And the Dark Sacred Night (44 page)

A third car is wedged into the scattering of peastone beside the lawn. Seated on the chaise with her back to the house, a woman is examining Fanny’s stone collection, the girl kneeling on the ground, handing select specimens to her grandmother. Kit and Will stand behind Fanny, watching.

The woman turns her head at the sound of the screen door clapping shut. She looks almost too young to have been a grandmother for nearly a decade. But that, as Shakespeare would say, is the rub. The crux of the matter. The knot in the cord. Her smile is quizzical, uncommitted. It startles Fenno to see in her expression that she has thought about him and that she wishes him to see this.

“Daphne. I’m glad you came.” He offers his hand.

She stands and takes it. “Kit is stubborn when determined.”

Like his father. Though stubbornness is hardly a rare quality, especially in men. Fenno offers to fetch her baggage.

She leads him to her car. She is the kind of slim called willowy. Her long hair, still half blond, is shot through with micalike glints of gray and springs haphazardly free from a plait that’s been crushed against a car seat for hours. Her dress, clingy but long, is the color of blackberries.

Fenno tries to see her through Mal’s eyes—but how many years ago was that? He stops himself from doing the sums, calculating everyone’s shocking age.

“I’ve always wondered about this place,” she says as she opens the car door.

“Let me.” Fenno reaches past her for the small suitcase.

She pulls out a posh shopping bag tufted with tissue and curlicued ribbon. He takes it as well. It’s large but light: not the customary vessels of wine or jam.

Kit joins them, reaching for the suitcase. Fenno gives in. “All right then. I hope you don’t mind that we’ve assigned your mum to the other bed in your room. Quarters are a bit tight. Lucinda can have the foldaway in the den, downstairs. Though we could juggle it up, put the women together and—”

“No,” Daphne says. “I’m happy to bunk with my son. We shared a room until he was five.”

Kit frowns slightly at this disclosure. He takes the suitcase into the house and up the steep colonial stairs. The children follow, eager to show off their allegedly historic lair. “Come see where they hid the slaves!” says Fanny.

In the kitchen, Walter is arranging hors d’oeuvres on yet another platter. “Reality-TV-show contestant number two? How’s it looking so far? Keeping up with the Kardashians yet?”

“You will wear me out before they do.”

Walter laughs his stage laugh. “Wearing you out is not a challenge these days, let me tell you that.”

“Any chance we could prattle about the weather again?”

In fact, Walter’s beloved laptop sits beside the microwave; taking Fenno seriously, he hits the touch pad and presto, the dark screen becomes a multicolored, enigmatically patterned map of the country, the meteorologist’s MRI. Walter points to the telltale spiral of a hurricane off the mid-Atlantic coast. Walter twirls his finger in imitation
of its conjectured path. He does his well-practiced rendition of the theme to
Jaws
.

“Sounds like you’re hoping it will hit us.”

Walter shuts the laptop. “Of course not. But we need to make like Scouts and be prepared. So I went out this morning for batteries, extra flashlights, and jugs of water. Proud of me?”

“Wouldn’t we just get in our cars and leave?”

“As if we’d be the only ones. We’d end up being blown off the Sagamore Bridge, along with the rest of the lemmings stuck in traffic.”

Fenno wonders if Walter is hoping to sabotage this gathering, despite his promise in the therapist’s office that he would take none of it personally, that he would see himself as Fenno’s rock-solid present, at which he would never have arrived without the igneous past inextricably stratified throughout.

“The past is never really past,” said Julian, the therapist Walter insisted they see. “Which is why psychotherapy exists in the first place. Do you know that song, ‘What a Wonderful World’? You do, I’m sure,” he said when Fenno looked willfully blank. “Louis Armstrong? We hear it so often that it’s become about as moving as a beer jingle. But it’s beautiful. Have you ever listened to the lyrics, closely? The list of things that prove how wonderful the world really is? I’m taken every time by this: ‘the bright blessed day and the dark sacred night.’ ”

The therapist paused for their reaction. After a beat, Walter said, “Well, I am definitely the day, and boy is he ever the night.”

Julian laughed with what sounded to Fenno like calculated warmth. “That’s funny, Walter, and we should revisit that thought. But what I mean is that the past is like the night: dark yet sacred. It’s the time when most of us sleep, so we think of the day as the time we really live, the only time that
matters
, because the stuff we do by day somehow makes us who we are. We feel the same way about the present. We say,
Let bygones be bygones
 … water under the bridge. But there is no day without night, no wakefulness without sleep, no present without past. They are constantly somersaulting over each other.”

After that homily, Fenno nearly freed himself from the overly plushy couch and the overly Buddhafied office. Julian’s bony yet
lustrously tanned physique (his clothing almost entirely white) put Fenno in mind of some desert cult leader—yet Fenno also knew, too well, his own phobias surrounding the confessional culture of his adopted country. Now several months into this ritual, he has come to accept that the weekly sessions with Julian give Walter a better place and time to vent his frustrations than their apartment at an hour far too late for sane, coherent discourse.

Fenno hears the murmur of Kit and Daphne talking in the guest room above the kitchen. At least there’s a real ceiling here, in the newer part of the house; Fenno prefers to do his eavesdropping on purpose. He also hears the percussion of the children’s bare feet on the front stairs. They appear almost instantly in the doorway.

“Are we allowed to be hungry yet?” asks Fanny.

“Hungry? Hungry is what makes my world go round,” says Walter. He hands her a plate of biscuits, cheese, and sliced pear, all surrounding a bowl of chocolate-covered almonds. “Take it outside, and do not feed the wildlife—by which I mean all those boys dressed as girls on the sidewalk. They bite.”

Will giggles.

Felicity, from her post on top of her cage, chuckles in response.

After the children leave, Walter says, “Don’t look at me like that. I mean, do you think their dad gave them the PG-rated spiel on Ptown? This week of
all
weeks. Just think how many Cinderellas, Ariels, Jasmines, and Briar Roses, right this very minute, are teasing out their wigs at the Crown and Anchor. No hurricane’s going to put
those
crinolines out of commission.” It so happens that this is the weekend leading up to Carnival Week; the theme is Classic Disney.

Fenno laughs. Walter’s wit has been described as indefatigable. It has also been described as tyrannical and tedious. But his gentle side is worth all the bluff and buffoonery. Walter is emotive, at times volcanic, but Walter is also wise.

Fenno looks at the clock. “Oh, crikey.” It’s twenty past six. He runs out the front door and across the lawn; on foot, it will take him fifteen minutes to reach the ferry slip—and that doesn’t account for the painful weaving through crowds (worse yet, crowds in costume).

Walter was right: the Disney princesses are already out in minor force. The sky is assertively blue, as is the bay beneath it: hard to believe that the weather could betray them anytime soon. Two men
dressed as generic Prince Charmings are strolling too slowly in front of him, eating ice-cream cones, their polyester capes swishing capaciously from side to side. “Pardon me,” says Fenno, sidling around them. He does hate this particular stretch of Commercial, where the hedgerows surrender to an enervating succession of taffy and tackle shops, the entire district a farrago of trivial, disposable merchandise, crystal paperweights alongside flip-flops, scented candles shelved beneath kites. How cruel a cosmos where
these
places survive yet a bookstore founders.

A fudge shop, he thinks as he skirts a line of people extending nearly half a block down from the door of a confectionery. That’s what he should open: a bloody fudge shop. Though Walter would warn him about the meat-versus-chocolate equation. How about a brickle-and-bacon shop, then? Maybe he ought to have sold bacon and brickle alongside the books. Brickle ’n’ Bacon ’n’ Books! BacoBrickoBookshop!

Fenno is working himself into a sweaty funk, not a good state of mind in which to greet Lucinda Burns, whom he has not seen in seven years. When they spoke on the phone about Kit, they were focused on a subject so emotionally momentous that to discuss their falling-out would have been counterproductive, retrograde—yet here it is in the front of his mind, the past somersaulting into the present, night intruding on day. Is it better or worse that he will greet her alone?

He realizes that he didn’t ask whether she could walk for any distance. How has she aged? She is … is she eighty years old yet? He can no longer remember her age. Could he get a pedicab to take them back? He begins to perspire more heavily from nerves than from exertion.

Walter was right: he is off his trolley to have arranged this weekend. Well, maybe he can keep company entirely with the nippers. He’s had the requisite heart-to-heart with Kit, whose nature—to his relief and to his chagrin—reminded him very little of Mal’s. Kit is a kinder or at least humbler man than his father; is that because he
is
a father? Whatever men acted as Mal’s stand-ins for Kit, it would appear they did a decent job. Or maybe being raised by a mother alone was the best fate possible. Fenno tries to imagine having been raised only by his mum, whom some people saw as more devoted to
her rigorously trained collies than to her three sons. But they turned out fine. Fine enough.

Arriving at the crowded pier, Fenno sees that the ferry came in on schedule. “Bollocks,” he mutters. He zigzags through the phalanx of passengers lugging their bulky belongings toward the town.

He is nearly at the end of the pier when he sees her, standing patiently beside her rolling case. She doesn’t look so different. Her once-reddish hair is now thoroughly gray, pinned back rather than loose, but she looks fit, not the least bit stooped. She wears a gauzy lavender skirt and ruffled white blouse, still one of those rare women who do not look silly in clothing designed for a younger generation. He waves, but she is busy reading a pamphlet.

Not until he stands before her does she look up. She makes it easy by throwing her arms around him and holding him close. She smells like roses. When they separate, he sees that she is tearful.

“Are you all right?” he asks. The pamphlet she’s holding advertises the whale watch tours; what, other than the prices, could have made her cry?

“I’m fine. It’s just—all these young men …”

Fenno smiles sympathetically. “All these gay young men.”

“They look so healthy.” She wipes at her eyes. “Is that a terrible thing to notice? Because it’s so much better than if … I didn’t mean—”

“I know,” says Fenno. “I know exactly what you mean.” Though in truth, the gay community here tends toward amnesia. This place is not about conscience; here, the past belongs to another dimension. In the context of something like Carnival, the AIDS epidemic feels as necessarily distant as the era when polio took its toll. Even in New York, there is a growing if unspoken sentiment that those who’ve survived—many becoming arthritic, contemplating lifted chins—deserve a time to be carefree, to go back to acting like they just might be immortal. All right, so they’re alive! Still, they were cheated. Shouldn’t they be immune to every iteration of cancer, to diabetes and heart attacks, even the freak accident involving the crazy cabdriver who texts while running a light? Don’t they get a do-over on the callow youth they never quite got to enjoy?

Lucinda tells Fenno how glad she is to see him, and clearly she means it. He wants to tell her he’s just as glad, but he asks her how
mobile she is, and she says, “March me wherever you like. Walking sharpens my mind.”

He wants to tell her that he’s sorry they let their quarrel estrange them, but he asks if she’d like a bottle of water. At a souvenir shop (condoms next to seashell key rings?) Fenno pays six dollars for two bottles of water whose labeling implies that it comes from the South Pacific. He opens one and hands it to her.

“Nice and cold,” she says. As they sip their water, Fenno takes the suitcase and wheels it along. She does her best to stay beside him as they join the burgeoning fantasia on Commercial.

He asks her about Zeke. His speech has improved a lot, Lucinda says, but he’s had to face retirement—for good. He’s focusing all his ambitions on physical therapy, and she dreads the day when he will have made as much progress as he can. “He can do stairs now, but he can’t even walk to the end of the driveway.”

Fenno remembers the straight pebbled lane leading from the country road to that dowager of a farmhouse, plainspoken in its lack of adornment: its tall unshuttered windows and narrow skirting of porch. He remembers the austere antiques, the vitrines containing dozens of trophies veined with intransigent tarnish. Behind the house, that mammoth barn, vacant but lovingly preserved, and the undulation of flowering fields. Mal once showed him a picture of the farm during his childhood, when the fields were grazed by dairy cows and the barn was one of four. Fenno was there just once, for the so-called celebration of Mal’s life, the dispersal of Mal’s ashes on Lake Champlain. It was ghastly for Fenno, not the least bit celebratory or cathartic. He felt hopeless, woebegone, his heart fissured and thorny, like the stone tossed away to shrivel and crack after the fruit is consumed. And when he looked closely at Lucinda that day, he could tell that behind her mask of gratitude she felt the very same way.

“Zeke doesn’t like slowing down, not one bit,” she says, “but we can still go out with friends, enjoy ourselves in a private way. He just has to make peace with surrendering the public.”