Before You Know Kindness (20 page)

Sixteen

L
ate Tuesday afternoon, while a photographer was taking pictures of her uncle Spencer in the hospital in Hanover, Willow Seton saw her first urinal. Urinals, actually. There were two of them in the men’s room in the clubhouse at the Contour Club. She was showing them to Charlotte—seeing them for herself—because this pair had a unique adornment all the grown-ups knew about but the women (at least) never discussed and because this was the most gloriously anarchic activity she could think of at the moment to take her cousin’s mind off her father. Since they’d arrived at the club her cousin had done nothing but continue to wallow in remorse. She’d sat, almost unmoving, in one of the big wrought-iron chairs that faced Mount Lafayette, and she hadn’t even bothered to change into her tennis shorts or her gleefully inappropriate string bikini. She wasn’t sobbing anymore, but she wasn’t talking, either. She was, in fact, barely moving.

Now Willow had her up and about. This wasn’t the sort of athletic, good-for-you activity in which her family usually indulged here at the club, but at least it was something. A project. She gestured for Charlotte to wait just outside the wood-paneled door with the silhouette of a male golfer in knickers, while she slithered in first to make absolutely certain it was empty. Willow didn’t believe there was a man in there because she had been hovering in the pro shop for close to ten minutes, carefully staking out the door. But she thought she should check—just in case. Charlotte was in no condition to be yelled at.

“Coast is clear,” she said, once she had confirmed that the room was empty. She had emerged partway from the doorway and glanced quickly out the club room’s picture windows to make sure that her grandmother was still on the practice putting green and her own mother was still reading a magazine with Patrick beside her in his baby chair.

The girls had heard about these urinals and their exceptional artwork—pictures, paintings, or photographs, no one would say—at the bonfire on Saturday night. Willow had never before had any desire to see a urinal because until then she hadn’t even known such a thing existed. In the last five or six years, whenever she had traveled anywhere alone with her father and needed to go to the bathroom—in shopping malls, in airports—he had sent her into the ladies’ room alone and stood guard outside the door. Even when she’d been three years old she was pretty sure that she had been using the ladies’ rooms (though in those days, evidently, her father had ventured into the refuge with her, standing beside the mirrors and the sinks as her sentinel against abduction). She’d actually had to ask Charlotte precisely what one was, and when her cousin had described their design to her that evening she wasn’t sure whether the notion astonished her more because it meant going to the bathroom with nothing but air between you and the person beside you or whether it was the freedom to go to the bathroom so casually. With such remarkable ease. Now that young Patrick was in her life she saw a penis with frequency, and its advantages—at least when it came to urinating—were apparent.

No, she decided finally, it was the immodesty that fascinated her more than anything. It was the complete lack of reserve.

“You coming?” she asked Charlotte, and the older girl nodded. She liked this reversal of roles. And so with one last glimpse around her to make sure no adults were nearby, she drew her cousin with her into the men’s room, scooted past the corner wall into the bathroom area itself, and saw before her the urinals. There they were, mounted against the far wall, the two of them surrounded by a delft blue tile that looked more interesting or impressive than the pink tile that adorned the ladies’ room. Still, the urinals themselves were disappointing: She saw nothing that resembled artwork, no glorious beautification, no flourishes that might elevate them beyond their purpose.

She looked at Charlotte and saw the girl was nodding, a tiny smirk at the edges of her lips. Her arms were folded across her chest, as if she were trying to understand a painting at one of the grand museums across the park from her apartment in the city.

“A guy from Franconia College did it years ago,” Charlotte said finally, her voice even now a tad shaky. “One of those hippie guys who went to the school before it closed.”

Willow had gotten the sense from her parents that
everyone
who went to Franconia College before it closed was a hippie guy—or girl.

“You know the painter. We both do,” her cousin continued. “He’s the man with that Rip Van Winkle beard in the bookstore in Littleton.” Willow nodded. She knew exactly whom Charlotte was talking about. Every other day Grandmother took them to the nearby town of Littleton on errands of one sort or another, and inevitably they went to the bookstore. Willow guessed she knew it as well as any of the bookstores near her home in Vermont. There was a fellow who worked there in his late fifties, and he had a bushy beard the color of cigarette ash that fell to the middle of his chest. He was a quiet guy, but when you asked him a question about a book he knew exactly where in the store to find it, and whenever he recommended a novel to Willow there was a very good chance she would like it.

She glanced back at the urinals, wondering exactly what she was missing—what the fellow had painted. She could tell the urinals were made of the same kind of porcelain as a regular toilet, and she’d never before thought about whether a toilet actually had to be painted. Individually painted, that is. The notion crossed her mind that perhaps urinals weren’t usually white. Maybe they were some other color. Something that made them even more repulsive than they already were.

No, that wasn’t possible. They couldn’t be more repulsive.

“Did you think the bugs were real?” Charlotte was asking. “I did when I first saw them.”

“Bugs?”

“The flies!”

She turned back to the urinals and understood for the first time what those black smudges were that hung slightly below the midpoint of each smooth-hollowed porcelain wall. They were so perfectly centered that she’d presumed they were merely a manufacturing logo of some sort. She took a step closer, and then another. Sure enough, the black marks were flies—rendered, she saw now, with the exactitude of a naturalist, right down to the tiny hairs on the bugs’ legs and the intricate lacework on the insects’ wings—one on each urinal.

“Why a fly?” she asked Charlotte. “Do you know?”

“Uh-huh. Aim.”

“Aim?”

“Aim. Some people at the club wanted to keep the men’s room a little cleaner and they figured out that all men—even my dad, I guess—are hunters at heart.”

Willow looked down at the ground around the urinals and then at the walls beside them. Some men, she knew, were better hunters than others, and suddenly she was desperately glad that she was wearing her sandals.

JOHN WAS UNSURE
if he was pleased that he was about to be alone with Spencer for the first time since the accident. The photographer was finishing up now, and Catherine was taking a short walk in Hanover to clear her head. Hours earlier his mother and Sara had brought the three children back to Sugar Hill . . . or, if he knew Mother, back to the Contour Club. Just because her son-in-law had just had half his shoulder blown away was no reason that she and the two girls couldn’t grab a quick swim or sneak in a brief golf or bridge lesson. By now, he guessed, his mother was on the practice putting green or the driving range, and the girls were doing something equally as wholesome and lively.

There was a lot that John felt he had to say to Spencer, most of it apologetic and self-flagellating, though he did want to discuss as well FERAL’s plan that he turn a lawsuit against the gun manufacturer into a public spectacle.

Once the photographer had packed his camera bag and left, John sat down on the empty bed across from his brother-in-law and said, “You must be exhausted. That looked excruciating.” The photographer had taken some shots with film and some with a digital camera, and twice he had insisted on showing John in the viewfinder the image of his brother-in-law’s shoulder that he was preserving for the lawyer—a woman from New York City named Paige. Paige was flying to New Hampshire first thing Wednesday morning, along with that pompous attorney from FERAL. Keenan Barrett.

“Excruciating is . . . ’bout right,” Spencer said quietly. The nurse had replaced his bandages and the splint that held his arm flat against his chest. It had been evident that despite the painkillers, the process had been almost unbearable.

“So,” John began, deciding now was as good a time as any to ask the question that was standing in the room with them like an uninvited and slightly malodorous third person, “how angry are you?”

Spencer considered his response for a moment before answering vaguely, “Don’t know.”

“But you know how sorry I am, right? How desperately and sincerely—”

“You’re . . . sorry. I know that.”

“You have every right to be angry.”

Spencer swallowed and then gave him the tiniest of nods in agreement. John had noticed in the course of the day that Spencer was not merely speaking softly, he was answering in as few words as possible (and sometimes with no words), as if even the act of speaking was at once painful and exhausting.

“May I ask you another question? Are you angry because—”

“Just angry, ’kay? I am . . . just . . . angry.”

“Because I hunt.”

“Yes.”

“Because I left a bullet in the gun.”

“Yes.”

“Because—”

“Because I may . . . be . . . crippled. That seems reason . . . enough.” It was the longest response he had heard from Spencer all afternoon, and the length—as well as the wheezy rasp—caught John off guard.

“They don’t know that for sure,” he murmured, and he feared he sounded blindly—illogically—optimistic.

Spencer rolled his eyes and then grimaced. “When did you start?”

“Hunting? Last fall. I got interested in the summer, around the time we got Sara’s amnio results and we realized we were going to have a little boy. A son. I’ve known lots of people in Vermont who hunt, of course, and I guess I’d always been intrigued. And so I took a course and some lessons—”

“Not enough . . .”

John sighed, knowing there was nothing he could (or should) say in his defense.

“No. Apparently not. Anyway, I took lessons and I took the safety course and before I knew it, I was”—and he felt himself shrugging, as if he were commenting on a subject as innocuous as which necktie he had worn to work—“hunting.”

“You kill something?”

“No. Not yet. Never, now.”

Spencer breathed in and out through his nose. It sounded a bit like a small plastic whistle.

“When you feel a little better—and only when you feel better—let’s talk about FERAL, okay? About what they want you to do.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so?”

“When it comes to . . . to that, we should talk . . . through lawyers.”

“God, Spencer, you know how sorry I am, don’t you? I am—”

“Go. Please.”

“You want me to leave?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“Look: I went hunting a couple times last November. I was one guy with one gun. I’m sorry about that. But it’s not like I was electrocuting minks or sending the ham hogs up the chute at Tar Heel. I’m—”

“John: Not now . . . okay?”

“Okay,” he agreed, stunned, and he stood. There was so much he wanted to explain to his brother-in-law—about why he hunted, what he had once (though no longer) hoped the sport someday might give to him and to his son. He wanted to explain to Spencer what was really in store for him—and, alas, for his daughter—if he made a public circus of a lawsuit against Adirondack. It would be more than just depositions and investigations. There would be thinly veiled threats. His daughter in news stories on television, in print, on the Web. He himself defined solely in terms of his disability. The media coverage might serve FERAL’s agenda well, but it certainly wouldn’t make his family’s life any easier.

And did he want to risk seeing his wife’s brother drawn into the suit by the gun company? That, too, was a possibility, depending upon the state in which they brought the action. The legal wording was “contribution among joint tortfeasors,” but in lay terms it simply meant that the gun company might drag him into this disaster as a codefendant.

Currently the rifle was with the New Hampshire State Police. Assuming that the state’s attorney decided not to file criminal charges (and John desperately reassured himself that no New Hampshire “live free or die” prosecutor, even if he were the sort of unforgiving Draconian sociopath he’d dealt with on occasion in Vermont, would charge either him or his niece with a crime), Spencer’s lawyers would want it. And, he knew, he would give it to them before they subpoenaed it, because this was Spencer they were talking about. Then his brother-in-law’s lawyers would have the rifle examined by experts of their own in a laboratory somewhere—probably that one in Maryland—and he would know once and for all just how incompetent he was.

Or, to be precise, just how incompetent he would be made to appear to the world.

Still, it wasn’t the fact that he was about to leave without having discussed the lawsuit that most distressed John: It was that he had asked Spencer, his brother-in-law and his friend, if he had known he was sorry, and the experience had proven completely unsatisfactory. He understood now that he wanted to fall on his knees on the hospital room floor and actually beg his brother-in-law’s forgiveness. He wanted, he realized, to weep. But he wasn’t the sort of man who cried—at least in front of other people—and Spencer wasn’t the type of man who would want to see such a spectacle. Nevertheless, he desired nothing more in the world right now than the chance to go back in time to Saturday afternoon and remove his rifle from the trunk of the Volvo. He would get that bullet out of the chamber—to think he could have fired the gun into the sky all along!—and then he would bury the weapon as deep in the fields of lupine as he could. He never wanted to touch a rifle again or venture into the woods with a gun. His brief excursion into the great northern forest as a hunter was over.