Before You Know Kindness (2004)

by Chris Bohjalian

  "We did not wear push-up bras," her aunt Catherine said.

  Grandmother looked up from the biography as thick as a brick in her lap and said, "When Marguerite had dinner there two weeks ago, she said that one of the busboys started playing the piano after the kitchen had stopped serving."

  "They have a piano there?" Aunt Catherine asked.

  "They do now. And the busboy started playing and three of the young waitresses started singing. And they sang the most lovely songs from The Sound of Music."

  "'Edelweiss,' I suppose," her father said.

  "Yes, absolutely. Marguerite said it was beautiful, and they all looked adorable in their little outfits."

  "As I recall, Mother, when I worked there you weren't wild about my little outfit. You thought it showed too much cleavage."

  "You're my daughter."

  "If we're going to go out to dinner, let's go to Polly's instead and have pancakes," Charlotte said, referring to a nearby pancake parlor. She glanced over at Willow and added, "After all, most of us can eat pancakes. We went to Gerta's last summer, and everything was meat."

  Uncle Spencer smiled sardonically. "Ah, yes. Remember the Alpine Meat Tray? A lazy Susan with a bit of cow, a little pig. Some chicken."

  "There was something else," her father said. "I swear there were four kinds of meat."

  "Werewolf?"

  "You're thinking too eastern European, Spencer. Too Romanian. Austria was never known for werewolves," Grandmother said.

  "Well, there's a huge salad bar, so if we want to go to Gerta's, it's fine with me. I could live on spaetzle and a salad bar."

  "Spaetzle has eggs, Spencer. It's loaded with eggs." It was her aunt Catherine telling her uncle this, and Willow thought she sounded a bit like she was talking to a toddler.

  Uncle Spencer turned to her and said--speaking so slowly it was as if every single word were a chore--"Fine, then. I will stick to the lettuce and the carrots and whatever soy protein they have at the salad bar."

  "There is no need to get huffy," Aunt Catherine said. "I was only pointing out for you--"

  "Correcting me, you mean."

  "No. I wasn't sure if you knew--"

  "I was simply trying to make all of your lives easier. I was trying to be agreeable. Truth is, I really don't give a--" He paused for the briefest of seconds before finishing his thought. "I really don't care where we eat."

  "Why don't we all see how we feel tomorrow," her mother said suddenly, her voice a tad louder than usual, and she got up from her chair and lifted young Patrick into her arms. When she sat back down, she discreetly opened a few buttons on her blouse and started to nurse. Normally Willow didn't feel strongly about her mother nursing in public, but because she knew it made Grandmother uncomfortable she found herself looking away. She concentrated on her toes, dabbing polish on the tiny squares of her nails. Once she looked up and stared for a moment at the white plastic spikes in the ground that marked the outer edges of the badminton court and at the grass in the yard, so verdantly green this time of the day that it shimmered. She noticed that Charlotte was glancing back and forth between her parents, a hint of nervousness in her eyes, and she wondered if Uncle Spencer and Aunt Catherine fought often.

  As she resumed her work on her feet, she wished there were fewer silences in the grown-ups' conversation so everyone would not have to hear Patrick savoring his early dinner with the gluttonous abandon of a baby.

  BY DESIGN, the Contour Club--the name an homage to the contour of the Old Man of the Mountain, the massive rock profile that once jutted out from a granite cliff a mere three miles to the south--was not physically impressive. Its founders, including patriarch James MacGregor Seton himself, wanted to be sure that the establishment had a rustic flavor to it. Consequently, the clubhouse, though spacious to the point that it sprawled, was only a single floor. It was shaped roughly like a croissant, with thin white clapboards that were repainted at least every other year and reflected the sun like fresh snow. The inner arc looked out on the first hole of the golf course and the practice green, and the outer walls faced the Presidential Range and Mount Lafayette. The tables in the dining room belonged in a hunting lodge--the pine had been stained the brown of old acorns, and the legs were stocky and straight--and the oak chairs with their massive cushions appeared capable of swallowing small children whole. The bar had the heads of deer and moose and black bears on two walls (though the animals without exception had been killed by generations long gone), and a series of shelves with the taxidermal remains of a fox, a mink, and a bobcat (again, all brought to the club years and years earlier). Another wall had the plaques with the names of the annual champions in golf and tennis and bridge, and twice there appeared Catherine's name: Her one summer after college when she was still Catherine Seton, she won the women's singles championship handily; then, after she was married, as Catherine Seton-McCullough, she and Eleanor Morrison had taken the women's doubles cup.

  Most of the Contour Club members were families like the Setons: Either they lived in Manhattan or Boston (or the suburbs of Manhattan or Boston) and only spent small parts of the year in the White Mountains at their second homes, or they had retired to the area after successful careers in New York or Massachusetts. Certainly there were some members who were actually born in New Hampshire: lawyers and doctors and accountants, and some of the developers and builders of the nearby ski resorts. But they were outnumbered and most felt vaguely second class because they had never worked in the Prudential Center or ridden subways twice daily to and from Wall Street.

  The bonfire for the teenagers was lit around eight thirty, when there was still a purple gauze to the west and--if the girls had been back at their grandmother's house now--just enough light for a few more minutes of badminton. But the mountains to the east were almost invisible now, just one more part of the distant night sky. Occasionally a gang of moths, hobolike, would approach the blaze before disappearing either into the night or the flames, and the girls saw fireflies that looked like stars.

  For the past hour, since the teens had started to congregate with their cans of soda (and, so far, no one was drinking anything stronger than soda), Willow and Charlotte had been looked after largely by Gwen--the lifeguard who was teaching them how to dive. It had crossed Willow's mind that either her parents or her aunt and uncle had probably asked the young woman to keep an eye on the two of them, but she wasn't sure. It might just have been that Gwen had taken pity on them: Charlotte was at least two years younger than everyone else, and Willow was four. Gwen wasn't with them every moment, but periodically she would wander by to see how they were and hand them some marshmallows or point an open bag of popcorn in their direction. A couple of times other teenagers had come with her, but they always seemed to view Willow and Charlotte as small, pleasant animals that could be stroked briefly and abstractedly and then left once more to their own devices.

  As the evening progressed it seemed to Willow that Charlotte's biggest disappointment wasn't that she was younger than the rest of the crowd. After all, she had expected this. Rather, it was that Gary, the lifeguard on whom it was obvious to anyone who cared to notice such things she had a serious crush, was actually hanging around with the grown-ups back at the clubhouse. Here Charlotte was with the teenagers at the bonfire, and the teenager she was most interested in had chosen to be with the adults. Worse, when they had first started down the hill with Gwen to the site of the great mound of long dead limbs and dying tree branches, Gary had been chatting with Aunt Catherine. The two of them were on the terrace with those old-fashioned highball glasses in their hands, and they were talking like they were old friends.

  Charlotte had been furious. Furious and confused. Why would Gary want to be with the adults when he could be with normal people his own age? she had asked Willow and Gwen rhetorically as they wandered across the fairway. Where was her father? she had wondered, as if there was something inappropriate about her mother chatting with the lifeguard.

  Willow h
ad expected that her own parents would leave early with Patrick and Grandmother, but they hadn't. Patrick had fallen asleep a little after seven in a corner of the clubhouse in his canvas baby seat, and her mom had decided it was best to let him rest. Normally her mom didn't seem to like the crowd at the Contour Club--at least not the way her dad and her aunt and uncle did--but she seemed to be having a pretty good time tonight.

  Someone had brought a portable CD player to the bonfire, and a few of the older girls were trying to convince a couple of the boys to dance. When Charlotte realized that Gwen was leaving them once again--when she saw the girl put an arm casually around Connor Fitzhugh's shoulders and then start to move him around like an immensely supple marionette--she sat down in the grass and pulled Willow down with her. Connor, though younger than Gwen, was handsome and athletic and the very same lad whom Charlotte had implied at breakfast had suggested that the two girls come to the bonfire in the first place. So far he hadn't said a word to either of them.

  "In my school in New York, by now someone would have gotten the party going with a little beer," Charlotte murmured, and her voice was dripping with condescension.

  "The party seems to be going just fine . . . if you're fifteen," she answered, and immediately she regretted what she had said. It had sounded clever to her in her mind, but when she saw Charlotte look down at the grass between her legs and start ripping at the small strands as if they were weeds in the vegetable garden, she realized it had only been hurtful.

  She wondered briefly why Charlotte hated being twelve so much, why she desired so madly to be older. "You know," she went on, "we don't have to stay."

  "You can go any time you want," Charlotte said.

  "I know."

  Connor was moving a bit on his own now, and sometimes he was holding Gwen's hands as they danced and sometimes there was a wide corridor of air between them. Gwen was wearing a sweatshirt and baggy shorts, and she didn't look nearly as heavy as she did in only a bathing suit.

  Behind them they heard a small group of boys arriving, three of them with baseball caps on backward, and they were laughing a little too loudly. When the boys got closer to the circle Willow saw why: They were holding open bottles of beer in their hands, and two of them had cases of beer under their arms. They put the cases down on the grass--one of the boys nearly dropped his, which caused everyone around them to laugh even more boisterously since those beers would now erupt like geysers when they were opened--and the teenagers descended on the cartons as if they were burlap sacks of grain at a refugee camp. A moment later the crowd dispersed and the music began to seem strident and angry to Willow.

  Beside her Charlotte stood. She watched her cousin brush the grass off the back of her shorts and then stroll casually over to the ransacked cardboard cartons. There she bent over, pawed briefly among the bent and torn flaps--and among something near the cartons as well, a bag or a large purse of some kind--and then seemed to find amid the pillaged boxes what she was searching for: two bottles of beer that had been overlooked when the hordes had started seizing the alcohol. She glanced briefly, nervously, around to see if any of the teenagers cared that she was procuring a little beer, but no one was taking any interest in her.

  When she returned to her spot in the grass beside Willow, she smiled knowingly and offered her one of the bottles.

  "No, thanks," Willow said.

  "Suit yourself."

  "You're not really going to drink that, are you?"

  "What do you think, I just got it for show?"

  As a matter of fact, I do, Willow thought, but she kept her mouth shut this time. She didn't want to challenge her cousin, to dare her in essence into consuming the whole bottle. Perhaps Charlotte's big plan was simply to hold the bottle in her hands, either so she could feel older or so that one of the teenagers would see her with the beer and start paying her some attention. A lot of what Charlotte did, in Willow's opinion, was about getting people to pay attention to her.

  "No, I didn't think that," she said simply.

  Still, Charlotte unscrewed the top and took a small sip and then, after pausing for just the briefest moment with the lip of the bottle at the edge of her mouth, she took a second one. Willow realized that as bad as the beer probably tasted, Charlotte planned at the very least to polish off that first bottle--and maybe, if the opportunity presented itself, that second one, too. She didn't think that was a good idea at all, and so she reached over for the unopened bottle in the grass between Charlotte's legs and said, "Here. Let me have that one."

  It was more difficult to unscrew the lid than she had expected--she saw in the light from the bonfire that she had given herself a sliver of a cut on the inside of her thumb, and a little blood was just starting to puddle in the small split in the skin--but the beer didn't taste quite as horrible as it smelled. She told herself that it would be better for everyone if she drank one bottle than if her cousin drank two.

  "You like it, don't you?" Charlotte asked.

  She shrugged. "It's okay."

  "Only okay. Yeah, right. I got something else, too."

  "Food?" Willow asked hopefully. "I'm starved."

  "Better than food," she said, and then she told Willow about stumbling just now across the canvas bag beside the cartons of beer in the grass. It was Gwen's bag--the small sack the high school student carried around with her like a purse--and it was on its side on the ground, the contents spilling haphazardly out onto the manicured fairway lawn: A lipstick, Gwen's bathing suit, a small can of lavender-scented aerosol body spray. A disposable lighter. Tampax. A plastic Ziploc bag with loose flakes of marijuana and three thick, tightly rolled joints. Charlotte said that she had set the large canvas bag upright, and carefully put everything back inside it except for one of the joints. Now she cradled the dope in her hand like a rolled hundred-dollar bill.

  "I can't believe Gwen would do drugs," Willow murmured, at once appalled and entranced. She had never before seen an actual joint. Certainly she had seen images in health class and on antidrug commercials on TV, but never before had she glimpsed an honest-to-God spliff up close and personal.

  "It's not drugs," Charlotte said, correcting her. "It's just marijuana. Cancer patients and people with AIDS smoke it all the time. And, if you want, we can, too."

  "Charlotte!"

  Her cousin mimicked her, repeating her name in the singsong voice of a little girl crybaby: "Charrrrrrrr-lotte!"

  "Come on . . . don't be like that."

  "Gwen had three of them. She won't miss one. It's okay."

  Charlotte patted the pockets of her shirt and her shorts, and Willow wondered what she was looking for. Then, without saying a word, the girl stood up again and walked casually back to Gwen's canvas bag. She reached in, and Willow presumed she was taking a second (or even a third) joint, but then she understood that her cousin was swiping--borrowing, she imagined Charlotte would say--the teenager's matches or lighter.

  When she returned, Willow saw that the girl had indeed brought back a lime-colored Bic, and she was flicking the striker with her thumb. She considered teasing Charlotte about that ridiculous bit of pantomime she had performed a moment earlier: patting herself down like she actually expected to find a lighter of her own in her pockets. But she restrained herself, and then she found herself watching enrapt as Charlotte proceeded to light the joint. She inhaled, hacked loudly and powerfully, rasped . . . and then inhaled again. This time she didn't cough, and then slowly she exhaled. The smell was sweet, vaguely reminiscent of both blueberries and an exotic herb she had once smelled at an Indian restaurant. She liked it, and when her cousin turned toward her and raised her eyebrows invitingly, she accepted the joint and took a drag, too. Then she took another. And there in the grass the two girls proceeded to smoke and sniff and rasp until the burning paper scorched the tips of Charlotte's fingers, and she dropped it onto the ground as if it were a wooden match that almost had consumed itself.

  Chapter Ten.

  Nan Seton wanted desper
ately to glance at her watch, but she knew if she did this nice but dull Martin and Cecilia Dallmally from Scotland would presume she was either tired or bored (or both). Still, like an itch the desire to know whether it was nine or nine fifteen was growing insufferable. Finally, just when she thought she was going to have to pull back the straw-colored linen on her wrist to look at her watch and make some pretext to leave, she felt a small breeze on her neck. When she turned toward the terrace door, she saw Charlotte and Willow approaching. For a brief second they looked a tad unsteady on their feet--Charlotte seemed to be touching every table and chair within arm's reach as she navigated her way through the crowded clubhouse--but Nan couldn't imagine why that would be and decided her eyes had played a small trick on her.

  "Oh, look," she said to the Dallmallys, "there are my granddaughters now. Will you excuse me?"

  "They're adorable! You'll have to introduce us," Cecilia cooed.

  "Oh, sometime, certainly," she murmured, pulling away from the couple like a sailboat that has at last snared the wind. She put a hand on each of her granddaughters' shoulders and was pleasantly surprised to find the girls smiling up at her.