The Memory Keeper's Daughter, Page 23

  When he finished there was silence for a minute, before Duke said, Damn, that was good! He ran a scale on the piano and launched into his piece from the recital, Grieg’s March of the Trolls, with its energy and dark joy. Duke played and then Paul did and they didn’t hear the doorbell or the knocking; suddenly the pizza delivery boy was standing in the open door. It was dusk by then; a darkening wind surged into the house. They ripped open the boxes and ate furiously, quickly and without tasting, burning their tongues. Paul felt the food settling in him, holding him down like a stone. He looked up through the French doors to the bleak gray sky beyond, and then at Duke’s face, so pale his zits stood out, his dark hair falling flatly over his forehead, a smear of red sauce on his lips.

  “Damn,” Paul said. He put his hands flat on the oak floor, glad to find it there and himself on it and the room around him totally intact.

  “No joke,” Duke agreed. “Some stuff. What time is it?”

  Paul stood up and walked to the grandfather clock in the foyer. Minutes or hours earlier, they had stood here, convulsing with laughter as the seconds ticked off, a gaping stretch of time between each one. Now all Paul could think of was his father, who paused to set his watch by this clock every morning, looking up across the table full of photos, and he was filled with sadness. He looked back on the afternoon and saw it gone, condensed into a memory no larger than that drop of rain, and the sky already nearly dark.

  The phone rang. Duke was still lying flat out on the living room rug, and it seemed like hours passed before Paul picked up the receiver. It was his mother.

  “Sweetie,” she said, over noise and silverware in the background. He pictured her in her suit, maybe the dark blue one, fingers running through her short hair, rings flashing. “I’ve got to take these clients out to dinner. It’s the IBM account, it’s important. Is your father home yet? Are you okay?”

  “I did my homework,” he said, studying the grandfather clock, so recently hilarious. “I practiced the piano. Dad’s not home.”

  There was a pause. “He promised he’d be home,” she said.

  “I’m okay,” he said, remembering last night, how he’d sat on the edge of the windowsill and thought about jumping, and then he was in the air, falling; he was landing with a soft thud on the ground, and no one heard. “I’m not going anywhere tonight,” he said.

  “I don’t know, Paul. I’m worried about you.”

  So come home, he wanted to say, but in the background laughter rose and fell, breaking like a wave. “I’m okay,” he said again.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, I don’t know.” She sighed, covered the receiver, and spoke to someone else, then came back on the line. “Well, that’s good about your homework, anyway. Look, Paul, I’ll call your father, and no matter what, I’ll be no later than another two hours myself. I promise. Is that okay? Are you sure you’re okay? Because I’ll drop everything if you need me.”

  “I’m okay,” he said. “You don’t need to call Dad.”

  Her tone, when she answered, was cool, clipped.

  “He told me he’d be home,” she said. “He promised me.”

  “These people,” he asked, “from IBM. Do they like flamingos?”

  There was a pause, the roar of laughter and clinking glasses.

  “Paul,” she said at last. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “It was just a joke. Never mind.”

  When she’d hung up, Paul stood alone for a moment, listening to the dial tone. The house rose around him, silent. It wasn’t like the silence in the auditorium, expectant and charged, but rather an emptiness. He reached for his guitar, wondering about his sister. If she hadn’t died, would she be like him? Would she like to run? Would she sing?

  In the living room, Duke was still lying with an arm over his face. Paul picked up the empty pizza box and the thin sheets of waxy paper and carried them out to the garbage can. The air was cool, the world brand new. He was thirsty like a desert, like a ten-mile run, and he carried a half gallon of milk back with him to the living room, drinking straight from the jug and then passing it to Duke. He sat down and played again, more quietly. The guitar notes fell through the air, slowly, gracefully, like winged things.

  “You got any more of that stuff?” he asked.

  “Yeah. But this’ll cost.”

  Paul nodded, kept on playing, while Duke got up and went to make a phone call.

  He had drawn his sister once, when he was just a kid, maybe in kindergarten. His mother had told him all about her, so he’d drawn her into the picture he made called “My Family”: his father, outlined in brown, his mother with dark yellow hair, and himself holding hands with a mirror figure. Drawn at school, tied up with a ribbon, he’d presented this gift to his parents over breakfast, and had felt some darkness open up inside him when he saw his father’s face, emotions that, at five, Paul couldn’t explain or describe but that he knew already had to do with sorrow. His mother, too, when she’d taken the picture from his father, was touched with sadness, but she slipped a mask over it, the same bright mask she wore with clients now. He remembered how her hand had lingered on his cheek. She still did that sometimes, looking at him hard as if he might disappear. Oh, it’s beautiful, she’d said that day. It’s a beautiful picture, Paul.

  Later, when he was older, maybe nine or ten, she had taken him to the quiet cemetery in the country where his sister was buried. It was a cool spring day, and his mother had planted morning glory seeds along the cast-iron border. Paul stood, reading the name—PHOEBE GRACE HENRY—and his own birth date, feeling an uneasiness, a weight, he could not explain. Why did she die? he asked, when his mother finally joined him, slipping off her gardening gloves. No one knows, she said and then, seeing his expression, she put her arm around him. It wasn’t your fault, she said fiercely. It was nothing to do with you.

  But he hadn’t really believed her, and he didn’t now. If his father secluded himself in his darkroom every evening and his mother worked long past dinner most days and, on their vacations, shed her clothes and slipped into the cottages of strange men, whose fault could it be? Not his sister’s, who had died at birth and left this silence. It all made a knot in his stomach, which started each morning the size of a penny and grew throughout the day and made him sick to his stomach. He was alive, after all. He was here. So surely it was his job to protect them.

  Duke appeared in the doorway, and Paul stopped playing.

  “He’s coming over, Joe is,” he said. “If you have the cash.”

  “Yeah,” Paul said. “Follow me.”

  They went out the back door and down the wet concrete steps and up the side stairs to the big open room above the garage. This room had tall windows on every wall, and during the day it was filled with light from every direction. A darkroom, windowless, was inset like a closet just next to the entrance. A few years ago, once his photographs had started to get noticed, his father had built this. Now he spent most of his free time here, developing film, doing experiments with light. Almost no one else came up here—his mother, never. Sometimes his father invited Paul, who looked forward to these days with a yearning that embarrassed him.

  “Hey, these are cool,” Duke said, walking around the exterior wall, studying the framed prints.

  “We’re not supposed to be inside,” Paul said. “We can’t hang out here.”

  “Hey, I’ve seen this one,” Duke said, stopping before the photo of smoldering ruins of the ROTC building, dogwood petals pale against the charred walls. This was his father’s breakthrough photograph. It had been picked up by the wire services and flashed across the country, years before. It started everything, his father was fond of saying. It put me on the map.

  “Yeah,” Paul said. “My father took that. Don’t touch anything, okay?”

  Duke laughed. “Be cool, man. Everything’s cool.”

  Paul went into the darkroom, where the air was warmer and stiller. Print
s were strung, drying. He opened the little refrigerator where his father kept the film and took a cool manila envelope from the back. Inside was another envelope, full of twenty-dollar bills. He slipped one out, then another, and put the rest of the money back.

  He came here with his father, and other times, secretly, he came here by himself. That was how he’d found the money, one afternoon when he’d been playing the guitar up here, angry because his father had promised to teach him to use the enlarger and then canceled at the last minute. Angry and disappointed and finally hungry. He’d rummaged through the refrigerator and found this envelope with cool bills, new, inexplicable. He’d taken one twenty that first time, more later. His father never seemed to notice. So now and then he came up here and took more.

  It made Paul uneasy, the money and his thefts and the not being caught. It was the same feeling he had when he stood here with his father in the dark, images taking shape before their eyes. There was not only one photo in a negative, his father said; there were multitudes. A moment was not a single moment at all, but rather an infinite number of different moments, depending on who was seeing things and how. Paul listened to his father talk, feeling a pit open up inside him. If all this was true, his father was someone he could never really know, which scared him. Still, he liked being there amid the soft light and the smell of chemicals. He liked the series of precise steps from beginning to end, the sheet of exposed paper sliding into the developing fluid and the images rising out of nowhere, the timer going off and then the paper slipping into the fixer. The images drying, fixed in place, glossy and mysterious.

  He paused to study them. Strange swirling shapes, like petrified flowers. Coral, he realized, from the trip to Aruba, brain coral with its flesh receded, leaving only the intricate skeletal framework. The other photos were similar, porous openings blooming in white, like a landscape of complex craters transmitted from the moon. Brain coral/bones, said his father’s notes, placed neatly on the table by the enlarger.

  On that day in the cottage, in the instant before he felt Paul’s presence and looked up, his father’s expression had been utterly open, washed with emotions like rain—some old love and loss. Paul saw it and longed to say something, to do something, anything that would make the world right. At the same time, he wanted to break away, to forget all their problems, to be free. He glanced away, and when he looked back his father’s expression was distant again, impassive. He might have been thinking of a technical problem with his film, or diseases of the bone, or lunch.

  A moment might be a thousand different things.

  “Hey,” Duke said, pushing open the door. “You ever coming out, or what?”

  Paul slipped the cool bills into his pocket and went back into the larger room. Two other boys had arrived, seniors, who hung out in the vacant lot across from the school during lunch, smoking. One of them had a six-pack and handed him a beer, and Paul almost said Let’s go downstairs, let’s do this outside, but it was raining harder now and the boys were older than he was and bigger too, so he just sat down and joined them. He gave Duke the money and then the lit ember moved around the circle. Paul became fascinated with Duke’s fingertips, how delicately they held the joint, remembering how they flew over the keys with wild precision. His father was meticulous too. He mended people’s bones, their bodies.

  “You feeling it?” Duke asked after a while.

  Paul heard him from a long way off, as if through water, past the distant whistle of a train. This time there was no wild laughter, no giddiness, only a deep interior well through which he was falling. The well inside became part of the darkness outside, and he couldn’t see Duke, and he was scared.

  “What’s wrong with him?” someone asked and Duke said, He’s just getting paranoid, I guess, and the words were so big, they filled the room up and pressed him against the wall.

  Long rolls of laughter filled the room, and the faces of the others grew distorted with mirth. Paul couldn’t laugh; he was frozen in place. His throat was dry and he felt his hands getting too large for his body, and he studied the door as if at any moment his father might burst through, his anger shattering over them like waves. Then the laughter was gone and the others were getting up. They were going through the drawers, looking for food, but they found only his father’s careful files. Don’t he tried to say as the oldest one, the one with a beard, started pulling files out and opening them up. Don’t: it was a scream inside his head, yet nothing came out of his mouth. The others were standing up now too, taking out folder after folder, spreading the prints and the negatives, so carefully arranged, on the floor.

  “Hey,” Duke said, turning to show him a glossy 8 by 10. “This you, Paul?”

  Paul sat very still, his arms folded around his knees, his breath a wild rush in his lungs. He didn’t move, he couldn’t. Duke let the photo slip to the floor and joined the others, who had gone a little wilder now, scattering photos and negatives all over the shiny painted floors.

  He sat very, very still. For a long time he was too scared to move but then he had moved, he was inside the darkroom, hunched in a warm corner, against the filing cabinet his father kept locked, listening to what was going on outside: swirls of noise, laughter, and then a bottle crashing. Finally, it grew quieter. The door opened and Duke said, Hey, man, you in here, you okay? And when Paul didn’t answer there was a hurried conversation outside and then they left, clattering down the stairs. Paul stood slowly and walked through the darkness, stepping into the gallery space filled with piles of ruined photos. He stood in the window, watching Duke coast silently down the driveway on his bike, his right leg swinging over the bar before he disappeared into the street.

  Paul was so tired. Drained. He turned and surveyed the room: photos everywhere, lifting in the breeze from the window, the negatives strewn like streamers from the counters and the lights. A bottle had been broken. Green glass was scattered over the floor, and the counters were splashed with beer. There were words on the walls, crude drawings and graffiti. He leaned against the door, then slid down until he was sitting on the floor in the mess. He would have to stand up again soon, he would have to clean this up, sort the photographs, put them right.

  He lifted his hand, looked at the photo beneath it, then picked it up. It was no place he knew: a ramshackle house fastened to the side of a hill. In front of it stood four people: a woman in a dress to her calves, wearing an apron, her hands clasped in front of her. Wind blew a stray strand of hair across her face. A man, gaunt, bent like a comma, stood next to her, holding a hat to his chest. The woman was turned slightly toward the man, and they both had suppressed smiles on their faces, as if one of them had just made a joke and in another instant they would burst out in laughter. The mother’s hand rested on a girl’s blond head, and between them was a boy, not far from his own age, staring seriously straight into the camera. The image looked strangely familiar. He closed his eyes, feeling drained from the pot, near tears with exhaustion.

  • • •

  He woke to dawn blazing in through the eastern windows and his father silhouetted, speaking from the center of the light.

  “Paul,” he said. “What the hell?”

  Paul sat up, struggling to realize where he was and what had happened. Ruined photographs and film scattered the floor, covered with muddy footprints. Negatives unfurled like streamers. Broken glass littered the room and had left deep scratches in the floor. Fear rushed through Paul; he felt like throwing up. He shaded his eyes from the blinding morning light with his hand.

  “Good God, Paul!” his father was saying. “What happened here?” He moved out of the light at last, he was bending down, squatting. He lifted the photo of the unknown family from the chaos on the floor and studied it for a moment. Then he sat back against the wall, the photo still in his hands, and surveyed the room.

  “What happened here?” he asked again, more quietly.

  “Some friends came over. I guess things got kind of out of control.”

  “I
guess,” his father said. He pressed one hand to his forehead. “Was Duke here?”

  Paul hesitated, then nodded. He was fighting back tears, and every time he looked at the ruined papers something tightened like a fist in his chest.

  “Did you do this, Paul?” his father asked, his voice oddly gentle.

  Paul shook his head. “No. But I didn’t stop them.”

  His father nodded.

  “It will take weeks to clean it up,” he said at last. “You’ll do it. You’ll help me reconstruct the files. It will be a lot of work. A lot of time. You’ll have to give up rehearsals.”

  Paul nodded, but the tightness in his chest grew stronger and he couldn’t hold it back. “You just want an excuse to make me stop playing.”

  “That’s not true. Damn it, Paul, you know that’s not true.”

  His father shook his head and Paul was afraid he was going to stand up and leave, but instead he looked down at the photo in his hand. It was black and white, with a scalloped white border around the family standing in front of the low small house.

  “Do you know who this is?” he asked.

  “No,” Paul said, but even as he spoke he realized that he did. “Oh,” he said, pointing to the boy on the steps. “Oh. That’s you.”

  “Yes. I was your age. That’s my father right behind me. And beside me is my sister. I had a sister, did you know that? Her name was June. She was good at music, like you. This is the last photo that was ever taken of us all. June had a heart condition, and she died the next fall. It just about killed my mother, losing her.”

  Paul was looking at the photo differently now. These people weren’t strangers after all, but his own flesh and blood. Duke’s grandmother lived in an upstairs room and made apple pies and watched soap operas every afternoon. Paul studied the woman in the picture with her barely suppressed laughter—this woman he had never known was his grandmother.