And the Dark Sacred Night (29 page)

Sadly, his accusations were reaffirmed by the selection of the latest pope. Benedict’s views mirror those of Father Jess, who succeeded Father Tom with what some of the most vocal parishioners praised as an invigorating return to “more solid values.” To them, Father Tom was a good, hardworking man, but he’d been tarnished by achieving priesthood in the age of Father Drinan and the Beatles. Lucinda wonders if that is precisely what she loved about him, that tarnish. You might have defined it as a wider latitude of forgiveness. Not long before Mal died, Father Tom assured her that God had made her son the way he was, that Mal would be blessed and welcomed to the kingdom of heaven so long as he fully embraced Jesus Christ as his Savior.

Which, Lucinda knew in her heart even then, he probably never had, perhaps not even as the small child who always seemed to have his own opinions, often lofty or contrarian, about the world around him. Mal had been her easiest baby: he seemed to “catch on” to everything, from nursing to turning over to sleeping through the night, with an almost condescending ease. Yet once he learned how to express his thoughts (early, of course), he became the kind of child who exhausts his parents with every possible iteration of
why, but, not
so,
isn’t true!
He questioned the absurd delights of nursery rhymes, the happy endings to fairy tales. And Lucinda, in struggling to respect
his challenges and doubts, came to feel far closer to him than she had to Christina or, later, to Jonathan. He was, she secretly felt, the child she could most confidently call
hers
.

After Mal died, she wished that she could gather up and possess his entire life. She had a hard time parting with any of his belongings. She had the impulse to claim even his pet parrot, Felicity, whose exotic aloofness and dark stare had always made her uneasy. But Felicity had already been in the care of Fenno McLeod, the friend who had so charmed Lucinda and then been the one to help Mal end his own life. It took her months to forgive Fenno, to stop seeing his complicity as a betrayal, to realize that Fenno might have been, at the end, the closest thing her older son ever had to a spouse. He had been, quite literally, a helpmeet. She has lost touch with Fenno, and now, all of a sudden, she feels sad and rueful about that, too.

Lucinda invited David for lunch, not realizing that this would subject Zeke to having his junior assistant witness how infuriatingly infantile his eating habits have become. She set the kitchen table for the two of them, hoping to leave them alone together—but what was she thinking?

And soup: what a cruel food to serve Zeke. She puts the bowls back in the cupboard. Sandwiches don’t seem like enough to offer, however. Cut vegetables? On two plates, she arranges slices of cucumber, halved cherry tomatoes, carrot sticks. She spoons hummus into two small dishes.

After cutting Zeke’s turkey sandwich in quarters, she decides she had better do the same with David’s. Maybe she should just go ahead and arrange the vegetables into smiley faces.

A bowl of chips. She now buys the kind made from sweet potatoes, though she doubts they’re much healthier than the usual (and far less expensive) type. The packaging on food has come to resemble political advertising. (She long ago stopped commenting on the alarmist radio spots and glossy postcards cooked up by Zeke’s so-called troubleshooting team.)

The doorbell chimes exactly at twelve-thirty. David’s comings and goings are as prompt and cheerful as birdsong. His ambition ripples off his perfectly pressed shirts like heat off the tarmac in August.
Lucinda starts toward the front door and then sees Zeke heading there with his walker. (Another pearl for the broken necklace.) She retreats quickly, pours iced tea into two thin, lightweight glasses (graspable in one uncertain hand?).

Zeke enters the kitchen first, so slowly that Lucinda has a hard time just standing there, waiting, as if it’s perfectly normal to take twenty seconds in crossing the room. “Good to see you, David,” she says.

Right behind Zeke, his towering height now exaggerated by his boss’s shrimplike posture, David beams at Lucinda. He’s carrying an armload of folders, so he doesn’t shake her hand. “Great to see
you
, Mrs. Burns. The senator’s doing fantastically, don’t you think?”

“Rubbish,” says Zeke, this word coming out clear as a bell. “No shickophantijm round ear.”

David tries to laugh lightly. He casts a fleeting
oops
sort of smile at Lucinda. He’s someone too reliant on his charms, but he’s good at what he’s supposed to do, and that’s what matters. Especially now. She doesn’t want to think about what will happen to Zeke if he can’t keep up with his work. Even the optimistic young doctor wouldn’t give a prognosis on that. She thinks of Father Jess’s most ardent supporters and how, flowers and prayers for swift recovery aside, they would love to see Zeke’s seat not only vacant but filled by some bushy-tailed young Republican. Vermont has more than its fair share of Sarah Palin clones just waiting to boast about the state’s permissive gun laws. If retirement would cripple Zeke,
that
would kill him. Look what happened in Massachusetts when Senator Kennedy died.

This latest intern in a decades-long parade is the most handsome one since Leo, the intern Zeke had back in the late eighties, who stayed nearly four years, far longer than any before or since. Leo was working for Zeke when Mal died, twenty years ago now. Because Zeke worked from home so much that terrible spring, Lucinda saw a great deal of Leo. She saw up close what Zeke’s interns did for him: the stupefyingly boring tasks outnumbering the ones that gave them any sense of political know-how. She concluded that politics itself, even at the highest level, involves a staggering amount of exhausting, mind-sapping, tedious work. Not unlike, it occurred to her then, the work of getting back to living your life after losing a child.

She stands by, like a maid, until she sees that Zeke will be able to manage (if barely) with the meal. David takes a few bites of his sandwich, then shoves it aside to make room for work. He’s looking down now, not watching Zeke as he slowly raises a chip to his mouth.

“Well then,” she says, “I’ll leave you two to your own important devices.”

“Aye-aye, Mrs. B,” says David.

Lucinda is tempted to take the stairs at a run, so happy is she to be free of her husband’s trembling hands and obsequious intern. She goes straight to the back room that serves as her sewing room and study (Zeke’s bedroom when he was a boy). Laid across a card table are the wax-paper templates for the quilt she’s making Jonathan and Cyril: a traditional wedding quilt, white on white, all grapevines, the leaves and fruit in relief (though logically—she hopes!—two men in their fifties hardly need their union blessed with a symbol of fertility). She aims to finish it by their first anniversary, next July.

She takes the sheet of notepaper with Jasper Noonan’s number out of her pocket. She looks at the telephone; this one still has a receiver joined to its base by a corkscrewed cord. She refused to let Zeke replace it; the connections are always clearer than on the cordless phones. Some new things do not improve on their older models.

The phone at the other end of the line begins to ring. Lucinda leans on the table, weight on her elbows, feet secured in the rungs of the chair: a defensive fetal position, she recalls from her training in body language, one of many courses she took when she started her work at The House.

After several rings a man answers, “Dad’s place,” out of breath.

“Jasper Noonan?”

“Hang on.” Not far from the phone, he bellows, “Dad!”

She hears clumping; muttered words; a door closing.

“No, not Loraina!” calls out the man who answered.

And then, “Noonan here.” He, too, is out of breath. Already she hears his age in his voice. It’s a well-used voice, saturated with woodsmoke.

“Jasper Noonan, this is Lucinda Burns. You left me a message a few days ago.” At first, she hears only harsh breathing.

“The senator’s wife, yes?”

Oh no. He’s a reporter after all. Of course he is. “I’m sorry,” she
says, “but Senator Burns isn’t doing interviews. He’s home, he’ll be fine, but he’s very busy. If you’d like to reach his office, I can give you that number.”

“Whoa. No, ma’am. It’s you I’m looking for, and I hope you’ll bear with me if I’m clumsy with the news I have. I’m guessing you’ll want to hear it. If not, I’m going to owe you an apology.”

She hears him sigh, as if he’s changing his mind. “Please go on.”

“Mrs. Burns, would you remember Daphne Browning? Her son, Christopher? Would you have a connection there?”

The sound that escapes from Lucinda’s mouth is shrill. “Yes,” she manages, worried that if she says nothing, the man will hang up. That mustn’t happen. She winds the cord more tightly around her fingers.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Burns?”

“Dear God.”

“Is that a yes? I’m sorry to shock you like this.”

“Just please go on, would you please?” Tears stream over her cheeks. What if Christopher is dead? (In a spiteful reflex, she wonders whether she would care if Daphne is dead.) “He’s my grandson. Or he … was. He is, if he’s—is he all right?” She did not know her voice could rise to such a pitch.

“Should I worry if you’re alone?” Jasper Noonan asks her.

“I’m not,” she says quickly. “I mean, I’m alone in this room. It doesn’t—I’m fine. Talk about Christopher.”

“Well, just as you say he ‘was’ your grandson, he was my stepson.”

“Was? Was?”

“Wait up there! I mean to say, technically, he still is. Even if his mother’s not married to me anymore.” Behind him, Lucinda hears the sound of hammering. Also a radio or a record: jazz, a lovelorn trumpet.

“Mr. Noonan, please just let me know if Christopher is alive and well.”

“Good Lord, sorry! Yes. Yes, both. He’s just, he’s decided … he’s looking to find out about the man who was his … 
biological father
’s the correct term, I’m told. And forgive me if I’m busting a confidence here, because Daphne kept the whole thing a secret, even from me in a way, but by some fluke I remembered—which amazes me—remembered that you’re a grandmother to Kit.”

“Yes. I am. His grandmother.” She looks around desperately for something with which to blow her nose. She takes a strip of orange poplin from the basket where she keeps her smallest scraps. “Excuse me. Please wait.” She disentangles her hand from the cord, lays the receiver down on the quilting templates, and blows her nose, though now she is crying ceaselessly.

She picks up the receiver. “Mr. Noonan. Mr. Noonan?” Her ears are clogged, from blowing her nose too violently. “Just talk, Mr. Noonan. I’m fine, even if I don’t sound fine.”

He curses under his breath. He yells at his son to stop hammering and take a break. And would he turn down the damn radio?

“I’m going to walk upstairs with this phone, Mrs. Burns. This is not a conversation I rehearsed.”

“How could you!” She finds herself falling in love with this stranger. “Just say whatever. Whatever you can.”

“So I hate to do this sort of snooping, but I needed to know some things. So I went on the Internet and found out about your son. I saw his Web page, the one he’s got for his students. And I thought I would just e-mail or call him, but I didn’t know whether … Look, all I could remember from Daphne had to do with you, how you helped her with Kit in the beginning.”

“I guess until she met you.”

“No, no, I came along later. It was just her wanting to be … independent. Daphne was always like that. To a point. But never mind her.”

“Is she … did she die?”

Jasper Noonan sighs. “She jumped ship, is how I put it. Kit stayed with me another year, till college. She’s got her own life, Daphne, she’s fine, but let’s just … I’m just making this call for Kit. It’s Kit who …”

Like one of those science filmstrips of a blooming rose or a sinking sun, Lucinda begins to picture a rapidly aging little boy, college already sped by, so that he’s … how old now? Her hands are shaking almost as badly as Zeke’s, and her mind won’t make the calculations, though it’s done so at various idle moments before now. He’s … is he forty? More? He cannot be that old—yet, equally implausible, she is more than twice that age. How can she have lost all those years?

But her mind is rushing ahead like a fool toward an unseen cliff.
What if Kit wants just to
know
about his “biological father”? He wants only the knowledge, the genealogical facts, not the complications of meeting anyone new. His search might be a matter not of desire but of delicate urgency: a child in need of bone marrow, a spare kidney. What if that’s why Jasper Noonan is the one calling her? After all, he mentioned Jonathan.

“Mr. Noonan?”

“Yes, Mrs. Burns.”

“Call me Lucinda, Mr. Noonan. And please just tell me what Kit needs.”

“Needs?” He pauses. “To know his … ‘roots,’ I guess. Used to be, people hid this kind of thing, right? Kept it under the rug.” Again he pauses. “Christ, listen to me. I’m supposed to be the messenger here, not the philosopher.”

Caution begins to enfold her heart like a fog. Who exactly
is
this man with whom she’s having this intimate conversation?

“Are you still there … Lucinda?”

“I’m here, and I’m falling apart a little.”

“Falling apart’s okay. I’d fall apart big time, news like this on top of what you’re going through with your husband.”

She thinks for a moment. “Did you ever meet him—Zeke?”

“No. But I saw the paper. I hope he’s recovering all right.”

“Thank you,” she says. “Is Kit there? Would he speak with me?”

“I left that message while he was here, but he’s gone home. Only reason I was the one to call is I worried what might happen if, in case …”

“In case I didn’t want the connection.”

“That’s the thing.”

From downstairs in her own house, Lucinda hears the scraping of furniture. No outcries, no indications of a fall. Is David leaving already?

“Mrs.… Lucinda?”

“Yes?”

“I didn’t tell him about Jonathan. Just told him I knew about you. I asked him to wait till I spoke to you. He did call me this morning.… ”