The Book of Illumination (31 page)

“Maybe,” she said again.

The wedding of
Q
and
U
, I learned that evening, was happening next week.

“Next
week!”
I said. Had that invitation come? Had I missed it? I didn’t think so.

“Yeah,” Henry replied. “Wednesday. I signed you up for cupcakes.”

“Oh. Okay. How many?”

“Lots!”

“Lots like—what? A dozen?”

“How many is that?” he asked.

“Twelve.”

He shook his head. “More.”

“Two dozen? Twenty-four?”

“
Way
more. It’s in the
cafeteria
, Mama.”

As Henry used the back of his spoon to create a volcano top in his mountain of mashed potatoes, I tried to figure out what relevance this fact had to the number of cupcakes I was now expected to bake. He reached for the gravy and poured it into the crevice, continuing to pour until the lava had swamped Pompeii.

“That’s enough,” I said, a little too sharply. I took the pitcher out of his hand.

He glanced up quickly. Even I was surprised at how harsh
my tone had been. I wasn’t really angry about the gravy. I knew he loved gravy. I was feeling just a little annoyed that he hadn’t checked with me before he volunteered me for “lots” of cupcakes.

Of course I could always buy them. But that would be cheating.

“Are other people bringing food?” I asked.

“Yup.” He began to stir the gravy into his potatoes.

“And there’s a cake, right?”

“I
told
you.” He maneuvered a massive pile of brown mush toward his mouth. I helped myself to a slice of meat loaf and attempted to spoon some carrots onto his plate.

“No!” he shouted, pulling his plate away. Because his mouth was full of gravy and mashed potato, the sound came out like “Moo!”

“Five bites. You know that’s the rule.”

He shoved his bread plate my way, and I realized he had no objection to carrots. He objected to carrots mixed in with the mush.

“I’m sure there’ll be plenty of desserts,” I said. Judging from the cookies and doughnuts brought in to celebrate every conceivable occasion, and lots of nonoccasions, I could already envision the buckets of Dunkin’ Donuts Munchkins and plastic trays of muffins and scones.

“We have to have enough,” he finally managed to say.

“For everybody? Not everyone’s going to eat a cupcake, honey.”

“But what if they want one and they’re all gone?”

“Then they can have a piece of cake.”

“No! We need to have enough!”

“And how many people are you expecting at this shindig?”

“It’s not a shindig,” he said, looking hurt. “It’s a wedding!”

“This wedding,” I conceded.

“Maybe like a hundred. Or two hundred.”

“Two
hundred?”

“Miss O. said we could invite anybody we wanted.”

“Well yeah, but how many people did you invite? Just one—me.”

“No. I invited Daddy and Nat.”

“You did? When?”

“When they were here. They said they would come. And Kelly and Nell and Delia, too, cause Dee-Dee’s starting kindergarten and Nell might come to pre-K. And Ellie. And Max.”

“You asked all those people?” I said. “And they all said yes?”

He nodded and speared a carrot. “I want to in—”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full.”

He finished the carrot. “Can we call Pop?” he asked. “I want Pop to come.”

My irritation about the cupcakes had turned to amusement, and I found myself feeling surprisingly touched. He was doing all right, Henry was. He knew I would have said yes to the cupcakes, to as many cupcakes as he needed me to provide. He didn’t have to check with me, any more than he needed my permission to try to round up all the other people whose love he took for granted.

“We can call Pop,” I said.

I watched Henry finish the rest of his potatoes and start in on the carrots and meat loaf.

“And I’ll talk to Miss O.,” I promised him. “I’ll make sure we have enough.”

He smiled, sat back, wiped his mouth, and let out a long, contented sigh.

“Thanks, Mama,” he said.

We called my father at about eight thirty and were off the phone within minutes. He doesn’t like to talk on the phone. He’s never really shaken a lesson he must have learned very early in life, at a time when long-distance calls were wildly expensive and reserved for the brisk communication of important facts. Dad likes to get right to the point, take care of whatever needs taking care of, and get off.

“
Who’s
getting married?” he asked, after Henry had handed me the phone.

“It’s not a real wedding,” I said. “It’s a party at his school. But he’s excited about it.”

“Okay,” my father said.

“Okay what?”

“Okay, I’ll come.”

“But it’s next Wednesday, Dad.”

“What of it? I haven’t got anything better to do. I’ll take the train.”

“Wow! Well, great! That’s fantastic.”

My father had only been to Boston once, just after I gave birth to Henry. The trip had been hard for him, every part of it—meeting Declan, seeing me all blotchy and teary, accepting the fact that his only daughter was going to be raising a child on her own, hundreds of miles away from any help he and Nona might have been able to give me. He never came back. Then again, I never asked him. Maybe all I had to do was ask.

“I’ll call you when I know the schedule,” he said.

“We’ll come pick you up. You can stay here.”

Eavesdropping, Henry shouted, “For as long as he wants.” And then, because I didn’t cut my dad off to deliver Henry’s message immediately, Henry grabbed the phone right out of my hand.

“For as long as you want, Pop,” he said. “You can sleep in my bed.”

He paused as my father said something I couldn’t hear. “I don’t think so,” Henry said earnestly.

I had been about to scold him for snatching the phone so rudely, but as I listened to him talk, and watched the smile that was spreading across his face, I bit my tongue.

“I don’t think I do,” he said seriously. He turned to me. “Mama, do I have stinky feet?”

“He’s teasing you, honey.”

Henry smiled and nodded.

“Okay,” he said quietly. “Okay. Okay, Pop. I love you.”

And then, abruptly, he hung up.

“I knew he’d come,” Henry said.

Next, we called Nona, but as we waited for her to pick up, I wished I had thought about this a little more before dialing her number. Things could get complicated. While it would be great to have her here for a visit sometime, this was not the time. This was the time for Henry and Dad to connect.

Fortunately, voice mail picked up. For a moment, though, I wasn’t sure it was hers. She used to rely on the impersonal, prerecorded message from the phone company, but now her greeting was warm and friendly and was prefaced by a snippet of …
waltz
music?

“Hi, Nona,” I said. “It’s me—and Henry. Just calling to say hi. Hope all’s well. Maybe you’re out.”

“Tell her!” Henry demanded.

I ignored him. “Everything’s fine here,” I went on.

“Tell her!” he shouted. “Ask her!”

I shot him a stern glance and finished leaving the message. “We’ll try you again tomorrow. Lots of love. Okay, bye.”

I hung up.

“You didn’t ask her!” he shouted, all revved up with urgent excitement. “Call her back!”

“Now wait just a minute, mister!” I said. “You don’t grab the phone out of a person’s hands and you don’t scream at somebody when they’re leaving a message!”

“You didn’t tell her!” he said angrily.

I took a deep breath and delivered my threat coolly.

“Do not talk back to me, or I’m going to call Pop back, right this minute, and tell him not to come.”

“No!” Henry shouted. “You can’t!”

“I can, too, Mr. Smart Mouth, and I will, unless you sit right down and listen to me.”

He turned away, stubborn. “You’re mean,” he said.

I let it go.

“Look,” I said. “I know you’re excited about this, but I’m not sure we’re going to invite Nona.”

“Why not?” he said, pouting.

“Because I want it to be special. For Pop. And you. Okay? Kind of like boys’ time.”

He turned around and looked at me.

“If Nona’s here, I’m not saying it won’t be really nice, but it’ll be—different. I think Pop would have more fun with just you and you’d have more fun with just Pop.”

“But she might be sad,” Henry said.

Suddenly, I knew where all of this was coming from. Late in the summer, Henry had found out that a birthday party had taken place for one of his friends from nursery school and he hadn’t been invited. Though it hadn’t been a
real
party—it was a low-key trip to the aquarium for a total of four kids, including the birthday boy’s younger sister—Henry had been crushed.

I had alternately wanted to murder both the parents and the boy and to cheer for the levelheaded grown-ups, who had opted
not to engage a circus troupe or rent the use of a hotel pool for a five-year-old’s birthday party. But Henry felt only one emotion: despair.

“We’ll pick another time for Nona to come,” I said.

He slumped onto the couch. This was complicated business. He’d no sooner learned how to put himself in the place of a person who was being left out than a new and more intricate set of social considerations was presenting itself to be learned.

“Maybe my birthday,” he said.

O
UR FIRST ORDER
of business was to make sure that no one surprised us in the bindery while Bishop Soares was meeting with the monks. I had spoken with the bishop’s assistant, Father Quinn, during their lunch break at the chancery. He and the bishop would be arriving at the Athenaeum at about five fifteen. While most of the library’s employees would be heading home by then, and few had reason to come down to the bindery anyway, I thought we should play it safe. I suggested that Father Quinn park in the garage beneath the Boston Common and told him I would come and escort him and the bishop to the library. I planned to bring them in through the back entrance.

“Let’s put a sign on the bindery door,” I said to Sylvia.

“Saying what?” Sylvia asked. “Nobody ever comes down here.” Then a rueful smile appeared on her face. Someone certainly had come down here. According to the monks, someone had been using a “flint”—whatever the heck that was—to destroy the book we thought no one even knew about.

“Warning!” I dictated, as Sylvia grabbed a pen and paper. “The bindery of the Boston Athenaeum will be off-limits to
all staff members today between the hours of five and … seven?”

“Let’s say eight,” Sylvia said. “In case they’re late.”

They had better not be
, I thought. I had arranged for Henry to go home from after-school with his friend Calvin, and to have supper at Calvin’s house, but I had to pick him up by eight o’clock.

I proceeded to dictate the rest of the notice. I gravely exaggerated the risks associated with inhaling the fumes of hot paraffin wax,
significant
amounts of which, I said, were going to be in use in the bindery between five and eight.

While it’s true that inhaling these fumes is a little like breathing in diesel exhaust, and that daily, prolonged exposure can wreak havoc on the respiratory system of people with asthma and allergies, the amount of wax that’s actually used in bookbinding is small. Anyway, we weren’t using it.