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.
It was Aunt Edna who identified her. From the back seat of the detective’s plain, unmarked car, I saw two men in black rain slicks lead her down the walkway and into the house. A few minutes later I heard a hollow, wrenching sound come from inside the house. It wasn’t so much a scream as a low, painful wail. It was then that the older detective turned and spoke to me, although, until recently, I could not remember what he said.
Aunt Edna was at the blue car a few minutes later, her jaw set, her lips so tightly closed that when the young detective asked if she was “the sister,” she could only nod silently in response.
It would be many years before I saw what Aunt Edna saw that afternoon, my eyes lingering hypnotically on the body of my mother, how it was so carefully and respectfully laid out with perfect formality.
Other pictures showed that the same care had not been taken with my brother.
Jamie Edward Farris, age seventeen.
He was tall and lanky, with glistening black hair. In pictures, he appears rather thin, with a pale face and large, dark, nearly clownish lips. His eyes were a milky brown, like his mother’s, with thin eyebrows, and short dark lashes. Like hers, Jamie’s face gave the sense of having been composed of various parts selected from other faces, the eyes too dull and faded to go with the glossy black hair, the nose too flat to fit in with the high cheekbones and narrow forehead.
Jamie and I were typical “older” and “kid” brothers. We shared the same room, the same bunk beds. We often annoyed and frustrated each other. In the evening, we listened to music together, always records selected by Jamie, and sometimes played Chinese checkers on a bright tin board. From time to time, he would try to teach me things, the guitar on one occasion, and how to use a cue stick on another.
But despite all that, we were never really close. There was a sullenness in him, a sense of subdued explosion which kept me at arm’s length. Wanting a room of his own, resentful that Laura had always had one, Jamie often made me feel unwelcome in his presence, as if I were an unwanted intrusion.
But even more than he resented me, Jamie resented my sister. “Laura gets her own room because she’s a girl,” he often sneered at those times when she would return home with some small school triumph. It was a maliciousness and envy of my sister which I didn’t share and probably despised. In any event, I don’t recall missing him a great deal after his death, certainly not in the way I missed Laura, longed for her and called her name at night.
Still, I do remember Jamie quite well. I remember that he often seemed listless, drowsy, the heavy lids drooping slowly as he sat at his desk, the head following not long after that, nodding almost all the way down to the open textbook before it bobbed up suddenly, and he began to study once again. More than anything, he seems to have been one of those people who feel estranged from their own existence. There were even times when he appeared to dangle above his own life, unable to touch ground, find direction, move in a way that he’d willed himself. Had he lived, I doubt that much would have come of him, for even as a boy, he seemed to have inherited that lethargy and lack of spirit that was so visible in the woman in the red housedress.
Even so, as I must add in a final qualification, he was not entirely inanimate. There were things that truly interested Jamie. He could spend long hours practicing his guitar, despite the fact that there was never any noticeable improvement in his ability to play it. He liked to fish, and he, Laura, and I would sometimes walk to the pond a half-mile or so from our house, cast our bait into the water and wait—usually for hours—before finally returning home with nothing. Even before Rebecca urged me back, I remembered those little fishing trips surprisingly well, the shade of the trees, the small boats that skirted across the nearly motionless water, the bell on the ice cream truck that made three rounds per afternoon, even when the driver knew that on this particular stop, there’d be no customers but the Farris kids.
What else of Jamie?
Only a few scattered items. I remember him rushing to hide something in his desk as I came unexpectedly into the room we shared. I remember him breaking a guitar string and cursing, then, his anger quickly spent, meticulously stringing another.
