"Robert?"
Gently, Father Delaney gripped my arm and brought me back to myself. I tried to smile. "I was just thinking, Father. Trying to remember what I'd felt then? I suppose you're right. I was angry. But I'm not sure I was afraid. If I was, perhaps it was because my mother felt it all so intensely."
"Yes, she did. But I'm thinking of you. If you don't mind, I'd like to ask something personal."
"Of course, Father."
"I could never say this when your mother was alive, for I know she wouldn't have wanted me to. And I hope she'll forgive me now, for presuming?" He hesitated, then looked up at my face. "When your father died, you knew there were all kinds of rumors?"
"Yes."
"You knew at the time? As a boy?"
"Yes, I knew."
He shook his head. "I should have said this years ago, but I'll say it now. Those rumors weren't true, Robert. I never knew your father well, but I knew him well enough. Believe me?they weren't true."
For a second, the briefest instant, we looked each other in the eye. Then I glanced away. But finally, in gratitude for everything this old man had given us over so many years, I managed the lie: "Thank you, Father. I know? I believe you."
For five minutes, as Father Delaney made his way back to the church, I stared into the valley.
Advancing like a heavy mist, the curtain of rain drew closer, until finally its outline was lost. Then I felt the first drops, cold and prickling, on my face. I looked down at the tombstone; in a second, as the rain grew heavier, it began to shine with a slick, velvety sheen. I wondered whether I'd kept its secret, wondered whether the old priest had believed his own words. It was hard to say. He was an old-fashioned Irishman who probably attached little importance to the literal truth and would let God take care of the dead while he concerned himself with the living. Long ago, I realized, he'd seen how troubled I'd been: now, he merely wanted to lay that trouble to rest. I only wished that he could: but what other people only suspected, I knew for certain and their dark imaginings were my clearest memories. Now, as the rain fell upon the cold stone of my father's grave, my mind again slid back to that day. Again, in horror, I watched my father disappear into the woods. Again, in terror, my heart began pounding. Again and again. I'd seen it all a thousand times, but nothing changed. There was still nothing to do but run. Running, running: but never quite fast enough. Finally, at the edge of the woods, I slumped to the ground. Before me lay a clearing, a patch of dried-up swamp filled with dead marsh grass and fern. Beyond this I could see a dirt road, and at the top of a hill, to the left, a blue Chevrolet sedan pulled onto the shoulder innocent images of fatality that would haunt me for years to come. Tears burned my eyes. My breath trembled in my chest. I look around desperately, but in this dead landscape nothing moved. Knowing my father had to be near, I tried to shout, but my strength no doubt like his was exhausted and not even the birds were disturbed by my cry. And then, with the great roar of the shot, the question exploded within me: Why? Why did you do it?
More than twenty years later, as I wrenched myself back to the present, I knew it was still the only question to ask.
Why?
I stared down at his headstone a door, locked and bolted, a tablet engraved with words in a language nobody spoke. Would I ever discover the answer? Did even he know what it was?
Just then the rain began falling in earnest, cold and driving; with a shiver, I turned up my collar. Still, even as it drenched me, I welcomed that storm. Let the dead bury the dead. The rain and the wind were alive, telling me that I had my own life to live. Once a year, I took a day off from that life to remind myself that somewhere inside I was still that boy in the woods, but now that day was over.
I took a step back, turned away. Head down, shoulders hunched, I made my way up the path toward the church.
2
As I said, everything began in that graveyard, but at the time I had no way of knowing this. October 28, that year, seemed no different from any other: an end, not the beginning of anything. Why had my father killed himself? As I got into my old green Volvo and lurched down the side road away from the church, the question seemed no nearer an answer than it had before. I told myself what I always did: let it lie, forget it, what else can you do?
But I could never forget, of course; not quite. And perhaps my mother's absence this year made it even more difficult. As the road twisted and turned through the tattered, autumn hills of Perry County, I could sense her beside me and hear her voice, low and murmuring, as she remembered him for, paradoxically, that was always her way of forgetting. She'd close her eyes and lean back on the seat, and slowly the stories would come out, but stories so carefully and formally elaborated that they only served to distance him from us, gradually turning him into a character in an old movie that flickers on and on through the late-show dawn. Long since, I'd learned all the scripts by heart; now, making my way back to the Interstate, I wondered which ones she might have selected this time around. My mother, une vraie frangaise, had first met my father when he'd been posted to Paris in 1938. So perhaps she might have recalled the crazy comedy about a bright young diplomat, speaking ludicrous Iowa French, who'd helped a manufacturer with some permits, received a dinner invitation in return, and then walked off with his daughter. Or she might have selected a melodrama Bergman and Bogart for she and my father had been falling in love just as Europe staggered toward war: drinking in the Cafe Flore as the Germans marched into Austria, huddling in my father's frigid apartment on Montparnasse as Chamberlain flew back from Munich, and joining the "phony war" crowds at the hit of the 1940 season, Maurice Chevalier's Paris Reste Paris. Decades later, that particular detail could still provoke my mother's bitterest laugh. "But we didn't see the joke any better than other people," she'd quickly add. "After the Communists made their deal with Hitler, it seemed there was nothing to believe in, not even war?" But of course the war came. They hurriedly married at the end of May, as the Germans raced toward the city. After that another favorite tale there was a classic chase sequence, for my father suddenly panicked. Fearing that his diplomatic status might not guarantee my mother's safety, he'd rushed her out of Paris when the British Embassy was evacuated in the first week of June. "Your father had his little English car and he steered it like a bicycle through all those refugees. I remember that we reached Bordeaux the day before Paris fell and listened to the broadcast on a portable radio. In those days, radios had very big batteries which gave off a peculiar smell when they grew warm for years afterwards, that smell haunted my dreams?"
The war, however, merely provided the most dramatic of her stories; there were plenty of others. My father's classic gaffe with Christian Herter? the incredible saga of their sea voyage to Capetown? a bizarre servant in Mexico City? Now, as the miles slipped by, I ran through them all; and, a little to my surprise, the process worked once again. I skirted Harrisburg, dawdled through Hagerstown, and finally, as Interstate 81 swung west, I could feel the mystery of my father's death begin to recede for another twelve months.