And the Dark Sacred Night (53 page)

Kit slept through much of the day on which Sandra arrived, on which Christina and Greg drove hither and yon to answer questions, fill out forms, arrange transport of Lucinda’s body once the coroner’s office agreed to release it. Thank heaven there had been witnesses. Had there been the slightest hint of suicide, everything, for everyone, would have been ten times harder.

Fenno was also relieved that Christina had already met Kit and Sandra, and the twins, if only once. Still, the twenty-four hours they spent packed into that borrowed house with people they barely knew (and who barely knew them) were a trial for all. For Fenno and Walter, that long day swiftly and efficiently annulled the salutary effects of all the leisure and letting go they had accrued over three long weeks (as if they were building some kind of spiritual savings account!). Walter finally lost the cheerful determination bolstering his ceaseless efforts to entertain, distract, and nourish.

The last two nights, after everyone else departed, Fenno and Walter went to bed without reading or talking. They slept with a vengeance and rose quickly each morning, hardly touching. Sex seemed irrelevant, even heretical.

Death to sex, death to reading, death to plans of any reasonable
sort, thought Fenno. Death to everything but death. Yet aside from whatever might happen to his relationship with Walter once everyone else had gone their separate, shell-shocked ways, his greatest concern was Kit. Before they left, Sandra treated her husband gently but firmly, forcing him to do errands with her, play cards with the children, take a family outing to a nearby beach. (No one suggested Twister.)

Wednesday morning, Sandra and Kit packed up their two cars. The twins would ride with Sandra.

“We will certainly stay in touch,” Fenno said as they stood together on the lawn. He was the only one to see them off.

“I hope so,” Sandra said. “I mean that.”

“I’m so sorry,” Kit said. “I’m just so—sorry.” Fenno heard the silent obscenity omitted in the presence of children.

“We’re all sorry;
sorry
is the sorriest of words for what we are,” said Fenno. “But like it or not, we’re tied together by that sorriness. And I don’t mind that. We’ll see one another; we don’t live so far apart.”

Sandra nodded. “We will.”

Fenno said to Fanny, “Do you have your collection of stones?” The table where she had arranged them was empty.

“I took them back to the beach. I only borrowed them.” She sounded as world-weary as the grown-ups.

“What about your books? Walter would be unhappy if you forgot them.”

“Yes,” she said primly. “We have the books.” Will was gazing out the opposite window, already leaving.

The conversation had to end. They had to drive away. Fenno directed them out the hedgerow. He waved, however pointless the gesture. He hoped he hadn’t lied to Kit and Sandra. If Walter, when all was said and done, declared that he never wanted to see them again, Fenno would never see them, either.

He looks at the clock on his side of the bed. Odd to think that it’s been ticking away here, oblivious to his absence from home, for weeks. Perhaps he should walk to the post office and fetch their accumulated mail. No: let it wait till tomorrow. Nothing in the post could make much difference to him now.

He lays Mal’s quilt on Mal’s chair. He feels a stirring of anger.
Mal claimed to have “organized” the effects and remnants of his life before so deliberately leaving it behind. As it turned out, he’d done a bloody poor job of it, hadn’t he? Fenno laughs bitterly.

In the kitchen, he looks inside the refrigerator: nothing but condiments. Walter is diligent about keeping it clean, free of spoiled or redundant foods. He even removed the pitcher that filters their drinking water; upended, it waits in the drying rack to be refiltered and refilled. Maybe there’s ice cream in the freezer. Alas, just a pair of pork chops, a pound of butter, a package of double-A batteries, and the bin of vaporous ice that Walter will empty noisily into the sink when he returns. He will not tolerate out-of-date ice cubes.

With all the windows open, Fenno hears the ecstatic shrieks of children in the sprinkler at Bleecker Playground. Time away from this sound has made it newly notable; in a week, it will fade once more into the complex embroideries of the city’s everyday clamor.

The landline rings.

“The car’s returned,” says Walter. “But I have to go straight to Bank Street. Two waiters are quitting this week. Grad students. I think they knew all along they were going back to school, but they swore to me they weren’t. Remind me to stick with actors. So reliable and selfless.”

“You want me to unpack for you?”

“No. But come for dinner at the bar. Nine-thirty?”

“Haven’t you had enough dinners with me the past month?”

“Creature of habit, what can I say? Shortcake of the day is
blackberry
. I am not missing that, and neither should you. But would you please get the mail?”

“Yes,” says Fenno. “I’ll go now.” He dreads the hot walk to the P.O., but never mind. On the way there, he’ll begin to compose his letter to Kit, the one he will send with the quilt. He promises Felicity to buy her a mango on the return. Gently, he moves her inside the cage to her favorite perch, closes and latches the door. He goes to the loo for the sunscreen he just unpacked.

Returning through the bedroom, he pushes his emptied suitcase to the back of the cupboard. Before closing the door, he looks up and sees it, on its high shelf: the red box that he stole from beneath Mal’s bed, the one containing letters and photographs related to Kit. The
framed label, in Mal’s handwriting, reads
CHRISTOPHER
. He takes the box down and sets it on the bed. To this day, he has resisted the urge to read the letters to Mal, from Lucinda and Daphne. There are just a few—their postmarks before and just after the beginning of Kit’s life—but they are the reason that Fenno has never known what to do with this box. Whom might he betray or wound with what were obviously secrets? And of course, that was before he met Daphne. (How could he ever have imagined he would?)

For all his protesting otherwise, Fenno knows full well that he was closer to Mal at the end than anyone else. Surely Mal would have told him about Christopher if the boy’s existence had not been a deeply private matter—wouldn’t he? Fenno has not lied to Walter: he and Mal were never lovers, not in the technical sense. But Fenno relives, more often than he should—sometimes, helplessly, in dreams—one of their last times together: sitting on the beautiful quilt, side by side against the pillows on Mal’s bed, some forgettable
Masterpiece Theatre
episode plodding along on the telly. By then Mal was so thin, his skin so easily bruised, his bones so close to the surface, that Fenno touched him only when he required help to move. That day, Mal fell asleep and slumped against Fenno, full length: his head on Fenno’s shoulders, knees over knees, one translucent hand, slender and weightless as a bird’s wing, curled on Fenno’s belly. For an instant, Fenno feared that he had died—but then his breathing became noisy, sawlike in a reassuring way.

Fenno froze at first, though gradually, after a few minutes, he allowed himself to relax. The heat of Mal’s slight body—its fever like a protest against its diminishing—bloomed through his own, till Fenno, too, slipped into sleep. He awoke only moments later, aware that he was fully aroused, erect beneath Mal’s hand. Mal slept on. For an hour, until Mal awoke, Fenno stayed perfectly still, not even reaching for the remote to mute the irksome drama on the screen at the foot of the bed. He would gratefully have stayed like that for days.

Perhaps Walter can help him decide whether to give the box to Kit, letters and all. Will it seem better or worse that his father kept track of him from a distance both cold and safe? Walter will look at it more objectively than Fenno could; more wisely, too. One way or another, it’s time for the box to go. It doesn’t belong here. It never did.

The clock tells him there’s still time to reach the P.O. before it closes. Good. He can buy a proper box for shipping the quilt.

Then he’ll go to the restaurant. Walter won’t have more than a few stolen minutes to sit with him at the bar. He rarely does. The all-seeing Ben will catch Fenno up on a month’s worth of gossip. He will order Hugo’s nightly special. (He hopes it’s the Idaho trout.) He will eat blackberry shortcake.

T
HE TOWN WHERE SHE HAD GROWN UP
, where her mother had once taught first grade and her father’s hardware store doubled as an alternate town hall, was small enough that once her news was out, the sequence of humiliating encounters Daphne had to endure, however endless they seemed at the time, were finite: from her family doctor (a ghastly conversation about venereal disease) and her tactless brother (“Knocked up? Whoa”) to teachers and neighbors and parents’ friends and the salesclerks she couldn’t avoid forever in the shops where she still had to do her everyday errands. On and on it seemed to go, this awkward continuum of faked joy, hidden panic—not regret, never regret, she would remind herself; at least not about the baby—and, from nearly everyone around her, thinly disguised pity. People were kind but distant; she almost wished somebody would go ahead and call her a slut. Now and then, she caught a certain glance exchanged by her parents, a glance whose meaning she wished she did not understand.

Yet somehow, in nearly a full round of seasons, she had eluded the one chance meeting that she dreaded more than any other. Just when she began to think that maybe she’d be spared—maybe Mrs. Patton had moved away or even died (she was, after all, a gray-haired widow)—it happened.

Kit was a few months old by then. It was a mercifully comfortable summer day, not too humid or still, and Daphne was taking a walk through town—a walk just for the sake of a walk—pushing him in his carriage, the same baby carriage in which her own mother had pushed her along the very same streets. She hadn’t been paying much attention to people passing her by on the sidewalk—often, when she could get away from the house, she would slip into vague daydreams
detailing Malachy’s change of heart, their fates rejoined through his mother’s intervention—so she had only a few seconds in which to absorb that the woman approaching her was Mrs. Patton.

Mrs. Patton had been her first cello teacher—the woman who had seen and believed in her early talent, who had persuaded Daphne’s mother to drive her three times a week to Hanover for expensive lessons with a more advanced teacher, who, in turn, had sponsored her audition for the camp. As soon as they received the acceptance letter, Daphne’s mother had invited Mrs. Patton for dinner. She arrived with a congratulatory bouquet of daffodils gathered from her garden. After handing the flowers to Daphne’s mother, she had embarrassed Daphne by grasping her hands and telling her, tearfully, “I always hoped that one of my pupils, someday, would have a chance like this. You, Daphne, are my true musical daughter.”

Daphne knew full well how disappointed her parents were in her “change of circumstances,” as they phrased it in their letter to her high-school principal, but at least they had a consolation prize: a first grandchild. If Mrs. Patton had meant what she said the day she came for dinner, she had every right to be disappointed, too—without a single consolation. Daphne had been a good student in all the subjects she possibly could; to cross a teacher was something that never gave her pleasure.

They both stopped, beneath the shade of a store awning.

“Hi, Mrs. Patton.”

“How are you doing, dear?” It was clear (and no surprise) that she knew about Daphne’s “change of circumstances.” Perhaps her parents had sent that letter to Mrs. Patton as well, to all sorts of people who’d had loftier expectations for Daphne. Maybe they had mimeographed it and asked the postmistress to slip it into everybody’s mailbox, like the flyers advertising sales at Mack’s Grocery. Or maybe she had posted it on the bulletin board alongside the FBI’s wanted posters. (What did Daphne care, at this point?)

“I’m doing all right,” Daphne said. “I’m living at home, and I’m going to take some college courses in the fall. I might major in music.” She became aware that she was shaking. “I’m thinking I could maybe become a teacher.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Your pupils would be fortunate,” said Mrs. Patton. Then she turned her attention to Kit. She asked how old he
was and if he was a “good baby.” She reminisced about her own two sons as infants, and she disclosed that she had three grandchildren, one of them not much older than Kit. She said nothing about Daphne’s cello playing (she hadn’t played in months) or her squandered chances.

As Daphne listened to Mrs. Patton, she understood that her old teacher held nothing against her, that she was a loving woman who took things as they came. (Maybe, when her husband died, she hadn’t been all that old.) Before she continued on her way, she leaned down so that her face was inches from Kit’s, and she said, “You have many happy surprises in store, little boy, especially with this young lady as your mom. A lucky baby, that’s what you are.”

After they parted ways, Daphne realized that she could stop dreading the judgment of others. Kit was real now; the youth of his mother and her lack of a husband were very old news. She stopped fantasizing about life in a distant city or anyplace where no one knew her. If she could just find a way to move out of her parents’ house—to wake up somewhere other than the same twin bed where she had dreamed so many grandiose dreams (which, in a way, she was relieved to set aside)—then she would be as free as she could hope to be.