And the Dark Sacred Night (57 page)

“That was something, at intermission, wasn’t it?” Christina whispers to Kit as he folds the chair and lifts it into the back of her car.

“I think he was thrilled, though tomorrow you can be sure he’ll say something cynical about it.”

Christina laughs quietly. During intermission, one of Zeke’s past colleagues from the senate recognized him. Gradually, a number of Zeke’s fans gathered around him. He insisted on standing and walking with them to the bar; Kit watched from afar as Zeke enjoyed their affectionate laughter, glad-handing, probably their recollections of his achievements—perhaps Lucinda’s, too.

But Kit was distracted by his mother’s tremulous emotions. Spotting a woman she recognized near the stage, she seized Kit’s arm. “It is. It
is
her. I can’t believe it.” She pulled him through the crowd,
Bart and Sandra following. The woman was older but arrestingly stylish. Her silver hair was cut in a razor-sharp pageboy. She wore a purple sequined sheath—short, showing off legs that defied her age. When Daphne approached her, spoke to her, it took the woman just a moment to place Daphne as one of her former students.

“You played ‘The Swan,’ ” she said.
Svahn
. Was she Russian? “I remember. You were an exceptional swan or I would not. I am telling the truth.”

Daphne told the woman about her playing in the Dartmouth ensemble. She did not mention her teaching. Kit held his breath, then realized that of course she wouldn’t say a thing about Malachy. (Had he been memorable, too?)

When they were seated again, Daphne said, “I guess she was just in her thirties then, maybe younger. We were so myopic about our teachers. Not that we weren’t in awe, but we needed them to be on the way out.” She smiled through the second half of the program.

“Are you sure you can drive back this late?” he asks Christina now as he closes the cargo door after securing the wheelchair.

“Please. I drive constantly, twenty-four–seven. Life of carpools, of chasing depositions from Boston to Bangor. And now Dad. I’ll be driving the day I die. Probably drive myself to the funeral home.”

“Tell him I’ll see him at the farm tomorrow night,” says Kit.

“Thank you, Daphne. That was amazing.” Christina opens her door. She hesitates visibly before adding, “And thank you for sharing this piece of my brother’s life. I forgot about his being here.”

Daphne hugs Christina forcefully. “You are welcome. You are so very welcome.” She’s been tearful since the end of the concert, especially since leading them along a roundabout path, a detour on which she discovered that a building she remembered well—an old barn—had been razed and replaced.

“Oh,” she said, as if someone had offended her. “Look at this. Now they sleep in real dorms. They probably have televisions. Computers. Who knows what luxuries.”

“It’s called progress, Mom.”

“No, Kit. No.” She wiped her eyes. “When I was here, the key to our work was
re
gress. If there’s such a thing. All we had was music.”

And one another, thinks Kit.

They wave off Christina, and then, finally, Kit’s mother pulls him
into a prolonged hug. “Kitten,” she says, “this was something we should have done a long time ago. I mean, just because this place is a part of
me
. Forget the rest.”

He lets her hold him, unsure what he should say.

Walking to their car, one of the last few in the lot, Kit and Sandra look at each other and let out a collaborative sigh.

“Are you all right?” says Sandra.

“Define ‘all right.’ I don’t think I’ve been all right in years.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Well, maybe I do. Let me sleep on that.” The truth is this: every new revelation, every new relationship, brings new confusion as well. Sometimes he feels like a mouse being coaxed through a laboratory maze. There’s no guessing what’s been planted around the next turn, or the next.

Sandra unlocks the car. Kit asks her, as he did Christina, if she’s sure she can do the driving. (Could he? Doubtful. The wine has worn off, but the entire evening has left him feeling raw, fretful, ready to howl at the moon.)

“I’m fine.” She clicks in her belt, then looks at him and says, “I got it. The Rutgers job. The memorial garden.”

“Oh God, that is so great,” says Kit. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

“I just found out. They texted me sometime during the concert.”

“Modern life. Did I actually call it progress?” Kit laughs. Soon, no one will be able to remember a time when there was such a thing as “between” or “away” or “off” in the context of work. (Though if he thinks of his mother back when he was a child, there were days she seemed to work—playing her cello, planning her lessons, teaching at school—from early morning till well after reading Kit a bedtime story.)

“I have to refine the design, call my plant sources, all that. And I somehow convinced them I know a lot about fountains. Because of course there’s a fountain. Where there’s sorrow, they almost always demand water.” She drives through the gate, the exit from Eden. “But the thing is, by September, I’ll be spending a lot of time there.”

“You’ll need me for the kids.”

“Or someone.”

“I ought to be back on the street by then.”

“Back at home, you mean. I hope that’s what you mean.”

“Hope. Word of the moment,” he says, trying to sound light-hearted.

“But look. Say you found a job in Providence, or Vermont—just about anywhere—I’d be fine with moving. Things change.”

“Or get desperate.”

“Stop. Really, Kit. The good news is, we’re flexible.”

“Flexible,” says Kit. “I’ll go with that.”

“And lucky.”

Sandra’s father loaned them money to pay for a new roof; last year, when their situation did seem more desperate than flexible, Sandra insisted they prepare to sell the house. They talked about moving out to Oregon, staying with Sandra’s parents for a while; Sandra could work at the nursery. Kit knows this is still a possibility, and it wouldn’t be the end of the world—but now he feels more tightly bound to the Northeast.

“I’m poking around at private schools,” he says. “But Mom thinks I should go for certification. She’s all for public.”

“Of course she is.” Sandra’s tone is hard to read. Over the past year, she and Daphne have been working hard at remaining amicable; anyone can see this.

Their car travels alone on a winding road where trees knit together above them, blocking out whatever light the stars and moon might offer. Sandra clicks on the high beams.

“What was your favorite song?” he asks. “Tonight.”

“You’re asking me to choose? Between Bach and Tom Waits? Ravel and the
Beach
Boys?”

“You know what? That was incredible. Maybe that was my favorite.” The married singers had performed, in all its hymnal sweetness (gazing into each other’s eyes), “God Only Knows.” Kit stops himself from saying that this is one of many songs he knows involuntarily well, because it’s one his mother taught in her class years ago, playing it over and over at home, asking him—and Jasper—for their impressions, too. He stops himself because he doesn’t want to bring up his mother right now—not yet. He isn’t ready to talk about the events or emotions of the evening, not even with Sandra. Instead, he says, “I read somewhere that Paul McCartney loved singing that song as a lullaby to his children.”

“Easy for him.
He
could do all the harmony on his own.”

Kit realizes that he is still holding the program. “Do you think we should take Will and Fanny to something like that? An outdoor concert?”

“Only if we balance it with a Giants game.”

“Will should be able to find entertainment outside a stadium.”

“Should. Now there’s a loaded word.”

Yes, thinks Kit, and how. Here it is again: worrying over how he
should
feel about recent events, rather than knowing what he genuinely does. It’s as if he’s living an unremitting dream, watching himself from the dreamer’s distance, a witness unable to intervene. He feels a growing affection for Zeke—yet he cannot vanquish his guilt. To be with Zeke is also to be without Lucinda, who would surely be there still, with her husband, if Kit had not barged into their lives. He feels gratitude toward Fenno McLeod—yet the quilt and the box of letters and pictures, which Fenno sent with a letter telling him more about his father, only sharpened Kit’s guilt. Here were swatches,
literal
swatches, from Lucinda’s bright, generous, celebratory life.… What was he to do with this memento? He will always love his mother, yet now that he’s muscled his way into knowing things she withheld—in a way, pulled filial rank on her (Malachy may once have been her lover, but he will always be Kit’s father)—he feels as much sadness for her sacrifice as he does admiration. Tonight’s outing only deepened that sadness. Never mind that it looks as if she’s happy: as if love, whatever form it takes in her marriage to Bart, will prevail, at least for now.

Sandra’s voice emerges from the silence. “Do you suppose the children will be in bed? I somehow doubt it.”

“Loraina can’t get enough of them, can she?”

“Don’t be fooled,” says Sandra. “Jasper’s the one who’d change the locks.”

The clock in the dashboard tells them it’s ten-thirty. They have at least another hour on the road, though Sandra tends to drive faster than Kit. “I could phone and find out. Put down my disciplinarian foot,” he says. “But they can sleep late. Can’t they?”

“Except that now I have to get back sooner, start making calls. They can’t exactly stay here with you.”

Sandra always remembers the logistics. Because yes, the kids will
return with her to New Jersey, while Kit returns to Zeke’s for another couple of days in the sweltering barn. Another visit or two and that work will be done.

“So tell me about the garden.” He saw Sandra’s earliest sketches, but he’s been away from home too much to have paid close attention.

“God knows if I’m up to it. Right this minute I’m terrified I’m in way over my head.”

The garden is as much a recognition as a memorial—and, Sandra says (though only to him), an act of political correctness. Rutgers is hardly West Point, so the number of graduates lost in a decade of skirmishes and roadside bombs is—so far—negligible. More than three dozen alumni, however, died on September 11. The garden will be a walled enclosure, intimate in scale, though the donor has wealth on a scale that is anything but. So while the job is “small,” says Sandra, she’ll be free to choose unusual materials and plantings. Despite the acutely different climates, she will hunt for horticultural crossovers between the Middle East and New Brunswick. “I do have a good source of opium poppies,” she says. “A client who loves to share her seeds. Garden-club insurgency.”

Kit pictures the cinematic field of poppies in
The Wizard of Oz
. Jasper began reading the
Oz
books aloud to Kit as soon as he and his mother moved in. He had read them to Rory and Kyle when they were younger; sometimes, if Jasper was reading to Kit on the sofa, they would loiter about for a minute or two and listen. Jasper’s deep sawtooth voice was the perfect storyteller’s medium. Just last night, he read to Will and Fanny; Fanny had brought along the third
Harry Potter
. He will have read to them again tonight.

The twins are sleeping in Rory and Kyle’s bunk bed, which Loraina is determined to haul to the dump. (“If we put in an honest-to-God four-poster with a mattress that doesn’t reek of feral boy, maybe we could attract some actual guests!”) Jasper claims, however, that having children as regular visitors is a vote in favor of keeping the room as it is, moth-eaten cowboy rug and all. Kit knows that Jasper is hoping Kyle’s life will stay on the rails; maybe he hopes for just one more grandchild—this one living right around the corner.

The children were predictably delighted when they entered Jasper’s house. Kit can still remember the first time he saw it. But unlike nine-year-old Kit, whose mother warned him to “behave,” the
twins ran up and down the stairs, peering into the various nooks with their various views, finally convening at the top, in the crow’s nest. “Can we stay
here?
” said Fanny, sitting possessively on the futon that Jasper installed once Kit moved out for good.

Kit briefly considered the image of himself and Sandra sleeping in the bunks below, and while there are still too many nights when they sleep together like siblings, he said, “No, I’m afraid not. This is my room.”

“How is it yours?” Fanny challenged.

“I slept here for ten years, or just about.” He glanced around, possessive in his own way. Above the desk where he did his homework hung the corkboard once crowded with his collection of art cards. But for a constellation of colorful thumbtacks, it had been empty ever since.

Fanny looked puzzled. Eagle eye that she is, she had already noticed, on the stone mantel in the living room, a picture of Rory, Kyle, and Kit. “Isn’t that you as a kid?” she asked. Kit had been startled by the picture; where had it come from? Since moving into Jasper’s house, Loraina has been softening its edges: not all at once, as Kit’s mother did, but by stealthy increments: one month a rocking chair by the fireplace, next a fresh rag rug in the kitchen … but it looks as if she’s also exhuming artifacts of Jasper’s past, a past with which she has no quarrels.

Kit was naïve to bring the children for a weekend at Jasper’s without, as Sandra put it, “full disclosure.” He sat on the futon with Fanny and Will. “You remember how I told you that Didi was married before Papa-da?”

Will frowned. “No.”

Fanny turned to her brother and said, “She got a
divorce
. We know that.”

“Right,” said Kit. “Didi was married to Jasper. We lived here when I was your age.”

“But Jasper’s not your dad,” said Fanny. “Your dad died.”

Once again, Kit wondered when he would be able to explain to his children all the discoveries of the past year—all these new people in their lives, these new places they were visiting. Kit is also certain that Fanny, though she hasn’t said anything, is taking note of the emotional hum that rises and falls around her father these days. He
can still detect in her the wariness both children felt after his collapse in Provincetown.