The Tree of Forgetfulness Read Free Page A

what he did. And it won’t do any good to say,
Why dwell on the ugliness of the past? A man has the right to some peace
. When the future comes to demand an accounting from the past, it will not be denied.

2
Curtis N. R. Barrett
October 1926
    S OUTH OF RICHMOND , when he was sure the train had crossed the Mason-Dixon Line, he closed the door to the Pullman sleeper, uncapped his flask, and drank and watched the light of the setting sun flash through the dark trees beside the track. In his notebook he found the page of details he’d gathered for the last story he’d written for the
New York World
before leaving for the South. The lines there, written as he watched the police photographers fire their flashbulbs at the couple on the bed, crossed the page at a slant. MR . AND MRS . THOMAS AUSTIN one of them had printed in block letters in the ledger at the Waldorf’s front desk. Then they’d gone up to the room, where he had cut her throat and his own. They were young, and they held hands on the blood-soaked satin bedspread, she in her slip, he in his drawers, the straight razor in his free hand and the look in their eyes that he’d seen in the eyes of corpses in France during the Great War: People always seemed startled to find themselves dead.
    The boy was pigeon-chested, so thin his ribs showed. The girl’s worn leather purse lay open on the nightstand next to a lacquered red Chinese stick, the kind that girls used to anchor twists of long hair. Hers was a rich chestnut brown, worn in the smooth, short bob that was in style now. Where it wasn’t heavy with blood, her slip was still creased, probably just unfolded from the Bergdorf’s box on the floor. “Fancier than either could afford,” he’d written. “Pale cream satin trimmed with lace. ‘Candlelight’ the salesgirl might have called it.”
    â€œWedding gift?” he’d scribbled. They’d worn rings, so they were married, not necessarily to each other.
    He’d been sent to the Waldorf because he was the
World
’s crime reporter, but a note had been fished out of the blood, defiant, printed in the same hand as the names in the desk ledger—they’d chosen this way over the plans that others had made for them—so no crime had been committed, unless you called the willing forfeit of two young lives a crime. Looking down at the bodies on the bed, his pencil moving across the page, he’d found that he did not share the dead couple’s surprise at what had happened to them; in fact, he felt nothing but a cold, steady pulse of anger at the fact that they had chosen what so many others had not chosen but what had been done to them anyway.
    Home from the war too late for the big parades, he’d gotten off the ship in New York, walked from the docks to Grand Central Station, and bought a ticket to New Bedford, Massachusetts, holding in his mind, as he’d done throughout the war, the image of his father opening the door of the office that waited for him at the mill. Barrett was one of the smaller mills in New Bedford: five hundred spindles turning out a fine cotton lawn. Every one of his father’s wartime letters had included a report on the mill’s monthly output and an assessment of whether the total yardage met or exceeded or fell short of expectations. He’d closed every letter with the same words: “Son,” he wrote. “You must not worry about where you will go or what you will do to make a living when you come home. Do not allow yourself to be distracted or burdened over there by uneasy thoughts about your future here.” His signature had occupied the bottom third of the page.
    Curtis N. R. Barrett returned to the States on a cool day, but as he walked along the platform looking for an uncrowded car, he started to sweat. Every window teemed with faces and hands pressed to the glass, and images of the mill came to him—flying spindles, steel