Chapter 17
We had reached Rockland, where I stopped the car on Main Street.
Not everything of which Angel and I needed to speak could be dealt with before I left for MSP, but there was more I wanted to share with him while there was time, because our conversation—our shared realization—explained a glitch in my recollections that had long disturbed me.
“I have clear memories of my father striking my mother twice,” I said to Angel, “but I’m also certain he hit her only once.
The first memory was to do with a small fire in the kitchen, which I think I might have caused, but the circumstances are blurred.
The second time, I am clear on. My mother’s pocketbook was stolen in a restaurant by the people sitting behind us, and my father slapped her for what he viewed as her carelessness, even though, as police, he should have known better.
“For years, I thought I must have invented one of the incidents, or conflated the first with the second, so that each ended with him hitting my mother when, in reality, he only became physical on one occasion. Obviously, that doesn’t make it any less wrong, but it was always confusing to me.
I could see and hear the blows land, and they were different blows, while all the time I knew I could say ‘My father hit my mother once, just once’ and be sure I wasn’t lying. That was my small madness.”
“But it wasn’t a mistake, right?” said Angel. “Because they were different mothers and different fathers. Only the child was the same.”
That was the final piece. Yes, I could see and hear the slaps; they echoed still.
But the faces themselves were clouded, or had been until now.
Like condensation wiped from a mirror, or mist dispersed by a breeze, what was formerly ambiguous became apparent.
The incident of the pocketbook was the more recent.
I saw my father hit my mother, saw the redness rising on her cheek, and saw the shock on his face as he realized what he had done, which could never be undone, and how he would forever after be less to her and less to himself because of it.
The slap following the fire was much earlier, in a kitchen smaller, humbler, and older than the one I remembered from Pearl River.
The house was only vaguely familiar, as though it might have belonged to grandparents long dead, visited in early childhood, or known to me solely from photographs.
And the man and woman, the one striking, the other flinching, were less recognizable too, so that they also might have been figures from a family album, creatures of sepia and deckle edges.
I couldn’t recall their names, or his occupation.
I couldn’t bring to mind the city or the town in which we lived, and whether I had brothers or sisters, but had I been forced to guess, I would have said that I was an only child, always an only child.
My surviving memory of them was a single incident of violence, and I suspect that had resurfaced because history had rhymed a generation or two later, one blow echoing another.
If that memory was real but buried, how many more were interred beneath it?
I pictured lives layered, like flakes of schist or shale, impossibly old and hidden from view, though one could mine them, breaking each stratum to release a cloud of musty, sealed air, a zephyr of remembrance and pain, because as those nameless parents retreated from me, so also did I retreat from them.
There was hurt, so much hurt, more than anyone could bear; loss upon loss upon loss that I was not yet ready to face.
This is a honeycomb world. It hides a hollow heart.
It hides the truth.