And the Dark Sacred Night (49 page)

The books that wouldn’t sell, not even for a dollar, were dumped for pennies at a stalwart used-bookstore on Carmine Street. Fenno sold the bookcases and homely furnishings to NYU students, the vitrines to a woman opening a craft store on Perry. She offered part-time work to Dru, but he had already landed a job as a barista at an independent ethically supplied coffee parlor called Fairgrounds.

Oneeka helped Fenno sweep and vacuum the emptied store. Across the wooden floor, long rectangular swaths of varnish eulogized row after row of vanished books. After a last look at the garden, she said, “You forgot the planters. Real stone. They gotta be worth something.”

“They were here when I came,” he said. They had belonged to a handsome baker named Armand, who had died during the plague years: one of those lost young men whom it had become so exhausting to remember. Suddenly, Fenno remembered the pavement sale of Armand’s equipment, the café tables and chairs. Yes indeed, he thought, what goes around comes around—and tends to wallop you in the face when it does so.

“Dude, you are so friggin’ honest, it gives me a migraine, know that?”

Yes
, he might have answered,
but honesty comes in so many different shades
.

The rain fades away an hour or so after dinner. Without the muffling effect of all that water, the wind sounds as if it’s been amplified, though Walter’s favorite weather site assures them that it’s slowed a good deal. The half-fallen tree continues to mock gravity.

Not long before dark, Walter puts on a pair of Wellies and announces that he’s heading across the street to have a look at the harbor. “Just to see if the Cape’s changed its shape. Or if there are major shipwrecks.”

Kit has found a book called
Tall Tales of the Deep South
, which he is reading aloud to his children by a rekindled fire. Lucinda is listening, too. Daphne and Fenno are in the kitchen, washing up, Garrison Keillor their sound track. Fenno gives Felicity a shaved corncob to pick at. Even the children seem talked out, gamed out, benumbed by the anxious inertia of waiting for the storm to end.

Walter returns, stamping his feet on the doormat. “Brrrrr-acuda!” he exclaims. “The sky may not be raining, but the trees still are! The waves are
monstrous
. A few dinghies tossed up on the beach, but no oil tankers, no pirate ships, no luxury yachts to plunder.” He stands in the doorway to the kitchen.

“What’ll it be like tomorrow?” says Daphne. “I want to get home before dark.”

“Sunny but still windy, that’s the current notion.”

From the living room, Kit says, “Mom, you can’t stay till Monday?”

“Sweetheart, I have to practice. I have a rehearsal on Monday.”

Lucinda joins Walter. “What are you playing?”

“Oh, it’s a smorgasbord of baroque. The usual suspects. Designed to please the masses.”

Then Kit is standing behind Lucinda. “Mom, I thought …”

“Kitten,” she says, “plans get complicated.”

If one of them must leave, thinks Fenno, Daphne is the one he’d
vote for. He wants to believe she would be more congenial under different circumstances, though he doubts he’ll ever know. After Walter, Kit, and Lucinda retreat to the living room, she says to Fenno, “So you’re the one who knew Malachy best. When he was older.”

“I wasn’t his best friend, if that’s what you mean.”

“Did he have one?”

“I don’t really know.” And that’s half true; Fenno wasn’t a part of Mal’s broader social life—or what remained of it in his last few years. But at the New York memorial service, and again in Vermont, when the closest friends joined Mal’s family to scatter his ashes on the lake, Fenno noticed one woman who seemed especially stricken. She had been a fellow writer at the
Times
, and Mal’s brother, Jonathan, sat with her at both ceremonies. He would hold her hand or put an arm around her shoulders whenever she succumbed to weeping.

Fenno remembers her name—Judith—but something tells him Daphne would be hurt to learn that Mal’s best friend might have been a woman.

“Before I knew him, he liked to entertain,” Fenno says. “Big dinner parties in his small flat. I’m not sure anyone got to know him terribly well. Intimately.”

“Not to be blunt, but it’s obvious he had an intimate life of some kind.”

Fenno dries the pot that held the chowder, saying nothing.

“I’m sorry. That came out wrong. I didn’t mean to sound cruel.”

“But you’re right,” he says. “I came along rather late to know the details.” Though that, too, borders on a lie. There had been the beautiful Armand, whose bakery, vacated after his death, turned into Fenno’s bookshop.

“I wish I’d met him just once, as an adult. Just to know whether he was someone I’d still have fallen for. We thought we were so grown-up when we knew each other. Or I did. But that’s how you become a grown-up, right? By acting it out first, trying it on. Practice makes perfect. Except when it doesn’t.”

“Some of us feel as if we’re still just acting it out,” says Fenno. Immediately, he wishes he hadn’t said something so trite.

“He composed limericks,” says Daphne, ignoring his jest.

“Limericks?”

“I guess it was an affectation. A kind of seduction, maybe.”

“I doubt that,” says Fenno. “He always struck me as the kind of man who wanted to be the one seduced. Not the seducer.”

“
Did
he,” she says, decidedly not a question. “Some things stay the same about a person, and some change.” She turns toward the radio. “But listen. It’s Guy Noir. I love how he pronounces it
Na-wahr
.” She turns up the volume. “The sound effects are my favorite part.”

By nine o’clock everyone has gone to bed except for Kit, who said he wanted to catch up on his e-mail and talk to Sandra. Fenno and Walter sit in bed, side by side. Fenno reads a book of Stanley Kunitz poems; Walter, laptop balanced on his thighs, monitors the latest meteorological developments and browses a blog about cheeses from Vermont. Even Walter is talked out.

When they turn off their lamps, Walter falls asleep fast. Fenno envies him his knack for nodding off at will nearly anywhere; he takes cat naps on buses, beaches, even the subway. Most nights, Fenno lies awake for half an hour or more, his mind, hawklike, circling and recircling his life from above. Tonight the incessant wind adds to his customary restlessness—and from the living room below, lamplight leaks faintly through the floorboards of the darkened bedroom.

Walter is snoring gently when Fenno hears someone go downstairs.

“Mom?” Kit, who must be seated on the couch, directly below the bed.

“Sweetheart. I thought I’d make a cup of tea. Or just … find the paper.”

“Can’t sleep?”

“I never sleep well away from home anymore. I’m getting too old for other people’s pillows.” She must be sitting now, by the fireplace.

“I wish you wouldn’t leave so soon. You don’t really have a rehearsal, do you?”

“Things come up, sweetheart. Coming here …”

“Was a mistake? Well, you told me that before.”

“No. I was going to say the timing wasn’t good.”

A long pause. “She wishes, you know, that she could somehow, I don’t know …”

“What, make it up to me? Be my friend? Do grandmotherly things with my grandchildren?”

Another pause. “Why do you have to be so possessive about them?”

“Kit, this whole … discovery … it’s yours. I know you wish it could be mine, too, but it’s not. My conscience is clear about the things I didn’t tell you. I’ve told you before, I hate the way privacy is so underrated these days.”

“I don’t want to have this argument again.”

“Well, sweetheart, I certainly didn’t come down here to have it.”

Daphne’s mention of conscience (never mind privacy) makes Fenno feel queasy. Should he drop his book on the floor? Clear his throat? He could find an excuse to go downstairs himself, make it clear that others are still awake, too.

“Can I ask you one thing, Mom?”

“You’ll ask me anyway, won’t you?”

“Did you honestly know he was dead, or did you just say that so I wouldn’t think he’d abandoned me, to spare my feelings?”

Fenno surrenders to eavesdropping full on. Is there anything here he
shouldn’t
know? Walter lets out a peal of a snore; that should alert mother and son to the intimate nature of the quarters they’re sharing. But no.

“I wish I were angry enough about all this not to answer you,” Daphne says. “But I’m more worn out than anything else. So the answer is that by the time I told you he was dead, it was true. And I did know it. Would I have told you that anyway?” She laughs quietly. “Well, maybe.”

“How did you know?”

“Oh, you can thank your stepfather, I guess. You know how resistant I am to everything high-tech, but back when the school got Internet access, he convinced me that we had to have it at home, too. He told me I’d learn to love it as a ‘research tool’ for my classes—that it would even let me buy cheaper sheet music for chorus and band. He showed me how I could find handy-dandy bios of all the composers, print them out instead of making photocopies at the library.… And now your sister is getting me hooked on Facebook. It’s the only way I get to see photos of the baby.”

“But my father—”

“Yes, Kit,” she says drily. “Yes, I’m getting to that. Because, you know, from about the time I married Jasper … about then, I learned that Malachy wrote for the
New York Times
. I saw his byline. Someone always left the big, fat Sunday
Times
in the teachers’ lounge. It got so I’d look for his articles. After a while, I didn’t find them anymore. I was relieved to stop looking.

“Anyway, there I am, years later, Bart showing me how I can find out about anyone and anything on the computer in our own house. It felt like having my own personal satellite for spying on the world.”

Or a personal insomniac listening through the floorboards.

Another pause, until Kit says, “You Googled him.”

“Of course I did. I even saw a picture of him at a party somewhere. A society party at Lincoln Center, somewhere like that. Which was spooky. Because a minute later I read his obituary. It was old by then. So the answer is yes, Kit, I told you the
truth
.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Aren’t we all sorry? Isn’t that what everybody keeps saying all the time, now that we’re a newly united family?”

“Mom.”

“Well, now I really am tired, Kit.” Her voice moves slightly. She must have stood. “Listen, sweetheart, I respect you for doing what you had to do. I really do. And I tried to be a part of it, this reunion. Maybe if I were a more selfless mother, I’d embrace it all—Lucinda, her family, Malachy’s siblings. But can I imagine meeting these people? Being looked over as the girl who might have trapped him into a shotgun marriage?”

“But you didn’t! And nobody’d be looking at you like that! I’ve met Christina and Jonathan and
their
families, and Mom, you’d like them.… And they’d like you. They would.”

“That’s a sweet thought. I appreciate it.”

“Oh, Mom.”

“Let me go home and give it all time. You know how I am, Kit. I work things out in my own good time. It’s like rehearsing a piece. Takes me a while to get it right. A lot of that work I have to do alone.”

Her voice is at the foot of the stairs when she says, “Good night, Kitten.”

“Night, Mom.”

Fenno hears Daphne climb the stairs, run water in the bathroom, and then he hears the creaking of the ladder to the alcove where the children are sleeping.

Sun floods the house, adamantly, staking a claim. This time, Fenno is the first one up. He goes straight to the kitchen and, before filling the kettle, looks outside. The tree hasn’t budged, though the wind continues to agitate its boughs. Fenno will call the police department; something must be done to avert its inevitable fall. But first, tea. And, for the others, coffee.

He uncovers Felicity’s cage and ferries her to his shoulder. She nudges his neck with her beak, mutters in his ear what Walter calls her cranky nothings.

After emptying the dishwasher, he lines up cereal boxes, counts out bowls and spoons. Or did Walter promise pancakes? He is checking on ingredients when Lucinda’s greeting startles him. Felicity utters a sharp scold.

“Hello, you empress, you,” Lucinda says to the parrot, but her hands are at her sides. She hasn’t asked to hold or even touch her son’s bird; no doubt she remembers the rivalrous nips Felicity gave to anyone venturing too close to Mal.

“Heavens, you’re looking snappy,” says Fenno. While he’s thrown a feed bag of a jumper over flannel bottoms, Lucinda is dressed for the outside world, in a cotton dress with sandals. She wears lipstick and pearl earrings.

“Can I ask you,” she says, “if there’s a Catholic church in town?”

“Goodness.” Certainly he’s seen churches, but, heathen that he is, Fenno hasn’t noticed their denominational flavors. “Consult the telephone book?”

“Never mind. There are whole weeks these days when I go without Mass. I just wondered. Habit.” She sits at the table. “Speaking of which, I’d love a cup of that tea.”

While he’s filling a second mug, she says, “You’ll be glad when this weekend’s over.”

He carries their tea to the table. “Mostly I’m glad the storm is over.”

“Walter tells me you’ve closed your shop. I’m so sorry. It was such a wonderful place … just to be. So tranquil.”

“Yes,” he says. “ ’Twas.” He recalls the many times he and Lucinda sat together like this, over tea, in Mal’s kitchen while Mal slept in his bedroom. There was a period of two or three months, at the very end, when Lucinda and Fenno overlapped a good deal—and Mal slept a good deal. They would speak surprisingly little about Mal, less about his illness. Fenno remembers how easy it was, after a time, to be silent along with Lucinda, as they are now. They sip carefully, faces down, letting the steam penetrate their skin.

He appreciates, too, that she doesn’t ask him if he’ll be “all right.” (What if he said, to the many people who make such inquiries, that he just might not?) She doesn’t make him spume forth a righteous indictment of Amazon or rehash the benighted state of book publishing or bemoan the growing disliteracy of humankind. And that’s the silver lining of closing the shop: he doesn’t have to natter on about such dismaying topics, day after day, with the customers who do still care about saving books or those who simply don’t want the world as they know it to change in any way.