Constance (13 page)

—He doesn’t want to get out of bed. He says it’s too cold. Imagine that, your father afraid of cold weather. He’ll get up when he knows you’re here.

Your father.

—You think you should tell him?

—It’s better if I go up.

She left the kitchen and I thought no, maybe she doesn’t hate me. If she thinks about me at all it’s in connection with Daddy’s welfare. The rest belongs in some archive in her mind stocked with ancient scandals. She visits them at night, then at dawn she locks them away again. She returned to the kitchen a few minutes later.

—He’ll be down soon, she said. It takes him a while, getting washed and dressed.

—You see a big change.

—Like I said, some days he’s himself.

She did something with her face then, a sucking in of the lower lip and a biting down on it, producing a tight pucker round the mouth that to me suggested pain. She loved him in her way. For years he’d looked after her sisters and their children. To her he was a good man. He was the doctor. She hated to see him grow weak. Then I heard his step on the stair, descending.

The change was not as dramatic as I’d been led to expect. He stood in the kitchen doorway much as I remembered him at Christmas, looming and frowning in his cardigan and corduroys. He was thinner than before. There was a prickle of white stubble on his jaw. There was a tremor in his left hand. But more remarkable was what occurred next.

—Morgan, shut the door, said Mildred sharply, you’re letting the heat out.

He entered the kitchen and closed the door behind him. His docility astonished me. It wouldn’t have happened like this even a month before.

—You didn’t tell us, Constance. We didn’t know you were coming.

—It was spur of the moment. Is it all right?

He shuffled toward the table and in his gait I saw an old man. He spoke to the floor in a querulous tone. He reached with trembling hand for the chair at the end of the table. Carefully he sat down.

—Is it all right, she asks me, is there anything to be done about it now? I don’t think so.

His head lifted.

—Mildred, give me a cup of coffee.

Later when we were alone I told him I knew who my father was.

—Oh you do.

We were in the sitting room by the fire. It was getting dark outside.

—Who told you?

—Not you.

He nodded to himself for a while. I’d always avoided confronting him if I could. He was too strong for me. Now I had no choice.

—I thought it might be too much for you, he said.

—You wanted me to think you were my father.

He answered without hesitation. I knew the tone and I hated
it. I was angry with myself for having elicited it. It was the clinical tone, and he used it when he spoke of matters about which he felt certain. He told me that yes, he did want that, it was better that way—

He sank back in his chair. I went to the window. I pulled the drapes closed. Away from the fireplace the room was cold but I had to put some distance between us. I asked him why he’d told me at all.

Again the bowed head.

—Daddy,
why
?

He spread his old hands, palms upward. There was no tremor.

—You have Sidney now.

—Sidney said you told Walter Knapp he’d go to jail and that’s why he killed himself.

He waved this away with weary disdain.

—That boy disrupted the household and I had to get rid of him.

—What do you mean?

—I mean I crushed him.

He lifted his hand and rubbed his thumb against his fingertips. I was standing over him now.

—What are you saying?

He sat back in the chair with his eyes closed.

—Sit down, he said quietly.

I stood there, staring down at him, aghast.

—Sit!

I obeyed him.

—I found them together in the damn boathouse.

—What were they doing?

He was silent.

—Daddy, what were they doing?

Blood from a stone! He opened his pale eyes. They were sparking with contempt. He asked me what I thought they were doing. But I needed to hear him say it! I had to know that this part of it at least was true.

—What did you do?

He shook his head. I felt as though I was trapped in a nightmare, the horror of it the persisting sensation of not being asleep.

—So they were in the boathouse—

—Where you were forbidden to go! I put a lock on it to keep you out but you paid no attention to that, did you, you and your sister? Now do you understand why I didn’t want you in there?

There was nobody else in the house except Mildred, and she’d already gone to the tower. Was he telling me he murdered my father in the boathouse? That that’s how he died? I asked him what happened when he found them.

He was groping in the pocket of his jacket. He produced a small object. It glinted in the firelight. He held it out for me to see. It was a thin, scratched silver ring. Whose ring? He wouldn’t say. Walter’s, I thought. He’d taken it from his body, he’d pulled it from his finger. He’d kept it as a kind of memento mori.

—Here, have it, he said.

When I was a child, and they were talking, Daddy and Harriet, and I came into the room, they’d fall silent and I thought they were talking about me. But I knew now they were talking about my father. That Daddy wouldn’t let it go, that he continued to punish Harriet to the end of her life. That he’d caused her death too.

—At least tell me where he died.

But he was indifferent to me now. I wasn’t his daughter, I was nothing to him. He was panting slightly. I saw him as monstrous.

—I know how you did it, I said. I know what you said to him.

—You know nothing.

He rose to his feet and I followed him to the kitchen. He was exhausted. Spittle was flecked on his lips and chin. His skin was ashen. It was wearing him out, all this drama I’d brought into the house. After we’d eaten he said he was going to bed. There was some clumsy pushing back of the chair as he got up from the table. I stood up and carefully put my arms around him. He allowed himself to be held and then he shuffled to the door. He paused, and turned, and I waited for the words that would shed light on what had just transpired, or at least affirm that love had once existed between us, and perhaps still did, and I asked myself: Is that why I’ve come here? Because it was no good trying to get the truth out of him. He was too old, and for old men there’s no point, there’s no past, there’s only the future, and it bears down on them with inexorable purpose: death in the form of the Albany train, or whatever instrument of termination it chooses for its work—

He told me to be sure the screen was on the fire before I went to bed.

After he’d gone upstairs I got my coat on and left the house by the back door. It had started to snow. I made my way down the hill and across the tracks. The snow came drifting in moist heavy flakes. I stood at the end of the broken dock and watched it melting in the icy water where it lapped at the pilings beneath my feet. Then I turned to the boathouse.

I pushed open the slatted doors. I remembered it as a summer place full of moving shadows and watery echoes, sunlight shafting through gaps in the planks, but that winter night it was dark, and where before it had been romantic now it was sinister. Daddy’s boat was tightly battened under its canvas canopy, green with lichen. The skiff was gone but he’d removed the outboard before he scuttled it and there it still was, clamped to a sawhorse and covered with a tarpaulin. Was it here?

I began to shiver. I felt sick. Then I was pulling the doors closed behind me. High on the bluff above me reared the black mass of the house. Its outline was sharp in definition in the falling snow.

When I returned to the city I told Sidney that Daddy killed my father. But Sidney didn’t take me seriously. He tried to tell me that the old man’s grasp of past events was not reliable, surely that was apparent to me. I couldn’t hold the old man responsible for this ancient tragedy.

I’d been afraid of this. I bowed my head and covered my face with my hands. Then I looked up at him.

—You said you were on my side, I said quietly. It wasn’t a tragedy, Sidney. It was murder. And it wasn’t Daddy who told me.

—Then who did?

—Mildred.

He said he had no more confidence in Mildred Knapp’s version of events than he did in Daddy’s.

—Did she see him do it?

—She didn’t have to.

—No?

—No, Sidney, she didn’t. She’s been living with him since Harriet died. She shares his bed, or she used to.

I told him that in the morning after my conversation with Daddy I’d risen early and gone downstairs to the kitchen and found Mildred at the sink washing the dishes. I told her that Daddy and I had talked about Walter. I told her I knew he was my father. She didn’t turn around. She didn’t move.

—And does he know you know? she said at last.

—Yes.

Then she’d turned. We stared at each other for several seconds.

—Where did he die? I said.

My heart was racing. I knew she’d tell me.

—South of here.

—How far?

—Tillman’s Landing.

I felt a rush of anguished recognition. I cried out. I remembered Tillman’s Landing. A riverside hamlet, four or five houses and a dock. A steep dirt track off the river road that ended at the water. Mildred sat down at the table. She reached across and seized my hand.

—I tried to stop him, she whispered.

—What do you mean?

But she was alarmed now. She couldn’t do it. She pulled away from me. She got up from the table. Then she was standing at the sink with her back to me, furiously pumping water into a saucepan. Our moment of intimacy had vanished as fast as it came.

—Do you have any photographs of him?

—I burned them all!

—What was he like?

Mildred still didn’t turn around. Her thin back was taut with tension under a cheap black cardigan.

—Ask him, he knows.

She meant Daddy.

—He won’t tell me.

She shrugged. She was a cruel woman, or perhaps she was just a frightened woman, or a guilty woman. I lost patience with her. I was weeping now. I took the keys from the hook by the telephone and got my coat on. I went out to the truck. It was parked by the barn. I climbed in and drove away. I heard a shout from behind me. In the mirror I saw Mildred on the front porch. She was pulling on her overcoat and running down the steps. I backed up. She got in beside me. I had no idea where I was going but then I realized I did know, I was going south on the river road. I was going to Tillman’s Landing and Mildred was coming with me.

The river was placid that day, slow moving, full of ice, silver in places beneath a gray wintry sky. I began to breathe more easily. I loved its steady beauty. I loved its calm. We drove in silence.

Tillman’s Landing was as I remembered it. Nothing had changed here. The road was unpaved and I followed it round a wooded headland and then it opened below us, the cluster of roofs, the railroad tracks and the dock, the station house, boarded up now, whitewash flaking off the bricks, and beyond it the silvering river and the distant mountains under a lowering leaden sky. Telephone poles marched along the railroad tracks. There was nobody around. On the high ground to the south leafless trees stood stark against the sky. I was strongly aware of my father’s presence, or no, not his presence, his
influence.

I drove down the hill and parked the truck. We sat staring at the railroad tracks and the river beyond.

—Was it here? I said.

Mildred nodded.

—So what happened?

Something happened. Something brought it to a head. Daddy got suspicious. He got wind of it. Perhaps he came home from work unexpectedly in the middle of the day, or they did something reckless and he saw it. All Mildred would tell me at first was that he found them in the boathouse.

—Where were you? I said.

She was in the tower. She saw Daddy going down to the boathouse. Then Walter came out. He went along the railroad tracks and Daddy followed him. A little later Harriet left the boathouse and came back up through the woods. She reached the house and went upstairs to her bedroom. Mildred stood outside her door and heard her crying. She was glad.

—You were glad, I said.

—I thought that was the end of it.

—But it wasn’t?

—It was the end of it all right.

What she meant was, the very thing happened that she’d been afraid of. She never got him back. A few hours later they told her he’d been hit by the Albany train.

It cost her, saying this. She became distraught. She took a few minutes to compose herself. Then she was pointing at the tracks where a low wooden platform allowed vehicles to pass over the rails to the towpath. That’s where he died, she said.

My father.

—Why did he do it?

She glanced at me and then looked away. She puckered her mouth like she had the day before. Then she started to talk. We
sat in the truck for an hour and not a living soul emerged from any of the houses, the place was empty, it was dead. Not even a train.

She was young when she married Walter, she said, they were both young. Her sisters were all against it. They’d heard stories about him. I wanted to know what the stories were, I wanted to know everything. What was he like? He was like you, she said.

—How like me?

He had my coloring, very fair-skinned, she said, and his hair was like yours, almost white. A strange boy. He heard things, like you do, and he’d get distracted. He’d get lost in his thoughts. You never knew for sure what he was feeling, he kept it to himself. He wrote things and sometimes he’d read them to me. What were they about? Oh, the river. The woods. Me, she whispered. But when he was happy … When he was happy the sun came out—

She smiled a little. She’d loved him of course.

So it was small things we had in common, she said, but they alarmed her. She’d think, Where did that come from? She found it uncanny we were so similar. It had unsettled her. I thought, She must have felt I was accusing her, but of what I didn’t know. Of not saving him. All these years I’d kept her misery alive, that was why she hated me. After they were married they’d moved into the servants’ rooms at the back of the house and he was taken on as a groundsman. The place was kept up to a higher standard then. There was more money, more staff. There were dogs and horses. They threw parties. People came up from the city.