During all his early years, my father lived with his parents on the same small farm. It was nestled in a grove of trees, with a broad expanse of field on either side. The house still stands, and only a few weeks before Rebecca, I visited it for the first time. Peter, my nine-year-old son, had spent the summer at a camp in upstate New York, and around the middle of August, Marie and I drove up to the camp to pick him up and bring him back home. I had a Volvo station wagon then, and we piled all his belongings into it and headed back toward Connecticut.
I hadn’t intended to visit the little house where my father grew up, but on the way to the expressway I saw a small sign for Highfield. I recognized the name, although I’d never been there. My father’s parents had died within a year of each other when he was only twenty-five, and evidently he’d never felt the need to visit the farm after that. I don’t think he ever took my mother there, or Jamie or Laura. At his parents’ death, it appeared to have dissolved from his mind.
But it hadn’t dissolved from mine, and according to the sign, it was only twelve miles away. Even so, I continued straight ahead, expecting to turn onto the expressway well before I reached the town. It was Marie who stopped me, looking quizzically in my direction only a few seconds after we passed the sign.
“Highfield,” she said finally, her eyes drifting over to me. “Isn’t that the town your father came from?”
I nodded silently and kept driving.
“He was born there, right?”
“On a little farm right outside it.”
“When did he leave?”
“When he graduated from high school, I think.”
Marie turned back toward the road. She knew about my father, of course, and I think that something in him, his sudden, inexplicable murderousness, had always interested her. Early on, she’d asked a great many questions about what he was like, probing like an amateur, somewhat Freudian detective, looking for
“Wouldn’t you like to see the house?” she asked after a moment.
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Because he was your father,” she answered.
I glanced in her direction. “I think you’re the one who wants to see it.”
She shook her head. “No. You do.” She smiled. “It’s only natural. Why don’t we drop by?”
I shrugged. “Okay,” I said.
And so I didn’t get on the expressway that afternoon, but headed toward Highfield, then drove through it, searching for the small road that Quentin had long ago described, a road that wound off to the right at the end of a stone wall.
The road came up shortly, looking like little more than a cattle trail through a green field. A narrow sign marked it with the words I’d seen on the letters my father had written to his parents during the brief time he’d lived in New York City: Lake Road.
I slowed as I neared the sign, stopped just before I got to it and looked at Marie. I remember very well the clipped, un-dramatic exchange that followed:
“Should I?”
“Why not? … It’s just a house.”
And so it was. Just a house, run-down a bit, but otherwise as I might have expected. The yard was neatly mowed, and a line of flowers had been planted along the small walkway which led to the front door. Two large trees kept the grounds heavily shaded. It had a gravel driveway, but no garage, and as I got out of the car, I could see an old wooden fence, weathered and dilapidated, which, I suppose, my father had helped build.
I left Marie and Peter in the car, walked up the small walkway to the house and knocked at the door. The woman who answered it was middle-aged, plump, her hair pinned up behind her head. She was wiping her hands with a dishcloth bordered with small red flowers.
“Hello,” I said.
She nodded, neither friendly nor unfriendly, simply curious to know who I was.
“My name is Steven Farris,” I told her.
“Uh-huh,” she said.
“This is a little strange,” I added, “but years ago my …” I choked briefly on the word, but nonetheless got it out. “… father lived here, in this house.”
The woman smiled. “Oh,” she said and, without another word, swung open the door. “I guess you’d like to see it then.”
“Well, I don’t want to disturb you.”
“No, not at all,” the woman said. She leaned out the door slightly. That your family?” she asked, eyeing the people in the Volvo.
“Yes.”
They want to come in?”
“I guess so,” I told her, then turned and waved Marie and Peter toward the house.
We were only there for a short time. Marie engaged the woman in conversation, the two of them finally heading up to the second floor, while Peter sat indifferently in the foyer, lost in one of his electronic games.
And so, for a moment, I was alone in my father’s house. Not alone physically, of course, but alone in the way
