And the Dark Sacred Night (10 page)

“There’s nothing alarming you’d need to know, I’m quite sure of that. I’d have told you if there was.”

“But Mom, how do
you
know?”

She raised her face and looked at him, her beaded earrings capturing light from the candles that still burned at the opposite end of the table. “Because I do.”

Both babies slept. Kit knew they should move the twins to their crib upstairs; Kit, too, needed whatever sleep he could bargain from theirs. So this was it: the same impasse all over again. He was trying to think of a new angle, to think like Sandra, who would have known how to maneuver out of this corner, when his mother said, “You should know that the man you’re wondering about is dead. Even if I told you who he was, if it made the slightest difference, you couldn’t search him out. You couldn’t meet him.” Her expression was miserly, not kind, and though she kept her voice low, her next words came out like a threat. “You need to leave it alone. Just believe me.”

“He’s dead?” Kit looked at her, and before he could think, he said, “God, Mom, I’m sorry, but that is the oldest line in the book. Do you expect me to believe that? Do you expect me to stop being curious even if it’s true?”

Kit’s mother pressed her lips together. She readjusted William in her arms, stood, and started toward the stairs.

“Mom?” Kit said fiercely, trying not to shout.

She turned around before she got to the staircase. “You do not get to know everything just because you
want
to know it. Did some
‘counselor’ give you this idea, tell you you’re
entitled
to know? I am not impressed by this whole psychotherapy fad, this let-it-all-out philosophy that’s got some kind of stranglehold on your generation. I am insulted that you’re calling me a liar, but I understand. If that’s what you choose to think, there’s nothing much I can do about it, is there? But I
can
go to bed. You should, too.”

Kit lay beside Sandra that night and did not get the precious sleep he craved. The twins slept for a rare stretch of four hours, during which he thought about his mother’s angry speech. He realized, sadly, that when she mentioned Kit’s “generation,” she was talking about a broad population that, at one end, might have included
her
, Daphne Rose Browning Noonan McCoy, if she hadn’t been forced to become older than she wanted to be—forced by Kit, even if he was blameless. He would bear whatever disappointment Sandra felt in his failure to “find out the truth.” This quest, he thought, is over—if it ever really began.

Upstairs, the alarm clock bleats. Kit hears it cease quickly; Sandra is up. (Sandra does not believe in the snooze option.) She will shower and dress before waking each child, a kiss with a ten-minute warning. She will come downstairs to make coffee for Kit, tea for herself, and prepare whatever healthy breakfast she has already planned: halve grapefruits, measure oats, slice a loaf of whole-grain bread, stir farm-share honey into the Greek yogurt of which she is lately enamored.

Sandra’s papers, divided into folders labeled with her clients’ names, occupy a rack to the right of the computer. To the left, in a jumble that appears belligerent by comparison, lie sheaves and scraps of information exerting pressure on Kit’s immediate future: a reminder from the dentist that it’s time for a cleaning; a request for a recommendation from a student he taught three years ago (the young woman somewhere out west, ignorant of Kit’s rudderless state of disemployment); the program from a poetry assembly where Fanny recited “Dover Beach” and three haiku by Basho (can they afford to send Fanny to a special after-school theater workshop?). Here, too, is a review clipped from the
Times
, praise for an exhibit of Tlingit drawings he wanted to see; it ended a month ago. Buried beneath
these items, but not forgotten, are envelopes containing applications for two jobs at private high schools in the city. Sandra’s idea. “You know,” she remarked late one night, making this suggestion out of the blue, “I’ll bet some of the precocious teenagers at those schools are every bit as articulate, and possibly more passionate about learning, than the—I mean, you’ve said so yourself—than the mostly average students you had at the college.” Understatement of the century.

Right again, Sandra. Fucking right again.

Outside, the sky has lightened from cobalt blue to cinder-block gray, the default hue of an early November sky at 6:32 a.m.

Will (Kit can tell from the blunt tread on the stairs) is coming down first, before his mother. This is rare.

He comes straight into the study. “Dad,” he scolds, “did you sleep in my room? There’s like a huge mess on the floor.”

“I needed guy company. SpongeBob and Max did the trick. But are you aware that the Uglies snore?”

Will gives him the
Dad you’re like totally insane
scowl, a foretaste of adolescence.

“Go make sure your sister’s up. Help your mother by setting the table.”

“Can’t do both at once, Dad.”

“Exercise free choice,” says Kit. “Prioritize.”

Sandra’s in the kitchen. The coffee grinder roars. He sits still for a moment, waiting to see if she’ll come into the study, now that Will has returned upstairs. He hears cupboards opening and closing, the loose-change clatter of flatware being removed from the bin in the dishwasher.

He pulls up Google Maps, clicks on
Get directions
. Though he hasn’t been to Jasper’s house in more than a decade, he could find his way there by memory, but he wants to see the journey quantified in miles and times, as a series of dots connected, the zigzag of thoroughfares linking Kit’s cookie-cutter cul-de-sac to that long dirt road. Perhaps the road has been paved by now; it pains Kit to think that some of the surrounding land might have been sold to developers, that the pine forest might be pocked with turf clearings and houses appointed to look like somebody’s misguided notion of grand.

Will Kit actually drive down that road? Will Jasper have him? Is
Jasper healthy, still working, still skiing—still teaching? (Till now, he hadn’t thought of their connection through teaching. Daphne, Jasper, Kit: all teachers.) By e-mail, a year ago—or, he cringes, possibly two—Kit had sent photos of the twins to Jasper. Jasper had thanked him, had said (hardly for the first time) that they would always be welcome; that it was high time those children learn to ski.

Sandra heads upstairs to tell those children it’s time to get up for real, time to face the day: the fortifying meal, the gathering and packing of worksheets and books, the finding of hats and gloves; the catching of the school bus; and then, just an hour from now, the daily effort (for Will) and inspiration (for Fanny) of navigating school itself. Kit, as a small child, was more like Fanny: loved the lure of stories, basked in his teachers’ approval, studied his times tables and spelling lists without much nagging. His heart goes out to Will, for whom the soccer ball and football are siren song and gospel alike.

Kit hears Sandra call the children’s names. “Waffles, anyone? Banana waffles with yogurt?”

In stereo, small cries of pleasure. This is a treat. This is, and Kit knows it better than they do, a special morning. A distinctly different morning, that much at least. Mentally, he packs the suitcase he hasn’t used since the last conference he attended. The suitcase will have gathered dust.

Now Sandra comes into the study. “Waffles?” What she means is
We have an agreement, but do we also have a truce?

He thanks her. “But syrup for me, not yogurt.”

“Have you seen the price of maple syrup?” she says, though her voice is cheerful. “There’s jam.”

She’s looking over his shoulder at the computer screen. She says nothing, too smart (and kind, really) to let on that it looks like she’s won.

“I need to tell you,” he says, “that there’s a leak in the roof. Up front.”

He hears her sigh, but she doesn’t tell him she told him so. “I can deal with that, call somebody. It’s no reason to put this aside.”

He continues to stare at the map on the screen. “So. What if I find out nothing?”

“You’ll find out something.”

“How do you know that?”

“What I mean is that you’ll learn or hear or see something new. Something will change. Something has to.”

Sandra’s tone is free of impatience or threat. Her quiet certainty, however generic it may seem, infects him, just a little (as it has before), just enough to carry him forward, against his nature, toward taking the risks he knows he needs to take. In a figurative sense, she is pushing him down the mountain on skis; how fitting that Jasper is his destination, if not his hope.

A
S THEY FILED INTO
their dedicated section, they laughed at one another and made faces. This was the season’s opening concert; only at concerts were they required to dress up. The girls, as discreetly as they knew how, struggled in vain to make peace with their garter belts and scratchy nylons; the boys moved their necks to and fro like turkeys, agitated by the confines of collar and tie. Daphne had chosen the yellow minidress with the square neckline and the long bell-shaped sleeves, one of two bought just for this summer. Her mother said it matched Daphne’s hair. Combed out loose, it felt almost like someone else’s hair; for the very first evening among these new friends, she would not be playing her cello. Campers did not take the stage until later in the summer, when the first of their collaborative pieces would be, as Natalya put it, “enough ready to pass for art.”

The camp’s performance structure, its one extravagant nod to modernity, was quaintly known as the Silo. The stage, a perfect circle, protruded from a tall curved structure painted a classic barn red. Overhead, a web of steel cables and baffles fanned out above the near portion of the audience. Spectators with the expensive tickets sat in folding wooden chairs that were stored beneath the stage between concerts. Those farther back sat on blankets in the grass. The ground was more forgiving than the chairs, but the acoustics were inferior—and the bugs were merciless.

Daphne sat between Malachy and her roommate Mei Mei. The campers’ chairs were close to the stage but off to one side, the sight lines less than ideal. They would be looking at the back of the pianist, the singer half-hidden in the curvature of the instrument. Esme McLaughlin, the season’s opening act, was a Scottish soprano
renowned not just for her exceptional range but for the covers of her record albums, on which she reclined in verdant Gaelic settings wearing scanty evening gowns and shamelessly expensive jewelry, not a musical prop in sight. Her pianist, a married man, was allegedly her lover.

As the campers gossiped and fussed, their anticipation kinetic, Daphne noticed that the adults seated in the center rows stared openly at them, smiling, as if they were an exhibit at a museum. Malachy waved to an older couple who called his name. “Too many people know my father,” he explained. Of all the campers, some of whom came from as far away as Europe, Malachy was the only one from Vermont, his home less than two hours north. He made fun of his father, a successful lawyer, but Daphne could tell that his scorn was just a veneer.

Together, they read the program. “If this concert had a title,” Malachy said, “it would be ‘Dare Me to Sing It and I Will.’ All she’s missing is something from the Supremes.” Esme would begin with two Negro spirituals and an Appalachian folk song, followed by a trio of Schubert lieder, a Handel cantata, and, to leave her audience longing for more at intermission, Cio-Cio-San’s farewell aria from
Butterfly
.

She came onstage wearing a gown that looked as if it were made of gold leaf. The skirt billowed dramatically from a cinched waist—the colored spotlights flashing on its folds as she moved—but the strapless bodice was so tight that Daphne wondered how the singer’s lungs could take in the air they required to produce such a powerful voice. Between each song, after the applause faded, the sound of crickets was urgent and vivid—yet every time Esme opened her mouth, Daphne’s ears shut out everything else, even the piano.

At the intermission, as spectators rose to stretch out the kinks from an hour of sitting on their punishing chairs, she felt as if she couldn’t move, as if she’d become, literally, “all ears.”

Malachy stood. “I’d better go find those friends of my dad.”

Mei Mei wandered off as well, so Daphne was alone, glad for a chance to collect her emotions. She looked up at the lighting cables and the night sky beyond, then back at the deserted stage. Only now did she notice the blue Oriental rug on which Esme had stood. The piano gleamed like a Cadillac waiting by a city curb to carry its privileged owner somewhere important.

It occurred to her that this was part of what they were being shown that summer: The Life. They were there to be drilled and tested, to learn that it could never be easy, and maybe to be noticed or even discovered, but they were also catching a flashy glimpse of the rewards for those who excelled. Daphne felt, for a moment, as if Esme were performing for them alone. The rich patrons with their city clothing, Esme’s fellow “artists” with their bloated egos, the locals with their picnic baskets way at the back of the field: all these people were merely set dressing, like the blue carpet, the potted gardenia plants flanking the stage, and the champagne bar at which the wealthiest ticket holders were toasting one another and scanning the crowd for celebrities. Daphne spotted Natalya, their dour taskmistress, in a short hot-pink dress, talking to the camp’s director, Antony Carpenter-Rhodes, and a handsome platinum-haired man in a plaid jacket. Natalya looked
giddy
; she was laughing, her magenta mouth wide open to the sky. She looked like a wax version of herself, a doll.