Before You Know Kindness (2004)

by Chris Bohjalian

  "Are you hungry? There seem to be some vendors along that road over there," Aunt Catherine told them, and she pointed at the row of food carts on the street, closed today to automobiles, that wound its way up to the Cloisters.

  "Cousin, are you hungry?" Charlotte asked her.

  "No."

  "That's probably good. I smell a lot of seared flesh," she murmured softly. Then she raised her voice for their parents and said, "We're both fine!"

  "Okay, then. Just let us know if there's something you want," her aunt said.

  Charlotte picked up her pace and Willow had to walk faster to keep up. When they had some distance once again on the grown-ups, Charlotte spoke: "This is very complicated, you know. I'm trying to do the right thing."

  "Me, too."

  "But here's something else," she said firmly. "How could we be friends after you revealed everything? How could we? Telling everyone everything would be so hurtful to my dad. That's what I don't get: Here I am trying to make up for what I did--yes, what I did, I know I'm to blame--by making this lawsuit and this press conference go perfectly, and you're trying to stop me."

  "I'm not trying to stop you."

  "Oh, but you would. You would undo everything if you talked," Charlotte said.

  "But--"

  "Look, we're not going to figure this out right this second. Would you do me a favor?"

  "What?"

  "Think about what I've said. Okay? Just think about it today, and we can talk more tonight. Deal?"

  Willow couldn't imagine she'd change her mind, but they really were getting nowhere. And so she nodded and mumbled, "Okay." Then she halted where she was to watch a pair of tumblers who were dressed like the court jesters on her grandmother's playing cards, while Charlotte walked on ahead.

  "What were you and Charlotte talking about?" She turned and saw her mother standing beside her. Her grandmother and her aunt were continuing to walk, slowly narrowing the gap between them and her cousin. At some point her mother had taken the carriage back from Grandmother, and so Willow peeked inside now and saw her brother smiling up at her. He seemed to be batting his eyelashes like a baby flirt.

  "Oh, nothing."

  "It didn't sound like nothing."

  "I'll tell you later," she said, though she had no expectation that she would tell her mother the real subject at any point soon. How could she until she and Charlotte had come to some sort of resolution?

  But then, maybe that shouldn't matter. And maybe it wouldn't matter. This had to resolve itself this weekend, because it was possible that after tomorrow she wouldn't see Charlotte again before their depositions. And so it crossed her mind that she should simply tell her mother and father tonight what had occurred that awful evening at the club in New Hampshire. Let them figure out how to deal with the information.

  An idea began to form. She wasn't sure if it was a good idea or--even if it was--whether she had the courage to go through with it. But it was certainly a notion that intrigued her. With her uncle Spencer now speaking to her father, she had no doubt that later that day or that evening both families would have a meal together somewhere. Maybe a nice dinner at a Japanese or Chinese or Indian restaurant on the Upper East or West Side. Then, with everyone gathered together, she would reveal the details that both she and her cousin had withheld since that horrible night. Charlotte would be furious--there would be no dignified British orphan scene once this word got out; this would be a performance, she guessed, comprised largely of screaming and hysteria--but wouldn't it be better to expose everything here in New York, with all the grown-ups assembled in one place, than as a complete surprise in a deposition?

  And, she knew, one way or another it was going to come out. No matter how hard she tried, she could no longer keep that part of the story to herself.

  HOW ODD, Catherine thought. Spencer was here and she was walking with him, and he had just had a long talk with her brother. This was exactly what she had wanted, exactly what she had hoped would occur but hadn't thought possible. They were strolling along the terrace that overlooked the Hudson River, while everyone else was back in the park getting something to eat. But then Spencer had told her of his conversation with John about the press conference and she had grown angry. Their family was lurching spastically toward public humiliation, estrangement, or both, and their daughter was, according to Dr. Warwick, a volcano of guilt and despair just waiting to explode--despite whatever serenity she was projecting on the surface. And here Spencer was bringing up the press conference. Again. The gentle feel of his fingers on her neck last night--their taste when she kissed them--seemed very far away to her now, and she knew exactly what she would say.

  She paused against the stonewall and gazed out at the Palisades across the water.

  "I've made a decision," she said, and she could feel him stopping beside her, though she couldn't imagine he knew what she was thinking.

  "Oh? About what?"

  She took a breath, exhaled. Took another and began: "If you go ahead with that press conference on Tuesday, I will leave you."

  "What?"

  "I will pack up our daughter and we will go across town to my mother's, and I will immediately start looking for a new home for us. For Charlotte and me."

  "Whoa. Where is--"

  "You know where this is coming from. At least you should. Things haven't been right between us for a very long time. As a matter of fact, if the accident hadn't intervened, I was going to tell you in New Hampshire that I wanted us to start counseling. Marriage counseling. At the very least I wanted that. Certainly we needed it. I might even have left you then, but you got hurt and so I couldn't. I just . . . couldn't."

  He was leaning against the stones beside her, and she wondered why she wasn't crying. She thought she might if she turned to look at him, and so she didn't. She focused on the shore across the water, on a plane descending toward Newark.

  "Why isn't counseling an option now, then? Why this threat--"

  "Maybe we could explore counseling once I've left. Maybe not. Right now I don't know. But I am quite sure that I cannot live with you if you are capable of subjecting our daughter--and, yes, my brother--to the indignities that will follow your press conference. It's just that simple."

  "But it will help the lawsuit," he said, a quiver of panic marking his voice. "And it's such a great opportunity for us to point out the horrors of hunting. Good Lord, the pain I'm enduring is precisely what deer experience--"

  "I don't care. For once I want you to put your family first. You know, those animals you live with, those animals who are a part of your very own little herd. Charlotte and me. My brother. Go ahead with the lawsuit, sue the hell out of Adirondack--though I would certainly hope that you and Paige would have the common sense not to let this thing ever get to a trial. But you hold that press conference to announce it on Tuesday--you so much as have Randy Mitchell pick up the phone to start calling people on Monday morning to tell them about the event--and your daughter and I are out the door. We are gone before the sweat from Randy's hands has left a palm print on her phone."

  "Why didn't you tell me you felt so strongly about the press conference sooner?"

  "What?"

  "Why didn't--"

  "I did! I told you every way I could! But it wasn't registering! That's why it has come to this."

  "An ultimatum. And all because of a press conference."

  "The press conference is just the tip of the iceberg. My God, Spencer, didn't you hear what I just said? I considered leaving you this summer."

  A couple of seagulls swooped down onto the stone terrace and started pecking at something between the stones. Beside her she heard him breathing, and she couldn't imagine what he would say next. She was hoping, she realized, that he was going to announce that the press conference was now a dead issue. Over, done with. He would call Paige and Dominique that afternoon to put an end to the nonsense.

  Finally he spoke: "I've tried the last few weeks to behave better. I know how diffic
ult I can be. Has it made any difference? Any difference at all?"

  "Yes, absolutely. I've noticed. And I've seen how attentive you've been with Charlotte."

  "But it's been too little too late . . ."

  "That's how it feels," she said. "I'm sorry."

  "And you're serious about this?"

  "Yes." She almost said more, but she felt a shudder in her throat and now, finally, her eyes were starting to mist. She could feel it, and it took every bit of willpower she had not to wipe them. She knew if she did, that would be it: She would be sobbing and that was the last thing she wanted. Not here, not today.

  "Okay, then."

  She tried to read meaning in those three short syllables--resignation or anger or acquiescence--but they were indecipherable. Completely impenetrable. The birds flew up past the two of them, apparently unsatisfied with the pickings in the stones at the foot of the wall, and she watched them wheel up and out over the wide river. She wanted to ask Spencer what he was going to do, but she didn't dare open her mouth.

  CHARLOTTE SIPPED her bottle of orange juice and nibbled at a very doughy, very salty pretzel and watched the contingent from Vermont eat frozen yogurt. Nearby, another family was eating "Medieval Festival Fowl"--turkey legs the size of bowling pins. They were using their hands, and their fingers glistened with fat.

  But her father didn't seem upset. If anything, he seemed oblivious. She wondered if his shoulder was hurting more than usual.

  Everyone was sitting on a massive beach blanket that her grandmother--who thought of everything--had brought with her. She and Willow hadn't spoken any more about her cousin's determination to tell everyone about the dope and the beer, but she, at least, hadn't stopped thinking about it for one single minute. The whole thing was making her a little queasy.

  She stood up now and looked at the stone edifice of the Cloisters itself, the museum perhaps a hundred yards away from their spot on the grass in the park. She imagined it was a real monastery for a moment and tried to envision the monks inside it doing whatever it was that monks did. She wasn't exactly sure. But she guessed they prayed and baked bread and they chanted. It probably wasn't a whole lot different from being a nun, except she presumed that nuns sang instead of chanted. For some reason, in her mind's eye she could see nuns wandering among those gardens and terraces inside the Cloisters, but not small gatherings of monks. Maybe it was the name of the place itself. Cloisters. It sounded feminine to her. Girlish. She'd learned that morning that a cloister was just a covered walkway in a religious building, but she understood that it was also the root of the word cloistered. And that meant something else. Something more. Separation. Isolation. Purity, maybe.

  The gardens and the terraces reminded her of the secret garden: that walled garden from the play, that secluded little world of magic and--what were the words in one of the songs in the musical?--spirit and charm. When Mary Lennox tries to get the little crippled boy to rise up out of his wheelchair in the second act of the show, she sings precisely that: Come spirit, come charm.

  She saw Willow pushing up off the ground now and walking toward her. She acted as if she hadn't noticed and wandered a dozen yards closer to the Cloisters itself. Her cousin followed, exactly as Charlotte suspected she would.

  "Have you ever met a nun?" she asked Willow when the younger girl was beside her.

  "No. I don't think so. You?"

  "No. How about a monk?"

  "No. I know I've never met a monk."

  "Me neither," she said. Then: "The gardens in there made me think of the secret garden. Maybe it was the little walkways and stonewalls. It's like in the play."

  "And the novel."

  "Yes, in the novel. I don't mean to relate everything back to the play." She finished her pretzel and put the paper napkin in her pocket. Willow looked so little to her right now, but also so strong. So courageous. So much more like that fictional Mary Lennox than she was. "You're really going to tell them, aren't you?" she said.

  "About what we did? Yes. I'm sorry, Charlotte. Really I am. But I can't lie."

  She nodded. "During the deposition later this year?"

  "Actually," her cousin said carefully, "I thought I might do it before the deposition."

  "So it isn't a complete surprise for everyone."

  "Uh-huh."

  "I was beginning to suspect that," she said. "If possible . . ."

  "Yes?"

  "If possible, would you wait until after the press conference? Let my father have that?" She could see that her cousin was pondering the idea, and so she added, "After all, the depositions won't be for a little while. But the press conference is this Tuesday. You'll have plenty of time to tell everyone what happened afterward."

  "I could do that."

  "Thank you."

  The girl licked at a drop of frozen yogurt on the back of her spoon. "What about you?"

  "What about me?" Charlotte wondered.

  "Are you going to tell your parents--or wait until they hear it from mine?"

  "Oh, I'll have to think about that," she said, but her sense immediately was that it would be better for them to hear it from her than from Uncle John. Or from Uncle John's lawyer. Or, perhaps, from Paige. "But I'll probably tell them myself," she added.

  "Do you want to pick a day now?"

  "No, I'd rather not," she said in her most mannered, most adult voice. "Is that okay?"

  "Sure. Charlotte?"

  "Yes?"

  "We're still friends, right?"

  "Yes, Cousin. We're still friends." She knew she should say something more reassuring to Willow, but she couldn't. Not yet. She was not happy with this turn of events, and she felt as if she had been needlessly cornered by . . .

  Not exactly by her cousin. But by the events themselves. What had happened. On the one hand, she understood that her cousin was correct and they shouldn't lie; on the other hand, telling the truth seemed to be almost a betrayal of her father. First she shot him. Now it comes out that she'd been smoking dope and drinking beer, and--worse--she hadn't told anybody. She had seen enough courtroom dramas on television to hear in her head some lawyer from the gun company telling a jury that while this was all real sad, the fact was that Charlotte McCullough was stoned when she ignored her cousin and shot her father. This was a real tragedy, but it sure as heck wasn't the fault of the Adirondack Rifle Company.

  She turned back to her family on the beach blanket and stared for a long moment at her father. He still looked a little dazed to her, as if he weren't listening to a word of whatever Aunt Sara and Grandmother were saying. She saw he had an unopened can of Diet Pepsi by his left leg, and she noticed that he was the only one there who wasn't drinking anything.

  Afraid that her father was thirsty but was unwilling to be a bother, she loped over to the blanket and knelt beside him, and there she popped the top of his can of soda and held it to him like an offering. The goblet of wine at communion. That gold chalice she had just seen inside the Cloisters. Drink, she said to him in her mind. Drink, drink.

  Chapter Thirty-One.

  On Monday morning, while he and Charlotte were taking Tanya for a walk before breakfast, he told her. The plan he and Catherine had agreed on the night before was that he would break the news to their daughter and then leave early for work so she and Charlotte could discuss Mom and Dad's immediate plans before heading across town to Brearley. They'd considered telling her together, but it was clear to them both that they'd end up squabbling if they tried to work as a tag team on this one. He guessed he could have been more eloquent (or, perhaps, more assertive) in his defense when he and Catherine had argued, though in hindsight it really hadn't been much of an argument. They hadn't discussed her ultimatum at all since she had presented it to him at the Cloisters. He'd thought about it, he'd thought about it all the time. But mostly it had just exhausted him. He felt simultaneously defensive, convinced that she didn't appreciate how hard he'd been trying lately, and disappointed in himself that it had taken him so long to
understand that his self-absorption was gnawing away at their marriage. His life, it was clear, was now completely unraveling.

  "What have you decided?" she'd asked simply when they both were in bed Sunday night.

  "About?"

  "Please. The press conference."

  "It really has come down to that, hasn't it? Just that one . . . thing?" He was too tired to say more. He'd spent most of Saturday afternoon and all of Sunday numbed by the realization that his wife wanted to leave him. He felt sorry for himself (I am crippled and in pain and my wife is leaving me), but it had been so obvious in hindsight that his marriage was trending this way that he wasn't surprised. Just fatigued.

  "That one thing is a gauge of where we are--and where we're going."