After a while they walked back toward the house. They were still talking, and as they passed, I heard my mother say, “You told her not to …” She didn't finish, because Jamie suddenly came rushing around the corner of the house. At the sight of him, both my father and my mother froze, each of them staring at him with such frightened, startled looks that I had sensed even then that the blue papers, and everything that had happened since I'd seen Laura reading them, had had something to do with Jamie.

During the next few days, however, the entire incident slipped from my mind. Everything returned to its normal pattern, except that my mother seemed even more subdued. There were times, forever after that, when she seemed to flee from any notion of command. Steadily over the next few years, she became more vaporous, slowly giving up the prerogatives of wife and mother so that in the end she seemed more like some distant relative we'd saved from poverty or shame, one who lived with us but had no standing among us, no office or authority, incontestably by then the “poor Dottie” of my aunt's unforgiving judgment.

But for the rest of us, nothing seemed to change, and as I sat at my desk that morning, remembering the blue papers, it struck me that I wouldn't have remembered it at all if something else hadn't happened, something which I always believed was connected in some way to what had been written in them.

It was about three months later. My father had recently put a redwood picnic table under the large maple tree that stood beside the rear fence, and Laura and I had begun meeting there to play Monopoly or checkers or some other game. That particular day, Laura had begun to teach me chess. Slowly, with infinite patience, she introduced me to each piece. I had only played checkers before, and it was not easy for me to get a grip on this much more complicated game.

We'd been at it for nearly an hour before Jamie strode across the backyard and sat himself down on the bench beside me.

Laura hardly registered his presence. Instead, she continued to concentrate on teaching me the game. Jamie watched sullenly while she did it, as if evaluating each word my sister spoke, each gesture she made, second-guessing and inwardly ridiculing her, at times even smiling snidely when she got something slightly wrong or out of order and had to correct herself.

As the minutes passed, I could feel the air heating up and turning sour around us. It was as if the peaceful little island that Laura and I created when we were together had been invaded by a poisonous wind.

Finally, the storm broke.

“You're doing it all wrong, Laura,” Jamie snapped. “It's stupid the way you're teaching him.”

Laura didn't so much as look at him. She picked up the knight, and began to explain its move.

“You're going to screw it up, as usual,” Jamie barked.

Laura's eyes shot over to him. “You're not supposed to talk like that in front of Stevie.”

“I'm trying to keep him from being a loser, Laura,” Jamie fired back. “The way you're teaching him this game, he'll play it like a sissy.”

Laura's eyes narrowed lethally. “Nobody asked you, anyway, Jamie,” she hissed angrily. “Nobody asked you to come over here and bother us.”

Jamie leaned toward her threateningly. “I don't have to be asked,” he said. “It's my yard, too, you know.”

For a flaming instant, Laura glared at him with a terrible ferocity. Then she turned her attention back to the game, but not before muttering a single, indecipherable phrase. “Sort of,” she said.

It had been said under her breath, but loud enough for us to hear it.

“What did you say?” Jamie demanded.

Laura didn't answer. She picked up one of the knights and pressed it toward me. I could see that it was trembling in her hand.

“What did you say, Laura?” Jamie repeated, only this time in a tone that was more than teenage anger. Cold. Severe. A prelude to explosive rage.

Laura locked her eyes on mine. “This is the knight,” she said evenly, “it moves like this.” She lowered the knight to the board and demonstrated the move.

Jamie continued to stare at her with a terrible, quivering hatred. I remember bracing myself, my own mind racing to decide what I would do if he lunged forward and hit her.

But he did no such thing. After a few more impossibly tense seconds, he simply rose silently and left us, a lean, disjointed figure striding awkwardly across the green summer lawn.

Laura had resumed teaching me about the knight by the time Jamie had finally disappeared into the house. She went directly to its moves, to various ways of using it. She didn't try to explain what she'd meant with that angry, nearly whispered “Sort of,” and I never heard her say anything so cryptic to Jamie after that.

So what had my sister meant that day beneath the maple tree?

For well over thirty years, it was a question I'd never asked. Then, that Sunday morning, as Peter and Marie slept upstairs and I sat at my desk, with both Rebecca and her mission steadily gaining force in my own mind, I tried to find out. I went to the box I'd brought up from the basement the day before, hoping that the answer might be there.

Within a matter of only a few minutes, I discovered that it was.

EIGHT

T
HREE DAYS LATER,
Rebecca had hardly taken her seat across from me at the restaurant before I handed her the document I'd found in the box. She took it from my hand and began to read it. What I gave her that evening was something she'd already asked for, my father's army records. After the war, he'd taken a few college classes under the GI Bill of Rights. A short application process had been required, and he'd submitted several forms to prove that he'd been in the army. One of them was a listing of his whereabouts during all that time. It began with Newark, New Jersey, where he'd been inducted in June of 1940, and ended with New York City, where he'd been mustered out on a medical discharge, an injured knee, in May of 1942. All the places my father had lived during those two years of military service were listed in the document, along with all of his official leaves. What it showed unmistakably was that he had lived at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, from July of 1941 until April of 1942, when he'd been given leave to return to New Jersey, and where, on April 1, he'd married my mother in a civil ceremony in Somerset.

When Rebecca finished reading, she looked up, her face very still. She had instantly put it together.

“Jamie was not your father's son,” she said.

“No, he couldn't have been. My father was in North Carolina when my brother was conceived.”

“And so he must have known that he wasn't the father of the child your mother was carrying. Even on the day he married her,” Rebecca added wonderingly.

“Yes, he had to have known that.”

She thought a moment, then asked, “So who was Jamie's father?”

“I don't know,” I answered. “How could I know? It all happened a long time before I was born.” Then something occurred to me. “Do you have the pictures you showed me last time?”

“Yes.” Rebecca took them out and spread them across the table.

I lifted the one that showed my mother posed alluringly against the stone wall and handed it to Rebecca. “I think maybe the man who took this was Jamie's father,” I said. “I mean, look at my mother, at the way her face is shining.”

Rebecca let her eyes dwell on the picture as I continued.

“I think my mother was in love that day,” I said. “She was satisfied in every way. I don't think my father ever made her feel like that.”

Rebecca returned the photograph to the table. She remained silent.

“Reading all those romance novels, that was the way my mother went back to that time in her life,” I told her. “She never forgot him. She never forgot the way he made her feel.” I glanced over at the picture of my father. “Maybe that's what my father couldn't bear, that he was going to live the rest of his life in the shadow of my mother's first love.”

“Which might explain your mother's murder, and perhaps even Jamie's,” Rebecca said. “But what about Laura?”

I had no answer, and after a moment, Rebecca's eyes returned to the picture of my father on his wedding day. “Even though he must have known about the child, he looks very happy in this picture,” she said.

“He was happy, I think,” I admitted. “It's the only picture he ever looked that happy in.”

She thought a while longer, then returned her attention to the military document that had revealed everything. “Where did you find this?”

“In some papers my aunt left me,” I said, “but there was something else I couldn't find.”

I told her about the blue papers, the ones Laura had found in the garage that day, the ones, I felt sure now, that had told her everything about Jamie, that he was only “sort of” a member of our family.

“So Laura knew,” I said when I'd finished, “and she used that knowledge against Jamie at least once.”

I went through the story of the argument beneath the maple tree.

“Do you think Jamie knew what Laura meant?” Rebecca asked.

“I don't know.”

Rebecca considered everything I'd told her for a few seconds. “What were the blue papers?” she asked finally. “They weren't documents, were they?”

“No … I think they could have been love letters,” I answered slowly, “from Jamie's real father. Letters she couldn't part with.”

“Even at the risk of their being found.”

“Yes.”

And so all my old surmises about my mother had been wrong. “Poor Dottie” had swooned to someone's touch, had caught her breath, taken a stunning risk, and in doing that had lived for just a moment the life she only read about from then on, in novels piled beside her bed.

Rebecca leaned back in her seat and remained very quiet for a long time. She was still thinking about my mother, I believe, but my mind had shifted over to my father, to the smiling figure in the photograph, triumphant on his wedding day.

“He must have loved my mother a great deal to marry her knowing that she was already carrying another man's child,” I said.

Rebecca didn't look so sure.

I remembered the look on my father's face the night I'd gone down into the basement, stopped on the third step, and watched him work silently on his latest Rodger and Windsor until his eyes had finally lifted toward me. I heard his words again:
This is all I want.