The back door of the car swung open and I slid out of the seat and into her care. She didn’t pull me into her arms, but took my hand instead, and then strode swiftly across the rain-soaked yard to her waiting car, jerking me along hastily, so that I nearly stumbled as I trotted along beside her.
Her car was an old green Packard, and as she hustled me into its front seat, I glanced toward my house, Jamie’s basketball suddenly floating into my view like a tiny orange planet. As the car pulled away, I got up on my knees in the seat and turned to look out the rain-streaked window toward the house in which I’d lived all my life. There it stood, in all its forlorn and broken gloom. I suppose by then I knew more or less everything that had happened within its various rooms during the last few hours. But all that had gone before it, the long march we had all made to that day in November, remained beyond my scope.
“Face forward, Stevie,” Aunt Edna commanded sternly. “Don’t look back.”
Before Rebecca, I never had.
But now, I think that memory is the consolation prize we get for each day’s death, the place we go to edit and rewrite our lives, to give ourselves another chance. Perhaps, in the end, that was all any of us ever wanted, just another chance. My father, my mother, Laura, Jamie, all of us locked up together in that house on McDonald Drive. From the street, it didn’t look like a prison, but I know now that it was one, and that although I didn’t hear them at the time, the sounds of my childhood were sliding bars and clanging doors.
Perhaps Aunt Edna had already sensed all that, and fearing the worst, warned me never to look back.
She was a middle-aged woman the day she rushed me across the yard to her waiting car, but she seemed ancient to me. Once at her house, she fed me a light dinner of chicken and white rice. I sat at the table, nibbling at the food, stunned into silence by what I already knew. I remember that she looked at me for a long time, as if trying to find the right words. Then she gave up, and simply muttered, “I’ll figure something out.”
But she never did, and I think part of the reason for her failure ever to “figure something out” with regard to me was that in some way I scared her. Without doubt, there were occasions during the short two months that I lived with her when she would gaze at me distantly, with an unmistakable apprehension, and I think that at those moments she was searching for the dark seed she thought must one day bloom in me, the ember that hadn’t been entirely consumed in the burning ruin of my family, but which still floated in the smoky atmosphere, dense, acrid, waiting to ignite.
Once, late at night, I wandered downstairs and into the kitchen, took the long carving knife from its drawer and headed across the room to the bowl of apples that sat beside the old tin sink. I had only moved a few steps when I saw Aunt Edna step out of the darkness of the adjoining room. Her eyes were on the knife, rather than my face, and I could tell she was fighting a terrible impulse to snatch it from my hand.
“Put that back,” she commanded.
“I was going to have an apple,” I told her.
“It’s too late to eat something,” she said evenly. “It’s bad for your stomach.”
For a tense, trembling instant, we stared at each other, the long knife still held tightly in my fist, her eyes now shifting from its blade to my face.
“Put it back, Stevie,” she repeated.
I obeyed immediately, of course, but I never forgot the look in Aunt Edna’s eyes, the way she seemed to sniff some poisonous vapor in the air around me.
Years later, when I told my wife the story, she said only, “How macabre,” and went back to her work. I know now that instead of such a light dismissal, she should have stopped me dead, stared at me and asked, “Was she right, Steven? Is it in you, too? What can we do to root it out?”
For years I believed that my mother should have demanded the same answers from my father, as if that one frank exchange might have saved us all.
My mother, Dorothy Coleman Farris, age thirty-seven.
During the brief time that I lived with Aunt Edna, she rarely mentioned my mother. When she did, she always referred to her as “poor Dottie,” as if “poor” and “Dottie” were melded together in her mind, impossible to separate. There were even times when I suspected that Aunt Edna finally blamed my mother for everything that happened that day in 1959.
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.