And the Dark Sacred Night (26 page)

And all of a sudden here’s Christina, her wheels on the gravel drive, her door slamming, her looming, puffy-coated figure striding through the front door, her sunglasses coming off as her eyes adjust from the snowy glare of the countryside to the dim foyer of the farmhouse.

“Okay, Mom,” she says without a greeting, “let’s hit the road, shall we?”

“Coat and boots, and then I’m ready.”

“Well, speak for yourself. But that’s you, Mom: ready for anything. I’ve gotta hand it to you.”

Hand what to me? Lucinda thinks crossly. Another citation for
community outreach or social betterment? (Is
betterment
even a proper word?)

“I brought you a cocoa, Mom. It’s in the car.”

Lucinda regrets her spiteful urge toward her daughter. “Thank you, Christina. I’d love a cocoa.”

Once the world at large—or the “media,” to be more accurate—beatifies you, life is never the same. And because you cannot resist the stoking of your ego, no matter how hard you try, you begin to lose sight of yourself as just another workaday sinner.

Father Tom, whose retirement Lucinda still mourns ten years on, was the only one to hear her voice such thoughts, from behind the lattice in the confessional. One Sunday, when he spoke about the sin of pride through virtue, Lucinda wondered (compounding that sin) if she had inspired the homily.

Lucinda helped found The House at a time when she believed that all three of her children were well on their way toward secure, prosperous lives. Christina was out of law school, working at a prestigious firm in Boston. Mal was in New York—not a practicing musician, as Lucinda once dreamed, but writing about the music he loved. Jonathan was in his junior year at Bowdoin.

The political work Lucinda did in support of Zeke’s causes began to feel shallow, a brittle, inadequate mortar to the structure of her life. She also yearned to do work in service of her faith, though she had always been mindful that anything public she chose to do could affect her husband’s career. By then, Zeke had been elected majority leader of the state senate. He knew full well, however, not to take anything for granted. “Political winds blow this way and that, always this way when you’re thinking that, spinning the compass ad infinitum,” he’d say. “If you fail to keep your full weight on both legs, you’ll up and blow away.” Philosophy straight from Zeke the Elder.

Just as Lucinda began to talk with Father Tom about how she could find a place for herself in the church’s outreach program, a small tragedy befell their parish. A sixteen-year-old girl found herself pregnant and, fearful of her parents’ wrath, tried to abort the baby herself. She succeeded, but she wound up in a hospital, barely alive,
and had to have a hysterectomy. Through Father Tom, her parents asked for donations of blood.

While Lucinda hardly knew the parents, the event seemed like a sign from God, a tap on Lucinda’s shoulder.
Yes, you. Yes, this
. Moreover, it seemed like a stroke of symmetry, a reminder, however unwelcome, of her lost grandchild. (Somewhere out there in the world, he was eight years old.) Perhaps Lucinda needed to be reminded that Daphne’s decision to have and keep that baby was courageous and, no matter what else she had decided, a blessing.

Lucinda had seen the child as a newborn, a baby, and a toddler, three times only. Each time, Daphne had driven from New Hampshire to meet her at a restaurant in Woodstock. Lucinda had met Christopher—Kit, Daphne called him—as any casual friend of the family might. During that time, she sent a check every six months. She told herself to be patient; there would be years ahead in which to become the freely doting grandmother she longed to be. She also knew that mother and baby lived comfortably, in Daphne’s parents’ home, though Daphne hadn’t felt ready—not yet, she said—for Lucinda to meet her family. About this, too, Lucinda had willed herself to wait; after all, no one in her extended family knew about Christopher, either.

So Daphne’s letter, which arrived a month after their last meeting, just shy of Christopher’s fourth birthday, assaulted her with the shock of a traumatizing burn. Daphne thanked Lucinda for her support, but she had decided to go forward on her own. She would be moving into an apartment with Kit, and she had a part-time job. He would go to nursery school while she worked. Folded inside the letter was Lucinda’s most recent check. Daphne ended by saying that if she changed her mind, she would be in touch again.

Through angry tears, Lucinda thought immediately of lawsuits she’d heard about, estranged grandparents suing for visitation rights. Leaving the claims of biology aside, surely her bank statements would be proof enough of her commitment. But when Zeke saw Daphne’s letter, he told Lucinda that they would be crazy to entertain such an idea. Zeke had never been keen on meeting the child to begin with; he’d found the entire situation next to unbearable. At one point, early on, he had literally covered his ears. “Give her money if you like, I’m not opposed to that, but please remember that she’s the
parent, she’s the one who was so determined to raise that child. She never considered our son’s feelings; remember that, too.” Defending Daphne’s harsh decision in the letter, he said, “Maybe she’ll find a man to be the kid’s father. Maybe she already has, and he wants you out of the picture. That’s their right. This letter might be good news, Lucinda. Good news for the child.” He refused to say Christopher’s name.

Father Tom, her only other confidant, told her to pray for guidance. He wasn’t one to offer a mortal opinion on something so thorny, so fraught with human follies. She prayed to the Virgin, that mother of all mothers, but if guidance was sent, it must have gone to the wrong address.

So there she was, a few years later, searching for a mission. She knew, from a letter campaign aimed in part at her husband, that a grassroots group called Liberals for Life had begun lobbying the legislature to allocate funding for “religion-free counseling on options for mother and child.”
We are not anti-abortion
, one leaflet read.
We do not adhere to Christian scripture or religious teachings of any kind. We want to see babies born and properly cared for, girls on the threshold of womanhood given the respect and nonbiased counsel to make grown-up decisions
.

Lucinda phoned the founder of this quirky group, a thirty-seven-year-old massage therapist from Middlebury named Pamela who wore Birkenstocks and a baby sling harnessing her fifth child tight against her muscular torso. She declared to Lucinda, over chamomile tea in a Winooski café, “Let’s get this straight. I’m a plain-vanilla Episcopalian who happens to believe that all life, from the moment ovum collides with sperm, deserves to be protected. But rosaries, nuns, original sin, the pope … all that liturgical crap—and I do mean crap—gives me the heebie-jeebies. No offense, but I see the cross around your neck, and it’s gotta give me pause. So if you’re cool with that as a starting point, let’s talk. And one more thing: we do not demonstrate against anything. Our group is about being
for
something, never against. No antis except on my family tree.” She smiled tersely.

Lucinda did not like this blunt young woman, but she was intrigued. Being for, not against: this way of living rang true to Lucinda. The church’s prohibitions, all the shalt-nots, sometimes cast a pall over her faith. Driving home from Winooski, she fingered
the cross around her neck. Delicate though it was, perhaps it branded her as someone ready to judge and condemn. And she thought of the time she had taken a long bus ride to Washington, with Father Tom and other parishioners, to join in a shouting, sign-wielding rally against military spending, an episode that left her with aching arms, a sore throat, and a queasy, flulike feeling of futility.

This was the beginning of Mother the Mothers, an organization that started with seed money from Lucinda’s share of Zeke’s well-invested inheritance, along with fund-raising efforts greased by the social contacts of a political wife and, through Pamela, the feminist alumnae network of Bennington College. (Mal, after hearing the story about his mother’s first encounter with Pamela, referred to her as Plain Vanilla. “Which, by the way, makes my Catholic upbringing, what, bitter chocolate? Amaretto, perhaps?”)

The House itself was a rambling, dilapidated brick residence on the outskirts of Montpelier that the organization bought in foreclosure. They enlisted bakers and bankers and educators to set up training programs. An architect, eager to burnish his civic glow, contributed blueprints for renovating and “repurposing” the building. An attorney took care of the copious paperwork required to secure their nonprofit status. Eventually, they would employ a social worker and a doula.

Finding the pregnant girls to nurture and guide was the easy part. They were sent by Planned Parenthood, school nurses, pediatricians, and priests; by parents lucky enough to be trusted by their terrified children. When a reporter from the
Christian Science Monitor
expressed interest in writing a feature on The House, Plain Vanilla was on bed rest, pregnant with number six. “You go, girl,” she told Lucinda. “You take us global. You be our shining face.”

Lucinda knew something about being a shining face turned out toward the world. She had smiled and waved at strangers for years, had learned to echo her husband’s positions with bumper-sticker brevity. But this—go out in public to represent an initiative that, on the face of it, didn’t seem controversial yet somehow, she knew, would cross the sights of a loudmouth crackpot somewhere—this seemed risky. Like it or not, she realized that she was now exposed to those fickle political winds, this time without Zeke at her side.

Zeke, however, was thrilled. He told her he was much happier to
see her, not some sandaled vegetarian feminist hippie, become the voice of a cause with which he would be permanently linked, if only through his money. He asked his favorite PR guru to put Lucinda through a mock interview.

And so it began, her beatification. She gave interviews to journalists from
Mother Jones
, the
Boston Globe
, even
Glamour
; they praised her for giving a sane face to the “pro-life agenda.” She was called pro-motherhood, pro-sisterhood, pro-family, the “right kind of Catholic.” (She still wore her small gold cross.) She declined to discuss abortion.

Minor grumblings arose from adoption advocates, who felt that idealistic girls should not be encouraged to undertake a task for which they couldn’t possibly be prepared—and whose undertaking could not be reversed—but no crackpots emerged. Fortified by praise, singled out as she had never been while stumping for Zeke, Lucinda felt younger. She blossomed. She enrolled in social work classes. She took aerobics. She joined a quilting circle that included two gay men (vainly hoping this might bring her closer to Mal). She began to dress in festive clothing and jewelry from shops in Burlington frequented mainly by students. “Mom, you look fantastic, like you’ve moved to California,” said Christina, expressing rare approval. How gratified Lucinda was to win admiration from the child who had chafed most belligerently against the teachings of the church. (When Christina was pregnant with her first child, after three years of marriage and five years’ work as a tax attorney, she had calmly told Lucinda that she was grateful to live in a country where she could get the safe, affordable abortion she’d had in law school. “Without which, God knows where I’d be. Not married to Greg, that’s for sure.” Lucinda had been speechless.)

But saints, like tyrants, fall hard. Saints are merely tyrants in the kingdom of virtue.

“Take it easy, Dad. I know that’s not a word in your vocabulary, but
easy
.”

Christina helps her father out of the car while Lucinda wrestles with the walker, unfolding and locking its cheap metal wings. Each of the women holds on to one side while Zeke fumbles for a grip.

Even though she knows he’s stooping to keep his balance, acquiesce to this crablike contraption, Zeke seems disturbingly smaller to Lucinda. He dozed on the half-hour drive from the rehab center, and now, still, he says nothing.

Once inside the front door, he glances around. He spots the hospital bed. “Christ, it’s come to this,” he says. Though it sounds like
Frise, come to fiss
.

Dear God. Mal’s contempt and resistance all over again; like son, like father. (Will Lucinda face her own dwindling with so little grace?)

“Zoe will come every day for the first week,” she reminds him. “She says if you do the work, you could be climbing stairs by Christmas, even sooner.” She sounds like she’s talking to a child. “Do you want to lie down? Are you hungry?”

“Calls,” he says.

Over Zeke’s tilted head, Christina rolls her eyes. “Dad, you’re not up to making calls. Everybody’s rooting for you, and David’s coming by tomorrow to fill you in on what you’ve missed, but as I said before, you’ve got to
take it easy
.”

Zeke begins to move on his own, but one of the walker’s wheels lodges in a crevice between two of the skewed antique floorboards. Stubbornly, he pushes it forward until it tips and falls, taking him with it.

“Dad!” Christina grabs for an arm while Lucinda cries out incoherently. Tears come to her eyes.

They get Zeke and the walker upright. “Sit, Zeke. I’ll get you a snack,” says Lucinda.

Once he’s seated in his chair by the fireplace, she goes to the kitchen. She leans over the sink and grasps the edges. Where is her strength, for heaven’s sake? She longs for the bygone readiness of prayer. She glances at the eggcup on the windowsill, the nest for her rosary. The beads are furry with dust.

Christina is right behind her. “Mom, Greg has a work dinner I can’t get out of. I have to leave in fifteen minutes.”

“Go, sweetheart. Don’t worry about us.”

“But I do.”

“Well, I give you permission to stop. Zoe comes first thing tomorrow morning. How badly can I mess up in that short a time?”

“I’ll get his things out of the car.”

Lucinda cannot remember the last time Christina came to visit when she didn’t have a pressing engagement to take her away ever so slightly sooner than would be ideal. Even now that Christina’s three daughters are grown, one in college, one in law school, one teaching English in India—soccer games, teacher conferences, orthodontist appointments relics of the past—still the obligations come thick and fast. Maybe Christina’s profession has conditioned her to guard even her “unbillable” time in units of five or ten minutes.