Before You Know Kindness (2 page)

Part I

The Deer

One

T
he sun was up over Washington, Lafayette, and the trio of nearby cannonball-shaped mountains that were called the Three Graces, and Nan Seton—elderly but far from frail—sat sipping her morning coffee on a chaise lounge on the Victorian house’s wraparound porch. She noted how the sun was rising much later now than it had even two or three weeks ago: It was already the twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth of July (it disturbed her that she couldn’t grab the precise date right now from the air), and her children would be arriving tomorrow. Friday.

A golden retriever—old like her but not nearly so energetic—lolled near her feet on the outdoor rug.

She had been on the porch close to half an hour and even the coffee in the stovetop percolator she had brought outside with her was cold, when she heard her granddaughters pound their way down the stairs. The older girl, Charlotte, was twelve; the younger one, Willow (a name that drove Grandmother crazy both for its absolute lack of any family resonance and its complete New Age inanity), was ten.

The girls collapsed into the two wicker chairs near the outdoor table, opposite their grandmother and her chaise. She saw they both had sleep in their eyes and their hair wasn’t brushed. They were still in their nightgowns, their feet were bare, and Charlotte was sitting in such a fashion—the sole of one foot wedged against her other leg’s thigh—that her nightgown had bunched up near her waist and she was offering anyone who cared to see an altogether indelicate and (in Nan’s opinion) appalling show of flesh.

“Good morning,” she said to them, trying hard to resist the urge to put down her cup and saucer and pull Charlotte’s nightgown back down over her knee. “How are my two little wildflowers?”

“Sleepy,” Charlotte said, her voice already the uninterested drawl of an urban teenager.

“You girls are up early. Any special reason?”

“There’s a bird on the roof,” Charlotte said.

“A woodpecker,” Willow added, and she reached down to pet the drowsing dog.

Nan nodded. She decided the bird must have been on the roof over the kitchen porch on the other side of the house, because otherwise she, too, would have heard him just now. “They don’t normally drum this late in the season,” she said to her granddaughters. “They—”

“Trust me, we are not making this up,” Charlotte said. “It sounds like there’s some guy up there and he’s trying to open a tin of Altoids with a machine gun.” The girl had two tiny hillocks starting to emerge on her chest. Not yet breasts and not visible in this particular nightgown. But they were evident in bathing suits and T-shirts. Her eyes were the shape of perfectly symmetrical almonds, her nose was small, and her mouth was a luscious pucker at once waiflike and impudent. She lacked her mother’s paralyzingly sensual red hair, but her mane was thick and dark with natural hints of henna, and it fell on her shoulders like a cape. In a few years, Charlotte would be gorgeous, an absolute knockout. For the moment, however, she was in that murky world between childhood and serious adolescence. In one light she might pass for ten; in another she might be mistaken for fourteen.

“She didn’t say we were making anything up,” Willow murmured, and then she did exactly what her grandmother wanted most in the world that very moment: She reached over to her cousin from Manhattan and pulled the older girl’s nightgown down over her knee so that taut and tanned twelve-year-old thigh once again was decently covered.

“If I had a gun, I would have shot it,” Charlotte grumbled, widening her eyes as she spoke because she understood her remark was so gloriously inflammatory. But then—and here was that child—she still lacked the anarchic courage of a truly angry adolescent, and so she allowed herself a retraction of sorts. “Well, not
it,
of course. Dad would completely disown me if I ever did something like that. But maybe I would have shot near it. Scared it. Scared its beak off.”

“Do you know why a woodpecker might drum in July?” Nan asked them.

“Because it’s an idiot.”

“Charlotte—” Willow began, but her cousin cut her off.

“It is! Why do you think we have the expression
birdbrain?
”

The woman watched Willow’s round face carefully. The girl was two years younger than Charlotte, and she lived in northern Vermont—barely two hours from this house, actually. She had worried this whole month that Charlotte would (and the word had come to her the moment she had spoken to her own adult children that spring when they had begun planning the girls’ annual summer stay in New Hampshire)
corrupt
young Willow. So far that hadn’t happened, but she knew there was still plenty of time. She saw now that Willow was more hurt by Charlotte’s tone than impressed by her attitude. The girl was gazing down at her toenails, and the salmon-colored polish that she had layered on them the night before. Her feet were elegant and small. The soles were smooth, the skin was soft.

“It’s not likely the bird is stupid, Charlotte,” Nan said. “He’s either boasting of his responsibility for a second clutch of eggs or he’s lonely and still trying to find a mate.”

“I wish I spoke woodpecker, then. I’d tell him to go write a personal ad. It would be a lot quieter.”

“Have you seen the crow?” Willow asked her grandmother.

“Yes, why?”

“It’s so big. I never think of crows as big. But twice yesterday near the garden—by the apple trees—I saw it.”

Charlotte rolled her eyes. “It’s probably a raven then. Ravens are much huger. Right, Grandmother?”

“No, it is indeed a crow. There’s a family with a nest at the top of one of the white pines near the strawberry patch. Try an experiment later today, if you feel like it. Before we leave for the club, place a dime in the driveway near the trees. Maybe even tilt it on its side so it catches the sun. When we return, there’s a good chance the dime will be gone.”

“Oh, good,” Charlotte said, and she smiled. “A woodpecker so dim he thinks bashing on the roof will get him a girlfriend and a crow who’s a petty thief. What nice birds you have, Grandmother.”

“He wants the dime because it’s shiny,” Nan said simply, as she carefully placed the wicker tray that held her coffee on the table beside the chaise and stood up. “Now, what would you two like for breakfast? I actually have some pancake batter in the refrigerator from yesterday and, of course, sausages—”

“Dad would freak if he knew how much meat you were trying to feed us,” Charlotte told her.

“Yes, your father probably would. You don’t have to eat it. But Willow and I still eat—”

“Dead things.”

“Yes, we do.”

Willow’s hair was the color of a sand dollar that has not yet been bleached by the sun. She looked up now, brushed her bangs away from her eyes, and said to her grandmother, “Maybe I’ll just have pancakes this morning, too, please.”

“What? No sausages?” Nan asked, unable to hide the surprise in her voice.

“No, thank you. Not today.”

“Hallelujah,” Charlotte said happily, and then she climbed off the chair and ran up the stairs to get dressed. The dog lifted his head, the vibrations from the human on the stairs causing his spot on the porch to shudder beneath his snout. Willow paused for a moment, and it seemed to her grandmother that there was something more she wanted to say. But then she stood, too, shrugged her shoulders and raced up the steps after her cousin.

AS SHE DROPPED
the pancake batter—after nearly twenty-four hours in the refrigerator, it was thicker than pudding—onto the electric skillet, the phone rang. Nan Seton had never bothered to purchase a cordless phone, and so she made a mental note as she scooted in her slippers across the long kitchen to keep the call brief: She did not want the pancakes—which, because the batter was substantial and heavy, reminded her of small loofah sponges on the griddle—to wind up looking like charcoal briquettes.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Nan. It’s Marguerite.”

“I’m making the girls breakfast.”

“Oh, I’ll just be a minute. Do you remember how you noticed at the club yesterday that Walter Durnip’s color wasn’t very good?”

“Vaguely. He looked a little gray.”

“He did, he did. Well, he died.”

She sat on the wooden stool by the phone, and nodded to herself. “How?”

“In his sleep.”

“That’s how I want to go. What was it? A heart attack? A stroke?”

“I don’t know. But when he went to bed, he didn’t say anything to Elizabeth about how he felt. He just went to sleep, and when Elizabeth woke up this morning she knew right away he was dead.”

“He was eighty-four, wasn’t he?”

“Something like that.”

“He wasn’t even ill.”

“At least not visibly.”

“Oh, we would have known if Walter was ill. He wasn’t particularly stoic.”

Nan heard her friend laugh, but she hadn’t meant this as a joke. It was, in her mind, a simple reiteration of an obvious fact: Walter Durnip was a man, and men were notoriously unwilling to keep pain to themselves—which was where, more times than not, it belonged. As a general rule, old people who talked about their ailments made Nan Seton uncomfortable. Too much . . . body.

“Elizabeth doesn’t know for sure when she’s going to have the funeral yet, but it will probably be the day after tomorrow. Saturday.”

“Saturday? Too bad. Oh, well. At least by then I’ll have a houseful, so the girls won’t have to go. John and Catherine arrive tomorrow,” she said, referring not to a husband and a wife but to her son and her daughter. Nan knew from years of conversations exactly like this one with her friend Marguerite that she did not need to explain that when she said Catherine she meant Catherine and her husband, Spencer, and when she said John she meant John, his wife, Sara, and—now—their infant son, Patrick.

“How long are they staying?”

“Catherine and Spencer are both taking next week off. Isn’t that nice? They’ll be here for nine days—”

“And John and Sara are bringing the baby, right?”

“Of course.”

“You
will
have a houseful.”

“John and Sara will only be here for the weekend. Till Monday morning. Still, it will be good fun. I’m sure the girls miss their parents. The only hard part is going to be dinner because Spencer is just so difficult.”

“Being a vegetarian is no big deal, Nan. Lots of people are!”

“There are degrees. And most people don’t obsess about it the way he does or lecture their dinner companions the way he does. Soy milk. Soy hot dogs on the grill. Tofu. Yuck. It just makes things so complicated because I never know what to buy.”

“Make him cook!”

“He does. Sometimes that’s worse. Everything always seems to have lentils in it.”

Upstairs in the bedroom above the dining room she heard a colossal thud and then she heard the girls laughing hysterically. Charlotte, she knew from experience, always woke up in a foul mood but tended to cheer up as the morning progressed. By lunchtime, she would be charming. Willow, on the other hand, seemed to grow tired as the day wore on and if she was going to be cranky (and it was generally rare for the younger cousin to grow irritable) it was likely to be at the very end of the day. Late afternoon, just before dinner. After they had returned from the club, where she had the children in a regimen of swimming, tennis, golf, and junior bridge lessons.

“How is Elizabeth doing?” Nan asked, referring back to her and Marguerite’s mutual friend, a woman who—like her and Marguerite—was now a widow.

“Oh, I believe she’s fine,” Marguerite told her, her voice as light as a dandelion puffball in May.

“Good. Walter was a lot of work, wasn’t he?”

“A
lot
of work,” Marguerite agreed.

Across the kitchen, the deep black circles around the outer edges of the loofah sponge pancakes were spreading into the centers, and the acrid smell of badly burned batter was starting to waft through the house. Quickly Nan said good-bye and hung up. She flipped the pancakes, telling herself that if she scraped the creosote-like sludge off the bottom and served each one with the undercooked side up the girls would never know the difference. She didn’t believe this for a second, but she wasn’t about to waste all that good leftover batter.

WHILE THE GIRLS
were picking apart their grandmother’s pancakes with their forks—each curious in her own way as to exactly how the edges of the pancakes could appear charbroiled while the insides were the consistency of mayonnaise—Charlotte’s father, Spencer, was standing before 150 executives and middle managers from the American Association of Meat Substitutes in the Ticonderoga Room in a conference center in Westchester County. The Ticonderoga Room was the largest of a series of meeting rooms in this wing of the building, all of which seemed to have been named after regional Revolutionary War landmarks (the Saratoga, the Delaware, the Yorktown Heights), though Spencer had yet to see anything anywhere in the conference center that in the slightest way reflected a colonial motif. Not so much as a bellhop in knickers and a tricornered hat, or a plugged-up wrought-iron cannon and hitching post along the exteriors.

Spencer was asked to speak here this morning both to provide the group with some light breakfast entertainment and to inspire them in their ongoing efforts to garner more (and more) refrigerator and freezer case space in the nation’s mainstream supermarkets for their garden burgers and faux sausages, their Fakin Bacon and Foney Baloney, their ground round made from seaweed and soy protein.

In today’s speech, before he got to his routine slides of the slaughterhouse in North Carolina that sent thirty-two thousand desperately frightened, squealing hogs to their death every single day (many of them dunked by mistake in vats of scalding water while still half-alive), he played a television commercial on the room’s three large TV monitors. The ad was for a more individualized torture chamber called the Microwave Home Lobster Steamer. He chose this particular commercial to warm up the crowd—get them good and indignant before they had even finished their bagels and muffins and vegan granola—because this morning he was beginning his speech with his own restaurant experiences when he was nineteen, his very first summer in Sugar Hill. He guessed he was choosing this part of his life because he and Catherine would be flying to New Hampshire tomorrow for their annual summer vacation.