And the Dark Sacred Night (30 page)

“I’m sorry, Mr. Noonan, that I didn’t try you sooner. My husband’s been … I’ve been—” Again, the instinctive caution of the
politician’s wife censors her. As if the entire state doesn’t know about Zeke’s stroke. Probably, by now, about his urinating on the Chinese rug.

Why does he keep mentioning Jonathan? Never mind. Be direct, she tells herself. She has dealt with strangers’ emotions; she was trained to do it.

Into the pause seeps distant music: country this time, no longer jazz. “Should I call him? Call Kit?” she asks.

“Yes!” he says. “If you would. He … it may sound absurd after all these years, but I think he’s waiting. Not to rush you.”

“All I want to do, first, is talk to my husband.” Which wouldn’t have been easy even in better circumstances.

“And maybe Jonathan,” he says.

“Jonathan?” She finally gets it. “Mr. Noonan, Jonathan isn’t Kit’s father. No. My other son. Malachy. Who’s gone. He died.”

Jasper Noonan’s sigh is so long and heartfelt that Lucinda feels ashamed she told him so much, so bluntly.

“My dear woman. I am so sorry.”

“A long time ago now.” Though all that “long time” has done is move the pain to a more distant room. When she enters that room, though she does so less often, the pain still blinds her with its keen, diamondlike brilliance.

“I’m sure it makes little difference. Time,” he says. “I’ve got two sons.”

“I would tell you to take good care of them, but I imagine they’re old enough that they have to take care of themselves,” she says.

“Mostly you’re right. Mostly.”

The protracted silence separates yet joins them. In the farther reaches of Jasper Noonan’s house, Lucinda can just make out the words of a song. Some twangy-voiced singer wails about the virtues of his long-dead father. Good God.

“That was your son—who answered the phone?”

“Number two,” he says, oddly brusque. Is he impatient to get off the phone? Lucinda finds herself desperate not to sever the thread of their fragile connection, peculiar though it is.

“Nice to have them at home sometimes, isn’t it?” Where is she going?

But he reels her back in. “Lucinda. I think now’s where I give you
Kit’s number. I’ll call him just to say we spoke—that you’ll call. He says you should call after nine o’clock at night—if you would. He says to tell you he’s always up till eleven. That work for you?”

“Fine!” To make this call, though she can’t yet imagine how to do it, she would stay up till all hours of the night—which, in any case, she often does.

“Bear with me while I go downstairs again. Number’s on my desk.”

As Jasper Noonan goes downstairs in his remote house (though according to their shared area code, it’s not all that remote), as the music grows louder, someone downstairs in Lucinda’s house picks up the phone, taps in a number.

“Hello? Someone there?” David’s voice (unguarded, impatient).

“David, it’s me. Is everything all right?”

“Oh yes, Mrs. B. Sorry to interrupt you. My cell’s acting up, but—”

“Lucinda?” Jasper.

“Hang on,” says Lucinda. “David, I’ll let you know when the line’s free.”

“Sure thing.” He hangs up.

Lucinda’s heart beats so hard that she cannot believe its palpitations aren’t visible through her blouse. She apologizes for the interruption.

And then she has it: the telephone number of her long-lost grandson.

“You’ll call him tonight?”

“Or tomorrow,” she says. “I want to tell Zeke.”

“Naturally.”

She’s pushing herself to say good-bye when Jasper says quietly, “Do you want me to tell him about … I’m sorry, what was your other son’s name?”

“Tell him the story about his father is complicated. Tell him he needs to ask me and I’ll tell him everything.” Selfishly, she wants this for herself—not that she wants to inflict pain, but the details have to come from her.

“Sounds best that way,” says Jasper. “And hang on to my number, would you? Call me for any reason. I know Kit. Or I used to know him, and now I know him again. A stroke of luck I owe to you, in a roundabout way. For which I thank you.”

“No, Mr. Noonan. I’m the grateful one here.”

“Jasper,” he says. “Please.”

“Jasper,” says Lucinda. “Tell Kit I’ll call him by tomorrow night.”

The sun is on its way down, the snow warming toward a buttery pink. If she watches for long enough, can she actually perceive the lengthening of the shadow cast by the enormous, empty barn? Of the original outbuildings, it’s the only one Zeke left standing after he sold the last of the herd, after Mal and Jonathan complained that they’d had enough of showing cows. (As sixteen-year-old Mal announced, “We’ve put in our time on the family legacy.”)

The barn is important to Zeke as a symbol of his father’s achievement—which he extols as the groundwork for his own. He spares no expense to keep it painted (pure white from the ground to its red-shingle roof) and properly buttressed, even if it’s nothing now but a city of swallows. During the time Lucinda sits facing the view, the sun sinks just enough to shine directly in the window. On the table before her, it sets alight a porcelain dish filled with straight pins, dispersing splinters of phosphorescence all over the walls and ceiling of the room, across the front of her blouse. She is shivering.

“Mrs. B?” David’s calling up the stairs.

“Oh, I’m sorry! The phone’s free now,” she calls back. She feels permanently fastened to her chair.

“I think I’m headed out, if it’s okay by you.” He’s waiting.

She puts both treasured phone numbers, written on the same sheet of paper, back in her pocket. Somehow she’s able to rise and go to the stairs. The look David gives her from below is a new one, an ever-so-covert smile.

“How’s Zeke? How was it, going over the things he’s been missing?” she says when she joins David near the front door.

“He’ll be up to speed in no time, Mrs. B.”

This is such an absurd speculation, such a fatuous lie, that she nearly laughs in David’s face. “He’s still in the kitchen?” she asks.

“Going over a few things I’ve left him to sign.” He lowers his voice. “Maybe you’d help him with the actual signing. Just steady his hand a little.”

Lucinda takes David’s coat off the rack and hands it to him. Suddenly, she wants him gone. “Drive safely. There’s black ice where you get back on the road. I’ll need to get it sanded.”

After he leaves, she goes to the kitchen. Zeke, his back to her, is
hunched over the table, a pile of documents before him. Lucinda says loudly, “Well, your young intern thinks I’m having an affair.” But when she rounds the table, to wash the dishes left by the sink, she realizes that Zeke is sound asleep in his chair.

She forgot to ask Zoe about when to wake him and when to let him sleep. She wants, more than anything, to pick up the phone at the stroke of nine, but she needs to figure out how to tell Zeke what she’s found out—and she needs to wait till he’s rested. She voices a silent apology to Kit, but one more day can’t hurt.

As she rouses Zeke and guides him to the living room, Lucinda cannot resist the vain thought that Kit owes his very life to her as much as to his mother—and the corresponding shame at the way in which she betrayed her husband. It was a necessary betrayal; that conviction will never falter. The uneasy question is how it changed Mal’s life, altered his path. If he were still alive, he would be fifty-nine years old.

How proud they were when Mal was accepted to that famous music camp. To prepare for auditions, he had worked with his flute teacher four afternoons a week for two months. Only then, as she eavesdropped on these lessons from the kitchen, did Lucinda realize that her son had real talent.

Because the camp was in Vermont, most of the young musicians came from New England and New York, but a few came from farther away, even from Europe. Some were prodigies who, not even finished with high school, had already left conventional schooling behind. Zeke would never have allowed Mal to take that risk; to him, Mal was just a boy who loved to play his flute and, having played it with such dedication for nearly ten years, had forged his own talent, a source of pleasure and self-discipline more than a “gift” pointing him toward a predestined profession. But Lucinda, as she mingled with some of the other parents and mentors at the camp’s orientation, began to envision her son on the stages of concert halls in cities all over the world.

Mal was barely sixteen, but because he had skipped sixth grade, he had already graduated from high school. A common refrain on his report cards was how “old” he seemed for his age. At his flute teacher’s
urging, he had applied to conservatories as well as nearby colleges, and halfway through that summer he was offered a place at Juilliard. Lucinda was elated. But to her surprise, Mal wrote her a letter to say that he had decided to take a year off. One of his instructors at the camp knew a New York record producer who had a satellite studio in Burlington; the man agreed to hire Mal as an office assistant. Lucinda was even more surprised when Zeke approved. “Any business experience is money in the bank of pragmatic living,” he said. “Especially if my son’s going to make a bid for Carnegie Hall!” Later, Mal would say that he never believed he had what it took to be a marquee performer, but Lucinda had to wonder if she and Zeke were to blame for letting themselves believe all the flattering nonsense about their son’s exceptional maturity. It is still unbearable to imagine how Mal must have felt when he learned just how badly he had let them down.

Not that Lucinda knew a thing about what happened at the camp until the letter she received in October: this completely unknown girl writing to tell Lucinda that she was pregnant with Mal’s baby.
Dear Mrs. Burns, What I have to tell you will come as a shock, and I apologize for that.…
Had there been a second Malachy at the camp? She took out the programs she had saved from the two concerts she and Zeke had attended.… Yes, there
she
was, this
Daphne Browning, Violincello
, but that did not mean …

Should she call Mal, at his job in Burlington? She pictured him in an office filled with strangers, answering the phone for someone else. But first Zeke should hear about the letter—the preposterous claim. (“Mrs. Burns, he’s in a legislative session that might last the rest of the day; is this an emergency?” Of course it was an emergency. But no, she told the secretary. And what had she planned to do—read the girl’s assertions of love and devotion over the phone to Zeke?)

All afternoon, as Lucinda waited for him, the letter lay open on the kitchen table, indigo cursive on cream-colored paper folded twice, top and bottom reaching up like pleading arms. The letter dared her to disbelieve it, dared her to flee the house and pray it would vanish in her absence.

Zeke arrived home at nearly eight o’clock. She handed him his old-fashioned and sent Jonathan upstairs to do his homework. No TV that night; because she said so. She led Zeke into the den and closed the door.

He sighed. “Jonathan in some kind of fix at school?”

She simply handed it to him. He read it quickly, still standing, letter in one hand, drink in the other. “Lord Almighty.”

Lucinda could do little more than stare into space, her arms folded tightly against her chest. She couldn’t even scold Zeke for his language.

“There is so much we cannot take at face value here,” he said. “Just what the hell went on at that place?”

“You can’t forget those amazing concerts, Zeke. They had to be playing music most of the time, wouldn’t you say?”

“Did we meet this girl? Did we know he had a girlfriend there? Christ, has he
ever
had a girlfriend? He didn’t even go to the prom!”

Lucinda tried to remember whom they had met. At the two concerts they attended, the young musicians had huddled together, mostly aloof from the adults. The parents had talked politely among themselves, sharing a sense of elite satisfaction that their talented children were mature enough not to follow the Pied Piper movement toward rock and roll—and all the other bad behavior that went along with music like that.

Zeke drained his drink. “You haven’t called Mal.”

“No.” She realized that this was what had to happen right then. She thought of Mal as more her son than Zeke’s, yet she had no idea how to broach a subject like this.

Zeke asked her to get him another drink and to leave him alone in the den. “I cannot have this conversation with you listening, I’m sorry.” But she didn’t want to listen.

Half an hour later, Zeke emerged and demanded a third drink. “One to get the news, one to confirm it, and one to tell you where we go from here.”

Lucinda went upstairs to make sure Jonathan had turned out his light. She looked in at him, still reading under the quilt with the red planes, and she wished that she could keep this one, the last one, a child forever. She made him promise to put the book down at the end of the chapter. She closed his door.

She found Zeke in the kitchen, eating a brownie he had cut from a tray on the counter. “Those are for the parish bake sale, Zeke.”

“Most of them are,” he said. “Unless I decide otherwise. At the moment, my cause is more urgent.”

“It’s true?”

Zeke took a sip of his third drink and winced at the clash of flavors. “He’s known about this for a couple of weeks. The girl called him. He says he’s been ‘paralyzed.’ He swears it was just once, just the one time. A mistake, which he regrets.”

Lucinda, though she had been a “good girl,” a virgin when she married, knew full well that this wasn’t likely to be something you did just once, not if you gave in. She knew the times they were living in. It also dawned on her that the very thing these parents assumed had kept their children “safe”—their intense focus on complex beautiful music, their prodigious hours of rehearsal—might in fact have left them wishing for greater release, wilder abandon, in the spaces between their precociously brilliant work.

“A mistake with consequences,” she said, deciding it was pointless to argue with Mal’s version. “He does understand that, doesn’t he?”

“He is not going to be a father,” Zeke said. “Not this young, he’s not.”