And the Dark Sacred Night (43 page)

“Listen,” he said, “I’m not sitting here thinking that my memories of your dead father are like some shrine you should be visiting with reverence, some hallowed place of worship. But now I’m afraid you’ll get up tomorrow, pack those children in your car, and hightail it home. That I don’t want.” What did Fenno want, honestly? To sit around spouting stories about a chap he’d known only while he waited for death to outwit him (hard as it had been to outwit Mal)?

Kit stared at him as if chastised. Their glasses were empty.

Fenno nearly told Kit that while he had never been Mal’s lover, he ought to have been. Not in a reckless, suicidal way but with all the tenderness that Fenno had been too frightened to show toward Mal. The worst thing was that even though Mal had never mentioned it, he knew. He trusted Fenno to help him die precisely because he knew Fenno was in love with him and didn’t want to lose him. To refuse Mal’s wishes would have meant to lose him for certain: to lose his regard. To honor them had left a paradoxical glimmer of hope: the hope of failure or a sudden change of heart.

“I am refilling our glasses,” said Fenno. “You stay here.”

In the kitchen, he listened. No voices or creaking of floorboards. He walked quietly to the living room and looked up: no seepage of light through the planks. Walter wasn’t waiting up. This was good; and then again it wasn’t.

When he handed Kit his glass, Fenno said, “I should confess that I’ve been terrified at the prospect of bringing you all together here. For a while, I wondered what the deuce I’d been thinking. But I will always feel I owe something to Lucinda, a debt I can’t fulfill.”

He told Kit the story of Mal’s end: how Mal had sent Fenno and Lucinda in his place to an evening of feasting and dancing in a far-flung corner of the city, a scheme to detour his mother away from his bedside long enough that he could take his exit in private. Countless times over the years since, especially on the always bleak, chilly anniversary in March, Fenno has marveled at how well he played his part that night and, more still, the next morning: how he let himself
into Mal’s apartment, knowing that he was supposed to hope that he would find Mal good and dead, the pills and vodka deft in their collaboration.

Yet Fenno unlocked the door that morning hoping that Mal had failed, if just this once. Because how could a man so adept at so many things, so formidably sharp in his wit, his intellect, his perception of where each person stood in the orbit of his life, be anything other than somehow immortal? Surely Mal was destined to be one of those wizened, quick-tongued, stylish-to-the-bitter-end ninety-year-old urban sages. Fenno had done what was asked of him, followed his directions perfectly (another instrument of Mal’s powerful will), yet even so, against all logic, he was crushed when what he found in Mal’s bed was indeed the corpse that Mal had wanted him to find.

But he left these sorry self-aggrandizing details out of the story he told Kit. Kit drank his whiskey and looked not at Fenno but out through the screen into the dull void of shrubbery and woods behind the house.

When Fenno had finished, it was hard to tell if Kit had been paying attention. A long silence drifted between them.

“That is so awful and so sad,” said Kit, “but what’s really awful is how it feels so completely unconnected to me.”

“Because it was. You didn’t know him.” Fenno felt strangely unconnected to the story as well; he had told it so many times over the years that the words had come to feel like distant cousins to the memories themselves.

“He chose not to know me. That’s what I keep reminding myself. But I didn’t know that for most of my life. When you don’t have a father—or no; when your mother withholds from you who that father is—then one thing you have to imagine is that he doesn’t know you exist. She kept it from him, too, and that’s not his fault! How could he know any better? But you figure he’s got to find out—or one day, when you’re grown up, you’ll find him. You’ll know how.”

“As you did.”

“Except”—Kit laughed mockingly—“except that I might never have done it if I hadn’t been pushed.”

By Sandra. Fenno knew this part of Kit’s story. Sandra whose work kept her from something as important as this weekend. Something else, Fenno feared, was going on here. But it wasn’t his place to ask.

“You’re talking,” said Fenno, “to someone who’s had to be pushed toward every important decision he’s ever made. If no one had pushed me, I’d still be sitting on the window seat halfway up the big stairwell in my parents’ house, wearing trousers far too small for me, reading another book.” Except that now his brother David—with his wife and children—lived in that house. He laughed briefly at the image of himself, a grizzle-headed gimpy-jointed man, sitting cross-legged on that tapestried cushion (porcupined with years of hair shed by his mother’s collies), and would his reading have matured despite his never leaving that spot? Or would he never have moved past adolescence, advancing through time only according to how the childhood classics continued to eclipse one another? By now he’d be long through Lemony Snicket and
Harry Potter
. He’d have devoured already the
Hunger Games
trilogy, some of the last books displayed in the window of Plume.

“I’m constantly in need of pushing,” Kit said mournfully.

“Let’s stop being maudlin, shall we?” Fenno said. “You’ve met Lucinda.”

Kit smiled. “At Christmas. She’s wonderful. And you know, I do have her. And Zeke—though I wish I’d met him before his stroke. My children don’t quite understand who those old people are—Sandra says we can’t rush it. Ironic, coming from Sandra. But we’ve told them a half-truth—that they’re new relatives we discovered. They don’t know enough about genealogy to ask the right questions. Though I think, any minute, Fanny will get there.”

“Lucinda told you we were friends for a while.”

“Were?” Kit paused. “She said you are friends. That’s why she could put me in touch with you, she said.”

“Are. Well. I’m glad she said that.”

“You don’t agree?”

“I did something—I condoned something—no, I actually
encouraged
something that appalled her. I don’t know how much you know about Lucinda, the work she did for years.”

“Unwed mothers. Single mothers: I guess that’s the politically correct term now for girls like my mother.” Kit leaned backward into the palm-patterned couch. He laughed. “You think she wouldn’t mention that to
me
?”

“Did she tell you I worked for her after Mal died? For a while, she
had a place for girls in the East Village. It’s gone now, thanks to Al Qaeda’s bloody hatchet job on the city’s social-welfare budget, but she charmed me into working there a few years. Training programs. One of the girls worked at my shop.”

“That part she didn’t tell me. Wow.”

She wouldn’t have, thought Fenno. She wouldn’t want to remember the argument they’d had when Oneeka, already mother to a six-year-old girl, just beginning to find a measure of independence, enjoying her job at the bookshop, got pregnant again. The argument took place after Fenno paid for the abortion. Foolishly, he told Lucinda. Foolishly, after the brusque end to their phone conversation (
I’m sorry, but it’s too late now anyway.… So you never considered asking me, never considered the life of that baby, not just a child but a sibling?
), he never wrote to salvage their friendship—in part because anything that distanced him further from Mal could only make life more harmonious with Walter.

“The Catholic thing—I can’t imagine growing up with that,” said Kit. “Lucinda doesn’t talk about religion. I guess she respects that my mother raised me without church. Or maybe she’s just biding her time.”

“No,” said Fenno. “You’ll never catch her soliciting souls for the Vatican. She’s one of those Catholics who’s privately ashamed of the pope, the way you might be ashamed of a father who has a violent hobby. It’s just that she saw me as somebody loyal to her mission. Most of the time I was. Or I was when it looked easy. I don’t know. Maybe you just can’t stay friends with someone you feel has good reason not to forgive you.”

Once again, their glasses were empty. Fenno had drunk too much and said too much, and already he knew his punishment: no matter how much water he drank, he was destined to wake with a searing headache.

“I should take you to your room. I didn’t even ask if you were hungry. Walter bought some special cheese and sausages.”

“Food was the last thing on my mind. The scotch—that was essential.”

They took their glasses to the kitchen. Fenno had turned out all the lights except the one above the cooker. He was shocked at the hour displayed on the clock. He whispered, “Sleep in, please.”

“Oh, but the children won’t. It’s fine. I need all the waking time I can get with you—and Lucinda, when she gets here.”

“And your mother.”

“My mother,” said Kit. “Well, that’s something else. She’s been very unhappy about all this, but she’s trying to accept it. I’d better tell you now that I more or less bullied her into coming.”

Kit’s mother would be the girl pictured, with Mal, on the newsletter from that music camp, which Fenno had found with the photos of Kit as a boy; with the letters he had exerted all his willpower not to read. They remained in the box he had hidden away in the commotion after Mal’s death. He told himself that to give the box to Lucinda could only cause her further pain. In a way, it contained only clues, not hard evidence, but looking at them, anyone but the most willfully daft would have surmised that the boy was Mal’s son and that Mal’s mother had played a part in whatever drama surrounded his birth. Other, collaborative clues emerged when Fenno remembered oblique remarks that Mal had made about parenthood, about the perils of first love. To this day, that box sits beneath another of comparable size which contains a pair of dress shoes Fenno hardly ever wears.

He led Kit upstairs. On the way to the guest room, he pointed at the alcove just under the peak of the roof, at the top of a short ladder. “Your children are up there.”

“That was part of the Underground Railroad?”

“Oh, I rather doubt it. Walter makes up fanciful things he considers entertaining but harmless.”

They laughed, quietly. Fenno went into the bedroom up front, where Walter slept on his side of the mattress, smaller than the one they shared at home. Voices still echoed down on Commercial—happy voices, ribald voices; whispering, yodeling: visitors to the town who, like Kit, wanted to stay awake for as much of their time here as they possibly could. It was time outside of time.

Walter spoons the salads into their hosts’ colorful Italian dishes. “Praise be! You remembered to buy some genuine meat this time,” he teases Fenno as he fans out slices of gingered pork loin on a platter. Walter maintains that most people eat greens and vegetables only
as a bargain with themselves for eating real meat (poultry a distant consolation prize). “And most normal people will choose steak over chocolate any day. Though I can testify with confidence that the ones who order steak just about always order chocolate to follow.” He maintains that the fundamentally carnivorous nature of mankind is the number one reason that his restaurant has flourished, outlasting every food fad of the past twenty years. (“Do you remember the cilantro epidemic? The blackened catfish era? Blackened
everything
? Egad.”)

Kit and his children are on the lawn. Kit and Will toss a football back and forth; Fanny is counting and classifying her beach stones on a chaise longue.

“Set the table for everyone,” says Walter. “Heard from the ladies yet?”

“Lucinda’s on the half-six ferry from Boston. I’ll meet her at the pier.”

“Do not even think of taking the car through that tsunami of tourists.”

“I’m not daft.”

“Jury’s out on that till Monday, buster.”

Felicity clings to Fenno’s shoulder as he shuttles plates and cutlery to the table against the kitchen window; the house is too small for a dedicated dining room. He feels the prick of her talons on his skin through his shirt. As soon as he comes to a standstill, surveying the table to see what he’s missed, she begins grooming herself, stropping her wing feathers one by one through her beak.

“Shall we discuss the forecast?” Walter says.

“I’m afraid to ask. Are we doomed to indoor fun?”

“We might be doomed to basement fun. Though all we’ve got here is a dirt crawl space filled with spiders. A monster storm is due to wallop us tomorrow night. Unless it doesn’t. It’s one of those will-she-won’t-she tropical divas. Either way, rain and more rain. Worst case, Cape Cod becomes the next Atlantis.”

Fenno looks at Walter. “You’re having me on.”

Walter shrugs. “You know what drama queens the weatherpeople are. But no, sweetie, I am not making this up. Want me to show you on my laptop?”

“No, I don’t.” To Fenno’s secret delight, there is no television in
this house, and though there’s Wi-Fi, he refused to bring his own computer. Walter, a neophyte devotee of Facebook, would probably rather have left Fenno behind than forsake his brand-new MacBook.

“It’s one of those fast-moving storms, so it might be violent but brief.” Walter yanks the cork from a bottle of wine. “Like sex with a few scoundrels I knew in the olden days.”

Fenno gives Walter a sour glance. “Please mind the visiting children. And grandmothers. A great-grandmother, if my genealogical skills are accurate.”

“Have I ever embarrassed you, Mrs. Vanderbilt? Don’t answer that.”

Fanny careens through the kitchen door. “Didi’s here!”

“Didi?” says Walter. “Didi LaVida? How did she find us!”

Didi LaVida, formerly Donald LaPlante, is one of the most conspicuous regulars at Walter’s Place. Walter would be able to recite her favorite dishes and describe her most recent escort.

“My Didi.” Fanny looks at him, for the first time, with less than adoration.

“Would that be your dad’s mom?”

Walter is restored to his pedestal. “Come outside! You have to tell her about the Underground Railroad!”

“I’m getting dinner ready, sweetheart. Fenno?” Walter raises his eyebrows at Fenno as Fanny runs back the way she came.