And the Dark Sacred Night (42 page)

Walter may be right that Fenno was too passive, even defeatist, but no amount of glad-handing would have kept his rent affordable, and moving was inconceivable; Fenno is someone who believes that souls cannot migrate from one solid entity to another. Plume, with its bonny back garden, its buckled plank floors, its tree-tinted light, was indisputably a place with a soul.

“Can I pick up some food at that supermarket we passed on the way out?” asks Kit. “I’d like to contribute to the weekend somehow. I can also cook.”

“You can cook?” interrupts Walter. “Honey, you are on. And don’t call me cheeky,” he says to Fenno. “I’ve had enough of your bee-bee-cue chicken with the sesame seeds.”

“I ordered posh salads from that make-believe farm stand you love so much,” says Fenno. “Since we’re not sure who’ll get here when.”

“I love family reunions,” Walter says to Kit, lying through his teeth. “I guess because mine wasn’t much of a union to begin with. Forget the re.” When Fenno told him the plan—to offer this borrowed house as a place for Fenno to meet Kit and bring together his newly extended family (all of them connected only through Mal)—he gave
Walter no more choice than Walter had given him about taking the house. Walter said, “You are packing a keg of dynamite, sweetheart.” Aye, and don’t I know it, Fenno thought. But it was, undeniably, the right thing to do.

Malachy Burns has been a source of resentment and retrospective jealousy for years, even though (or perhaps because) he was never Fenno’s lover and even though he was long dead before Walter so much as shook Fenno’s hand. (They had nodded to each other for months on the short stretch of sidewalk between restaurant and bookshop. It took the casual kinship of their dogs—now long dead as well—to force an introduction.)

Walter turns to Fanny and Will. “Ready to head back? I bought a
sack
of lemons for real lemonade. And grenadine to make it pink.” The twins brighten. “Speaking of pink? Time for the sunburn test.” He presses a forefinger into Fanny’s cheekbone. “You’re done. Maybe a little rare, but that’s how we like our roasted human.” He looks at Will and says, “I know. Totally gross.”

Fenno and Kit shake out the mats and towels. Walter closes the umbrella, retrieves stray flip-flops, corrals the scattered newspaper sections that Fenno will never get around to reading. Fenno checks his mobile—how he hates yet depends on the thing—to make sure neither of the women have left messages about their arrival. He is always relieved when the miserly screen (“No one could ever call that phone smart,” says Walter) shows him nothing more than the same snapshot of Felicity sunning herself, in all her avian splendor, on the back of a chair in the garden behind the shop where customers now casually spend on a single handbag the same sum of money they apparently thought unreasonable to spend on a dozen brand-new hardcover books.

Felicity put up an insolent, deafening fuss when Kit and the twins arrived last night. She was dozing on top of her cage, so when she woke to the invasion of visitors, she raised her wings and puffed up her scarlet feathers, threatening flight.

The boy hid behind Kit, who raised an arm in front of his face.

“Not to worry!” Fenno reassured them. He forced the parrot onto his sleeve. “You’re an evil sorceress, you know that?” he said as he
stroked her. Once she had muttered her final complaints, Fenno put her back on the cage.

The girl walked cautiously toward the bird. “Can I touch her?”

“Fanny, introduce yourself, please,” said Kit.

She blushed and held her hand out to Fenno. Walter took Fanny’s suitcase and said, “She’s a cranky old biddy, that bird, and it’s past her bedtime, but we’ll make sure you get acquainted tomorrow. Come upstairs and see your digs, which are pretty amazing. You too, bro,” he said to Will. “You’re in the hideaway. There’s a rumor it was used in the Underground Railroad. I’d sleep there if I could fit.”

“We studied that last year! That’s cool!” exclaimed Fanny, and without another glance at their father, the children followed Walter. My very own Pied Piper, thought Fenno, who had fallen for Walter much the way children did: here was someone you simply
knew
you could trust, who might nag or infuriate or sulk, but whose greatest charm lay in the most durable of virtues: loyalty.

Left alone together in the kitchen, Fenno and Kit did everything not to stare at each other. Whatever anxieties they had harbored about this meeting, their curiosity would finally have its way.

“She’s stunning,” said Kit.

“She is.” Fenno stroked Felicity’s neck.

“She belonged to my father?”

“For a couple of years, until he became ill and couldn’t keep her. His doctor said there were … issues of immunity.” Felicity watched the newcomer closely but let herself be lulled by Fenno’s affection. “I lived across the street; my shop sold bird-watching gear as well as books. He took a gamble that I might be willing to adopt her.”

“I remember. She’s the reason you met.” Kit reached a hand slowly toward the bird, but she scuttled to the peak of her cage.

In the one letter Fenno had written to Kit, he’d told the story: how the Audubon prints in the store had given Mal an avenue on which to approach Fenno for an outlandish favor; how taking on Felicity had brought Mal into his life and then, inadvertently, lured Fenno deep into Mal’s, just as it began to falter and dwindle.

Kit hovered by the table, glancing around. “This house is seriously old.”

“The front portion was built in the late seventeen hundreds.”

“Not so old if you’re British, I guess.”

“Old enough,” said Fenno. “Older than the house I grew up in. We’re not all lairds of drafty castles with parapets and moats.”

“I love all the rafters. The beams.”

“Wait till you go upstairs. Walter has to bend down to pass through the bedroom door.” He paused. “But it’s not ours, this house.”

“Yes. You explained.”

More slowly than usual, to give himself time, Fenno moved Felicity inside her cage to settle her for the night. He changed her water, emptied and rinsed her food cup, scratched her ruff one last time, and adjusted the cover. “Let me get you something,” he said to Kit. “Tea or coffee? Wine, whiskey?”

“I should see about the kids.”

“If you don’t mind, Walter loves playing godfather. Down to making certain they floss.”

They heard Fanny’s laughter from upstairs.

“He’ll be reading to them,” said Fenno. “I realize they’re not so wee, but Walter’s been known to force fairy tales down the gullets of adolescents. He’s a lapsed actor. Needs his daily dose of stage time.”

Kit laughed uncertainly. He held on to the back of a chair with both hands, as if he were on a boat or train and might otherwise lose his footing.

Fenno would have liked nothing better than to join Walter in the sleigh bed beneath the slanted ceiling and drift into sleep against the nocturnal shrieks and murmurings of strollers on the other side of the privet: young bucks and partygoers ebullient in the town’s warm, salt-steeped air and frothy permissiveness. As much as Fenno had tried to protest Walter’s plan, after a fortnight in this place, its paradoxically ingenuous cheer had softened his prudish resistance.

But Fenno suspected that Kit wanted a chance to be alone with him, ask certain questions before the women arrived. Walter was the one who had suggested that if the children would let him usher them to bed, he could discreetly follow suit. (“I do not,” he said, “need to stay up till all hours hearing about the lives of the saints.”)

Kit asked, “Did Walter know my father?”

So, thought Fenno, now it begins.

“By neighborhood reputation. But that was before Walter knew
me. Mal made an impression. As he meant to—something like Felicity here. Me, I was more of a … bystander.” Fenno paused. Did it sound as if he pitied himself?

“You know what? I’ll say yes to whiskey. That’s a rare choice for me.”

“Rare choice for a rare occasion.” Fenno went to the cupboard where Walter had stocked up on liquor.

Kit’s laughter came more easily now. “I guess you don’t do this every day. God, I hope not, for your sake.”

“If I did, I’d be doing a better job of it than this.” Fenno went to the cupboard for a glass—two. Whiskey was a rare choice for him as well.

He led Kit to the screened porch behind the kitchen. Up front, the living room had no true ceiling; one could see pinstripes of light passing between the floorboards of the master bedroom above. From the bedroom, conversely, one could hear every sigh, every mote of punctuation, threading the conversation below. In a way, the house wasn’t terribly conducive to guests.

They sat down facing each other, but at first their attention was on their drinks. They sipped delicately, almost in unison. Fenno listened to the intermittent tattoo of insects colliding with the screen. Kit spoke first. “It is so bizarre to be here. To state the obvious. You’ve been so kind to me when I’m probably intruding on your life. Lucinda insisted that you would be glad to hear from me, meet me, but I want you to know I take nothing for granted.… More and more that’s the case.”

“Lucinda’s right. I was glad to hear from you. You should know whatever you can about Mal. Your father.” Something else occurred to him. “Your children’s grandfather.”

“They still don’t know the story, exactly why we’re here. I hope Walter—”

“Not to worry. Walter has the tact of a butler in situations like this.” Crikey, thought Fenno,
what
situations like this?

“I’m afraid to ask the wrong things,” said Kit. “I did look up his reviews. The
Times
has everything archived now. Lucinda sent me pictures.”

“There are no wrong things to ask. If you mean about how he died,
how sick he was for so long, you can ask me all about that. Better me than Lucinda.”

“I don’t want to hear about his illness. I didn’t even get to know him then, never mind when he was healthy. The worst thing is knowing that I could have. Known him before he was sick, I mean. But just to have known him at all …”

Fenno tried to imagine Mal meeting Kit while he was still healthy—which was, of course, before Fenno knew Mal. Kit would have been a teenager then. But that was immaterial. The Mal whom Fenno had known wouldn’t have been able to bear meeting Kit; he wouldn’t have volunteered to face his own guilt. While Mal was alive, Fenno hadn’t the faintest hint that—as Fenno’s dog-breeder mother and even Mal himself would have put it—he had “sired a child.”

“Mal was an incomparably clever man,” said Fenno. “But lest you wonder what you missed, he wasn’t cut from fatherly cloth.”

“I guess that’s obvious,” Kit said sharply.

Yes. Of course there would be anger. After a moment Fenno said, “Plenty of gay men become fathers. Or surrogate fathers.” He thought of Walter’s stories, both comic and catastrophic, about the time he had invited his teenage punk-rocker nephew to share his flat and work at the restaurant. Thank God Walter had exorcised the fatherhood fantasy before they came together.

“I’m not talking about his being gay,” said Kit, “though maybe that’s part of why my mother didn’t want me to know who he was. I just mean—I mean there are a lot of fathers who take on the job, or even a tiny bit of it, or maybe not very successfully, but they do it because whether they like it or not, they
are
fathers. My mother refuses to see it that way—she’s one of those nurture-over-nature people. Maybe I’m a literalist, but I’m sorry: make a kid and you’re a father. Biology doesn’t lie. Lucinda told me he
knew
that I existed out there in the world, right from the start.”

This was not a declaration Fenno wanted to hear, but why should the conversation conform to his wishes? To Kit, he was a conduit, an opportunity; Christ, he was a bloody priest.

“I’m sorry. You’re right,” he said. “But part of what made Mal so successful was …” Fenno hadn’t known how dodgy it would feel to risk saying the wrong things—nor how insidious this conversation
would be to the way in which he remembered Mal. He had known Mal in life for only a few years; as a memory, Mal had been with him for twenty.

“Mal was the sort of man people described as ambitious, determined—if they didn’t like him, as arrogant, tactless. Cheeky. It wasn’t just that he pushed hard at what he did or that he was a perfectionist. I think—and I only understood this after he died—that he cleared a wide track before him. He didn’t want to face the unpleasant surprise around the next corner.” Or maybe this became true only after he had stumbled onto the worst surprise of all. Maybe Mal, before knowing Fenno, had been more spontaneous, more open. “Anyway, to do that, he had to eliminate all obstacles.”

That wasn’t the right way to put it; he knew this from the look on Kit’s face. Fenno had just painted a portrait of someone you might call ruthless.

“Acknowledging that he had a son out there somewhere, yeah, well, that would have been a pretty serious obstacle,” said Kit.

Fenno took a gulp of his whiskey. “I’m not doing a very good job here.”

Kit sighed. “Please don’t see it as a
job
. And I have to tell you, I’m not where I was when I spoke to you a few months ago.”

“You’re angry now. Is that the difference?”

“Sorry.” Kit shrugged. “Weird how dime-store psychology turns out to be true, whether we like it or not.”

Fenno would have laughed if he had known this man better.

“I should probably crash,” said Kit. “The traffic was horrendous. And I was mad that Sandra decided, at the last minute, she couldn’t come along. It’s not that she didn’t want to meet you. She has a deadline she’s worried about.”

How unlike Mal Kit seemed, in his apologies and modest desires. Why
shouldn’t
he be in a roaring rage over Mal’s refusal to face his existence? Had Fenno deserved to know, too? Or would Fenno’s knowing about the son have been just another “obstacle” to Mal’s plans? He thought of Lucinda, whom he had come to know and like through the last months of Mal’s life (through his protracted death, to put it bluntly), and only now did it dawn on him that Kit was a secret Lucinda had carried
for
her son, all those years. Fenno had
known Mal to be self-centered, even self-righteous, but now he saw these qualities as less ambiguous, not so easily forgiven. Mal may have died a terrible, unjustly early death, but that misfortune did not absolve him. Now Fenno, too, was angry at Mal.