Before You Know Kindness (8 page)

She guessed she’d have a better chance of rounding up a match if she asked her brother (with any luck he’d even have a fresh can of balls, a real novelty for the Seton family when they were together in New Hampshire) than if she bounced the idea off Sara, who she presumed was still bleary-eyed by her five-month-old. And so she retrieved the cell phone once more and left a message for her brother with a woman who happened to pick up the phone at the clubhouse. If he got the message before she and Spencer reached Sugar Hill, then they could drive directly to the Contour Club instead of straight home.

Her mother would be proud: Going directly from the plane to the tennis court. Now,
that
was vigorous.

Inside the shoulder bag in which she kept her cell phone and her computer were four unopened Slim Jims. Spencer, of course, knew nothing about her secret stash of beef jerky—about, in truth, any of her secret stashes of meat. She hid them along with her Altoids and those potent Listerine PocketPak strips of paper-thin mint that melted instantly on your tongue and she presumed were designed more to encourage better oral sex than oral hygiene. She considered whether she should tell Spencer she had to run to the ladies’ room so she could scarf down one of the Slim Jims, but her secret desire for meat wasn’t as powerful as a smoker’s need for nicotine. She was not uncomfortable and she could wait.

She told herself that she needed to approach the coming ten days with a good attitude. Or, at least, not a bad one. She would play tennis, a little golf, she would swim. And there were worse ways to spend fifteen or twenty minutes in the morning than weeding a vegetable garden or deadheading rows of annuals. Had it been all that unpleasant to plant the gardens in the first place? Not really.

Moreover, soon she would get to see her daughter—though, these days, Charlotte was as likely to be a source of anxiety as she was emotional quietude or maternal pride. She adored the girl, but she didn’t look forward to the way she and Charlotte could fight over nothing. Charlotte knew precisely how to push her buttons: which slang annoyed her the most, which music she found the most offensive. She was like her father in that anything could lead to a confrontation, any interaction could become a power struggle: which bathing suit to wear, when to go to sleep, whether it was appropriate to read
Cosmopolitan
in the orthodontist’s office waiting room—whether an orthodontist should even have
Cosmopolitan
in his office waiting room. The child knew exactly where to leave her drool-swaddled retainer to cause her mother the most discomfort (the mouse pad beside the living room computer one day, atop whatever magazine Catherine was reading the next), and exactly which cosmetics were absolutely off-limits and therefore she simply had to use (the lids of which she would be sure to leave askew on her mother’s vanity).

Before she had left for her grandmother’s home for the summer, she’d even begun to challenge the antimeat, antileather, antizoo dictates of their household. She wanted a leather skirt. Leather shoes. Catherine suspected that she’d been to McDonald’s. Hormones were starting to course through the girl like river rapids, and Catherine hoped they wouldn’t transform a difficult child into an ungovernable adolescent.

When Spencer had finished with the forms for the rent-a-car, they each grabbed their suitcases and carry-ons, their tennis rackets and golf clubs, and labored their way through the tiny concourse and out into the small parking lot. The sun was still high and the air was warm. She thought it irrational that with a week of tennis and gardening and after-dinner family badminton challenges before her she was still so filled with anxiety.

But, of course, she also understood why that disquiet was there.

Six

S
pencer stood in front of the vegetable garden, dinner behind him and the sun at the very tip of the highest of the scalloped foothills to the west, and considered going inside to boot up one of the laptop computers that sat inside the house in their nylon ballistic carriers. Perhaps the Internet held a solution to this problem with the deer. Sure, there had been no way to stop them in Connecticut, but that was both because there were so many and they were so comfortable in the Long Ridge suburbs. One time when he was inching along in traffic just south of exit 34 on the Merritt Parkway—exit 34, barely thirty miles from his office near the Empire State Building—he counted nineteen in a single, mile-long stretch nibbling the delicate April buds that grew on the trees just beyond the asphalt. The animals would pause, raising their heads so he could see clearly their great black marble eyes and their eyelashes—as long and lovely as human bangs—and then they would resume eating.

The only predator he knew of in Fairfield County was his neighbor Rick Salieri and his Ford Expedition: Salieri had managed to slam into deer on three separate occasions.

Spencer was sure there couldn’t possibly be as many deer here in this part of New Hampshire, and they couldn’t possibly be as sassy or fat. Not with all the hunting that must occur in the fall. Not with winters here so much colder and longer than in southern Connecticut. The snow pack so deep. This herd had to be a reasonable—a
manageable
—size. Plus, here Spencer knew he had that lupine to work with. Clearly deer hated lupine, and as big as the garden was, it was still a small island in the midst of a sea of the stuff. It grew like grass, except that it was waist high and the roots were like vines. If only he could find the right Web site for gardeners or wildlife management . . . 

Perhaps he could somehow build an impenetrable tangle of lupine, a barrier that would keep the animals at bay.

He was imagining exactly such a wall—a hedgerow made of lupine, the enclosure creating a secret garden of almost Victorian sensibility—when he realized his brother-in-law, John, was standing beside him, holding two bottles of beer by their long, thin necks. He’d already pulled the tops off them both, and he handed one to Spencer.

“You’re depressed,” John said to him with mock gravity and earnestness. “I understand.”

Spencer took a swallow. “I’m not finished.”

“You plan to sleep out here?”

He smiled. “I won’t go that far. But I am shocked. How could everything have been thriving only yesterday?”

On the other side of the house they could hear the squeals from their girls as they played badminton in the yard against Grandmother and Catherine. Catherine wasn’t as proficient at whacking birdies as she was tennis balls, but she was a Seton and thus had a genetic ability to swing things—rackets and golf clubs and, in the summer she’d lived at home immediately after college and thus wound up a part of the Brick Church’s co-ed softball team, a baseball bat—with hereditary competence. Sara was nursing Patrick on the porch.

“Well, I presume it was only yesterday when the deer discovered what kind of good eating we’d put in the ground for them,” John answered.

“They’ll be back tonight, you know.”

“And they’ll bring their friends. Yes, I do know.”

“I remember one year in Connecticut—the first year we tried to have a garden—they devoured the whole plot in two nights.”

“It will take them more than two to finish off this one. Unless there’s a whole herd that’s interested.”

“I know they’re just acting like deer . . . but I really didn’t think this would happen.”

“Personally, I figured we’d lose the garden to rabbits. Or raccoons.”

“It’s like a car accident.”

“Oh, it’s not that bad. You sound like one of your news releases.”

Above them a bat darted past in the twilight, then another. The bats lived in the room Nan used for storage above the garage, and when Spencer was leading the charge to get the seeds in the ground he took comfort in their presence: A tiny pipistrelle bat, he knew, ate as many as three thousand mosquitoes on a warm summer night; a colony of brown bats—say 150 animals strong—would consume eighteen million rootworms in a year. He squatted now and ran his fingers over the ravaged tendrils of one of the rows of what would have been snow peas. His mother-in-law’s golden retriever had wandered outside, and when the dog saw him the animal ambled over and put a front paw on his knees. He scratched the back of the dog’s ears and stroked his neck. Then he wrapped an arm around the canine’s strong chest and allowed the creature to lick the side of his face.

It was already too dark to see the yellow and black
POSTED
signs at the bottom of the field, but John looked in that direction and thought about them. He had a vision of himself and a ten- or eleven-year-old boy, Patrick in a decade and change, marching one crisp November morning off into these woods in search of a buck: the offspring, perhaps, of one of the animals that had had dinner last night in this very garden. The signs, by then, would have been gone a long time, pried from their trees with the hooked end of a hammer.

John’s father had never hunted, but his grandfather had. His great-grandfather, too, a man he had never met but the architect—literally—of this house on the hill behind them and the elegant carriage barn that once had stood beside it. John knew that barn only from black-and-white photographs and a painting that hung in the hallway on the second floor of the house, because his grandfather had replaced it with the less sophisticated, more functional two-car garage long before he’d been born.

He watched Spencer stand and wondered exactly what kind of tirade would be triggered in his brother-in-law if he mentioned that he had gone hunting last November and planned to go again in another three and a half months. If Spencer knew that he found himself browsing Web sites for hunters and purchasing magazines about tracking. If Spencer somehow discovered that most days in a locked cabinet in the guest bedroom in their house in Vermont was a rifle and two little bottles of buck urine that—sometimes John couldn’t believe this himself—he had doused on his legs last year every time he went into the woods in search of deer.

Lord, how large would be the explosion if Spencer knew that the only reason there wasn’t a rifle in that cabinet right now was because it was currently in its gun bag in the trunk of his car, stashed there because he was taking it to a gunsmith on Monday morning? He thought of those fifteen-thousand-pound Daisy Cutter bombs the United States had dropped a few years back in Afghanistan. Spencer, he decided, would be Daisy Cutter mad. His brother-in-law was thirty-eight and change, and every single day of his adult life he had worked for the likes of the Animal League, the Wildlife Partnership, and, for the last six or seven years, FERAL—each group more extreme than the one that preceded it.

Actually, the part that would truly have disgusted Spencer wasn’t the notion that his brother-in-law, the lawyer, was capable now of firing a bullet into a deer: That would infuriate him, all right, but it wouldn’t sicken him. The part that would send ol’ Spencer over the edge was the reality that when he was in the woods he carried with him a knife with a massive handle and a four-inch blade to field-dress the deer once it was dead. Cut away its penis and its genitals, cut through the breastbone and yank up its windpipe. Extract the heart, the entrails, and the liver.

In truth, John wasn’t completely sure he could field-dress a deer without vomiting. He hadn’t gotten a deer yet so he hadn’t had to eviscerate one. But he had studied the manuals, and in his knapsack was a set of instructions with the sort of photographs that only a pathologist, a medical student, or a hunter could love.

He considered whether things might be different if Spencer had a son, too, but he doubted it. Spencer was meant to have a daughter: a child he could take to
Oliver,
The Phantom of the Opera,
and—two times that John was aware of, so Charlotte could see how different actors handled the lead role—
Annie Get Your Gun.
John knew he could try to explain to his brother-in-law his vision of days alone in the woods with his son—the two of them occasionally whispering as they walked through the brush, sharing the sorts of intimacies he never shared with his own father—but he knew that none of it would register. You don’t sing show tunes with a boy in the woods. Besides, all Spencer would hear was the fact that John wanted to take his son into the forest to kill something. The sense of independence—the feel of the tall trees that constituted the canopy and the small ones around which was built the understory—would never make sense to him. Nor would he ever acknowledge that hunting was a sport that demanded genuine skill. The hard reality was that Spencer would be appalled by what he would see as a betrayal . . . and then deeply disappointed.

Almost as if he knew that someday in the future he would be holding a gun at the edge of this very field and would thereby have earned Spencer’s wrath, he thought he should top off the well of goodwill that existed between the two men—at some point he might need the water in that well to be lapping at the brim—and so he finished off his beer and wandered to the far side of the garden.

“What do you say?” he called back to Spencer. “Should we try to scare the piss out of a couple of uppity deer with some good old-fashioned human pee?”

“Damn right,” his brother-in-law agreed, gently squeezing the dog one last time before rising himself, and there in the gathering dark the two men urinated along the edge of the lupine.

IN THE BRIEF MOMENT
between when she unsnapped a cup on her nursing bra and brought her son’s mouth to her nipple, Sara Seton felt a rush of the crisp twilight air on the sensitive skin on her breasts and she shivered. Then she gently pressed her son’s face upon her, his wet maw a lamprey attaching itself to the areola, and she felt her nipple stretching like toffee and then disappearing into the infant’s needy mouth. She held her son against her like he was a blanket against the chill, and with her fingers she stroked the down on his head that passed for hair.

“Fourteen-ten,” Charlotte shouted gleefully, holding the birdie in one hand and the racket in the other. The girl was preparing to serve what she and Willow clearly expected would be the game-winning point. Across the net Nan and Catherine stood with their rackets raised as if they were saluting royalty, and while Sara understood that in badminton this was the proper position to await the birdie, she thought they looked ridiculous.

She wasn’t happy here on the porch, but she didn’t want to go inside with Patrick: Everyone else was outside, either playing badminton or inspecting the gardens. Although this house was extraordinarily cheerful when the sun was high, on cloudy days or at night she found the place capable of inducing a Zoloft-resistant depression. The place was over a century old, and its best feature was the simple fact that it existed at the very top of a ridge of foothills near the White Mountains and it had a wraparound porch facing east, south, and west that allowed one to savor the location. The clapboards, not yet in desperate need of fresh paint but certainly looking a tad tired these days, were dove gray, and the latticework along the bottom of the porch was a long series of diamond-shaped cross-checks. There was fish-scale trim on the first floor and a massive cupola bedroom—Nan’s—on the third. The house had three more bedrooms on the second floor and a fourth off the kitchen on the first, but other than Nan’s third-story empire—adjacent to her bedroom was a small study, her own bathroom, a walk-in closet, and a nook she used to catalog a lifetime’s worth of photo albums and handwritten correspondence—most were oddly shaped and difficult to furnish despite their size. They had knee walls or dormers or the side of a chimney exactly where you might want to place a bureau. Moreover, the bedrooms—again, Nan’s being a notable exception—were dark because the window frames were strangely thin, the curtains upon them were heavy, and the shades had springs so tired they never went all the way up. There were no ceiling fixtures in any of the rooms but the kitchen and the dining room, and every room could have used an additional outlet and a third (or, in some cases, a second) floor lamp. Clearly, the Setons—and Spencer, too—loved the dusky aura of the myriad ill-lit, melancholic rooms that made up the house, the narrow corridors that groaned underfoot, but most of the time she found the place merely gloomy.

The girls and the women in the yard batted the shuttlecock back across the net at each other six, eight, ten times, and each moment when her niece or her daughter would strike the red rubber tip Sara thought for sure they would finish off their older relatives, the game would end, and they would all go inside together. Nan was always indefatigable, however, even now at seventy, and Catherine was nothing if not competitive. Just when Sara was certain that the children had put the previous two generations away, Catherine raced back and hit a long, high lob from the very edge of the baseline that sent Charlotte reeling backward. And though the girl was able to return her mother’s desperate shot, her own comeback was soft and Nan was waiting for it at the net, where she slammed it into the grass at the feet of her lunging granddaughters. The old folks were coming back, and Sara feared now that she might be outside with her son on her chest until it was too dark for any living creatures but the bats.