the title seemed as cool and academic as its author:
For the rest of the night, I sat at the window of my room and read Rebecca’s study of “these men.” One by one, she explored and exposed them, moving through those elements of character and background which united them, closing in on that single element which joined them together in a dark, exclusive brotherhood, the fact that they were, above all, deeply romantic men. So much so, that each of them had found a kind of talisman, an emblem for his extreme and irreducible yearning. “Creatures of a visceral male romanticism,” Rebecca wrote, “each of these men had found a symbol for what was missing in his life.”
True to her method, she then ticked these emblems off.
Crude and childish, they would normally have seemed no more than the physical representations of men who had become locked in boyish fantasies. But under Rebecca’s transforming eye, they took on an occult and totemic symbolism: Fuller’s baseball bat, Parks’s simple curl, Townsend’s foreign stamps, Stringer’s safari hat, and last, as Rebecca described them, “the sleek racing bikes of William Patrick Farris.”
“By clinging to these symbols,” Rebecca wrote, “these men made one last effort to control a level of violent romantic despair which women almost never reach.”
With the exception of my father, each of them had even gone so far as to take these totemic objects with them in their efforts to escape. Fuller had thrown the bloody bat into the back seat of his car; Stringer had worn his safari hat onto the plane he’d hoped to take to Africa; Townsend had stuffed his briefcase full of foreign stamps beneath the seat he’d purchased on an eastbound train; and Herbert Parks, though trying to disguise himself in other ways, had stubbornly maintained his enigmatic curl.
The tenacious hold of these symbols upon the imaginations of the men she’d studied led Rebecca unerringly to the final conclusion of her book:
In the minds of these men, the most immediate need became the elimination of whatever it was that blocked their way to a mythically romantic life. That is to say, their families. Essentially, they could not bear the normal limits of a life lived communally, domestically, and grounded in the sanctity of enduring human relations. Instead, they yearned for a life based, as it were, on male orgasmic principles, one which rose toward thrilling, yet infinitely renewable, heights of romantic trial and achievement. In time, they came to hold any other form of life in what can only be described as a murderous contempt.
But even as I read this final passage, I wondered if it could actually be applied to my father. For where, in all the descriptions of vast romantic torment which dotted Rebecca’s book, was the man who’d puttered with a bicycle in the basement and played Chinese checkers with a little girl, and who’d said of these simple, normal, intensely humble things, “This is all I want.”
Once more, I read the section of Rebecca’s book which dealt with my father. She’d written elegantly and well of my family’s life, and even given my father an exalted place among her other subjects by suggesting that his particular totem, the Rodger and Windsor bikes, provided the most fitting symbol for the destructive male romanticism she had studied and at last condemned, “a thing of high mobility and speed, self-propelled and guided, capable of supporting only one lone rider at a time.”
Only one?
Then to whom had he passed the shotgun that rainy afternoon?
Once more I imagined the “someone else” with whom he might have joined in such murderous conspiracy, but even here, I found that there was still something missing, something that didn’t fit.
And so, at last, I returned to the small stack of crime-scene photographs Rebecca had sent to me. Slowly, one by one, as the early morning light built outside my hotel window, I peered at each picture, my mother’s body behind the floral curtains, her blood-encrusted house shoes on the floor beside her bed; Jamie, faceless, beneath the wide window, his biology book opened to the picture of a gutted frog; Laura, her body wrapped in a white terry-cloth robe, her bare feet stretched toward the camera as if trying to block its view.
By the time I’d returned the last of the pictures to the envelope that had contained them, I still was no closer to knowing if Rebecca had been right about my father. At least for me, she had not yet solved the mystery of his murderousness, but she had doubtless offered the only clue as to where and how it might be solved.
FIFTEEN
RODGER AND WINDSOR.
Rebecca had made an immensely persuasive case that the men she’d studied had been unable to live without their private romantic totems. In my desperate need to find him, it struck me at last that my father might have been no less obsessed than the rest of them, that the sleek red racing bikes he’d imported from England had perhaps made the same romantic claim upon his mind as foreign stamps and safari hats had made upon the other men in Rebecca’s book.
It was a wet, fall day when I reached Rodger and Windsor’s offices in New York City. The cold drizzle I’d walked through had given me an even more desolate appearance than usual, and because of that, the neat young man who came out to the front desk to greet me seemed hesitant to come too close.
“May I help you?” he said.
“I’m looking for my father,” I told him.
“Your father?” he asked me, puzzled. “Does he work here?”
“No,” I answered.
Then, in all its appalling detail, I told him the story of my father’s crime. One by one I showed him the crime- scene photographs of my mother, Laura, and Jamie. At each picture, he flinched a little.
“Your father did all that?” he asked finally.
I nodded, then took out Rebecca’s book and read him the relevant passage. He listened with a rapt intensity.
“My father was obsessed with these bikes,” I told him, “he wouldn’t be able to live without getting one.” I
