And the Dark Sacred Night (35 page)

“And I wasn’t as brave as Mal, okay? Neither as talented nor as brave.” It was Jonathan’s turn to sound angry.

“I would never compare you,” she said. “Certainly not now.”

“Well.” He laughed coldly. “If I were you, I’d be comparing like crazy. The son you lost versus the one you’re left with. Raw deal.”

“Oh, Jonathan.” How could she be enduring this conversation? “I cannot take this in right now. Or take it in graciously.”

“I must seem incredibly cruel. All I can say is I’m sorry. It’s just, if I didn’t do this, I think I might never be able to come home again. I’d suffocate. From my own cowardice.” Jonathan looked as if he might cry. The car, sitting in the sun, had grown uncomfortably hot. Lucinda could smell the large slab of salmon they had bought to grill for dinner.

“I haven’t told Dad yet. I wanted to tell you first. How you feel matters most to me.” Then he did cry. And still, God smite her vain indignation, she couldn’t stifle her fury. Never mind the brute irony: that
this
son came to her first, before telling his father. She got out, took two bags of groceries from the backseat, and carried them into the house. Jonathan followed a few minutes later, his composure restored.

As they put the food away, Lucinda said, “I hope you have someone loving in your life. And I hope you’ll introduce him to us if you do. I don’t think Mal ever had that. A real partner.”

“He had so many good friends, though.”

“Not the same thing, sweetheart. I hope you know that.”

“Of course I do,” Jonathan said coldly, and they let it rest there.

That was so long ago, years before he met Cyril.

Lucinda eats two pieces of toast while she scrambles eggs for Zeke. She spoons the eggs onto a plate, then slices a banana into a small bowl and scoops vanilla yogurt on top.

Jonathan and Cyril appear to be cooking far too much food, but Lucinda keeps this thought to herself. She will try to behave as if she is the guest and they are the hosts. Really, she’s lucky they are doing all the work.

Her son comes over and puts an arm around her shoulders. “I see your sidelong glances, Ma. Let me reassure you, we’ll have this place cleaned up by the end of the day. Table set and everything. We want tomorrow to be totally relaxed. Totally! All we’ll have to do is stuff and roast the turkey and bake the bread pudding. So try to ignore the pandemonium.”

“Thank you for doing all this,” she says.

“We are
thrilled
to be doing all this,” insists Jonathan. “Your kitchen is twice the size of ours, so we’re having fun with it. Nothing like a big old farm kitchen, designed to turn out meals for dozens of hardworking men!”

“He’s right,” says Cyril. “We are envious.”

Lucinda looks around at the scarred wooden counters and dull blue linoleum, the outdated appliances, the rusting can opener screwed to
the broom-closet door. “Well,” she says. “It has served a lot of feasts in its day.”

She arranges Zeke’s breakfast on a tray and takes it into the den. He’s pulled himself up to a sitting position on the sofa bed, but she wonders if he can manage eating off his lap. “Do you want to go into the dining room?”

“Here,” he says. “And no huffering. You get dreshed.”

Upstairs, Lucinda puts on corduroy pants and takes out a turtle-neck sweater. If she’s to be banned from her kitchen, maybe she can go out on her snowshoes. Or maybe, it occurs to her, she could drive Zeke to the movies. Unless he doesn’t want to risk conversation with people who will no doubt recognize them. For the second time in a week, she puts on her bra with such acute consciousness of her own dexterity that her fingers fumble at matching the tiny hooks with their respective apertures. Is there a synapse of the brain that handles this specific task? What does it handle for a man—loading a gun in the dark?

The syrupy crescendo of “Younger Than Springtime” rises from below.

“Don’t I wish,” she tells her mirrored self. In the calendar of her life span, she is just about exactly where she finds herself this month: in late autumn, surprised by a sudden storm, a storm that only seems untimely. Is she facing her own metaphorical Thanksgiving? The gratitude before the last decline, the toss of the calendar into the recycling bin. What a maudlin train of thought!

When she returns to the kitchen, Jonathan is standing in the center of the room, wearing a flowered apron that belonged to Zeke’s mother, arms outstretched, eyes closed, singing “This Nearly Was Mine.”

“ ‘
So clear and deep are my fancies of things I wish were true
—’ ” He opens his eyes and sees her. “Mom!”

Cyril turns from the sink. “He thinks he’s Carreras. I’m putting on something less obnoxious when this ends. Definitely less sing-along-able. Do you have any Gregorian chant, Lucinda?”

Jonathan sashays toward Cyril, holding out the corners of the apron. “Gayer than laughter, what can I say?”

Lucinda picks up the case. “This is my favorite song in the show.”
Though it wouldn’t have been when she was much younger. It’s an old person’s song, a song with a panoramic view of the past.

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard it before,” says Jonathan.

“And you’re not going to hear it again. Not if I’m around,” says Cyril.

“Are you finding everything?” Lucinda asks. After Cyril assures her that they are perfectly self-sufficient, she tells them she is hoping to get Zeke out of the house for a few hours. The energetic repartee of the two younger men is not only wearying to her but oddly worrisome. Perhaps their sprightliness, especially here in her house, merely reminds her how old both she and Zeke have grown, but still she feels as if Jonathan, however happy, just isn’t himself. Can persistent happiness change someone, fundamentally? Well, why not?

Persistent unhappiness changes you, this she knows—but not as much as it does your sense of purpose. She thinks of the contemptuous young woman on the street in Montpelier.
Meddling like that
. She hastens back to Zeke.

Why does it feel as if she
begrudges
Jonathan his obvious happiness? This terrible thought did not occur to her until she watched Jonathan and Cyril proceed (radiant with glee, nearly romping) back up the aisle after their wedding vows. Zeke squeezed her arm. She felt the profound relief of a mother seeing her child engulfed by joy, but she understood, too, exactly why she couldn’t quite join in. She wished that it were Malachy’s wedding. She wished that Mal could have been the one standing there in the field with his true love: Mal in the white suit, Mal against the white sky and the sunstruck surface of the bay, Mal in the blanching flashes of camera after camera sealing the moment to hold it far into the future. Even if he’d still had to die so young, she wished she had been able to witness a moment like this in his life.

There must have been two hundred wedding guests on that hill, so happy for Jonathan and Cyril that they cheered, as if the two men had won an athletic competition, not solemnly promised to be together forever. Lucinda felt as if all these strangers loved her son more than she did. What was the matter with her?

After Mal’s death, numerous friends and fellow parishioners told Lucinda that she must learn to “let him go.” They might mean that she should let him go to God, let him be released from his pain, or
relinquish her possessive grief. What it meant to her, however, was that beyond accepting his death, she had to understand that from then on he would belong as much to others as he did to her. She had loved him too much, perhaps, more the way she ought to have loved his father. And God forgive her if, in helping all those girls have those unexpected babies, learn to be mothers far younger than they should have, she had been trying to undo that death.

“Can you finally, after all these years, stop calling me that?” Christina is extracting herself from Jonathan’s embrace.

“Oh, Teeny, lighten up,” says Jonathan. “I love how you grew so completely
out
of that nickname.”

Greg is hanging up coats, Madison is carrying bags to the kitchen, and Christina’s two Labs are thrashing their bargelike bodies against the furniture. They act like bumper cars, as if their objective is to make a contact sport of being indoors. Lucinda finds it amusing that in the midst of her daughter’s admirably disciplined life, she cannot seem to make her dogs behave, but she is not so amused by her worry that one of them may knock Zeke off his feet.

Christina catches Lucinda’s look. “I know, Mom. But by the time I realized we should put them at the kennel, it was
—down
, Ferris! No!” She follows the dog into the living room. “Dad, hey, you look great. I said
down
, Ferris!”

“Dog’s fine,” says Zeke. Ferris, his front paws up on Zeke’s thighs, is avidly licking his face. Zeke is petting him.

“That is so disgusting, Mom. Don’t let him do that. Yuck,” says Madison, returning from the kitchen. Cyril comes in behind her, and for a moment, all of them stand awkwardly around Zeke, who finally says, “Could use a little dog shlobber, lighten shings up round here.”

Relieved laughter. But now the second dog, Jimbo, is careening in circles around the room.

“Stop NOW!” shouts Greg in an artificially deep voice, spreading his arms wide, like a scarecrow. Jimbo instantly responds, crouching by the fireplace.

After an awkward freeze-frame, Lucinda says, “Well. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody. I’m so glad we’re together.”

Jonathan, too soon in Lucinda’s opinion, takes drink orders. Cyril,
carrying a large tray of hors d’oeuvres, pauses near the coffee table with a glance at the dogs.

“Christina,” says Lucinda, “could you please put those beasts in the den?”

“Mom, they’ll be fine. They’re just working off all that cramped-up car time. Greg’s got them trained not to eat off tables.”

Cyril, obviously more trusting than Lucinda, sets the tray down on the coffee table. Instantly, the dogs crowd in, but they merely sniff, whiskers grazing the cheese. Greg commands them to follow him to the front hall, where he makes them lie down after an absurd amount of menacing talk. He sounds as if he’s doing a bad imitation of Arnold Schwarzenegger, minus the Austrian accent.

Jonathan and Cyril moved Zeke’s bed against the front windows and brought the sofa back from exile, but now the furniture is all much closer together, like a group of people who don’t know how to keep a proper distance while having a conversation.

A champagne cork fires off in the kitchen. A dog barks in response. “Qui-ET!” booms Greg. The bark shrivels to a whine.

Lucinda catches sight of Madison, sitting on the bench in the front hall, fingering her phone. She’s wearing a pretty blouse, but she’s also wearing blue jeans that show every curve of her slim yet feminine form and ballet flats without socks. (Is that a tattoo on her granddaughter’s ankle?) Lucinda remembers the crinolined dresses she bribed Christina into wearing to all holiday occasions when this house belonged to Zeke’s parents. She feels ominously behind the times; would she, at the height of working with those young mothers at The House, have thought twice about what
this
young woman is wearing? She thinks of Kit’s nine-year-old daughter, whom she will meet (she hopes) at Christmastime. Kit has e-mailed her pictures of his family, including Frances—Fanny (how fine and old-fashioned a nickname)—and already Lucinda has imagined how Fanny will look up to her three grown cousins. Perhaps Madison will take her skiing or shopping (or, God forbid, to get her first tattoo).

Lucinda calls her in. “Madison, sweetheart, please join us. I know it’s tedious, but I need to hear how your year is going.”

Madison smiles at her grandmother, tucks her phone in a pocket. As she crosses the room, Jonathan hands her a glass of champagne.
She looks surprised but pleased. “Twenty was way over legal in my day,” her uncle tells her.

Forget about “legal.” It’s barely noon. Lucinda has never offered liquor before midafternoon.
I am a guest
, she tells herself for the tenth time today. She sits on the couch next to Greg and Cyril.

Christina is in the kitchen with her brother. Madison (whose tattoo reveals itself to be a tiny mermaid, not so egregious) has taken the wing chair nearest to Zeke and is making an effort—obvious, but so it goes—to tell him about her studies, her vacillation between majors, and what she sees as the inevitable decision about whether to follow the “family imperative” toward law school. “Looks like Courtney’s the only one to escape,” she’s saying. “But she had to go halfway around the world to do it! India’s too crazy-far for me, I’m sorry.”

Zeke, also making an effort—just to hold himself still without trembling—laughs quietly. “Law shkool leadj many places.”

“Oh, I know that,” says Madison. “Like look at Dad. Or you, of course. You can do useful things, not just sue people. I do realize that.”

Lucinda makes herself focus on the conversation beside her. Greg and Cyril have met only once before—at Cyril and Jonathan’s wedding. Greg is an environmental consultant; he helps people with large tracts of undeveloped land figure out ways to preserve it without compromising too much on potential income. He comes at it from the law side, not the nature side, which means that engaging him in small talk about his work elicits digressions on subjects like eminent domain and conservation easements—often abetted by Zeke. Greg is the kind of man people refer to as “brilliant” in a defensive tone, because even though he’s almost terrifyingly smart, he’s socially tone-deaf, rarely able to discuss matters too far from his professional concerns. After an evening in his company, Lucinda often has the shameful reflex of reminding herself what a steady husband he is to Christina and how game he’s been about raising nothing but daughters. Visiting their home, Lucinda has witnessed Greg, alone in the room they call the man cave, cheering on a sports team, while Madison, Hannah, and Courtney perch at the kitchen counter trading magazines or vials of nail polish. The girls played sports in high school, but only Hannah continued her soccer in college.

Cyril, accommodating to the opposite degree, has drawn Greg into talking about the ruthless cuts in state funding to California’s parks. Cyril looks riveted as Greg lays out, in numbing detail, the plan that the governor
ought
to follow.