that I could look at it without distraction.
At first, I wandered into the living room, glancing at the old fireplace, the neatly arranged furniture, the varnished wooden floor. A great number of family photos hung from the walls, sons in uniform, daughters in communion dresses, and later, grown older now, these same boys and girls with strangers at their sides, children on their knees, the boys with moustaches or thinning hair, the girls with wrinkled eyes. Time went forward on the wall, and hair retreated even more, faces grew more slack. The children left their parents’ knees to dress in uniforms and bridal gowns, choose strangers from a world of strangers, have children of their own.
“Steve, you want to look upstairs?”
It was Marie’s voice. She was standing on the staircase, leaning over the rail. “His room must have been up here,” she said.
I headed toward her, walking up the stairs, touring the house now as if it were a black museum, my father’s room cordoned off as Washington’s or Lincoln’s might have been, all the furniture in place, but with an atmosphere altogether different, sinister and grave.
Marie was standing at the end of the short corridor, poised beside an open door, the woman standing beside her, smiling sweetly.
“This must have been it,” Marie said. “There are only two bedrooms up here, and the other one’s big, so it must have been for his parents.”
It was the amateur detective at work again, and as I walked to where Marie stood like a guide waiting for a straggling tourist, I remember resenting how flippantly she had come to regard the story of my father, treating it more as a childhood tale, an imagined horror. Of course, I’d been partly to blame for that, answering her questions matter-of-factly, without emotion, like a reporter who’d covered the story, rather than a child who’d lived it. Perhaps, because of that, she’d come to think that the whole dark history meant little to me, that I no longer felt its grisly power.
And yet, for all that, Marie didn’t go in my father’s room, but remained outside, waiting in the corridor.
I have often wondered why. Was there something in that tiny room that warned her away, the ghost of the black-haired boy his friends had called
In any event, I went in alone, stood on the circular hooked carpet at the center of the room, and turned slowly to take it in. I felt nothing. Everything that might have given me some sense of my father had long ago been removed. His bed was gone, along with whatever he might have tacked to the walls, maps or photographs or pennants. If he’d ever had a desk or chair, they were gone as well. In their place, the new owner had put a small worktable and wooden stool. The table was covered with spools of different-colored yarn, along with an assortment of needles and brass clips. “I make things for the crafts fairs we have up here,” the woman said as she stepped up beside me. Then, glancing about the room, she added, “It makes a nice little work space, don’t you think?” She smiled. “Very cozy.”
She offered coffee and cake after we’d all gone back downstairs, but neither Marie nor I felt inclined to take her up on it. Instead, we thanked her for her generosity, returned to the car, and headed home, the old house growing small in my rearview mirror before it finally vanished behind a sudden curve.
It was dark by the time we reached Old Salsbury. Peter was asleep in the back seat. I took him up the stairs and laid him on his bed, then sat down beside him and ran my fingers through his hair. I had seen my father do the same to me, and certainly he’d done it to Laura and Jamie as well. There had been a gentleness in him, a guardianship and care. That murder might finally flow from such a source seemed inconceivable to me.
I left Peter to his sleep, and walked across the hallway to where Marie sat at her dressing table, applying her nightly oils and creams. I took off my clothes, placing everything neatly on the little wooden valet which stood on my side of the bed, and crawled beneath the covers. The sheets were very cool, as I prefer them, but later Marie drew in beside me, her body heating them, so that I pulled away from her, finally edging myself precariously toward the far side of the bed.
I rarely dream, or if I do, I rarely remember my dreams. But that night I had not so much a dream as what I would call a visitation. It was not a visit from my father. There was no shotgun-toting figure moving toward me from the depths of a smoky corridor, the subject of my childhood nightmares. In fact, there was no one in my dream at all. At least, no one but myself. And yet, it was so powerfully rendered, so elaborately detailed, that I could easily recall it the following morning.
In the dream, I awakened slowly, rather than the way I usually do, with a sudden start. It was a luxurious restfulness from what appeared to have been a state of great exhaustion. The dream gave no hint as to what had tired me so, but only that I had slept a long time, and was now rising with a natural and unhurried rhythm.
The room was very bright, but it was not my room, nor any room in which I’d ever been. It seemed a bit drab, but also strangely atmospheric, so that I felt completely at home in it, as if living there were my natural state. There was a large wooden bureau, the plain metal bed on which I had slept, and a sink. A pair of wrinkled towels hung over each side of the sink, and a slender full-length mirror hung from the wall beside it.
In my dream, I got to my feet languidly and walked toward the window. On the way, I glanced at the mirror. What I saw did not alarm me. I had about a three-day growth of beard, and I was wearing a white, sleeveless T- shirt and baggy brown trousers. I was barefoot, but I could see a pair of old shoes beneath the bed, one set of laces a little frayed, but otherwise in good repair.
At the window, I parted a pair of ragged white curtains and looked out. The sun was very bright, and I remember sensing that it was midday. Beyond the window, there was a large, dusty city, a conglomeration of rust- colored shingled roofs and distant church towers. In the streets below, I could see signs written in a foreign language, and hear men laughing in an outdoor tavern. Over their laughter, I could make out the sound of guitars, strummed softly by men I could not see, and the lilting cry of what I took for a wooden flute.
I awoke while still standing at the window. Nothing at all happened in the dream. And yet, it awakened me, not languidly, but with the usual sense of being startled. Dawn had not broken, and so I felt my way through the continuing darkness until I made it into the hallway. I switched on the light, walked past Peter’s room, then down the stairs to the kitchen. There was a can of soda in the refrigerator, which I opened and poured into the huge mug Peter had given me the previous Christmas, porcelain with German figures on it, smiling milkmaids and old men in lederhosen.
I drank silently, the dream still lingering in my mind, as if it were an afterimage which needed only a bit more time to fade. But as the minutes passed, and I followed the first soda with a second, it still held its place in my mind, all its details fully intact, everything from the tiniest scratches I had seen on the old bureau to the notes I’d heard played on the flute I’d never seen.
I couldn’t finish the second soda, and after a while, I walked back upstairs, crawled into bed again, twisted
