And the Dark Sacred Night (33 page)

She called Kit’s number at nine-thirty the following night, sitting alone in the den. As she had expected, her hands shook and she was short of breath. As she had forgotten to expect, a woman answered.

“May I speak with Christopher?” Lucinda asked.

“Who’s calling?”

“Lucinda Burns. Do I have the right number?”

“Yes! You do! Just—yes. Hang on, please.”

Lucinda shivered as she waited.

“Lucinda Burns?” The voice was loud, tense. “This is Kit. Christopher.”

“Kit.” She paused. Which one of them was supposed to ask questions first? Her voice trembled when she said, “I spoke to Mr. Noonan. Well, you know that, don’t you?”

“He says you’re my grandmother.” Obviously trying to put her at ease, he forced a laugh. “Are you?”

“I guess I am. Or no, I’m
sure
I am.” But was she? Should she, like the credit card people, ask him to state his birthday, the last four numbers of his social? Of course not.

“I can’t believe this,” he said. “I’m, I have to …”

She could tell he had covered the mouthpiece. Returning, he apologized. He laughed again, this time the sort of laughter that acts as a reminder to breathe. “I asked my wife—Sandra—to let me talk to you alone. This is so—”

“Strange,” said Lucinda. “I’m too nervous. I wish we could just—see each other. I’m counting on that. I mean, hoping.” Was this too forward of her?

“I am, too,” he said. “Hoping we’ll meet.”

Do not cry, she reminded herself. She took a deep breath. “I know the person you’re hoping to meet is your father.”

“Yes. If I can. If he would. I know it’s a lot to ask.”

“Kit, my son Malachy was your father, and I wish you could meet him. I’m sure he’d have wanted that.” Did it matter if this was a lie? Was it? She had no idea. “I’m sure you’d have met him already if he were alive.”

She had expected silence, but almost right away Kit spoke. “My mother told me he died. That’s all she told me. I didn’t believe her.”

Had Daphne known about Mal’s death? Or had she simply claimed he was dead from the moment Kit could ask? One thing Lucinda knew she mustn’t do was to make Kit any angrier at his mother than he might be already.

“Your mother was telling the truth. I think you’ll see why she had a hard time telling you more. Mal was gay, and he died from AIDS. Twenty years ago. I can talk about it, so don’t think you can’t ask me anything you want. I want you to.”
I want to have a new reason to talk about him
, she could have said.
No one wants to hear about him anymore. Not from me
.

After a moment, she said, “I’m sorry if I was too blunt.”

“It’s me who’s sorry,” he said. “Sorry for you. That’s so awful.”

“Yes. It is. But you know what? You have an aunt and an uncle—Mal’s sister and brother. I know they’ll be dying to meet you.”

“They know about me?”

“No!” she said. “Not yet. But how could they not? Want to meet you.”

Though what if everything Kit had to absorb now—gay father, dead of AIDS—made him change his mind about meeting even Lucinda? “Please forgive me if I assume too much,” she said.

“Wow.” He sighed loudly. “There’s no book on how to do this, is there?”

“Probably there is. But if there isn’t, I won’t be the one to write it.” Why was she making a joke of something so serious?

He was quiet for a few seconds. “I need to tell you that my mother doesn’t know I’m doing this. Finding you. She’s never wanted that.”

“You know what?” said Lucinda. “I’m yours to find. I always have been.” She resisted the urge to say that a part of her has been waiting, wishing, to be found. Is that why she’s outlived so many of her friends?

He whispered something she didn’t catch.

“Your mother will understand, Kit. I remember her. She’ll be all right. She’s—if she’s the girl I remember, she adapts to things. She couldn’t have raised you otherwise.” That part was true. But as for what Daphne wanted or would understand, that didn’t matter anymore. Lucinda felt a surge of a fierce, mean emotion: triumph.

“I don’t know, but here we are, right?”

“Yes, here we are.”

“So where do we go?”

“Toward knowing each other. I hope. If that’s what you still want.”

“Of course I do,” said Kit.

“So you,” said Lucinda. “You live in New Jersey. You’re married.”

“We have two children. Twins.”

Lucinda felt her triumph give way to wonder. “Twins!” she exclaimed.

So many Thanksgivings in Lucinda’s life are entwined with momentous events or revelations. She and Zeke announced their engagement over a just-carved turkey in this very house, during her senior year of college; a year later, they announced her first pregnancy. (Dora had two children by then.)

Eight Novembers passed without incident until the year in which Zeke the Elder died of a stroke the week before Thanksgiving. The meal at the farmhouse was canceled; it fell to Lucinda and Zeke, with three young children underfoot, to fit everyone into their modest house in town. Subdued but still hungry, people ate off their laps in three rooms; on one arm of her old sofa, now upstairs in the boys’
bedroom, she can still make out gravy stains where Matthew’s son upended his plate.

The next Thanksgiving was the first one Lucinda hosted at the farm. Zeke’s mother lasted alone in the house for three months before she confessed that she felt frightened living alone. The den became her bedroom.

Over yet another Thanksgiving, his first visit home from his first year of college, Mal came out to Lucinda. The two of them were washing dishes while everyone else slept off the excess food and drink. (That expression, “coming out,” was as foreign and irrelevant to her then as Tunisia had been before Aaron Burns died on a beach in that country.)

Mal had not gone to Juilliard. Because he hardly spoke to Lucinda during the year he worked for the record producer in Burlington, she was never able to talk to him about his decision to go to the University of Vermont instead. Zeke had told him about Lucinda’s support of Daphne, her promise to help with the baby however she could. It was hard, after that, for Lucinda not to see Mal’s turning away from his music as revenge, the dashing of her fantasies. This was absurd, she knew, yet the resentment Mal felt toward his mother was real.

“He might never lay eyes on that kid,” Zeke said to Lucinda after she received news of Christopher’s birth, “and still it will change his whole life.”

“He’s too young to see it clearly yet,” she said.

“See what clearly? That his mother wants to make sure he understands the consequences of giving in to human temptation? What he’s not too young to do, Lucinda, is cut you off from his life.”

“Sounds as if you wouldn’t care.”

“Frankly, I’m staying out of it. What goes on between you and Mal is beyond my powers of negotiation.” Zeke’s sarcasm silenced her.

The only sympathetic man in her life was Father Tom, who told her to exercise humility in the face of her son’s withdrawal. “God isn’t the only one who works in mysterious ways,” he said, smiling at the truth become cliché. “Our children do as well. Mal is a talented young man, and he will find his path. Perhaps he’ll teach music. Perhaps he simply knows that he’s not mature enough yet for life in a big city. New York—well, New York! When I go there myself, I feel like an ant. Which, I admit, is a useful perspective.”

Was that it? Had Mal simply wanted to stay near home? Lucinda would never know. When he finally spoke to her about something meaningful, the news he shared toppled anything so trivial as where he had chosen to go to college.

They stood side by side at the sink, the usual wash-and-dry assembly line. She asked him about a class he was taking in European cultural history, which he’d brought up over dinner in a conversation about French movies with Zeke. Silent at first—had he heard her question over the running water?—he finished drying one of the fragile, gold-rimmed wineglasses and set it aside with its mates. He put down the towel and faced her. “Mom, I don’t want to talk about European history. I’m behind on the paper I’m writing about Vienna, so I’d rather not go there anyway.”

“To Vienna?” she joked nervously.

“Funny.”

“What should we talk about?” She didn’t care what they talked about. After months of ignoring her letters, of calling home to speak only with his father, her son was finally, freely speaking with her. She had been prepared for him to dry the dishes without a word, then go upstairs to bed.

“I want to talk about my homosexuality. Or I need to. I don’t mean to shock you, but there’s no other way to do this. I’m not going to give you a bunch of wink-wink hints. Dad knows already. I talked to him Tuesday, when he picked me up. Moms are supposed to be easier—most guys start with their moms, or that’s what I hear—but not everybody’s mom is … religious the way you are. I know you’re thinking I’m damned to hell. If that’s what you believe, I can’t change it. If you want to talk about God, you’re wasting your time. Sorry.”

She wasn’t thinking about the fate of Mal’s soul—not yet. She was thinking that he had told Zeke two days before he told her. More upsetting, Zeke had said nothing to her, had not even seemed out of sorts the past two days (though she had not been alone with him at bedtime those two nights, staying up in the kitchen to cook).

She said, “Mal, sweetheart, I’m glad you can talk to me about this.” She knew she sounded anything but glad. She was thinking, or this was the gist of the storm occupying the space where her brain
had been,
You presume a lot, speaking to me so harshly after breaking my heart for so long with your silence
.

She sat down at the kitchen table. “Please sit, Mal. I need you to sit down, honey.”

For once, her most obstinate child obeyed her. “I asked Dad how he thought you’d take this. He took it better than I thought he would. Though maybe that’s politics. I mean, he has to accept a lot of people for what they are, people other people would avoid. It’s their opinions he wants to change.”

Lucinda assumed Mal wanted her to laugh, so she did.

He didn’t even smile. He said, “I realized I needed to tell you this, now, for a couple of reasons.”

“You’re in love with someone?”

“No. I’m not getting ready to bring someone home to introduce to the family, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

She pictured him walking through the door of the farmhouse with another young man. How could she face that? Had Zeke, who took the news so calmly, imagined such a scene?

“Did you just realize this?” she said.

“No.” He looked directly at her, and she had to struggle to meet his gaze, which had steered clear of hers for so long. Her son’s gaze, when serious, was almost foreboding. “How long I’ve known isn’t important. Part of why I took the year off was to try to … get clear about it before … well, whatever comes next.”

“But Daphne—” Immediately, Lucinda knew she’d said the wrong thing.

Mal frowned. “That was a mistake. A mistake in every way. I am never going to be a father, and I made that exponentially clear to her. So by involving yourself …” When he sighed, he sounded so heartbreakingly boyish. Lucinda thought of Father Tom’s advice: to accept Mal’s anger with humility.

He slumped in his chair and teased at the fringe of a woven place-mat. “I wasn’t going to talk about this. Even though, I guess, this is one of the reasons I needed to tell you. The fantasies you probably have.” He sat up straight and pressed his long hands—hands God had made to play a musical instrument, Lucinda was sure of it—flat against both sides of his long face. He squeezed his eyes shut and
mussed his hair, as if waking himself up. He made a sound of muted desperation. When he finally looked at her, he said, “I’m not making as much sense as I planned to. Well, does one ever? And come to think of it, not much of the past year has made any sense to
me
.”

“But you are,” she said. “Making sense.” She wanted only to keep him talking.

“I thought I would never forgive you for what you did, but I love you, Mom, so not forgiving you isn’t an option. Life is too complicated right now, or maybe too simple. I’d have crashed and burned at Juilliard—or anywhere I had to go on doing nothing but drilling myself mad trying to be a Great Musician.”

But you are, you could be
, she wanted to argue.

“I need to be selfish now, and I need to be honest, too. Steer clear of bullshit. But now you know what it is I’m concentrating on.”

“Life,” said Lucinda, and when she said it, she was filled with admiration. She realized her son was more valiant than foolish, whatever he was doing with the gifts he had, even if he set them aside for a time, hid them under the proverbial bushel.

“Well, Mom, you could put it that way,” he said. “That’s one way to put it.” He smiled at her, with genuine if cautious warmth. It felt to Lucinda as if they were meeting each other on a narrow bridge across a wide river or canyon that had divided them far longer than the year of wounded feelings. “Let’s finish doing the wineglasses,” he said, “and let’s go to bed. And let’s actually get some sleep. No quilting allowed. I’ll be listening for the machine.”

“No quilting,” she said. “I promise.”

Cyril’s arrival, late on Tuesday night, seems to intensify Jonathan’s joie de vivre. Lucinda is already in the sofa bed (with its wonderfully dense new mattress) when she hears the two men enter the house, Jonathan making more noise shushing Cyril than Cyril might have made had he been talking.

She puts on her robe and goes to greet them. She hugs Cyril in the dim front hall. She says quietly, “It would take an airstrike to wake Zeke. Come into the kitchen and have a cup of tea. A glass of wine?”

She sees Cyril hesitate but decide to accept, perhaps out of courtesy.

“It’s only nine-thirty back in Berkeley,” he says once they’ve shut the kitchen door. “I’m still wide awake. So wine would be fantastic, thanks.”

“Aren’t you exhausted by that ghastly security nonsense you went through in Boston?” says Jonathan, pulling his chair close to Cyril’s. Lucinda pours them each a glass of red wine. Jonathan pushes his glass away, but Cyril takes a sip and nods with pleasure.