Dutifully he’d written home once a week, the letters preserved by his parents, then passed down to him, and finally, because of Mrs. Fields’s second phone call, the one that made him quickly pull on his coat and hat and head for the waiting station wagon, also passed on to me.
They weren’t chatty letters, and they suggested that my father hadn’t felt much excitement about being in New York. They were informative, but little else. In them he mentioned the attic on Great Jones Street, but not that he shared it with a crowd of other itinerants. He talked about the weather, but only in the most general terms, days described as cold or hot, rainy or clear. The word “pleasant” recurred, as did the word “nasty,” but all the more detailed descriptions were left out.
Left out too was the sense of limited horizons that must surely have overwhelmed him from time to time. He’d been a boy of only nineteen, alone in an enormous city, living in a dreary attic with nearly a dozen other people, men probably older than he, broken and displaced men, fleeing shattered homes. At night, he must have listened to their tales of bad luck and betrayal, perhaps from his own dark bunk, too young and inexperienced to join in the talk or to be treated as an equal.
Since Rebecca, I’ve often imagined him in such a posture, lying faceup on his grimy mattress, his pale-blue eyes fixed on the ceiling, the murmur of voices curling around him while he tried to calculate his next move, a man locked in a grim and airless solitude.
But that day months before, as I stared quietly at the photograph Rebecca had placed before me, I saw only an empty-faced young man, a face without a past, almost a fictional character, one whom murder had created.
“I never heard my father talk about New York,” I said. “I never heard him talk very much about Highfield, either.”
Rebecca didn’t press me for more. Instead, she drew the photograph away and revealed the one beneath it, a picture of my mother as she stood beside a low stone wall. She was dressed in a light-colored skirt and blouse, her hair shining in a bright summer light.
“She looks about eighteen,” I said.
“Do you know anything about her youth?” Rebecca asked.
“I can’t even imagine her as young,” I said. “She always seemed so old to me.” I thought a moment, then added, “I think she was probably a very depressed person. Clinically depressed.”
“Why do you think that?”
“She never seemed to have any energy. There was something faded in her, like she needed someone to brush the dust off her shoulders.”
Rebecca nodded toward the photograph. “She seems to have a lot of energy in this picture,” she said. “She looks quite vivid.”
I looked at the photograph again. My mother was smiling very cheerfully at the camera. She seemed not only young, but free, lighthearted, happy. There was a flirtatiousness in the way she leaned back against the stone wall, in the girlish tilt of her head, in the “come hither” look she offered to the camera.
“Who took this picture?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Rebecca answered. “They were among the pictures the police took from your house on McDonald Drive. No one ever claimed them, and so Swenson let me go through them. Most of them had dates and locations written on the back, but this one didn’t.” She shrugged. “I don’t know why.”
My mother’s face appeared to beam toward me, her joy sweeping out like a wave. “I think I know why,” I said quietly. “It was because she knew exactly where and when it had been taken, and knew that she’d never forget that particular moment.”
Rebecca said nothing. Instead she waited for me to continue, to call up some other memory of my mother.
“I don’t have anything else to say about her,” I said after a while. “She never talked about her youth. She never seemed to want to talk about it.”
“Why not?”
“Well, maybe she didn’t want to be reminded of it,” I said, though without much certainty, mere conjecture. “Maybe she didn’t like to compare it to what her life became.”
“Which was?”
“Drudgery,” I said without hesitation, returning now to the woman of my most recent memories, the one in the red house-dress, who piddled in the flower garden and lost herself in romance novels.
Rebecca nodded quickly, then slid the photograph to the side, revealing the one just under it.
It had been taken the day my father married my mother and it showed the two of them outside a small church. My mother stood beneath his arm, smiling brightly. My father seemed to be drawing her closely to his side, smiling, too.
Rebecca tapped my mother’s face gently. “Did he talk about her?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Not to me.”
I was still looking vacantly at the same picture when Rebecca slid another one up beside it, the one taken years later, which showed my mother on the bed, her face and body neatly scrubbed, hands folded, dead.
I realized, of course, that it was the contrast Rebecca wanted, perhaps for the initial shock of it, or perhaps for something deeper, the sense that for “these men” and their murdered families, life had been a long descent from some initial happiness to a murderous despair.
I looked at both pictures for a long time, shifting my concentration from one to the other before finally glancing up at Rebecca.
“What do you expect me to say?” I asked.
She didn’t answer.
I tapped the picture of my father and mother on their wedding day. “They seem happy together, don’t they?”
Rebecca nodded, then looked at me significantly. “Did you know that your mother was pregnant the day she got married?”
My eyes shot over to Rebecca. I was astonished. “She was?” I asked, unbelievingly.
“According to the records, Jamie was born on October 7, 1942, only seven months after your parents were married,” Rebecca told me. “He weighed nearly nine pounds, so he couldn’t have been premature.”
I looked at the wedding photograph again, my eyes concentrating on my mother, the “poor Dottie” of Aunt Edna’s vision, and yet a woman who, in her youth, had done at least this one daring thing. She had slept with a man who was not yet her husband, an act that had seemed beyond the reach of the woman I remembered.
“We never know them, do we?” I said. “Our parents.”
“It depends on what they’re willing to reveal,” Rebecca answered.
I glanced at the photograph, this time settling on the tall, commanding figure of my father. He was dressed in his army uniform, the green garrison cap cocked raffishly to the right. “He must have been on leave,” I said, unable to think of any other comment.
“Do you have his army records?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “Are they important?”
“Well, I like to have a basic chronology of each man’s life,” Rebecca answered.
“I’ll look for it,” I told her, though unemphatically, my eyes still set firmly on my father’s beaming face, on how happy he seemed. “He doesn’t seem to mind the idea that he’s about to be a father,” I said.
“No, he probably didn’t mind that at all,” Rebecca said. “These men rarely do.”
I could see “these men” more fully now. I could see them in their game rooms and their basements, in their trucks and station wagons, standing in their driveways and out beside their glittering blue swimming pools, men with baseball bats and rifles, who later killed their families in inconceivable acts of annihilating violence. Step by step, they were becoming less abstract to me, less headlines glimpsed in newspapers than faces emerging slowly from a pale white cloud.
I shook my head as I studied my father’s smiling face on his wedding day. “I would never have guessed that my father would have ended up as one of ‘these men,’ as you always call them,” I said.