And the Dark Sacred Night (52 page)

A fisherman rowing from shore to check on his mooring saw the wave knock Lucinda off the breakwater. (Fenno pictured a spiteful
hand toppling a tiny porcelain figure from a shelf.) The fisherman radioed the Coast Guard. A man walking a dog along the beach also saw her go in; had it not occurred at such a distance, he claimed, he would have dived in to save her. The Coast Guard pulled her out of the water just before noon. Her purse had wedged itself between two stones in the causeway.

After Fenno spoke with Christina, Walter was the first to return to the house, along with the children—their lips tinted blue by some newfangled flavor of ice cream designed to flout the all-natural bias of grown-ups. As they got out of the car, Walter saw Fenno only from a distance and put his finger to his lips. Behind him, Fanny emerged in the middle of reciting a poem—or its conclusion; Fenno recognized the poem.

“ ‘O, but Everyone / Was a bird!’ ” she trilled with the drama singular to a young girl hoping for fame. “ ‘And the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.’ ”

A beat, and then Walter applauded. When he turned again to Fenno, who walked steadily toward him, he read the look on Fenno’s face as disapproval. “So it took us twenty-five minutes to get through that line,” he said defensively. “Will my witnesses please confirm that fact?”

Will nodded emphatically. “Like forever.”

Fanny said, “They gave us a free scoop because we had to wait so long.” When Will started for the house, she shouted after him, “I get the downstairs!”

Walter faced Fenno, hands on hips, poised to become indignant.

Quickly, quietly, Fenno said, “Something terrible has happened. Worse than terrible.” That’s when Kit walked through the hedgerow.

He told the two of them together. Knowing that the children might rejoin them within minutes, he delivered only the brunt of the news: that Lucinda had been swept into the water and drowned.

Kit cried out, “What are you telling me? What are you saying?”

“Unless there’s been a colossal error,” said Fenno. “This being the place it is, I’d like to think what I heard is nothing but lunacy—and until Christina gets here, we can hope the police have bollixed everything up. But—”

“Where are my children?”

Walter clasped Kit’s shoulders. “In the house. They’re fine. They’re fed, they’re fine, we just got back. They’re safe.”

“Safe!” Kit looked as if he’d gone mad. He ran toward the street, and for a moment he disappeared through the privet.

Walter started after him, but Kit, reversing course, ran back toward the house. Too loudly, he called his children’s names.

“Bloody bloody hell,” whispered Fenno. “What now?”

Walter was already through the door. Fenno followed.

Wild-eyed, his voice shaky, Kit was telling his children to take their books and go read in their room. “It’s hot up there now,” Fanny complained.

“Sweetie,” said Walter, “why don’t you two go in our room. We have a jumbo fan.” He handed Will the bag they had dropped inside the door, their loot from the book sale, and he led them upstairs.

Fenno, who couldn’t bear to look at Kit, listened for the sound of the fan.

“This cannot be happening.” Kit started to whimper, then to cry loudly, uninhibitedly. He sat on the couch and doubled over.

Sit beside him, Fenno ordered himself. Awkwardly, he tried to put an arm around Kit’s shoulders. What could he say? What could anyone say? The policeman on the phone had spoken as if he were ashamed of the facts, as if the circumstances could have been averted; not as if this woman had heedlessly tempted fate. It crossed Fenno’s mind, uselessly, that some people would level blame at the town or the Coast Guard: sue
someone
for failing to prevent or thwart such a mishap. Americans refused to see accidents as accidental. They did not comprehend that while tragedy always exacts a formidable price, it rarely incurs a debt.

Kit cried like a child, plaintively, forlornly, without any sign that he would try to take control of himself.

Fenno went into the kitchen and returned with a glass of water. “Kit, drink this. Please.”

Kit paused to look at the glass of water, then resumed crying.

Where was Walter? Was he explaining to the children? Did they see Lucinda as anything more than a benevolent stranger? Fan or no fan, they would hear their father’s calamitous lament through the gap-toothed bedroom floor.

Again Fenno sat beside Kit. After a moment, he drank the water
himself. Perhaps he should refill the glass with whiskey. He laid a hand on Kit’s back. “Walter’s with Fanny and Will.”

Kit sat up and wiped his eyes, though he did not cease crying. “Please call Sandra. I can’t drive the children home.”

“I’ll do that.” Crikey, thought Fenno. Bring another player into the drama?

When Walter came downstairs, he and Fenno went into the kitchen. It was four o’clock. Food, thought Fenno. Food was the only sane, dependable option he could think of. He told Walter about Kit’s request.

“So call her now,” said Walter. “You have their home number, don’t you? You do that, and I’ll search the bathrooms for some approximation of Valium. Why am I such a clean-living individual?”

Fenno opened the refrigerator.

“What are you doing?”

“Seeking solace,” said Fenno. “What were we going to eat?”

“Burgers,” said Walter. “Burgers and dogs. The definition of summer. Mac ’n’ cheese for Fanny. I was going to make icebox cake.” He shook his head. “Never mind. Pizza is what we’ll be having.”

Sandra, with whom Fenno had spoken only once before, quite briefly, turned out to be, like Walter, a listener. She did not ask unnecessary questions. All she wanted was his assurance that her children were fine. She would be there by noon the next day. She asked to speak with Kit. Fenno carried the phone into the living room. Kit took it, and Fenno returned to the kitchen.

Walter appeared in the doorway empty-handed. “Percocet, three years past the expiration date. And some mysterious drug prescribed to the wife, probably hormones. And a truckload of Q-tips. Come the revolution, these folks will have clean ears.” He walked to the porch. “If that blasted tree had fallen on the house, this would never have happened. Go ahead!” he shouted at the tree. “Make my day!”

An hour later, Fenno found himself keeping a reluctant vigil beside Kit’s inert body. Was he asleep or paralyzed with sorrow?

Shamelessly, he stared at Kit: at his flat torso, twisted against a cushion; at the pale legs that protruded from his shorts; at the unruly hair matted with perspiration, blond streaked with gray. Who was this man, really? Fenno tried to remember Mal’s legs, hair, the shape of his torso before the wasting. They hadn’t been lovers, but Fenno
had seen Mal naked, in the helpless exposure brought on by disease. He had helped Mal clean his own body, take off and put on his clothes, climb into a bathtub, climb out again.

When he heard Kit snore lightly, he sighed with relief. And then it occurred to him that while Lucinda had felt the deep satisfaction of finding Kit after believing for so long that she had permanently lost him, for Kit it was the other way round. Kit had never known that Lucinda was there to begin with—and then, having only just found her, lost her for good, far too soon.

And that, Fenno realized, glad that Walter wasn’t there to witness his own tears, is what losing Mal had been like for him—though Fenno, unlike Kit, hadn’t even realized what it was he’d found until he had managed to lose it.

He went into the kitchen, unable to bear even the company of a sleeping companion. He was pouring a glass of whiskey for himself when he heard a muffled ringtone in the living room. Kit’s mobile, on the floor beneath a fallen cushion. Fenno took it into the kitchen. Perhaps Sandra had decided to leave at once and needed directions.

“Kit! I just wanted you to know I got home safely. Not even too much traffic.”

“Daphne? It’s Fenno.”

“Oh! Hello there. Thank you again.” Her voice became oblique and courteous. “What a beautiful place, and how kind of you to bring us all together.”

“Daphne, this is difficult to say,” he began.

Unlike Sandra, she hungered to know every detail; too tired to resist, he complied. When she asked to speak with her son, he told her that Kit was out with the children, fetching pizza. “Can you call back tomorrow? I think that’s best, with all that’s happening here.”

“That poor woman. Her poor family.”

“Her daughter is on the way. The rest of us are coping.” As if. “There
is
a lot to do, I’m afraid,” he hinted. He could hear Walter’s voice on the front lawn.

He had barely ended the call when Will opened the door. Walter entered, carrying three enormous pizzas and a plastic bag clearly containing a liter of wine. Fanny held a large box from the fudge shop. She looked at Fenno and said, as if she wasn’t certain, “Six kinds?”
She understood that the indulgence was hardly a matter of reward or celebration.

Walter led the children swiftly into the kitchen, instructing Will, in a whisper, to close the sliding door.

A storm of energy, Walter set the table for four, found jazz on the radio, lit candles, poured wine and lemonade. “Fenno, would you get some pizza on everybody’s plate before we expire?”

Once the two men and the two children were seated, he said, “Fanny, can I ask you a favor? We don’t say grace, but I’m wondering if you’d recite that poem again.”

“The one about the wild geese?” Her pride seeped through her bewilderment.

“I was thinking the one about everyone singing.”

She sat up, raising her chin. She might have been admiring her young face in a mirror. “ ‘Everyone suddenly burst out singing,’ ” she began.

When she finished, Fenno said, “Siegfried Sassoon.”

“Yes!” exclaimed Fanny, pleased.

“Poems by men in trenches,” whispered Walter, but only Fenno heard; the children were lunging at their pizza. Walter had accomplished, more or less, what he had doubtless intended: to reassure the children that the sky was not falling—even if their father lay on the couch looking as if he had been crushed by something far weightier than a cloud.

Walter suggested to Will that there just might be a baseball game on the radio—though didn’t they all despise the Red Sox? They could jeer instead of cheer. He got up and skimmed the stations until, sure enough, they were in Fenway Park. “The Orioles!” he exclaimed after listening intently for a few minutes. “All right, we’ll root for them.” Never mind that Walter couldn’t have cared less about baseball.

Fenno had the brief illusion that here they were, parents as well as partners, having slipped sideways into a parallel existence where everything was a different, happier version of normal.

By the time Mal’s sister drove up to the house with her husband, it was past midnight. She was subdued and resigned, well past hysterics. Christina and Greg had driven from Logan Airport to the hospital in Hyannis. They had identified Lucinda’s body. She told Fenno
that much, and she asked if she could go to bed. Fenno showed them to the den where, the night before, her mother had slept. He didn’t tell her this; he had already packed Lucinda’s things in her suitcase and put it in the closet off the living room. He silenced Lucinda’s phone.

They pull up in front of their apartment building in the middle of a scalding afternoon. They spoke very little for the last two hours of the journey, Walter dedicated to the intricacies of traffic approaching the city, both of them slipping into resignation, well aware that normal responsibilities must resume—and that they aren’t through with the fallout of how their holiday came to a crashing end.

Double-parked, they go through the tedious relay of guarding the car while lugging possessions up the stairwell, Felicity last of all. Walter will return the car to the leasing agency; Fenno will open windows and turn on fans.

Once everything is inside the apartment, he frees Felicity; she flies her well-practiced circuit of the living and dining rooms, returns to the kitchen, and settles in a fuss on the summit of her home cage, empress and sentinel both.

Fenno wheels his suitcase into the bedroom and hoists it onto the bed. He begins unpacking: soiled clothing into the hamper, shirts and trousers into the cupboard, plimsolls on their appointed shelf.

Taking up the bottom half of the suitcase is a polystyrene bag containing the gift intended for Kit. He had meant to bring it out in Lucinda’s presence. He was also conscious that by relinquishing it, he might earn a morsel of goodwill from Walter.

The quilt has lived in Fenno’s bottom drawer, beneath swim trunks in the summer and waffled undergarments in the winter, ever since his move to Walter’s flat. It’s a stained-glass window of silks and velvets, a sumptuous, glittering flummery of patchwork fashioned from remnants of party frocks that Lucinda had intended to discard. Mal loved to tell the story of how he had chanced to be visiting his parents at the time, how he persuaded his mother to turn them into a bedspread rather than give them to the jumble sale funding her church. (“Evening gowns for an establishment that promotes the
wearing of sackcloth? Mom? I’d call that a felony, a crime against beauty.”)

Mal referred to it as his “insomnia quilt”: invoking the kinship of sleeplessness that he shared with his mother had been the key to her compliance. He had slept—and not slept—beneath it for years. During his final months, it had covered his body while he pined with fever, clung to the telly for distraction, cursed the bone pain and nausea, and probably, when no one else was with him, wept in panic and fury at the imminence of death. The night he chose as his last, he asked Fenno to fold the quilt and put it away, worried that the messiness of dying might ruin it. Afterward, Fenno had kept it, but even before Walter, he had never been able to bring himself to spread it across his own bed. It would always remind him of a funeral shroud.

He need not share such details in the letter he will write when he ships the quilt to Kit. Not just yet, however; he’ll give it a month. Which reminds him that, like it or not, he should call Kit, check in on him, this evening.