And the Dark Sacred Night (32 page)

Lucinda had been in this church before, but still she was puzzled by its bleakness: the plain pine cross; the unadorned altar; most of all, the transparent windows. They made Lucinda feel weirdly embarrassed, as if the church were a woman caught naked in public. In place of saints and angels, a view of the mortal world. Saint Joseph’s, with its stained glass and gilt trim, its carved wooden figures gazing toward heaven from their alcoves in the wall, made her feel cocooned by God’s Word, the deeds of the apostles.

The minister talked about war and sacrifice and the healing effects of a community binding its wounds and the consolations that springtime on a farm would bring to this family a few months hence: new calves, new shoots from the ground, flowers blooming, peas and beans twisting up trellises in the sun. He said very little about Aaron as a real person, and there wasn’t much talk involving God—who, as Lucinda saw it, had determined this wretched course of events, from Japan’s attack on the navy down through proclamations made by Roosevelt and Churchill, all the way down to the death of Lieutenant Burns on a hot beach in Africa. Lucinda’s father had explained to her that the battle in which Aaron died was only a strategic prelude to the “ultimate showdown” that would be fought in Europe. Would Matthew fight there? She hoped not—and when the minister asked them to bow their heads (but not to kneel), she prayed for exactly that:
Mother Mary, full of grace, please spare Matthew Burns from the evil of war. Please give him tasks to help the Allies that don’t mean fighting or killing. Please don’t make his mother lose another son
. She knew she was praying that others be chosen to die instead. Those others, as it turned out, would very nearly include her brother Patrick, who fought in the Pacific and, after a month in a Hawaiian hospital, came home wasted by a tropical fever and missing his right leg. Matthew would return from France with a thick scar on his right hand from a gash inflicted by the jagged edge of a large can of tomatoes opened with a farm tool. Zeke the Younger, though he wanted to enlist, was compelled by his parents to take a farm labor deferral.

After the service, Lucinda waited with her parents for an hour in the reception line at the church hall. One by one, friends, well-wishers, and voyeurs shook the hands of the Burnses and thanked them for their son’s life. When Lucinda shook Matthew’s hand, he leaned down and kissed her on the cheek again, so close to her mouth that she thought she might faint. But immediately after, she had to shake his mother’s hand. Even through a thick layer of powder, Mrs. Burns’s face looked ruddy and tender, but for that day, at least, she had stopped crying. (So many years later, Lucinda would wonder how.)

“Hello, Lucinda. Thank you for helping us say good-bye to Aaron. Thank you for being a friend to Matthew.” And then she released Lucinda’s hand and reached for her mother’s. Lucinda would never remember shaking the hand of her future husband. Probably he ignored her, reaching out instead to Patrick, shortstop passing the ball to second base—someone he knew outside the ruthless rituals of mourning. She was just the little sister of his teammate.

In 1944, within a month of returning home and laying aside his uniform, before Lucinda even saw him, Matthew was engaged to Dora Keene. He married her in the exuberant heat of August following the end of the war: a ceremony in the big plain-windowed church with two hundred guests long starved for a true celebration. That night, the two families hosted a dance party in a pasture mowed, just for the occasion, by Matthew and the two Zekes.

Lucinda was out of high school; in September, she would go to college in Middlebury. At the party, she tried not to watch Matthew dancing with Dora. The hem of Dora’s white dress was stained bright green from the newly cut clover. She looked too happy to care; had she so easily forgotten Aaron, buried less than a mile up the road? Were the brothers so interchangeable to her?

“Hey, Pat’s little sister, why the long churchy face?”

Startled, she turned to answer Zeke the Younger. What could she say? “Just thinking about going away in a few weeks.”

“Don’t worry. You’ll come back,” he said lightly, “your head stuffed to the rafters with knowledge. You won’t pay much heed to us farmers then. But for now … dance?”

His request was so sudden, she didn’t have time to say no; the brothers were not interchangeable to
her
. As they moved among the other couples, she became conscious of dancing with one of the only
able-bodied young men in town who had never even gone to boot camp. He had worked hard on the farm, of course—extra hard. He’d been indispensable to his father, who had lost his best hands to the army. No one looked down on Zeke Jr.—they knew he would have gone to war in a flash if his service hadn’t been needed at home—but he didn’t have the swagger of the boys returning from foreign perils. (Who cared if all they had done was load supply trucks or work a transmitter at an air-force base? They’d been
over there
.) Even Patrick, with three bony limbs and one artificial leg, found a way to stride down the street like a hero, not a cripple.

Lucinda did go to college that fall, and in a strange twist—she pictured the Möbius strip that her algebra teacher had made from a simple bit of paper—Zeke began to write her letters. The pile of envelopes in her dormitory desk grew far faster than the pile of letters she had gathered from Matthew Burns. But there was no comparison to be made except in memory: bitterly, Lucinda had discarded Matthew’s letters after hearing about his engagement to Dora.

At Lucinda and Zeke’s rehearsal dinner, in a toast he must have thought sweet and funny, Matthew raised his glass and said, “To Lucinda, who may have had a schoolgirl crush on me but found the right brother in the end … and to my baby brother, Zeke, who kept the home fires burning bright while the rest of us skipped town. He kept those damn cows milked, the fields mowed, the tractors running—and our girls safe from the threat of invading Huns. Though maybe not safe from his charms!”

Perhaps she had found the right brother after all, she thought as she absorbed the unintended slights of that clumsy toast; yet for years to follow, whenever she saw Matthew dancing with or simply leaning close to Dora, she felt a vestigial yearning. Almost worse, she sensed—from looks that lingered a beat too long, from the occasional wink—that Matthew saw her yearning. At least he and Dora had moved away, settling in western Massachusetts, so she didn’t have to endure this awkwardness too often. And then, fifteen years ago, Matthew sold his half of the farm to a developer. He was tired of leasing the land from afar. Besides, with their grown offspring scattered across the country, he and Dora had decided to move even farther away, to a beach house in Florida. Zeke spent hours on the phone trying
to change his brother’s mind about the fate of the land. For once, his persuasive powers failed him.

Lucinda hasn’t seen Matthew since then, not since he came up to close the deal in the very office where her father once worked (the bank now an insignificant link in a national chain, little more than a teller’s window, a pair of plywood cubicles, and a vestibule with an ATM). Five years ago, Dora died of colon cancer. Lucinda sent the requisite donation to the cancer foundation named in the death notice and wrote a short letter to Matthew.
I will never forget that beautiful wedding in the southeast field. Dora was the happiest bride I’d ever seen. I’m sure she believed you saved her life, and probably you did
. The reply she got, thanking her for her “kind gesture,” was from Matthew’s oldest daughter. She wondered, sadly, what it might have been like to get a letter from Matthew Burns himself so many decades after the last ones he had sent her. She can remember his handwriting—larger and more legible than his brother’s, though Zeke, even before law school, was always more eloquent. She still has the letters of courtship and love he wrote to her when she was in college. Christina and Jonathan can read them one day, after she’s gone, and know that whatever else they’ve wondered, their parents married out of love. For Lucinda, was it displaced love? Sometimes she worries that it was, but really, what did she know—what did either of them know—back then?

Zeke has been home for a week and a half, though Lucinda could swear it’s been a month—and still she cannot tell if he’s improving. One day he seems sure-footed, the walker obsolete; next day it will take her ten minutes just to help him out of bed. It’s too soon to expect dramatic results, says Zoe, who came this morning, followed by the speech therapist. They won’t come again for close to a week, because of the holiday weekend. This will be a test for Lucinda, even with visitors to help in a crisis. She has yet to spend a night upstairs in the bedroom, and her back is killing her from sleeping on the sofa bed. When she happens to mention this to Jonathan, who is reading student papers on his laptop at the kitchen table, he looks up at her, eyes wide, and snaps the computer shut. “There is no reason not to fix that problem now, Mom!”

He sprints upstairs and back down, returning with his iPhone. Peering into its genielike screen, tapping and stroking it furiously, he murmurs, “Yes … yes … oh good … huh. All righty …” Without looking up, he says, “Mom, don’t you guys have a Sleepy’s in some mall around here? Yes! Okay. Here we go.” Lucinda doesn’t follow him into the den; she hears him opening the sofa, talking to someone on his phone.

He returns to the kitchen and announces, “New and much better mattress will arrive today between noon and five. How’s that?” With a flourish, he slides his phone into his shirt pocket, sits at the table, and opens his computer.

“Sweetheart, I can’t thank you enough,” says Lucinda.

“You are welcome. And now,
eh bien
, back to Simone and J-Paul, the ever-dynamic duo. Let me know when Dad wakes up. I’m going to get him to play chess. Zoe told me it’s good for his brain
and
his hands.”

In the two full days since Jonathan’s arrival, his effusive energy and nearly manic helpfulness put Lucinda in mind of a dervish, though she isn’t quite sure what a dervish is. Yesterday he got up at seven, spoke with his sister on the phone and made a long list, after which he drove to the monstrously overstocked grocery store (the one whose parking lot and checkout lines Lucinda cannot endure) and the gourmet shop and the wine store. He insisted on going alone, and when he returned, he ferried what looked like dozens of bags from the car and put everything away on his own.

“And these are for you,” he said, presenting his mother with four gaudy, durable cloth sacks emblazoned with the logo of the monster grocery store. “Save a few maple trees, Mom.” She thanked him, even though she already owns dozens of these eco-friendly bags. No senator’s wife, least of all a Vermont senator’s wife, should be caught wasting resources of any kind. (Forget that the fuel bills for the monster store negate, to a laughable degree, any do-gooding efforts at conserving grocery bags.)

Now Lucinda hardly dares open her own refrigerator, for fear of dislodging a torrent of vegetables, fruits, breads, boxes of pastry, artisanal goat cheeses, and bottles of champagne. Hunkered down beneath all this bounty is the carcass of a formerly free-roaming, organically fed, never-drugged turkey that Jonathan ordered online
while back in California and picked up in person at a farm half an hour away.

Lucinda likes to orchestrate and shop for Thanksgiving herself, but under the circumstances (including treacherously icy roads) she is relieved to let someone take over. Until a few years ago, Jonathan would have been the least likely candidate for this role. She’s pretty sure the catalyst is Cyril, who will arrive tonight. Jonathan says that he and Cyril will spend tomorrow making a “royal feast” and that no one else will be allowed in the kitchen all day.

Jonathan has found domestic happiness on the late side, in his fifties. Perhaps, having found it so late, he’s making up for lost time. That’s the only way she can explain the startling changes in her son. He has lived in California for close to thirty years now, giving Lucinda only the rarest glimpses into his adult life. During most of that time, he did not mention attachments of any kind. And then, five years ago, he met Cyril. Two years after that, Lucinda and Zeke made a trip out to see the house they bought together (which Zeke thought a risky arrangement, just from a legal perspective). Still, when Lucinda found herself giving advice about their wedding last summer, what felt unnatural to her was not that her son would be marrying a man but that he would be settling down in any conventional sense.

This visit is the first time she’s seen Jonathan since then, and it’s clear that he’s added muscle and a healthy bit of flesh to his bony frame. His clothes—just the jeans and striped shirts he wears around the house, the colorful socks in which he pads to and fro like a playful cat—look as if they’ve been more consciously chosen; and is his hair actually styled? It’s wonderful, the apparent contagion of Cyril’s confidence and flair, but it worries her just a little, too.

Jonathan has a fine academic reputation of his own (she heard this, time and again, from the university colleagues she met at the wedding), but sometimes it looks to Lucinda as if her son has blissfully donned the mantle of cheerleader wife. He is constantly telling her about Cyril’s glowing book reviews, his never-ending honors, his keynote addresses to conferences in luxurious locales. Last year, according to Jonathan, Harvard tried to “poach” Cyril from Berkeley with a tempting offer that included the loan of a historic house on Brattle Street where Longfellow and Hawthorne frequently dined as
guests. Lucinda felt a pang at the thought of her son moving so much closer to her; if Harvard had offered a position for Jonathan as well, would they have moved?

Christina e-mails her mother to say that she will bring a cranberry cheesecake and her traditional sweet potatoes (mashed with too much butter and maple syrup). She and Greg will drive down Thursday morning with their youngest daughter, Madison. Courtney is still in India, and Hannah is going to her boyfriend’s parents’ house in Albany.

Lucinda wishes they were coming sooner. She has decided that she will tell Jonathan and Christina the extraordinary news about their forty-two-year-old nephew once they are all together. Zeke seems to have agreed with this plan, though once Lucinda told him about Kit’s desire to be in touch with them, he had surprisingly little to say. Perhaps he was too tired to react properly to something so cataclysmic—perhaps she shouldn’t have told him at night—but it was clear that he understood right away what she was talking about when she described her conversation with Jasper.