And the Dark Sacred Night (54 page)

T
HE TIMING OF THEIR CONVERGENCE
, from three different places—three different states—is nearly perfect. Kit has just pulled his jacket from the backseat and slipped his sunglasses into a pocket when, looking over the roof of the car, he spots Christina, three rows away, unfolding her father’s wheelchair.

“Can you bring along the picnic stuff?” he says to Sandra.

He calls out Christina’s name and jogs across the lot, shrugging his jacket into place: uncomfortable in the afternoon heat, but his mother says he’ll be glad to have it once the sun goes down.

“Were you planning on managing this by yourself?” he says when he reaches her car. Seeing Zeke in the passenger seat, Kit waves.

“The chair I can deal with,” she murmurs. “Dad is the challenge.”

“Heard that!” Zeke is climbing out, stiff and slow but determined. “Leave that contraption,” he commands Christina. “Don’t need it.”

“Dad, believe me, it will make all our lives a lot easier. It’s not just about you and your senatorial dignity.”

“You,” Zeke says to Kit. “Glad to see you.” It seems to take a full minute for the older man to hoist himself to a standing position, but it’s true that he can maneuver on his own two feet.

“How about,” Kit says, “we use it to carry the food until you need it?”

“I won’t eat on ground. Done with that silliness when I retired.”

“My mother says there are picnic tables.” As Sandra arrives with the canvas bags containing their contribution to dinner, Kit’s phone rings. “We just got here, Mom. Where are you?”

She’s already there, waiting for them in the main building.

Cars locked, wheelchair piled with cooler bags and satchels, they set off toward … Kit reads the sign. “ ‘Manoir de Mélodie’? What
is this, a theme park?” He intends, if nothing else, to keep the mood light. Nearly a year has passed since the catastrophe in Provincetown, but he hasn’t been together with his mother and anyone from Lucinda’s family since last Thanksgiving.

They move slowly, the pace set by Zeke, but they have plenty of time, and Kit is happy to stop every few paces, just to take in the variously impressive views, the fragrance of the burgeoning flower beds. The “camp,” as his mother so quaintly calls it, was established in the 1930s, cannibalizing a bankrupt estate built around a dairy farm (so the website explained). Over nearly a hundred years, it’s become an eclectic campus of ornate Victorian structures and clusters of low whitewashed buildings—the “studios”—with a Scandinavian reserve.

At Christmas, his mother began to describe her memories of this place, but none of her descriptions prepared Kit for the sense of studiously understated privilege—high culture merged with old money and horticultural know-how—that greets outsiders who visit the camp. The trees are tall, lustrous, and vaulted, their shadows on the far-reaching lawns magnificently wide.

The signs, by contrast, are low to the ground and meant to simulate rustic modesty, the names of the various buildings burned into cedar planks.

“You two go on ahead. Dad and I are going to visit the facilities.” Christina points down a hill toward a shed sequestered by yews.

Kit hesitates, but he knows his mother will be impatient for them to arrive. He and Sandra follow the arbitrarily serpentine course of the bricks until, emerging between the embrasure of two oaks, the vista brings them to a halt. Here is the building his mother referred to as “HQ,” a turreted white mansion competing for their awe with its backdrop: the satin surface of Lake Champlain.

“My God,” says Sandra. “I can’t begin to imagine the caretaker’s budget. Forget the rest. She spent a whole summer here and you never heard about it?”

“Well,” he says simply. Her question is as rhetorical as they come.

A group of people dressed up for the concert commune on the porch. Kit and Sandra sidle through their midst to enter a spacious hall, its principal furnishings a moose head over a stone fireplace, a
gilt-framed mirror on the opposite wall, and a red Persian rug easily twice the size of their living room.

“I can’t believe you’re here; I can’t believe
I’m
here!” To Kit’s relief, his mother glows with excitement. She rushes to embrace them. “This place—it’s all so … it’s been so gussied up since I was here, but I guess that’s a sign of the times, isn’t it? The arts demand opulence now.”

“Opulence or grunge,” says Kit.

Bart, catching up with his wife, grins at Kit and reaches for a high five. “Dude!” he growls. Kit has often wondered whether Bart’s mimicry of teenage mannerisms (always a year or two behind the times) endears him to the students at his high school or makes him an object of ridicule. Reflexively, Kit plays along.

“Word,” he answers as they slap palms (uncertain what the word
word
, in this context, might actually mean).

“Word indeed. Like, can this be for real?” Bart gestures broadly.

“Where are the others?” says Daphne.

“Zeke’s taking his time,” says Kit. “Christina’s with him.”

Sandra stands before the fireplace and gazes up at the stuffed moose, its bearded chin four inches above her head, antlers reaching just shy of the coffered ceiling. “Can we—can you give us a tour?”

“Of course.” Daphne takes Bart’s hand. They look like people on a date rather than a long-married couple. How much does Bart know about her history here? Maybe, unlike Jasper, he’s known all the details from day one—maybe since before Kit’s mother left Jasper (which she did in order to be with Bart). Now that Jasper is back in Kit’s life, he can’t help comparing the men. He will never see them through his mother’s eyes, but he is baffled by her choice. Was Bart’s playfulness, even buffoonishness, something she needed? Did she think it would help restore her stolen youth? Bart has always been attractive in a sporty way: fit, hale, game for anything upbeat and social. But he has none of Jasper’s wry edge; didn’t she miss that? (Not that he can’t see the obvious justification: here was a man who gave her another shot at being a mother—a married mother, properly paired with a father.)

“Show Sandra around,” says Kit. “I’ll wait here for Christina and Zeke.”

“But you have to see everything, sweetheart. You more than anyone else.”

“There’s time. Don’t worry about me.”

From the porch, he sees no sign of the others. He wanders inside again, past the moose and into another large room, this one paneled in dark polished wood; no cedar-plank aesthetic here. Another massive hearth, a pool table, and a grand piano all vie for attention—losing out to a bay window facing the lake. Far more captivating to Kit, however, are the row upon row of photographs checkerboarding the walls. They are not hung chronologically, as photos of sports teams in a college gymnasium would be, and only some are posed group shots (posed on the porch of this very building). Most depict musicians in performance or rehearsal. Kit, who now defaults to a curatorial mind-set, is irritated at the haphazard quality to the display, especially at the lack of identifying captions on most—but, more irritating still, not all—of the pictures. Hastily, he scans the photos whose occupants are attired in a way that suggests “the sixties”: girls in grannyish dresses that look like they belong on women braving the Oregon Trail; boys flaunting sideburns like strips of Velcro, wearing bell-bottoms and Nehru jackets (
there’s
a garment overdue for its comeback). He finds a group shot dated August 1968, one year too late.

“Here you are.” Christina, alone. “I’ve parked Dad out front. About five people got up to offer him their chairs as we approached the porch. That always puts him in a gloomy mood. Two years ago he looked a decade younger than he is; now he looks a decade older.”

She pauses to assess the room. “Are we in a fairy tale or what? I can’t believe Greg and I have never been to one of these concerts—or brought the girls.” Then she says, “Listen. Don’t look so worried. Dad’s fine—as fine as he can be. What I hate is the way he refuses to take into account his effect on other people. Since the stroke, I mean. Ironic, if you consider that knowing his effect on other people was the key to his career.”

“It’s too bad Greg couldn’t come.”

“He claims he’s overworked right now, but that’s the status quo. Know what? Just about now”—she looks at her watch—“he’s micro-waving a bowl of popcorn and tuning in to a ball game. And bully
for him. I think he’s gone from stunned to bored over the family soap opera.”

“Starring me.”

Christina puts a hand on his arm. “Ouch. Sorry.”

“I’m flattered you can be so blunt.”

“I have a huge mouth. Speaking of knowing one’s effect on other people.” She turns toward the view of the lake. “Un
real
. Where’s your mother?”

“Giving a tour to Sandra. And Bart.”

“Ah, Mr. Chips!”

“I think his fantasies tend more toward
Breakfast Club
or
School of Rock
.”

Christina sits in a morris chair beside the piano. “Where’s the butler with my Pimms?”

“You hang out till he gets here,” says Kit. “I’ll spell you with Zeke.”

Zeke sits rigidly, arms and legs symmetrically placed, in the same grave posture, with the same glum expression, as Abe Lincoln in his stone memorial. “Yo,” he says drily when he sees Kit. “Daughter’s left me here as ant bait.”

“Don’t feel so sorry for yourself.” Immediately, a woman in the chair adjacent to Zeke’s offers it to Kit. He accepts. Zeke’s hearing has begun to dwindle, so Kit sits close when they talk.

Zeke laughs his sandpaper laugh. “Probably miffed no one’s recognized me. Right?”

Kit smiles. “From your lips, not mine.”

“Lucinda called me on it. The vanity.”

“A sin we all suffer in spades. Don’t think you’re special there.”

“See? Vain about my vanity.” Zeke turns to Kit and smiles, victorious.

It took Kit surprisingly little time to feel comfortable (and to stop feeling guilty) around this thorny man, to recognize that his thorniness is the shadow of his former easy charm, his public radiance—a side of Zeke that Kit is sorry he will never know. But he did see Zeke at the apex of his grieving, during the arduous, awkward Thanksgiving
when all the Burnses—or those remaining—came together at the farm with Kit, Sandra, Daphne, Bart, and the twins. Predictably, Lucinda’s absence was magnified by the occasion. More than once, Christina would murmur, “This is when Mom would always say …” or “If Mom could have seen …” Jonathan made a show of reciting grace before the meal. When they lifted their heads, Kit looked instantly at Zeke, who was wiping his eyes.

Kit wonders what it would feel like to be the sort of man regarded as a figurehead, someone voted for—your name ticked off on a ballot—by thousands of strangers who trust you to make decisions affecting their lives. Does their trust become the unspoken foundation of your life, so that when they forget you—when your decisions no longer affect them—you lose your sense of balance? No wonder public figures—athletes, movie stars, rock musicians—seem to die younger than painters, inventors, scientists, those whose success relies on a talent for solitude.

It was Christina’s idea to hire Kit for what Zeke called the family chaos project, or FCP (the F, as Christina likes to say, vacillating in what it really stands for). This is the work of weeding through and cataloguing the letters, speeches, ledgers, pedigrees, auction programs, studbooks, photographs, and frighteningly plentiful paraphernalia related to the history of the farm and Zeke the Elder’s influence on American agribusiness. Some of it will go to a dairy museum in the Midwest, some of it to a Vermont historical society mounting a major exhibition. “And please may a heck of a lot of it,” said Zeke, “go directly to the landfill.”

Since December, Kit has been spending two to three days a week at the farm. He survived the stage of inhaling gallons of dust and aerated rodent dung in Zeke’s enormous, neglected attic, bashing his head repeatedly on the roof’s raw interior as he removed box after box, trunk after trunk, and carted them out to the barn for sorting. There is a soothing monotony to the work—broken every so often by the discovery of startling treasures: most notably, a 1948 letter from Thomas E. Dewey to Zeke the Elder, floating the notion that Zeke might be secretary of agriculture if Dewey is elected president. The surviving Zeke—despite his age, still the Younger—held the letter in his trembling fingers and, when he finished reading it, gasped.
“Kept that from us? Ego he had? Wonders never cease!” But Kit saw how moved he was.

For Kit, the most momentous find, irrelevant to the project itself, was a carton of his father’s belongings that Lucinda had clearly saved from Mal’s apartment yet hidden away. (Had she worried that others might find their preservation pointless and maudlin?)

Here was a small velvet box containing garnet cuff links and studs. Here was a perfect malachite egg, a cherrywood metronome, a fountain pen well worn above its tarnished nib, a ceramic tile glazed with a tiger, a folding travel alarm clock, a set of ornately carved wooden spoons that looked as if they were made in Morocco or Turkey. Here was a framed photograph of Mal looking vigorous, well sunned, and completely at ease in his tuxedo, laughing, with the glamorous scarlet Felicity vamping on his shoulder. Mal’s left arm was bent, his fingertips concealed in the bird’s feathery ruff, one of the garnet cuff links visible at his wrist. Kit held it against his chest, breathing quickly in the stifling air of the attic. Each object emerged from a shroud of yellowed tissue, a gift. At the bottom lay a trove of programs (Lincoln Center, BAM, the Metropolitan Opera) with opinionated notes tucked throughout, the critic pulling no punches in private. Out of one fell a sheet of paper torn from a pocket memo pad, a scrawled verse: