Before You Know Kindness (43 page)

“I’m torn.”

“Go ahead.”

“I was wondering if I should go to the press conference. Or, to be specific, I was wondering what would happen if I told Spencer this weekend that I would show up at the press conference if he goes ahead with it.”

“And the point would be?”

“Talk him out of having it. Convince him that I would cause such chaos with my presence that it wouldn’t be worth it to FERAL or to his lawsuit.”

“And you would do this . . . why? So you’re not humiliated?”

“So Charlotte and I both are not humiliated. I’ve spent the last few weeks worrying about this. I’ve worried about how I will look to Willow. To you. To our friends. I’ve worried about how Charlotte will deal with the notoriety that will surround her. At dinner tonight it dawned on me that perhaps I don’t have to take this lying down. I thought I had to because I owed it to Spencer. But I’m less sure of that now.”

“And you believe you could scare Spencer out of having the press conference by telling him you’ll show up?”

Her voice was thoughtful and soft: questioning his idea, certainly, but offering at least the courtesy that she thought his plan had a small kernel of potential. Hearing it verbalized by someone else, however, made it clear to him how completely absurd the notion was. Spencer wasn’t going to cancel the press conference simply because his brother-in-law had announced he was going to be present. And Spencer’s associates would actually revel in the reality that he was there. They could make the public pillory that was about to become his life even more uncomfortable, even more unpleasant.

“Unfortunately, it doesn’t make sense when the idea is spoken aloud, does it?” he said, putting his arm around her shoulder and pulling her to him as they walked.

She shrugged lightly. She’d made her point.

Nevertheless, he vowed that he would talk to Spencer this weekend. Face to face. And though he didn’t believe he could persuade his brother-in-law to abandon the idea of the press conference, perhaps he could convince him to be kind. Perhaps he could remind him that once, not all that long ago, they had been friends.

CATHERINE PHONED
her mother and told her about the dog, and then John got on the phone and she told him. When John asked to speak with Spencer, she pleaded his case to her husband, but he refused to pick up the receiver.

And so an hour and a half later, having avoided her husband since hanging up the telephone, after kissing her daughter good night and petting her daughter’s dog—the animal was on the carpet in Charlotte’s room as the girl tapped away on her computer, sending instant messages to the Dudesters and Dreamdates and Lexicon-Domos who were her friends—she climbed into bed beside Spencer. She was still as miffed as she’d been when she’d informed her brother that her husband had no intention of removing even a single brick from the Berlin Wall he had built between them. He was thumbing through color layouts of the pages from the upcoming FERAL holiday catalog, pressing blank Post-it notes onto some of the corners with his left hand. Both of their cats were curled on the chaise lounge by the window, but Emma’s eyes were open and they were wary: She was watching the door for any sign of the dog.

“You’re mad at me because I won’t talk to John,” he said when she was settled in on her side of the bed.

She considered ignoring him, but then decided against it. She’d ignored him for the last ninety minutes and it hadn’t proven particularly satisfying. “Yes,” she said. “I am.”

“I’m sorry, sweetheart, I can’t. I simply can’t.”

“That’s apparent.”

“Would you like to discuss it?”

“What’s there to discuss? We’ve been over this ground so many times . . .” Her voice broke, and she was surprised.

He put the pages down on his nightstand and turned to her, contemplating her for a long moment. He knew she wanted to say something, but he didn’t know what. “Where’s Tanya?” he asked finally.

“With Charlotte.”

“We had a nice walk tonight,” he said.

“I’m happy for you.”

“But you’re not happy for yourself? Are you really that angry with me for getting our daughter a pet?”

“I’m angry . . .”

“Yes?”

“I’m angry at you for a lot of reasons.”

“I know.”

“And . . .” She paused, wondering whether to continue. Finally: “I just don’t know how I can go on this way. How we can go on this way.”

“I know that, too.”

“Do you care?”

“Of course I care. And I’m trying, Catherine, really I am. Haven’t I seemed less cranky? Less a pain in the ass? Tell me honestly.”

“Oh, you have. But . . .”

“Talk to me. Please.”

She thought of the different sources of her annoyance, the springs that were feeding her resentment—including, she had to admit, his sudden placidity and tolerance when it came to her eating meat, behavior that seemed more punishing and hurtful on some level than if he had chastised her, because it was as if he’d simply concluded that she (like her mother and her brother) was beyond redemption. She decided as well that she could rail at him for not talking to her brother, for getting a dog without consulting her, even for the last year of neglect. Hadn’t he himself just alluded to this issue? But when she considered what really was troubling her most at the moment, she concluded it was the sheer inconsistency—the utter irrationality—of his behavior toward their daughter these days. On the one hand, he had become Jim Anderson from
Father Knows Best;
on the other, he was going ahead with that hateful press conference next week. That was the issue, and it had been driven home to her this evening by his unwillingness, once again, to speak with John. “Okay,” she said, trying to remain as calm as he was, “one minute you’re getting Charlotte this sweet dog and the next you’re planning to embarrass her at the press conference. I just don’t see how you can do that.”

“Charlotte won’t be embarrassed. And I hope John won’t be—at least not too dramatically. Paige doesn’t think much of him, but eventually she’ll need him as an ally against Adirondack. She’ll be careful. And even if John is a little uncomfortable, well, the fact is he was the one who left a loaded rifle sitting around in the trunk of his car.”

“Charlotte
will
be embarrassed. How can she not be? I know she was crying with Dr. Warwick today.”

“Really?”

“Yes!”

He brought his left fingers to his mouth in a tight fist and blew onto them. These days they sometimes grew cold. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised,” he said softly. “For the rest of her life she does have to deal with this. And though I know it’s not her fault, we both know she feels guilty.”

“And the press conference will make her feel even worse!”

“See, that’s where we disagree. I won’t let that happen. I know what I’m going to say. I know what Paige and Dominique are going to say.”

“Her name will be splattered all over the newspapers and on the TV news for shooting her father! How can that not make her feel horrible?”

“Her name won’t ever be mentioned at the—”

“You’re kidding yourself! You’re being ridiculous! You should have heard Paige warning her about the media at breakfast last week.”

He gazed at his fingers and then did something he hadn’t done in a very long time. Slowly, as if the digits extending out from the gauze and the tape were breakable twigs of glass, he moved them toward the side of her neck, and then—as if her neck, too, were a fragile wisp of porcelain sculpture—he stroked her. He petted her. He ran his hand gently along the skin as if he were touching it for the first time, his eyes focused on her neck and then on her face. Her eyes.

“It’ll be fine,” he whispered, his voice so soft she barely heard him. “It’ll be fine.”

“How?” she asked. She felt the pulse in her neck beneath his fingers. She considered pulling away: She was almost too angry to be touched. But it had been a very long time since he had touched her like this, and she couldn’t bring herself to move.

“I just know it will be. I am trying . . .”

“Yes?”

“I am trying to treat people like animals. I am trying not to be angry.”

“I’ve noticed. Sometimes, I have, anyway.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Tanya. I thought you’d like the surprise, too.”

She nodded, and she felt the soft skin of his thumb on the side of her jaw.

“And I am sorry about . . . oh, there’s lots I am sorry about, Catherine. Lots. There is so much I wish I could do over. And so these days I’m trying. Really, I am. I’m trying.”

Now she did reach for his hand, and she pulled it before her face and stared at the dots of blood that had soaked through the bandages there. He
was
trying, she had to agree; she didn’t know quite what that meant, but she guessed that trying was better than not trying . . .

“Please, then,” she said, “for me and for Charlotte, will you talk to John? You don’t want the next time you see him to be in court, if it comes to that, or at my mother’s funeral.”

She heard the thump of one of the cats bounding onto the foot of the bed, and she looked up and saw that Emma had leapt from the chaise to the mattress and was walking now across the bedspread. The animal waited by Spencer’s legs, and then hopped over them and into her lap, where she started to knead at the cotton of her nightgown.

“I guess I’m not all that popular,” he said.

She realized that because she had been holding Spencer’s left hand, he’d been unable to pet or massage or hold Emma—to show the animal that her presence was welcome.

“Emma just wants a little physical reassurance,” she told him. “It’s what we all want, I guess.”

“Could you help me change into my pajamas? Is now a good time?”

“Of course. It’s fine.”

“Thank you.”

“And will you talk to John? Will you at least consider the idea?”

He exhaled a long breath and sounded tired. “Yeah, I will,” he said finally.

“Yeah, you’ll consider it?”

“Yeah, I’ll talk to him. I’ll . . .”

She couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing, and she was afraid that she might have misunderstood him. She brought his fingers to her mouth and kissed them. She kissed each one, and when she was through she heard him murmuring something about how he might join them all at the Cloisters in the morning, and maybe he and John would go for a walk. He didn’t know, he’d play it by ear. But he would definitely go with them to the Cloisters.

Thirty

W
hen the two girls had been younger, they would run into each other’s arms when they were reunited in New York or New Hampshire and hug each other like lovers, their bodies colliding in a minor ecstasy. They would wrap their arms around each other’s backs and there had even been a time—he guessed it had been when Charlotte was seven or eight—when his niece would actually lift his daughter into the air and spin her beloved younger cousin around as if they were in a perfume commercial. Even now, however, one girl thirteen and the other on the cusp of eleven, ages when they could be self-conscious about everything, they still scampered playfully toward each other like baby colts. Charlotte no longer lifted Willow off her feet and their embraces weren’t as long as in years past, but whatever the ties were—blood, history, friendship—they still were solid. The girls held each other, and Charlotte patted her shorter cousin on the back.

A dozen yards behind Charlotte, winding their way through a small crowd surrounding a pair of musicians dressed up like Chaucerian minstrels, he saw his sister and a strange man with a beard. It took him a moment to realize it was his brother-in-law. Behind them he could see the western tower of the George Washington Bridge and the graceful, sloped curves formed by the stay ropes and suspender cables on the New York side. The families had planned to meet at the top of the stone steps at the entrance to the Cloisters itself, rather than here in the middle of Fort Tryon Park, but here they all were—even Spencer.

He’d never seen Spencer with a beard, and the combination of the whiskers and the mere fact that the man was present caused him a brief second of disbelief, then incredulity:
Is that really Spencer? Has he really come along?
The giveaway was the sling. Spencer’s right arm was strapped in a sling across a blue cotton tennis shirt, the fabric a pale echo of the cobalt sky above them.

John knew that even if he and Spencer hadn’t been feuding, they never would have greeted each other with anything like the exuberance of their daughters. Given, however, that they were sparring (rather, that Spencer was sparring with him), he tried to decide how much ardor and warmth he should manifest now. He felt a September breeze coming up off the Hudson, warmer than the wind in Vermont, riffling the leaves on the park’s maples and oaks.

Willow was pulling Charlotte over to them, and he and Sara both took turns hugging their niece. She looked like she had grown since New Hampshire, but then John decided it was something else. She seemed more poised. He wondered if a few weeks in eighth grade could change a girl so much. She was wearing a denim skirt and a balsam-colored cotton cardigan, and now that she was done greeting her cousin she was carrying herself as if she were . . .

And then he got it. She was carrying herself as if she were that kid in the play she was in. That proper British orphan. He thought he might even have heard the suggestion of a British accent when she had said hello.

“Heavens! Spencer has a beard!” It was Nan speaking, apparently more taken aback by her son-in-law’s facial hair than the reality that he had deigned to join them. Gently she pushed the stroller with her grandson back and forth, fearing, perhaps, that her small outburst had upset the child. Patrick wasn’t sleeping, but at the moment he was content to bat at the small plastic boats that dangled before him from the awning of the pram.

“Yes, isn’t it nice that Father chose to come along, too?” Charlotte said, allowing that small hint of a British accent to become almost overwhelming. John didn’t believe he had ever heard his niece refer to Spencer as
Father,
and he was quite certain that collapsing an
er
sound into an
a
was a new affectation.

He smiled at her and then offered his sister and Spencer a small wave across the crowd. His sister waved back, but Spencer remained almost completely motionless. A juggler in harlequin tights drifted through the crowd, tossing garish cloth beanbags into the air, and John remembered that Willow had expressed an interest in the jugglers. And so he made eye contact with the jester and motioned for him to join them. When he was sure that the juggler had seen them, he murmured to his mother and to Sara that he thought he would go say hello to Spencer. He didn’t know quite what he would say. But Spencer was here, and even if they resolved nothing, at least they could talk.

INSIDE THE STONEWALLS
of the Cloisters, Spencer stared at Bartolo’s massive
The Adoration of the Shepherds,
but he was less interested in the depiction of the humans’ veneration of the baby Jesus than he was in the awe that he saw in the eyes of the donkey and the cow. Arguably, they were more prominent in the painting than the shepherds. Luke, he knew, had never said specifically in his account of Christ’s birth that there were animals present, but neither did he say that the barn had been empty. Certainly it was impossible for Spencer to imagine the Nativity without them. He couldn’t envision how, years ago, Charlotte could ever have built her own crèche scenes without carefully finding a place for each creature. Their metaphoric importance to the story was profound, and certainly Bartolo had understood this. Most medieval artists did.

“I like the name Tanya. Did you choose it, or did it come with the dog?” he heard John asking him. Everyone else was outside on the terrace overlooking the Hudson River. They had fled as a group as soon as they saw that he wasn’t going to shun his brother-in-law from Vermont, in theory leaving the two men alone to iron out their differences. So far, they hadn’t said more than a dozen words about anything other than medieval altarpieces and twelfth-century wooden sculptures. Now John was bringing up the dog.

“She’s two years old. The name came with her,” he said, keeping his eyes fixed on the great cow eyes in the painting before him.

“Charlotte sounds very happy to have her.”

“She is.”

“She seems to be in a good phase right now. Is it the play?”

“Maybe. Maybe she’s just growing up.”

“Does she talk about what happened in New Hampshire?”

He turned away from the Bartolo. This was the first time John had deviated from small talk. He sighed. “Well, we don’t discuss it much. She’s started to see a therapist, and the first session may have opened up some doors for her.”

“Does she seem okay about it—about the accident?”

“Now, have you thought about why you’re asking me that?”

“Spencer, please. Come on.”

“I’m serious. Why do you think you’re asking? Is it so you can feel less guilty about what you did—be reassured that your niece is not going to be traumatized for life—or is it because you’re interested in my daughter’s mental health? Personally, I think the answer’s a combination of both.”

Two young women, one in a Fordham sweatshirt, pressed close to the painting. They had clipboards, and they seemed to be scribbling notes about the image.

“Yes, I’m sure my guilt is a factor. Is that what you need to hear? If so, I’m happy to admit it. But the primary motivation behind my question just now was my niece and how she’s doing. And I’ll tell you something else: As bad as I feel for Charlotte, I feel a thousand times worse when I think of how my stupidity led to your injury.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have made such a big deal about your question,” he said.

John looked taken aback—almost dazed—by his apology. Only after a moment did he continue, “So . . . you and Charlotte really don’t talk much about what happened?”

“Nope. But it’s not like it’s a subject we avoid, either. It is in our faces. After all, I’m still learning to eat with my left hand. I can no longer tie my own shoes. It’s impossible to hold a book open and turn the pages. A hardcover novel, I’ve learned, is really quite heavy.”

“Does she blame me? If I were her, I might.”

He resisted the urge to chastise John for bringing this all back to him.
Does she blame me?
Yes, they were in the midst of relics touched by the true pioneers of the hair shirt, but if only because John’s voice sounded so pathetic his question didn’t seem quite so narcissistic. “Did she seem to blame you a few minutes ago in the park?” he asked in response.

“No.”

“Well, there’s your answer.”

“I’m glad.”

Spencer wandered toward the glass looking out on the garth garden and the fountain from a twelfth-century French monastery. It felt good to be strolling through here with John. Anger, always an exhausting emotion, was particularly trying when you were already investing so much energy in simply trying to button your shirt. The main reason, he guessed, he had agreed to resume speaking to his brother-in-law was precisely because not speaking to him was becoming so much work. “Can I ask you something?” he said when he felt John standing beside him once more.

“Absolutely. Ask me anything.”

“How much weight have you lost? You look like hell.”

“I don’t know. Ten, maybe fifteen pounds.”

“That’s impressive. All since mid-August?”

The man shrugged with both shoulders, a motion Spencer noticed largely because he couldn’t do it. “Early August, mid-August. I don’t know.”

“Why are you on a diet?”

“I’m not. I’m just not hungry.”

“Well, the two of us look pretty scary.”

“I know. I saw in the paper today that there’s a play opening downtown about the Bataan Death March. We should have auditioned.”

He grinned in spite of himself. “I’m amazed I’m not losing more weight. I spill more food than I get to my mouth. At breakfast this morning I overturned a bowlful of cereal. Sent the whole thing somersaulting onto the floor. Fortunately, Tanya was right there. To be honest, that’s the main reason I got the dog. It wasn’t for Charlotte. It was for me. She’ll eat anything.”

“Even soy milk?”

“Oh, yeah. I checked her references. I made sure she was a vegan.”

“Really?”

“I’m kidding. The animal shelter doesn’t categorize its animals that way.”

“But you will try to make her a vegetarian—like your cats. True?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I may even pick up a few cans of Friskies for the cats one of these days. Just leave them on the kitchen counter for Catherine and Charlotte to discover one evening when they go to feed them. Everything is so much harder now, and not just for me. Sometimes I need to give in and accept the fact that I can’t do as much as I’d like.”

“You’re getting mellow in your old age.”

“You learn to compromise when you’re down to one arm. And the truth is, Catherine eats meat—did you know that?”

“She told me a few weeks ago.”

“Yup: My wife eats meat and the sun continues to rise.”

They were quiet for a moment. The garden was starting to empty, and he wondered if something special was about to occur in the park. The jousting, maybe. That would explain why people were beginning to leave.

“Spencer?”

“Yes?”

“I was thinking of staying in town for the press conference.”

“That would be interesting. Did you discuss this with Paige?”

“I’m not going to stick around. At least I don’t think I will. And I wouldn’t have been staying to help you. I was going to
threaten
to stay—
threaten
to talk about the benefits of hunting—to try to convince you not to announce your lawsuit with a press conference. It was a stupid idea. And I’m only telling you now so you understand the depth of my concern. I mean, I have no objections to the lawsuit itself. Absolutely none . . .”

Spencer circled his left index finger at John, signaling him to continue.

“But if I were at the press conference,” John said, “a lot of reporters would want to talk to me. It would be chaos. And, in the end, less time and space would be devoted to the FERAL message, because the writers and producers would have the chance to quote me—the guy who owned the gun. And I would talk very reasonably about managing the size of the deer herd through hunting, and how contraception only works in very controlled little worlds. But it was all just brinkmanship. Public relations brinkmanship. I couldn’t have gone through with it.”

He thought about this, picturing John in the rear of that large conference room in Paige’s firm where they were going to announce the lawsuit, and the vision didn’t make him angry. Certainly it would have once. Mostly, he guessed, he was surprised that John—exactly like his sister—had so little faith in what he was going to do at the event, in what he was going to say.

“You sound like Catherine,” he said after a moment.

“Was she threatening to go, too?”

“No. It’s that both of you seem to think I am going to mismanage the press conference, and my daughter is going to be humiliated. That’s not going to happen. I know what I’m doing.”

“I won’t ask what your plans are, but . . .”

“Good,” he said, “it’s too nice a day and it’s too good to see you again.” He reached into his left pants pocket for one of the Percocet he carried there loosely like change and popped it into his mouth without water. When he had swallowed it he continued, “Seriously, John, you can sleep easy. I know what I’m doing, and I would never embarrass my daughter. Now, shall we rejoin our families and see if the jousting is about to begin?”

A MAGICIAN
dressed up like Merlin was throwing bolts of fire into the autumn air from his fingertips, while a group of costumed adults were performing a living chess match on the tournament field. Willow decided that her art teacher, Grace Seeley, had been correct: This festival was wonderful. She had to remind herself that the whole reason she was here was to talk to her cousin about their depositions, a conversation toward which she had made no overtures thus far. Mostly they had discussed the school musical in which Charlotte had a lead and her cousin’s new dog. When she put the two subjects together, it almost made Willow breathless with envy: How interesting her New York City cousin’s life was compared to hers!

They were walking alone now, a dozen yards ahead of their mothers, their grandmother, and Patrick, when Charlotte surprised her by saying, “Are you still worried about those oaths we may have to take?”