He stood very tall, a lean man with wavy black hair, the checked shirt billowing slightly as he came out into the yard. He didn’t notice me at all, but walked directly to the edge of the yard, the place where it began its sharp decline toward the beach.
I walked over to him and stood at his side, looking down, as he did, toward Laura.
“Laura came back about an hour later,” I told Rebecca, “but not by way of the road. She came up the beach instead, and she was alone.”
Alone, because she must have known that whatever lie I’d come up with to tell my father, it surely hadn’t included Teddy.
Standing beside my father, I could see her moving slowly, her head bowed slightly, as if she were looking for shells. She was barefoot, her brown leather sandals dangling from one hand, as she waded through the weaving lines of white lacy foam.
“There she is.”
That was all my father said, and it was no more than a whisper, three words carried on a single, expelled breath. Then he returned to the house, without waiting, as I did, for Laura to make the hard climb up the stairs along the sandy hill to our cottage.
She was out of breath by the time she reached me, her long hair slightly moist with sea spray. She wasted no time in getting to the subject:
“I saw Dad up here.”
“He went back into the house.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That I didn’t know where you were.”
“Good. Thanks, Stevie.”
“Where were you, Laura?”
She didn’t answer me, but only walked directly back to the house and joined my father on the small back porch. While I played in the backyard, I could see them sitting together, their faces gray behind the screen, smoke from my father’s cigarette drifting out into the summer air.
A few hours later we all went down to the beach, trudging cautiously through the deep sea grass, my father lugging a huge picnic basket, Jamie dragging along behind, looking as morose as he had the preceding day.
Teddy came bounding down a few minutes later. My mother invited him to have one of the ham sandwiches she’d made, and he accepted without hesitation. For a time, he chatted amiably with us all, although his eyes often fell upon Laura with a deadly earnest. Neither of them gave the slightest impression of having met earlier that morning, but I remember having the distinct impression that my father knew that they had. Perhaps Laura had told him while the two of them sat behind the gray screen. Or perhaps he’d sensed it in the looks that sometimes passed between Teddy and Laura while we all sat together on the blanket my mother had spread over the sand.
It was very hot that day, and not long after lunch, Laura, Teddy, and I all went into the water for relief. My mother, who never swam, gathered everything up and wandered back to the house, leaving my father alone on the beach. He sat there for several hours, his long legs sticking out of a dark blue bathing suit, watching us distantly, with that strange attitude of concentration which I’d only seen in the basement before, and which I associated only with the assembling of fancy European bicycles. And yet it was there on his face, that look of intense study and attention.
It was not directed at me, of course, but at Laura and Teddy as they moved farther and farther out into the sea. Glancing toward them from time to time, I would see hardly more than two heads bobbing happily in the blue water, although I am sure now that my father saw a good deal more.
Rebecca looked at me quizzically. “What more did your father see?” she asked. “I mean besides what was obvious, two teenagers attracted to each other.”
“I’m not sure, but I think it was something about life.” I remembered Rebecca’s earlier remark about what she was looking for in these men. “Maybe something unbearable,” I added.
I could see my father’s face as it had appeared that day. Although in his youth he’d been a pale, skinny boy, middle age had filled him out a bit. He was still slender, of course, but his face had aged into an unmistakable handsomeness, his sharper features less bird-like, the eyes more deeply set and piercing. His curly black hair framed his face well, and when the wind tossed it, as it did that afternoon, it gave him a wild, curiously appealing look. Because of that, I realized that I’d been completely mistaken in what I’d just told Rebecca. “No, he didn’t look like a man about to break,” I said. “He didn’t look like that at all.”
I watched her quietly for a moment, certain now that I was following behind her in some strange way, covering ground she’d already covered.
“My father wasn’t some little gray man who crumbled under pressure,” I said finally. “Why have I always wanted to think of him that way?”
I instantly thought of the other men Rebecca had chosen for her study. None of them had been inept or inconsequential; none had seemed to lack a certain undeniable dignity.
I saw my father again as he’d appeared that day on the beach, his legs stretched out before him, leaning back slightly, propped up on his elbows, his eyes focused on Laura and Teddy as they bounced up and down in the heaving waves.
In my imagination, his features took on a classical solidity and force, almost the military bearing of one who had chosen to defend the city, no matter what the cost.
I looked at Rebecca, amazed by my own reassessment. “My father had a certain courage, I think.”
It was then that the utter loneliness of my father hit me with its full force, the darkness within him, his long silence, the terrible hunger he carried with him into the basement night after night, and which, I realized now, Laura had sensed as well, and perhaps even tried to relieve from time to time, like someone visiting a prisoner in his cell.
Rebecca looked at me questioningly. “Did something happen on the Cape, Steve?” she asked.
I nodded. “Yes.”
Rebecca seemed almost reluctant to continue, as if she felt herself being drawn down in a world even she was not quite prepared to enter. “Do you want to stop now,” she asked, “or do you want to go on?”
“I want to go on, Rebecca.”
And so I did.
I told her how Teddy and Laura had spent almost all their time together after that first morning, how my mother had remained almost like an invalid, reading her romance novels, how, at last, my father had seized the gray back porch like a conquered province, sitting hour after hour in the little metal chair, his eyes trained on the sea.
Finally, I arrived at the place where I’d been heading all along, that last night on Cape Cod.
“Nothing really strange happened until the end of that week,” I began, “the night before we headed back to Somerset.”
Early that afternoon, it had begun to rain. By evening, it had developed into a full summer storm, with sheets of windblown rain slapping against the cottage’s rattling windowpanes. While the rest of us retreated into the house, my father remained on the back porch, still in that same chair, his eyes fixed on the violently churning sea.
“Lost in thought, that’s how I’d describe him,” I told Rebecca. “Lost in thought.”
“But you don’t know what he was thinking about?”
A possibility occurred to me: “Killing us, perhaps.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Because, over dinner that night, he did something cruel to my mother.”
She’d called him in to a hastily prepared dinner of hot dogs and baked beans, and he’d taken his usual seat. He looked preoccupied, intensely engaged in something within him. He remained silent while the rest of us chatted, mostly about the things that still had to be done before we could leave the next morning. A couple of times during the meal, Laura had tried to engage him, but he’d only answered her in quick, terse phrases, little more than a yes or no, sometimes not even that, but only a brisk nod of the head.