And the Dark Sacred Night (25 page)

Lucinda did not remove the Chinese rug, though the deliverymen warned her that the wheels of the bed, when locked, might damage it. Never mind. She is hopeful the bed won’t be here too long. She will not turn this room into a clinic.

In an hour, her daughter, Christina, will arrive in that profligate minivan of hers, and they will drive to the rehab center, to bring Zeke home. If she puts her mind to it, Lucinda can accomplish a lot in that hour—though all she wants to do is to lie down upstairs, forget it all in sleep for just this last sliver of time alone. Tonight she’ll sleep on the foldout in the den—to be nearer Zeke in case he panics or becomes disoriented in the middle of the night.

All right then: the flowers. With no time to visit the florist on her round of errands, she chose the least sorry specimens at the grocery store: yellow roses that are flawless in form but smell like old ice cubes. She scans the high shelves in the pantry and chooses a vase of dark blue glass.

After trimming and arranging the roses, Lucinda takes a package of boneless chicken breasts out of the freezer. Bake them in tomato sauce with herbs and capers? Or maybe that’s too acidic for Zeke, after all the bland geriatric food at the center. She worries that she never heard him complain about those meals; did the stroke rob him of taste as well as mobility? (Zeke loves eating out and eating well, loves the richness of French food, the spice of Thai, anything assertive in flavor. The few seasons she campaigned with him on the deli/BBQ/doughnut tour—DBD heartburn their name for the usual
payback—they would end each day, alone in their bedroom, by listing the abominable foods they’d had to eat with such gusto. She was relieved to stay home when, after two terms, Zeke’s seat was secure.)

Safer, she decides, to sauté the chicken in butter, mix it with pasta—shells, not spaghetti—and peas. Early this morning, she baked a pear pie.

When she opens the refrigerator to check on the ingredients—yes, good, a block of Parmesan—she decides on a glass of white wine; Christina will do all the driving. She pours a glass and sets it aside. First, she’ll grate the cheese and put a large pot of water on the stove. Should she set the table? Will Zeke be able to sit at a table yet? Stairs are out of the question for at least a month, the therapist said, but didn’t she say he’d be able to get around with a walker? Suddenly, Lucinda is terrified of being home alone with her husband in his abruptly altered state.

Your husband has a stroke: a common fate for women her age, yet it’s hardly something you plan for. She imagines an educational seminar at the town’s Senior Health Colloquium, called “In the All Too Likely Event” or “Worst-Case Scenarios.” More practical than chair caning, holiday crafts, or Pilates (unpleasantly, Lucinda thinks of Pontius every time she sees that mystifying word).

She carries her wine into the living room and stops. Her habitual place on the sofa is gone because, of course, the sofa is gone. She chooses one of the wingback chairs flanking the fireplace—not the one where Zeke always sits but the one that belonged by custom to his father. (At Christmas, her son Mal used to joke that he could see his grandfather’s ghost in this chair, warming his bony butt by the fire.) So now she faces the hospital bed, its taut sheets covered with a quilt she brought from upstairs, the one she made for Jonathan when he was ten: red airplanes, appliquéd square after square, on a pale blue sky. When Lucinda ordered the ugly, sinister bed, she knew this moment would come, the past hurtling forward into the present.

Twenty years ago, after her older son’s final stay in the hospital—though, since he had survived so many infections by then, beaten so many odds, she did not see it that way—his doctor had suggested renting a bed like this one. She had even helped Lucinda order it. Hours before Mal’s discharge, Lucinda directed the men up the steep stairs of the city brownstone to her son’s apartment; remarkably, the
bed made it all the way up. They were clearly familiar with maneuvering such a bulky item through narrow spaces.

But Mal refused to sleep in that bed. “I see you’ve summoned the chariot of Thanatos,” he said when he saw it, a jarring addition to his small but stylish living room. “Well, no thank you, Mom. I’ll hail a cab when it’s time to go. Preferably a Checker.”

The insult of the bed was minor compared with the insult of his disease, which long before then had made a mockery of his dignity, his body, even his job at the paper—from which he’d been forced to retire. He was thirty-eight years old when he died. Until the very end, Lucinda wanted to believe that Mal’s illness had also stolen his faith, so that saving his soul would be a matter merely of reclaiming it. In his last years, he told her repeatedly that he had never felt that kind of devotion, but she wouldn’t believe it, not entirely, not until he chose to end his own life rather than live out the course of God’s plan. Who could honestly say there had been no hope of recovery? Now, belatedly, she understands that void all too well, that dark cavity widening around the heart, that pitch-black hollow at the bottom of her rib cage.

She was so deeply alone with Mal’s death. That he had died of AIDS, a disease barely touching their staid rural community, seemed to embarrass even her best friends, no matter how genuine their condolences. Christina was immersed in raising babies, a task she undertook with the same ferocity she had applied to studying and practicing law. Jonathan, adrift in his own life, flew from California to New York and tried, mutely, clumsily—and, in retrospect, fearfully—to help his mother cope with his brother’s “affairs” (such a painful word to Lucinda in the context of the disease, which killed Mal before he could find any sort of lasting love). Jonathan did tackle the essential work of packing the most portable contents of his brother’s elegant apartment and shipping them to Vermont. For that much, Lucinda was grateful.

Zeke had been preoccupied with a possible run for a seat in Congress. Though he took a week’s break from all the necessary scheming, he was constantly on the phone. Two months later, almost overnight, he dropped the notion of higher office. Sometimes Lucinda wonders if all that networking, glad-handing, and calculated stroking of wealthy egos had simply been the best way for Zeke to hold on to
his sanity. One of them had to stay sane, and it couldn’t have been Lucinda.

Without consulting her, Zeke bought airline tickets to Italy that summer. He had rented a house near Perugia for a week. Lucinda had no desire to go anywhere yet no will to resist. Because she couldn’t even think about packing, Christina filled an absurdly large suitcase for her mother with a wide range of outfits. It was featherlight next to the sorrow Lucinda was sure she would carry with her forever: so heavy, so immutably leaden, that she half expected to set off alarms as she and Zeke passed through airport security in Boston.

Italy was a colossal mistake. Everywhere, everywhere—in churches, in museums, even etched into the façades of buildings—Lucinda encountered Mary. Mary receiving the miraculous news. Mary holding her chosen baby son, a golden dinner plate perched on his head. Mary at the foot of the cross; Mary—visibly shattered; forget whatever prophecy some angel had revealed—cradling the beaten, lacerated, bloodied corpse of Jesus. The stigmata painted on his hands and feet were the color of the poppies that bloomed along the Umbrian roads, their petals fluttering in the dusty air stirred by passing trucks and cars.

Zeke did not share Lucinda’s faith (though now and then, with an eye on his constituents rather than the Lord, he tagged along to Mass). So he couldn’t understand that beyond this tauntingly ubiquitous reminder of losing a son, and to such a cruel death, Lucinda felt keenly the sacrilege of aligning her pain with the Virgin’s incomparably holy anguish. All at once she could not accept the inevitability, let alone the celebration, inherent to the Passion; Mary was that boy’s
mother
. If God were the least bit merciful, she’d have died first. And where was Joseph when she needed him most? (Perhaps he’d been busy contemplating a run for Congress.)

After their second day of sightseeing, a day of wandering the lofty rose-colored lanes of Assisi—Lucinda waiting outside the basilica while Zeke went in to admire the frescos—she refused to leave the rented house. It was large and magnificently old, though its stone walls sealed inside its rooms a damp, tomblike chill. At Lucinda’s insistence, Zeke would go out alone for the day. She would sit under the awning over the patio, sometimes attempting to read a novel but mostly staring out at the neighboring fields, exactly as she’d been
doing back at home. The one welcome difference was the privacy. No one came by to take the temperature of her grief. No one asked her if she had been eating or sleeping. No one tempted her to wonder, so uncharitably, if their motives were more prurient than loving. And perhaps because of the privacy, she did not cry so much. She wrote falsely reassuring postcards to Christina and Jonathan, and she thought about a quilt she might make if she could find fabrics in the particular blues, greens, and fleshy pinks of her surroundings.

Each evening, Zeke would return with cartons of restaurant food. He would read aloud from an English-language newspaper sold at a shop that catered to local expats. Lucinda listened almost contentedly to news of political strife and natural disasters, thankful for its irrelevance to her own tragedy. At the end of the week, they returned home, wearier than when they had left, to face the last trickle of condolence letters, from places as distant as Moscow, Rio de Janeiro, and a town in Italy to which they could have driven, from the rented villa, in under an hour.

Mal had traveled to every civilized, highly cultured corner of the world. Mal had been a well-known music critic, an authoritative lover of opera, ballet, and classical music. He had not been a fan of, as he put it, “the let’s-all-pretend-we’re-tone-deaf-and-bash-on-a-trash-can scene.” To the openings of nearly all the events he wrote about, he had worn a tuxedo.

He did live one hell of an amazing life and he knew it!

He packed three lifetimes into one
.

Few people who live to be a hundred can look back on a life so richly lived
.

Such sentiments filled the notes from Mal’s colleagues and friends. Did they really believe that quality trumped quantity? In this case, Lucinda realized she stood firmly in the camp of how much over how good, Holstein over Jersey.

In the growing mansion of her mourning—that’s how Lucinda began to think of it within hours of seeing her son’s body—another large room had opened when she found out that Mal had disposed of all his classical music recordings. Why on earth had he done such a thing? But stacked in a file drawer were dozens of CDs, sound tracks to Broadway musicals, a kind of music he never reviewed but enjoyed in a casual way. One of the last evenings Lucinda spent with her older
son—though, again, she had no idea it was a “last” anything—they sat on his bed and watched
An American in Paris
on TV.

Months went by before she opened the boxes Jonathan had packed, searching for this collection. She lined up the CDs on a shelf in her sewing room. As Mal would have done, she grouped them by composer, anthologies by singers. She bought herself a portable CD player, a cheap thing designed for college students or housepainters. On nights when she stayed awake long past Zeke, working on her quilts, she would put one of Mal’s musicals into the machine and play it at a moderate volume.

She liked the intimacy of playing all these jubilant, dramatic songs sotto voce. The sewing machine hummed heedlessly along, white noise behind seductions and street brawls and men throwing fateful dice and kings dancing with commoners. People fell in and out of love, despaired and rhapsodized. Orchestras swelled. Imagined theater curtains, like velvet evening gowns engaged in a waltz, gathered up in curtsied folds, then fell to sweep the surface of the imagined stage.

Mal had inherited Lucinda’s tendency toward late-night wakefulness; many nights during his twenties and thirties, she would think of her son during those hours when most people in their time zone were sleeping, and she’d wonder if he, too, was up. How complicitous it felt. They both disliked the word
insomnia
for its implication that sleep would always be preferable. That might often be true, yet Lucinda and Mal were pleased by how productive they could be while everyone around them slept. It was a gift, said Mal, if you were a music critic for a newspaper, overnight deadlines a piece of cake. As for Lucinda, she can still do trapunto at four in the morning, her stitches tight and steady.

She returns the empty wineglass to the kitchen. Twenty minutes remain until her daughter is scheduled to pick her up. Christina is always on time; her punctuality is (and she has said so) a reaction against a childhood whose comings and goings were often dependent on the unpredictable responsibilities of a father in politics.

She thinks of the odd message on the answering machine: someone
named Jasper Noonan, his voice kind and polite (setting him apart from the meddlesome reporters): “Mrs. Burns, I have news I think you’ll be happy to receive. I promise you I’m not a salesman.” She has listened to the message three times. She’s not sure she has energy to spare for even the best of surprises.

She might have erased it, but for one tattered hope she’s hoarded for decades, one she has wanted to act on so often. Zeke warned her, however, that she would be overstepping her bounds, imposing her selfish desires on someone else’s family. She has defied Zeke in the past, but he is probably right about this.

She took down Jasper Noonan’s number on the memo pad Zeke keeps beside the phone, every sheet printed with his various phone and fax numbers, under the seal of the state of Vermont. She touches the receiver.

But the last thing she wants is to have Christina walk in on the middle of a momentous, possibly very private conversation. She will call after they get back, once Zeke is settled and Christina’s gone home. Lucinda can call from upstairs, a domain that will be hers alone for at least the next month, according to Zoe, Zeke’s PT. Zeke should have stayed at the rehab center another week, but he insisted (as best he could) that he would recover more quickly at home. Even if he has to pay extra, he wants the therapists to come to him. Lucinda suspects that he also wants the reporters to tell his constituents that he’s gone home, so they’ll think he’s in better shape than he really is. (Or perhaps it’s wishful thinking that he is still capable of even the simplest political scheming.)