It was on another summer day, and tough or not, I would probably not have dared ask if we hadn’t gone to Hartford. I had to attend a lecture at the medical center, and Mother said she’d ride along and visit a friend who lived nearby in Farmington. When I picked her up after the program, she suggested driving down to Park Street to see the old triple-decker. At once my childish fears returned. I stopped in the parking lot and looked at her.
“If it’s not out of the way,” said Mother, handsome in her dark navy dress. For years she had worn only dark colors, black, navy, deep purple, somber shades that gave her a vaguely European air. The rich ladies who patronized the bridal salon where Mother worked thought her taste distinguished and sophisticated.
I shook my head. “Is it wise?” I asked.
Mother gave nothing away. “Who do you think will notice us?” she answered.
Of course she was right. I parked near the house, and Mother got out on the sidewalk and looked up at the big solid building with the flaring eaves and the prowlike porches. Blue-gray vinyl siding covered the dark wood shingles, and Mother approved. “Saves the painting,” she said. “Clean-looking. Young Joe must be up on all the latest.”
“Young Joe?”
“Mr. Conklin’s son. He must be just a few years older than you are. Aileen’s probably turned everything over to him by now. It was her money, part of it anyway. Her people owned some grocery stores, you know.”
I did not know, and I thought Mother might say more about the Conklins, but she took a last look up at the apartment and got back into the car. “I’ve never been so hot as in that third floor flat,” she said. “Remember how hot it used to get?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Go on down Park,” Mother said. “We might as well stop by the snack shop, too.”
She spoke so casually that I felt guilty for all the years of suspicion and apprehension. Nonetheless, I drove downtown carefully, nervously alert for stop signs, traffic lights, and squad cars. Next to me, Mother looked out the windows and remarked on changes in the neighborhood. The Portuguese shops had mostly gone, leaving a mix of Indian and Southeast Asian businesses: Bombay Foods, a Vietnamese market, shops that promised to speak Khmer, Vietnamese, Hindi, or Laotian. The old snack shop had been transformed into the New Thai Palace Restaurant, and Mother said, “Turn in. There’s room for you to park.”
I pulled next to a van labeled NEW THAI PALACE — RESTAURANT, CATERING, TAKEOUT and shut off the motor. The late spring evening was mild and pleasant. The sun turned the bricks of the restaurant to gold, and the sky was a peachy shade of pink. Mother stepped out of the car and walked around behind the restaurant where a big exhaust fan whirred out the smell of hot oil and spices. Beyond a brown board fence, children were shouting and playing, and on the sidewalk two women in saris and dark sweaters pushed their children in strollers. Mother studied the restaurant, the garbage cans, the little open porch that led into the kitchen. Long ago Mr. Conklin had been seized by some swift and terrible force right at the foot of those steps.
For years I had wondered about the precise agent. Now that I was on the verge of discovery, I found I’d rather not know. “Please let’s go,” I said.
Mother seemed surprised that I was nervous. She herself was perfectly composed, a fine looking woman somewhere in middle age, her hair still dark, her face only faintly lined, old hardships and weariness visible only in her eyes. The days of sweatshops and exploitation had eventually ended in Boston, where she had turned her toughness into such elegance that men admired her and were afraid of her. Six years ago she had married a brave one who owned a fancy funeral home and had become comfortable and happy.
“There is no danger,” she said as she walked back to the car. “I told you that years ago.”
I remembered the hot apartment, panic, fear, and pain — and Mother’s contorted mask-like face. “You said you’d fix Mr. Conklin.”
“I wanted to comfort you,” my mother said, looking at me calmly. “But people are different. You would have been happier not knowing. You lack the taste for vengeance. It is a shame you never went to the sisters. They would have approved.”
“I would have suspected anyway,” I said. “We packed right up and left.”
Mother gave a slight shrug. “We’d have gone immediately in any case. Aileen hated me; she’d have had us out of the apartment before his funeral.”
“I was terrified you’d be questioned,” I said. “For years I worried that someone would come, that you’d be taken away, that somehow…”
“We didn’t exist,” said Mother. “If he told me that once, he told me a hundred times.”
“But the knife, the fingerprints, the other workers? There must have been evidence. Look at this place — where was there to hide anything?”
Mother got back in the car and fastened her seatbelt before answering. “I didn’t have a plan,” she said. “I’ve been told that makes a difference, not planning I mean. I don’t even know all that was in my mind when I went out the door after him. It was around ten fifteen. He was going to the night deposit, but first he stepped out for a smoke — one of those vile cigars. There was a boning knife on the counter, sharp as a razor. I picked it up because I wanted him to know I was serious. I was desperate and hot and sick, and my heart was breaking. He’d gone too far. I wanted to tell him that he was never, ever to touch either of us again.”
“What did he say?”
Mother’s face grew dark and reflective. “He laughed,” she said. “He had trampled my heart; he had hurt the one person I had left, my only treasure, and still he laughed — you see what it is to be rich and powerful. Then he said that I was looking older, and I understood everything. We were nothing to him, nothing at all, and he was thinking of you for a replacement.”
“I was ten years old,” I said in a small voice.
“There was really nothing else to do,” Mother said. “I was surprised he took such a long time to fall.”
I imagined the night parking lot with the moths swirling around the security lights, the long shadows, the urban smells of hot asphalt, exhaust, and garbage cans, and my mother, young then and frightened, standing by the stair with a knife in her hand. “Everyone thought it was a robbery,” I said.
“So it was: the day’s taking from two restaurants,” Mother said with a slight smile. “The police blamed the gangs, the Puerto Ricans, wild kids from the project. What else could they do? He’d managed very carefully, and very few people knew me.”
“But the knife?” I asked. “What about the knife?”
“You don’t know restaurants,” she said. “Restaurants are full of knives. I rinsed off the boning knife in the sink and threw it in the dishwasher. As far as I was thinking at all, I figured the staff would unload it the next morning and put it back in the rack as usual.”
“Of course,” I said. I realized that my brave and decisive mother was untouched by fantasy. While I had been tormented for years by fears of discovery and loss and guilt, failure had never crossed her mind. She was a woman without imagination. “But didn’t he have a wallet? Didn’t he used to carry something for the money?”
Mother opened her pocketbook and pulled out a battered green leather zippered purse that I’d seen a thousand times without recognition. “No matter where you discard things, they’re apt to be found,” she said calmly.
I was dazzled by the simplicity of her strategy, which had required only nerve and silence. Until now. I could not decide whether her guilty secret had finally and irresistibly resurfaced — as guilty secrets are supposed to do — or whether she felt a satisfaction that demanded recognition. I realized uneasily that the parish gentlemen who admired and feared my mother were right. Life had made her desperate, and then it had made her remarkable. Mr. Conklin had been hit by a force quite out of his reckoning.