And the Dark Sacred Night (48 page)

“Time to build a fire,” he says to Fenno, “and you get the job. I’ve had it with cowering in the kitchen.” He hands Fenno the directions on using the flue.

Walter has given over his laptop to the children, who are hunting down bloopers from some movie they recently saw. Every few seconds, they shriek with laughter, and Felicity, back on her cage, provides an echo.

Kit goes upstairs to take a nap; he’s volunteered to make pasta primavera for dinner. Walter goes upstairs as well. “Remember: cremation,” he whispers to Fenno. “In case that tree gives in.”

Lucinda and Daphne, however, remain in the living room, each absorbed in her book. Fenno kneels at the hearth and goes through the directions, step by step. Once he gets a small blaze kindled, he lingers long enough to make sure the smoke is headed up the flue.

“Heavenly,” says Daphne.

“Thank you,” says Lucinda.

Fenno goes to the kitchen. Huddled at the screen, mesmerized, Will and Fanny look as if they’re warming at a hearth all their own. They do not look up when Fenno passes them to check the leaning tree: no, not an inch. Its smaller branches fret in the wind, but the trunk remains staunch in its arrested fall.

He wants to join Walter upstairs, but his upbringing tells him that one of them should be awake to look after the guests—and the fire in the hearth. He offers to make the children cocoa, and at this suggestion they finally notice his presence. “That would be awesome!” says Fanny.

“Thank you,” Will says pointedly, poking his sister.

Gratitude, thinks Fenno: how often has he expected gratitude and been disappointed? The greatest favors he’s done for the people he loves have by no means made them closer. And why should they? He does want something in return, though; he can’t help it. He should be ashamed of himself, but there it is. He doesn’t believe that sinners will be punished or that saints will find some otherworldly reward, so why should he expect any sort of quid pro quo? (How uncomfortable he had felt when, working for Lucinda in New York, he saw her lead the girls in prayer. He felt oddly indignant; what right did she have to impose her assumptions about divine justice on those tender young women who had no idea how many forms of injustice awaited them once they had their babies? Much as Lucinda wanted to even the scales, she had no such power. Who did?)

As he stirs the milk, he hears Lucinda’s voice, raised just enough that he can catch her words: “That isn’t accurate, Daphne. I did nothing to keep you apart. You may not know this, but for a while my son turned his back on me.”

“I was the one he turned his back on,” Daphne replies. “For good. All those
years
he could have relented, just a letter, a phone call … nothing.”

“It was your decision to cut ties.”

“By then I knew I’d never hear from him. And you were the one who told me …” Daphne’s voice dips to a murmur.

Fenno glances at the children. They remain hypnotized by the screen.

Should he close the sliding door to the living room, let the women have it out, bury their grudges? He stands at the threshold, out of the women’s sight lines.

“All right,” Lucinda is saying, “then let me accept the blame. He was so young, and maybe I ought to have been more forceful.”

“You couldn’t have forced him to do anything. He’d have been miserable. Well. I guess I’d have been miserable, too—wouldn’t I?”

If Lucinda answers, Fenno doesn’t hear her.

“We can’t talk about this now,” Daphne says quietly. “And you know what? We shouldn’t talk about it at all. I have no desire to talk about it, none. I thought I’d reached the point where I’d never have to. A long time ago. Sorry. I think we have to be honest with each other.”

Fenno hears a sudden hissing.

“The stove!” Fanny calls out. “The cocoa!”

The milk is boiling over.

Fenno grabs the handle of the pot and yanks it off the heat. What a bloody mess. The milk has run down between the coils of the electric burner. It continues to sizzle, emitting the stench of charcoal mixed with sour milk.

“There’s more milk,” he says. “Not to worry about that.”

Lucinda and Daphne stand in the doorway, their shoulders almost but deliberately not touching. “Well, here we all are,” says Daphne. “Stuck on a sandbar in the middle of a hurricane—and starting a fire, from the smell of it.”

“As I said, not to worry.” Fenno sponges the top of the cooker, determined to stay calm.

“I’m going to follow Walter’s lead and take a nap,” says Daphne. “Doing nothing all day is wearing me out.”

Lucinda sits at the table with the children, watching them with hungry affection. Fenno feels sorry for her, to see the fulfillment of one yearning lead her on to yet another.

“What do you say to corn chowder?” he says. “All those uneaten ears from yesterday.”

“Let me help,” offers Lucinda.

“That would be super.”

He puts her to work stripping kernels from the cobs while he heats a new batch of milk, giving the task his full attention.

“I’m very glad,” she says as she works, “that circumstances have brought us back together. You and I.”

“I should have written you ages ago, to apologize.”

“No, no. I meddled with something that was none of my business.”

“Your convictions are your business. I disappointed you by ignoring them.” He spoons cocoa powder into a pair of mugs boasting sponsorship of two different environmentally chivalrous organizations. “But really, what happened was Oneeka’s decision, not ours. We were hardly her parents.”

“When I ran The House, my worst critics accused me of having a parent complex, of wanting to mother half the world.” Lucinda’s smile is hard, almost a grimace. “I thought, And so? Who would call that a sin? That was back before the very notion of sinning began to confuse me. Or before I could admit that it did.”

Fenno carries the hot mugs to the table and tells the children that they must close the computer while they drink their cocoa.

As he puts the pan in the sink, Lucinda says quietly, “I’m letting go of so much these days. I feel a lot lighter for it.”

“Nothing like almost losing your spouse to put things in perspective.” Fenno winces at what he’s said. Losing a spouse, at least so late in life, is surely nothing next to losing a child.

But she says, firmly, “You’re right about that.”

Fenno walks casually to the back door. No change. (Is there any law of physics which would allow the tree to stand up again, regain its root-bound status in the earth?)

“The corn’s all set,” says Lucinda. “And you know what? I’m just going to forge ahead and make the chowder myself. Will? Fanny? You’re going to be my sous-chefs.” She turns to Fenno, who’s quickly moved away from the door. “You. Go amuse yourself. Find a good
book, enjoy the fire. Or go take a nap. What do you Brits call it? A kip? That’s what this weather was made for: reading and kipping. Heading off to other, sunnier worlds.”

Fenno could have kept the bookstore alive if he had been willing to move it to a different neighborhood (possibly a different borough) or to conjure a scheme combining his business with another. The last standing children’s bookstore in Manhattan assured its longevity by joining forces with a cupcake vendor. (In fact, mused Fenno, how shrewd to raise children who might henceforth affiliate literature with chocolate sponge and sprinkles. Red velvet Robinson Crusoe. Sword in the strawberry-shortcake stone. Onward and upward to Ivanhoe iced with coconut custard, lemon meringue Lolita.)

But Fenno was incapable of such adaptations. So the mourning process began within a few stunned minutes of hanging up the phone once the landlord informed him that no, the new rent in the e-mail was not the mere slip of a digit.

For one week, he said nothing to his two full-time employees: Dru, a stocky poet whose Technicolor tattoos of teeth-baring, sword-swinging samurai clashed with his gentle, courteous nature, and Oneeka, a tall, flirtatiously cheeky young woman whose afro was dyed the same reddish brown as her amply exposed skin (no tattoos needed). A dozen years before, Oneeka had been a woefully pregnant teenager just canny enough to find Lucinda’s haven in the East Village. Through a series of circumstances that baffle him still, Fenno signed on as Oneeka’s birth coach—or, rather, as the uptight middle-aged poofter whose quietly panicked presence confused but charmed the entire maternity staff of a major hospital. He cannot remember doing any actual “coaching.” What he remembers best is how masterfully he resisted fainting.

Furtively, Fenno devoted all his spare time that week to investigating how he might help Dru and Oneeka find alternative jobs. He made calls; he sent e-mails. He wandered the neighborhood in search of new shops that were not a part of the sartoriocracy which threatened to turn the West Village into one big Barneys window display.

But bearing down on Fenno more heavily than the death sentence on his shop or the prospect of turning out his employees was his
innate resistance to telling Walter. His dodgy excuse was that Walter would feel overwhelmed. Already, there had been the letter from Kit—upheaval enough—and then, following Fenno’s reply, Kit’s call (which Walter had been there to answer).

Rubbish. It was, no mystery, Fenno who felt overwhelmed, Fenno for whom change and risk were terrifying prospects.

The problem with keeping the news from Oneeka and Dru was that the landlord began to request appointments for prospective tenants with far deeper pockets: an indignity Fenno had failed to anticipate. So when a Swedish woman representing a chain of spas offering sea-salt therapies showed up with her entourage one morning, Dru and Oneeka stood by together, alert and still as a pair of deer scenting nearby hunters, while she exclaimed with delight over the wee garden and then clucked in dismay at the substandard plumbing. Her visit lasted all of ten minutes, but the jig was decidedly up.

“Dude?” said Oneeka to Fenno when the woman left. “No chance that bitch runs a book club.”

Fenno had long ago given up on mitigating Oneeka’s language. Too often, her bluntness was apt.

He told them.

“Oh man,” said Dru. “Man, that is a royal bummer.”

“Well, fuck that shit,” said Oneeka. “Excuse me, but that just supersucks. For you most of all.” She meant Fenno. “You, Dru, you’ll float.”

“Oneeka, I promise to help you find something else,” said Fenno.

“So guess what, dude? You got no exclusive on the news around here.” She told him that her mother, with whom she shared a flat in Inwood, had decided to move down south—not south as in Bay Ridge or Bed-Stuy, but south as in Raleigh, North Carolina. It was a hotbed of relatives; Oneeka and her daughter would be smart to tag along.

“You want to go?” Fenno asked. “To Raleigh?”

“Hell, yeah. Not because it’s with Mom—I could lose her attitude—but I am done with what it costs to live here.” No hard feelings, she said, but if she ever wanted to move out of her mother’s place, the wages she made at the shop would never permit that. And she wanted Topaz in a decent public school.

Despondently, Dru listened to their exchange. “Can you go to, like, housing court? Appeal this thing? It’s robbery.”

Fenno stared at Dru, silenced. He didn’t want to think about himself, what he would do next. Far easier to think about Dru and Oneeka. He was ashamed, for a moment, that he had imagined himself in charge of their destinies.

“You really just planning to lie down and take it?” said Oneeka.

Hands on their hips, Fenno’s young employees regarded him as if he’d gone round the bend. He’d never felt so pathetically old.

“As I understand it, I have no recourse.”

Oneeka laughed and shook her head. “ ‘No recourse.’ Dude, you know lawyers. Lawyers walk in this place every day, buy their John Grishams, their Scott Turows. Work it!”

He told Walter that night, pretending he had received the news that day.

“Liar,” Walter said calmly. “You big fat liar.” It was after nine, and they stood together in the kitchen, waiting for the pot roast that Walter had brought from the restaurant to finish warming in the oven.

“Pardon me?”

“Oh yes, as a matter of fact, I
will
pardon you. If you’d held out much longer, I’m not so sure. What is
with
you? Did you honestly think I wouldn’t hear about that evil overlord’s plan to jack up the rent so we can have another trust-fund hair salon or gourmet olive oil purveyor? Do you think there’s any shelter news within ten blocks that I don’t hear before anyone else? Ben—hello? He’s the one, I promise you, who dug up the skinny on where bin Laden was hiding.” Ben was the longtime bartender at Walter’s Place; he might have been the city’s top psychotherapist if he didn’t make twice that money in tips.

“Why didn’t you tell me you knew?”

“Why? Because I know you. Because I wanted to see how long it would take you to ’fess up. I wanted to catch you red-handed. This, buster,
this
is why we need therapy. We begin next week, no caveats or codicils.”

But softhearted Walter had also spoken to several lawyers who were addicted to his chef’s Tournedos Toledo and Osso Buco Chicago.
“No way to get around this one,” said Walter. “Unless you want to sit tight till they evict you. Which doesn’t suit your standards of dignity. For which I love you.”

Walter was certain that they’d find another location for Plume. For once, he was wrong: or, to be truthful, when Fenno looked at his options, he couldn’t bear the thought of what he would lose—or of spending the money to relocate only to see the shop’s revenues continue to shrink.

When they moved some of the final inventory onto sale tables on the pavement, people would stop and say, “Are you moving? Please say you’re not closing. Why are you closing?”

Fenno managed not to say, “Because people like you don’t bother to buy books anymore—not for yourself, not even as gifts, not even to pile up on coffee tables or stand on in order to reach a high shelf.” Sometimes he would go through the tedious tale about the rent, giving rise to much empathic outrage, but when he was too tired to face the scripted exchange on capitalist pigs, he would say, “I’m retiring to Brazil” or “I’m thinking of opening a yoga studio in Fort Greene” or any number of remarks that would move people swiftly along.