Before You Know Kindness (11 page)

CATHERINE PADDED ACROSS
the grass toward her sister-in-law and her nephew like a cat. Not a timid house cat: a feral cat, a mouser, the sort of strong and lithe feline that kills for a living. Her tennis sneakers barely touched the ground as she walked, and though she was sweating—it had taken her more effort to dispose of young Gary Winslow than she had expected—she wasn’t tired and she moved with an undulant allure.

“That’s Willow’s mom, right?” Gary said to her as they approached Sara.

“Yes, indeed.”

“A shrink?”

“Therapist,” she answered, and as she said the word she wondered what her sister-in-law the therapist would think when she turned around and saw her striding across the grass with this young buck of a teenager. The truth was that Gary was simply going to introduce himself to the woman who was Willow’s mom and then change into a swimsuit for his shift at the pool (and, suddenly, she thought of the swimsuit she had with her in her canvas bag and feared that it would seem matronly to this . . . boy). That was the only reason he was coming this way with her, after all, it wasn’t really like the two of them were . . . together. But Catherine wondered if someone less perceptive than Sara might presume there was something vaguely untoward about her spending time with a strange teenager, the two of them glistening with sweat.

Sara looked up from the baby at her side and held her hand flat over her wild eyebrows like a visor. And the woman did indeed have big eyebrows. Sara was attractive, but with her eyebrows in need of attention, her coffee-colored hair the length of a teenager’s—hair that was growing now the first telltale filaments of white, a few strands sprinkled in amid the brown just above her ears—and those eyeglasses even more dated than the ones worn by her own brother, John, she looked a tad too earthy for Catherine. Especially today in those sandals with clunky straps and those shorts the color of army fatigues.

Catherine remembered when John had first brought Sara to Manhattan to meet their mother and her and Spencer. John had discovered her while skiing in Vermont—within weeks, actually, of her and Spencer’s own wedding—and unlike almost everyone else in the lodge that afternoon she was actually from the Green Mountains. Had grown up in a town northeast of Burlington. Her father taught at the University of Vermont, in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, and he was one of the country’s leading experts on a bug with the appalling-sounding name of the pear thrip. Being an expert on the pear thrip mattered in Vermont, because pear thrips liked to eat maple tree leaves. Sara’s mother was the secretary at the village’s elementary school, but she had recently retired. In any case, when Sara first saw the courtyard and the columns in Nan Seton’s Manhattan apartment building, the cobblestone circle into which the town cars and taxis would travel while awaiting the privileged who lived in the great monolith of a structure, the doormen—there was not a single doorman, not here; there was instead a cadre of wizened old men and enthusiastic young ones scattered throughout the courtyard and standing vigil inside the elevators, some in blue uniforms and some in gray, all of whom had thick, lyric Irish accents—and then the endless sprawl that was the apartment itself, she seemed ill at ease. She had been quiet when she was getting the tour, and when she finally said something more than a monosyllabic murmur of appreciation, she had shaken her head and announced in a voice—playful, yes, but the awe, it was clear, was real, too—“Imagine. And to think I’d thought that everybody in New York City (at least everybody I’d ever meet) lived in those teeny-tiny studios where you slept on a convertible couch by the kitchen.” Catherine remembered that her mother had been charming: She laughed and with a self-deprecating shrug explained to John’s girlfriend that she and her husband had bought the apartment in the mid-1970s, when Manhattan real estate was worth a little less than property along the Love Canal. Nevertheless, Catherine thought that while there had been wonderment in Sara’s reaction, there had also been a slight whiff of disapproval—as if Sara saw something decadent in the plates with the gold leaf in the breakfront or in the notion that although there wasn’t a live-in maid, there really were two small bedrooms in the back of the apartment near the kitchen that were referred to as the maids’ rooms. Catherine recalled experiencing an unpleasant quiver of guilt, and suddenly the Japanese screens and the Italian floor tile seemed ostentatious. Showy. Dissolute.

Yet Sara never seemed to manifest any particular bias toward either the proletariat or the rustic sugar makers, loggers, or beleaguered dairy farmers in her own corner of the country, and so over time Catherine decided that she had read more into Sara’s reaction than was there. Still, Sara’s upcountry lack of refinement had made an impression on Catherine, and though Sara had since earned a series of postgraduate degrees and then joined a large and thriving counseling practice, in some ways Catherine still viewed the woman—even though she and Sara were in fact the same age—as a younger sister who would always need a bit of her guidance.

Behind Sara, Catherine saw their two girls sitting on towels on the cement on the side of the pool. Her daughter was wearing a tank suit today, because—bless her own mother’s heart—yesterday Nan had accidentally left the two strips of black that Charlotte had chosen as her summer bathing suit in the trunk of the car overnight, and when they finally found them this morning they had still been damp and they smelled like a tire iron. Even her daughter had had the common sense to see that she couldn’t wear the string thing today, and she had donned her green and yellow Speedo without a fuss.

“Sara, this is Gary Winslow,” she said, and quickly Gary squatted like a baseball catcher so that he was eye level with her sister-in-law. She hadn’t expected this sort of impulsive graciousness on the lad’s part, and she was impressed. “Gary is a lifeguard,” she added. “His grandparents are Kelsey and Irene Winslow.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” Sara said.

“I’ve had a wonderful time watching over your daughter this month. She’s terrific,” he told her, and Catherine felt a twinge of jealousy, a small spasm of resentment. This was awfully similar to what he had said to her about her own daughter when he’d introduced himself at the tennis court not forty-five minutes ago.

“She’s having a nice summer,” Sara said. “Thank you.”

“And this must be her brother. Patrick, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

He smiled at the infant, and then with a teenage boy’s complete unease around babies—a discomfort that actually bordered on fear—he quickly turned back to Sara. Patrick reached out a hand toward him, batting at the air, and he might have cried out for this new person to pay him the attention he was accustomed to receiving, but he seemed to like the swishing feel the air made on his skin when he sliced his arm like a sword. “Has Willow showed you how well she can dive?” Gary asked.

“She has. It was one of the first things she did when we got to the club yesterday. She and Charlotte have been at it again most of this morning. They only stopped a couple of minutes ago.”

“Gwen is teaching them. I can’t dive to save my life, but Gwen is awesome. She’s got the girls doing somersaults and inwards. Amazing.”

“I saw.”

“Mrs. McCullough just destroyed me on the tennis court. You play?” he asked.

Catherine found herself looking away, slightly relieved that he had called her Mrs. McCullough in front of her sister-in-law. At the tennis court, when they were changing sides after their fifth game, he had referred to her as Mrs. McCullough with such obsequiousness that she had told him he could call her Catherine. And, for the rest of the match, he had. Now, however, she was glad that he understood instinctively that around Sara a certain deference was in order.

So long, of course, as he didn’t overdo it.

“I only play when I’m here,” Sara replied, and she made it sound as if she played under duress. As if someone—a Seton, a McCullough—put a gun to her head.

“We just had an awesome game—me and Mrs. McCullough.”

Catherine rolled her eyes for Sara’s benefit. Now he was overdoing it: One “Mrs. McCullough” was appropriate; two, especially in such close proximity, made her sound geriatric.

“Oh, so that’s what you were doing,” Sara said, as if she hadn’t known. As if she thought the tennis rackets they were holding were mere props. She was smiling when she said it so Catherine would know she was kidding.

“Yup,” Gary said, and then his eyes trailed down Sara’s legs to her ankle. “I like your tattoo.”

“Ah, yes. I got that years ago.”

“It’s pretty.”

“Thank you.”

Catherine understood why men found tattoos on a woman erotic: It suggested she enjoyed forbidden things, was excited by taboos. It meant that she thought about her body as an object of ornamentation (or that she simply thought about her body at all). Still, Catherine didn’t see how a wraparound tattoo of a little ivy could compensate for such dowdy shorts.

She was about to say something now to pull Gary’s eyes away from her sister-in-law’s legs, and her mind was trying to finalize the thought: perhaps note that Sara was married to her older brother. She didn’t have to open her mouth to divert the young man’s attention, however, because in the sky in the distance they all heard a small engine, and they looked up at once and saw an ultralight plane—a hang glider with an engine, really—moving in slow motion against the hulking silhouette of Mount Lafayette. Gary stood so he could see it better, and even the pair of girls by the pool left their towels on the cement and ran over so they, too, could watch the strange, birdlike machine motor high above them in the crisp, cloudless air.

FROM THE PARKING LOT
of the garden nursery Spencer could also hear the steady rumble of the ultralight, but he had no interest in the craft. He stood before the minivan for barely an additional second before climbing inside and slamming the door. Slamming it so hard the four thousand pounds of rented metal actually rocked back and forth on the wide radial tires. He had bought nothing, and he was frustrated. No urines, no pepper sprays, no magic deterrent that would keep the deer at a distance. He was going to drive now to the club with absolutely nothing to show for his visit to the garden center—or, for that matter, for the hour and a half he had spent surfing the Web that morning, enduring the nightmarishly sluggish download of each image onto his laptop computer’s screen.

He wondered what the ancient Stoics did to protect their produce—or the Essenes or the Manicheans. Actually, he had a dispiriting feeling he knew what the Manicheans did: They probably posted their slaves in their gardens. Clearly that wasn’t an option here.

Nevertheless, it infuriated him that the only thing even the owner of the nursery himself could suggest was a fence.

“Make it six and a half to ten feet high, and you should be in business,” the guy had said. “You’ll be safe from most deer if you make it six and a half feet tall, but you’ll be safe to the max if you go for a ten-footer. No deer is going to jump three yards and change to get a little Swiss chard.”

The owner had long, jet black hair that he tied back in a ponytail, and the reddest eyes Spencer had ever seen at ten thirty in the morning. Or, at least, the reddest eyes he had seen at ten thirty in the morning since college. He was so thin that he looked almost gaunt, and he was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt with a silkscreen of a massive, fully open crimson peony on the front. Spencer could almost see real ants attempting to climb among the two-dimensional petals. The owner had a smaller, less vibrant tattoo of a flower on each of his biceps. One looked to be a faded purple pansy, but Spencer couldn’t quite tell what the other one was. Monkshood, maybe. Foxglove, perhaps. Maybe it wasn’t even a flower at all: Maybe it was a biker’s helmet of some sort. Either way, it was rough-looking—both the tattoos were—and nothing like the delicate, almost genteel bit of latticework that his own sister-in-law had had needled into the skin around her ankle when she was eighteen.

“I don’t want a fence,” Spencer had told him.

“Then get a great big thorny thing.”

“A great big thorny thing?” Spencer asked. He expected more precision from the owner of the nursery than “a great big thorny thing.”

“Rows of them. Build walls and walls of big thorny things. Deer hate thorns. Me, too. Don’t carry a whole lot that has thorns—other than roses, of course. No one likes thorns, you know?”

“I do know. Certainly I don’t like them.”

“Evergreens, then? How about evergreens? I got two or three Fat Alberts you could take with you. Three seventy-five apiece,” he said, and Spencer knew enough about trees to know that he meant $375.

“I doubt three would be enough.”

“Oh, you got that right. I just meant to get you started. How big is your garden?”

“Maybe a third of an acre.”

The man whistled, shook his head, and then allowed himself a laugh that sounded a bit like a snort. “You’d need a hell of a lot more than two or three trees. You got to build a fortress with them, you know!”

“It was your idea.”

“I didn’t realize your garden was . . . was a farm.”

“It’s not a farm.”

“You hunt?”

“No.”

“I was going to say if you started—”

“I don’t hunt. I don’t even eat meat. I work for FERAL.”

He nodded. “Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of FERAL. You’re the folks who hate dairy farmers, right?”

“We don’t hate dairy farmers. Why would you think such a thing?”

“My nephew’s in college, and one year he and his roommate had this poster on their wall. It said something like ‘You don’t have to milk barley and hops.’ It was a picture of a giant hop, and it had all these suction tubes and—”

“I know the poster. The point wasn’t to say that anyone hates dairy farmers—”

“And wasn’t there some farmer in a leather mask? One of those creepy executioner’s S-and-M hoods you see in . . . well, you know, you see some places?”

“No!”

“Oh.”

“There was one very stylized photograph of some natural barley being treated like a dairy cow,” Spencer told him, struggling to keep his voice even. He remembered well the fallout from the “Milk Is Cruel Food” disaster. It had kicked off late summer, almost two years ago now, and its purpose was to educate college students—huge milk drinkers—about the inhumanity of the corporate dairy industry. The vacuum pumps that were attached to the cows’ udders, the male calves that were sent away to be slaughtered. The shadowy growth hormones that increased production.