Rebecca as a wounded man might have looked forward to the first soothing touch of a doctor or a nurse.
I was relieved to see her when she arrived that Friday afternoon.
She was wearing a white blouse and dark green skirt that fell nearly to the floor. I noticed the skirt most: “It’s very beautiful.”
“Thank you,” Rebecca said. She was just that crisp and dismissive, a mode of behavior that her beauty had no doubt taught her, to be distant, restrained, to slap the hand long before it made its first uncertain movement toward her. She opened her briefcase and reached for something inside it, speaking at the same time, though with her eyes averted, focused on the papers her long brown fingers were riffling through.
“I brought a few pictures,” she said.
“Pictures of the murders?” I asked.
A certain wariness came into her face, as if she didn’t want to rush me into a terrain that she knew I would find horrible.
“I have those pictures, too,” she said, “but they’re not for today.”
I watched her as she placed the pictures in a small stack at her right hand. It was obvious that she’d already arranged them in the order she thought appropriate. She shifted slightly in her seat, and I could hear the sound of her body as it rustled against her dark green skirt. It was a soft but highly detailed sound, crisp and distinct, like the crunch of bare feet moving softly over leaves.
She plucked the first picture from the stack and moved it slowly toward me. It was of my father when he was in his late teens. He was standing at the bus station in Highfield, dressed in blue jeans and a plaid shirt, his traveling case dangling from his hand.
That must have been taken the day he left home,” I said.
“He went to New York, didn’t he?” Rebecca asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you know anything about how he came to make that decision?”
At the time, I didn’t. But I’ve learned a great deal since then. There was a box of letters and other papers which he left behind. Aunt Edna had stored them in her attic, and when she died, they came to me. For years they moldered in our basement, but when I finally began to look through them, I discovered, among other things, the world my father had confronted in his youth.
The Depression had been in full swing, of course, so that by the time he’d graduated from high school, he’d had few prospects in a town like Highfield. Because of that he’d gone to New York City, looking for work along with thousands of others, and had ended up in a dingy rooming house on Great Jones Street.
After Rebecca, when I finally visited that place, I found a plain, six-story brick building that had long ago been converted into a drafty, dilapidated warehouse. My father’s room had been on the top floor, little more than a converted attic which he’d shared with several other men, a grim hall without a stove or a refrigerator, where the beds were hardly more than bunks, thin mattresses on wire springs.
From the room’s dusty window, I could see the same brick street my father must have seen. The man who let me do it, standing in the doorway, watching me suspiciously as he puffed at a stubby black cigar, must have thought it odd that a son would wish to do such a thing, retrace, at such distance, the journey of his father. But he was willing to let me in anyway, escorting me up the stairs, and opening the long-closed door to a musty, unlighted room.
I didn’t know exactly what part of the room my father had used as his small space. The beds had been removed years before, leaving only a bare floor and a scattering of loose boards. A great many names had been carved on the wooden walls and supporting beams, and for a while I looked for my father’s name among them. I found J. C. Paxton and Monty Cochran and Leo Krantz and a host of other solitary males, but there was no sign of William P. Farris, or Bill Farris, or even W.P.F.
He’d lived there for nearly a year. Each night, from his small window, he’d seen the men in the street below, brooding by their open fires, tossing wooden slats into the flames while they grumbled about the state of things.
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.
