And the Dark Sacred Night (34 page)

“Hey, they didn’t lose my luggage. That’s always something.”

“That’s cause for
rejoicing
,” says Jonathan. “These days, I think the airlines want you to feel grateful just for arriving at your destination
alive
.”

Cyril laughs quietly but looks at Lucinda. “How’s he doing?”

“Making progress. I think. He’s discouraged about how hard it is to express himself. But it’s looking like he’s all there—his mind—as if he just has to push his way out of a stuffy, windowless room.”

“To have his faculties intact—that’s a real blessing.”

Lucinda feels genuinely liked by Cyril—she likes him, too—but sometimes she has the sense that he cannot stop thinking of her as “religious” and taking care not to offend her. When the two men called, on speakerphone, to announce that they were going to get married, Zeke pointed out that same-sex marriage had been legal in California but not anymore; did they realize that?

“Dad, I think we know the laws of our own state,” said Jonathan, “especially as they relate to biases that affect us directly. Biases we refuse to condone. We know that the
state
would see what we’re doing as a commitment ceremony, but to us it will be a real wedding. Your wedding to Mom in the church? That was just as ‘symbolic’ to the state of Vermont as this one will be to California.”

“It’s not symbolic if you believe it’s a sacrament,” Cyril said at once. And then it sounded as if he was leaning closer to the phone. “Lucinda, I just want to say that I respect your Catholic views on this matter. I know you’re pretty liberal, which I love about you, but I don’t want you to be uncomfortable. There’s this one priest—I guess he’s an outlaw of sorts, but he holds Mass in the Castro—well, I was thinking that maybe we’d have him be part of the ceremony.”

“I don’t want you doing that for my sake,” said Lucinda. “It’s your day, and I’ll happily play whatever role you like.”

“Mother of the groom,” chimed in Jonathan. “That’s a no-brainer. The orchid corsage, the great hat, the usual.”

“Mother of
a
groom,” said Cyril.

“Of the older groom,” said Jonathan. “The one who was almost an old maid.”

“Oh, stop,” said Cyril, who was five years younger. “We’re both getting long in the tooth, and the point is, Zeke and Lucinda, that’s something we want to continue to do together.”

The wedding took place last July, on a grassy hillside with a dizzying view of San Francisco Bay, Jonathan and Cyril wearing white suits. Lucinda liked Cyril’s parents. His mother was English, with the muted accent of someone who had lived in the States for most of her life; the father was an architect. At the rehearsal dinner, Lucinda sensed that the fathers of the two grooms were watching each other, quietly competing, convinced that many of the guests wondered how they honestly felt about watching their sons marry other men. Each gave a toast that was almost embarrassing in its self-conscious balance of humor and liberal-minded bravado.

Even when Lucinda had asked Zeke, in their suite at the Claremont Hotel that morning, how he honestly
did
feel about the wedding, he had smiled tersely and said, “With all we’ve been through, like it or not, we were catapulted long, long ago into a world no one could have pictured back in our 4-H days.”

Was he referring to Mal, going through the hell-on-earth of AIDS, the disease itself and then the political fallout (for her personal; for Zeke professional, too), or was that her imagination? Was it pathetic that nearly every intense emotion she had experienced over the past two decades circled back to the life and death of her older son? He was dead by the time Jonathan came out to her—Mal’s death spurred his confession—and as Lucinda lurched through the days of her horribly altered life, she would sometimes stop to wish that the greatest challenge of her life, and of Zeke’s, had been facing up to having two gay sons, but two gay sons who would outlive them. That—oh that would have been easy!

Zeke is sitting on the edge of the sofa bed, his walker beside him. “Honey? Are you all right?” Lucinda sits up.

“Ruckish in air,” he says, but he gives her the one-sided smile she’s beginning to accept as a version of normal.

How she slept through it, while Zeke did not, is a wonder to Lucinda. Maybe because, finally, she’s sleeping on a comfortable mattress. Zeke is right: there’s quite a ruckus coming from the kitchen. Laughing, singing, the repeated roar of a blender. It’s seven o’clock in the morning.

With painstaking care, Zeke pulls his legs onto the mattress and lies down beside Lucinda. He sighs. His hands lie limp on the front of his thighs. His eyes are closed, so she stares at him briefly. Zeke is an old man, his throat a rumple of flesh, his face dappled with nutmeg age spots. Were they so prominent before now, or is it just that he’s pale from lack of sun?

He will have to retire. She’s suddenly certain of this; is he? Less than a month ago, one reporter called him an “inspiringly vigorous octogenarian.”

That Zeke’s mind may be as sharp as ever isn’t entirely good news; he is lucid enough to be despondent about his diminished prospects. When the doctor agreed to discharge Zeke earlier than he would have liked, he warned Lucinda about patients who set impossibly high standards for themselves. “The all-or-nothing patients are the hard ones,” he said. “Sometimes, if they can’t return to what they see as ‘one hundred percent,’ they give up, and then they go into a downward spiral. You have to help him be realistic.”

Lucinda pats Zeke on one knee. “I’ll be right back. Sleep if you want.”

When she enters the kitchen, she says to Jonathan, “I know I said your father sleeps soundly, but not this soundly.”

He and Cyril turn toward her from the long wooden counter where they are chopping vegetables, grating cheese, and filling bowls. The oven is on, and a dozen serving platters are out on the table. “Mom, we got carried away.”

“We’re so sorry, Lucinda,” says Cyril.

“Never mind. Zeke’s in the den now.”

“Can we play music?” asks Jonathan. “We love cooking to music. And I found that great collection in your sewing room.”

Lucinda sees the stack of CDs, along with her player, by the bread box. She never brings them downstairs. “They were Mal’s.”

“I know.” Jonathan looks confused; she realizes she’s frowning.

“It’s fine, fine,” she says. “Use what you need, play whatever you like.”

At least they made coffee. She pours herself a mug and returns to the den. Zeke’s eyes are closed, so she moves quietly, setting her coffee on the desk. She should go upstairs and dress, find a space in the kitchen to make breakfast.

“We tell jhem today.”

“Tell them, Zeke?”

“Kit.”

“No, Zeke, tomorrow. When Christina’s here.”

“Tomorrow.”

“Thanksgiving.”

“I know,” he says impatiently. “Thought shwaz today.”

“You’d think so from the level of chaos. But I guess I’ve always started the food this early, too. I feel redundant, though, and I hate it.”

“Think you do.” He makes the guttural sound she recognizes as a tattered remnant of his hearty laugh.

“So now there are two of us.”

“Kit,” he says.

“Zeke, I can’t believe it—that we’ll see him after all these years. You—you for the first time.” She wonders if he’s up for it; she should consult his doctor, but she doesn’t want to hear that this encounter might be stressful. And Christmas is still a month away. “It’s all right with you, isn’t it? That he’s coming to meet us. Here.”

Zeke nods, his eyes still closed. “Handshum boy.”

Is he thinking about Mal now, or Jonathan? Jonathan’s in good shape, but he’s never been as good-looking as his siblings. His face cannot quite reconcile his mother’s delicate chin with his father’s jutting brow. Or maybe Zeke’s thoughts have drifted to Cyril, with his thick blond hair and Devonshire-cream complexion. (“When I first saw him, I thought I’d fallen down a wormhole into
Chariots of Fire
,” Lucinda has heard her son say more than once.)

“I’m glad Cyril was able to come,” says Lucinda. “I just wish Christina’s older girls could make it, too. I wonder if Hannah and that boyfriend are thinking about getting married.”

“Kidj take time now,” says Zeke. “More careful.”

Lucinda thinks inadvertently of Daphne and Mal, how very uncareful they were. “Should
we
have been more careful?” she teases.

Zeke opens his eyes. “War shped thingj up. Carpe diem et shetera.”

“We did everything sooner. As if we had no time to lose.” After losing so much else. And yet, if she thinks back to the war years, she does not remember any greater awareness of her own mortality, only the worry that her ongoing life might be changed unpredictably. As one of her classmates put it in French class, “If the Germans win, will we have to learn German instead? Will we eat things like bratwurst and cabbage?” Even when Lucinda’s brother shipped out, she didn’t think much about the possibility that he might die. Only decades later did she understand her mother’s wanderings through the downstairs rooms so late at night. Patrick had survived, of course, only to die of skin cancer in his sixties (all that Pacific sun, or so reasoned the doctor who failed to cure him). At least their parents were gone by then.

Lucinda hears a heavy metallic object hit the floor in the kitchen. Much laughter, alongside the overture to
South Pacific
, the movie version. Mal’s collection includes the Broadway version, too. She knows them both by heart.

“Let me get breakfast. I’ll bring it in here,” she says. “I don’t think we’re safe in there. Sounds like a combat zone.”

“Eggjh. Thank you.” Zeke closes his eyes again.

The chefs give Lucinda permission to cook breakfast in “their” kitchen; Cyril clears a miserly swatch of countertop. Jonathan is singing “Some Enchanted Evening,” exaggerating Giorgio Tozzi’s Italianate ardor. This is not the son she remembers from his teenage years, the child who earned Bs in nearly every subject, played no sports, hung out with girls, and spent much of his spare time reading biographies and organizing a stamp collection in tiny wax-paper packets. She had worried about him for so long.

Nowadays, with all the information thrown at parents (at least in the liberal Northeast), she might have guessed that he was gay. But Jonathan, unlike his brother, made efforts to keep his parents in the dark. He brought young women home from college, never claiming romantic involvement yet acting, around these charming girls, in ways that left Lucinda relieved and hopeful. “I went through a whole barbershop of beards,” he joked in his wedding toast to Cyril.

Once he moved to California, in his late twenties, he rarely came back to Vermont. The first time Lucinda and Zeke saw him out there, he looked as if he was leading a contentedly solitary life. Lucinda can remember thinking that if she had raised him fully in the faith, without the dilution of his father’s indifference, he might have become a priest.

He did not tell them the truth about his life until the week after Mal’s funeral. He was thirty-five years old.

They were in the car, just the two of them, returning from grocery shopping. The last mourners had drifted away; the refrigerator was empty. Jonathan was to fly back west the following night. They had ridden in silence for the entire ten minutes, Lucinda dumbfounded and sedated by grief, glad of one thing only: that she was done having to talk with strangers who had apparently been close to Mal. (Why had she never met them before?) When Jonathan pulled up to the house and turned the engine off, she was inert. All that spring and summer, there were times when she felt as if she had no joints or muscles, no physical means with which to move about the world. She could lie in a bed or sit on a chair unable to recall what it felt like to rise and hold herself upright on her feet. It was like paralysis, she imagined—or no, maybe the opposite, since paralyzed people could remember standing, balancing, moving forward, with an exquisite sense of longing. She was indifferent to motion.

Jonathan turned to her and said, “So before I go back, I have to tell you something. The timing is terrible, but it’s now or never.”

She didn’t even look at him when she said, “If it’s bad news, sweetheart, you’ll have to put it on hold.”

He said, “It’s just that I finally have to tell you that I’m gay. Too. There wasn’t ever a good time, and now there couldn’t ever be.”

Lucinda’s first emotion was anger. Out of her mouth came a sound of irrepressible disgust. She was no longer so naïve as to think this was something he hadn’t known for years—years during which Jonathan could surely see that his brother’s coming out hadn’t changed him in his parents’ eyes. Jonathan had no reason to be fearful.

“I know how this must hit you, Mom, especially now,” he said, gripping the steering wheel of Zeke’s old Volvo.

“Mal knew this?” she heard herself say. Which was really to say,
had Mal withheld this from her? Because of course he must have known.

“I think he suspected. But I figured you and Dad couldn’t take it—two of us, both of us … you know. I didn’t want Mal to bear that burden.”

“He
didn’t
know?” But if Jonathan hadn’t told Mal … “Do you mean to tell me that all these years, the years your brother was sick and dying
because
he was gay, you hid that from him? How could you?”

“Mom, I didn’t ‘hide’ anything. Look, I live on the other side of the country, and we were never close. But to tell you the truth, it only got harder to tell him once he told us he was sick. You have every right to yell at me. You think I’m coldhearted. But here’s the thing: I’m negative. I don’t think that would have helped him at all. I think he’d only have felt more alone.”

“You, a pessimist? And what kind of an excuse is that?”

Jonathan looked baffled. Then he said, “Negative—Mom—what I meant was that I don’t have the virus. I’m not sick. I tested negative.”

Lucinda was stunned. Here is the bad news, here the good. Except that she could not absorb the good news in any way signaling relief. She understood now—perhaps—why Mal had often referred to his brother with a tone of dismissal or even scorn. She knew they hadn’t been close, but maybe now she knew precisely why. Mal was too smart not to have guessed.