And the Dark Sacred Night

by Julia Glass

  Each evening, Zeke would return with cartons of restaurant food. He would read aloud from an English-language newspaper sold at a shop that catered to local expats. Lucinda listened almost contentedly to news of political strife and natural disasters, thankful for its irrelevance to her own tragedy. At the end of the week, they returned home, wearier than when they had left, to face the last trickle of condolence letters, from places as distant as Moscow, Rio de Janeiro, and a town in Italy to which they could have driven, from the rented villa, in under an hour.

  Mal had traveled to every civilized, highly cultured corner of the world. Mal had been a well-known music critic, an authoritative lover of opera, ballet, and classical music. He had not been a fan of, as he put it, “the let’s-all-pretend-we’re-tone-deaf-and-bash-on-a-trash-can scene.” To the openings of nearly all the events he wrote about, he had worn a tuxedo.

  He did live one hell of an amazing life and he knew it!

  He packed three lifetimes into one.

  Few people who live to be a hundred can look back on a life so richly lived.

  Such sentiments filled the notes from Mal’s colleagues and friends. Did they really believe that quality trumped quantity? In this case, Lucinda realized she stood firmly in the camp of how much over how good, Holstein over Jersey.

  In the growing mansion of her mourning—that’s how Lucinda began to think of it within hours of seeing her son’s body—another large room had opened when she found out that Mal had disposed of all his classical music recordings. Why on earth had he done such a thing? But stacked in a file drawer were dozens of CDs, sound tracks to Broadway musicals, a kind of music he never reviewed but enjoyed in a casual way. One of the last evenings Lucinda spent with her older son—though, again, she had no idea it was a “last” anything—they sat on his bed and watched An American in Paris on TV.

  Months went by before she opened the boxes Jonathan had packed, searching for this collection. She lined up the CDs on a shelf in her sewing room. As Mal would have done, she grouped them by composer, anthologies by singers. She bought herself a portable CD player, a cheap thing designed for college students or housepainters. On nights when she stayed awake long past Zeke, working on her quilts, she would put one of Mal’s musicals into the machine and play it at a moderate volume.

  She liked the intimacy of playing all these jubilant, dramatic songs sotto voce. The sewing machine hummed heedlessly along, white noise behind seductions and street brawls and men throwing fateful dice and kings dancing with commoners. People fell in and out of love, despaired and rhapsodized. Orchestras swelled. Imagined theater curtains, like velvet evening gowns engaged in a waltz, gathered up in curtsied folds, then fell to sweep the surface of the imagined stage.

  Mal had inherited Lucinda’s tendency toward late-night wakefulness; many nights during his twenties and thirties, she would think of her son during those hours when most people in their time zone were sleeping, and she’d wonder if he, too, was up. How complicitous it felt. They both disliked the word insomnia for its implication that sleep would always be preferable. That might often be true, yet Lucinda and Mal were pleased by how productive they could be while everyone around them slept. It was a gift, said Mal, if you were a music critic for a newspaper, overnight deadlines a piece of cake. As for Lucinda, she can still do trapunto at four in the morning, her stitches tight and steady.

  She returns the empty wineglass to the kitchen. Twenty minutes remain until her daughter is scheduled to pick her up. Christina is always on time; her punctuality is (and she has said so) a reaction against a childhood whose comings and goings were often dependent on the unpredictable responsibilities of a father in politics.

  She thinks of the odd message on the answering machine: someone named Jasper Noonan, his voice kind and polite (setting him apart from the meddlesome reporters): “Mrs. Burns, I have news I think you’ll be happy to receive. I promise you I’m not a salesman.” She has listened to the message three times. She’s not sure she has energy to spare for even the best of surprises.

  She might have erased it, but for one tattered hope she’s hoarded for decades, one she has wanted to act on so often. Zeke warned her, however, that she would be overstepping her bounds, imposing her selfish desires on someone else’s family. She has defied Zeke in the past, but he is probably right about this.

  She took down Jasper Noonan’s number on the memo pad Zeke keeps beside the phone, every sheet printed with his various phone and fax numbers, under the seal of the state of Vermont. She touches the receiver.

  But the last thing she wants is to have Christina walk in on the middle of a momentous, possibly very private conversation. She will call after they get back, once Zeke is settled and Christina’s gone home. Lucinda can call from upstairs, a domain that will be hers alone for at least the next month, according to Zoe, Zeke’s PT. Zeke should have stayed at the rehab center another week, but he insisted (as best he could) that he would recover more quickly at home. Even if he has to pay extra, he wants the therapists to come to him. Lucinda suspects that he also wants the reporters to tell his constituents that he’s gone home, so they’ll think he’s in better shape than he really is. (Or perhaps it’s wishful thinking that he is still capable of even the simplest political scheming.)

  And all of a sudden here’s Christina, her wheels on the gravel drive, her door slamming, her looming, puffy-coated figure striding through the front door, her sunglasses coming off as her eyes adjust from the snowy glare of the countryside to the dim foyer of the farmhouse.

  “Okay, Mom,” she says without a greeting, “let’s hit the road, shall we?”

  “Coat and boots, and then I’m ready.”

  “Well, speak for yourself. But that’s you, Mom: ready for anything. I’ve gotta hand it to you.”

  Hand what to me? Lucinda thinks crossly. Another citation for community outreach or social betterment? (Is betterment even a proper word?)

  “I brought you a cocoa, Mom. It’s in the car.”

  Lucinda regrets her spiteful urge toward her daughter. “Thank you, Christina. I’d love a cocoa.”

  Once the world at large—or the “media,” to be more accurate—beatifies you, life is never the same. And because you cannot resist the stoking of your ego, no matter how hard you try, you begin to lose sight of yourself as just another workaday sinner.

  Father Tom, whose retirement Lucinda still mourns ten years on, was the only one to hear her voice such thoughts, from behind the lattice in the confessional. One Sunday, when he spoke about the sin of pride through virtue, Lucinda wondered (compounding that sin) if she had inspired the homily.

  Lucinda helped found The House at a time when she believed that all three of her children were well on their way toward secure, prosperous lives. Christina was out of law school, working at a prestigious firm in Boston. Mal was in New York—not a practicing musician, as Lucinda once dreamed, but writing about the music he loved. Jonathan was in his junior year at Bowdoin.

  The political work Lucinda did in support of Zeke’s causes began to feel shallow, a brittle, inadequate mortar to the structure of her life. She also yearned to do work in service of her faith, though she had always been mindful that anything public she chose to do could affect her husband’s career. By then, Zeke had been elected majority leader of the state senate. He knew full well, however, not to take anything for granted. “Political winds blow this way and that, always this way when you’re thinking that, spinning the compass ad infinitum,” he’d say. “If you fail to keep your full weight on both legs, you’ll up and blow away.” Philosophy straight from Zeke the Elder.

  Just as Lucinda began to talk with Father Tom about how she could find a place for herself in the church’s outreach program, a small tragedy befell their parish. A sixteen-year-old girl found herself pregnant and, fearful of her parents’ wrath, tried to abort the baby herself. She succeeded, but she wound up in a hospital, barely alive, and had to have a hysterectomy. Through Father Tom, her
parents asked for donations of blood.

  While Lucinda hardly knew the parents, the event seemed like a sign from God, a tap on Lucinda’s shoulder. Yes, you. Yes, this. Moreover, it seemed like a stroke of symmetry, a reminder, however unwelcome, of her lost grandchild. (Somewhere out there in the world, he was eight years old.) Perhaps Lucinda needed to be reminded that Daphne’s decision to have and keep that baby was courageous and, no matter what else she had decided, a blessing.

  Lucinda had seen the child as a newborn, a baby, and a toddler, three times only. Each time, Daphne had driven from New Hampshire to meet her at a restaurant in Woodstock. Lucinda had met Christopher—Kit, Daphne called him—as any casual friend of the family might. During that time, she sent a check every six months. She told herself to be patient; there would be years ahead in which to become the freely doting grandmother she longed to be. She also knew that mother and baby lived comfortably, in Daphne’s parents’ home, though Daphne hadn’t felt ready—not yet, she said—for Lucinda to meet her family. About this, too, Lucinda had willed herself to wait; after all, no one in her extended family knew about Christopher, either.

  So Daphne’s letter, which arrived a month after their last meeting, just shy of Christopher’s fourth birthday, assaulted her with the shock of a traumatizing burn. Daphne thanked Lucinda for her support, but she had decided to go forward on her own. She would be moving into an apartment with Kit, and she had a part-time job. He would go to nursery school while she worked. Folded inside the letter was Lucinda’s most recent check. Daphne ended by saying that if she changed her mind, she would be in touch again.

  Through angry tears, Lucinda thought immediately of lawsuits she’d heard about, estranged grandparents suing for visitation rights. Leaving the claims of biology aside, surely her bank statements would be proof enough of her commitment. But when Zeke saw Daphne’s letter, he told Lucinda that they would be crazy to entertain such an idea. Zeke had never been keen on meeting the child to begin with; he’d found the entire situation next to unbearable. At one point, early on, he had literally covered his ears. “Give her money if you like, I’m not opposed to that, but please remember that she’s the parent, she’s the one who was so determined to raise that child. She never considered our son’s feelings; remember that, too.” Defending Daphne’s harsh decision in the letter, he said, “Maybe she’ll find a man to be the kid’s father. Maybe she already has, and he wants you out of the picture. That’s their right. This letter might be good news, Lucinda. Good news for the child.” He refused to say Christopher’s name.

  Father Tom, her only other confidant, told her to pray for guidance. He wasn’t one to offer a mortal opinion on something so thorny, so fraught with human follies. She prayed to the Virgin, that mother of all mothers, but if guidance was sent, it must have gone to the wrong address.

  So there she was, a few years later, searching for a mission. She knew, from a letter campaign aimed in part at her husband, that a grassroots group called Liberals for Life had begun lobbying the legislature to allocate funding for “religion-free counseling on options for mother and child.” We are not anti-abortion, one leaflet read. We do not adhere to Christian scripture or religious teachings of any kind. We want to see babies born and properly cared for, girls on the threshold of womanhood given the respect and nonbiased counsel to make grown-up decisions.

  Lucinda phoned the founder of this quirky group, a thirty-seven-year-old massage therapist from Middlebury named Pamela who wore Birkenstocks and a baby sling harnessing her fifth child tight against her muscular torso. She declared to Lucinda, over chamomile tea in a Winooski café, “Let’s get this straight. I’m a plain-vanilla Episcopalian who happens to believe that all life, from the moment ovum collides with sperm, deserves to be protected. But rosaries, nuns, original sin, the pope … all that liturgical crap—and I do mean crap—gives me the heebie-jeebies. No offense, but I see the cross around your neck, and it’s gotta give me pause. So if you’re cool with that as a starting point, let’s talk. And one more thing: we do not demonstrate against anything. Our group is about being for something, never against. No antis except on my family tree.” She smiled tersely.

  Lucinda did not like this blunt young woman, but she was intrigued. Being for, not against: this way of living rang true to Lucinda. The church’s prohibitions, all the shalt-nots, sometimes cast a pall over her faith. Driving home from Winooski, she fingered the cross around her neck. Delicate though it was, perhaps it branded her as someone ready to judge and condemn. And she thought of the time she had taken a long bus ride to Washington, with Father Tom and other parishioners, to join in a shouting, sign-wielding rally against military spending, an episode that left her with aching arms, a sore throat, and a queasy, flulike feeling of futility.

  This was the beginning of Mother the Mothers, an organization that started with seed money from Lucinda’s share of Zeke’s well-invested inheritance, along with fund-raising efforts greased by the social contacts of a political wife and, through Pamela, the feminist alumnae network of Bennington College. (Mal, after hearing the story about his mother’s first encounter with Pamela, referred to her as Plain Vanilla. “Which, by the way, makes my Catholic upbringing, what, bitter chocolate? Amaretto, perhaps?”)

  The House itself was a rambling, dilapidated brick residence on the outskirts of Montpelier that the organization bought in foreclosure. They enlisted bakers and bankers and educators to set up training programs. An architect, eager to burnish his civic glow, contributed blueprints for renovating and “repurposing” the building. An attorney took care of the copious paperwork required to secure their nonprofit status. Eventually, they would employ a social worker and a doula.

  Finding the pregnant girls to nurture and guide was the easy part. They were sent by Planned Parenthood, school nurses, pediatricians, and priests; by parents lucky enough to be trusted by their terrified children. When a reporter from the Christian Science Monitor expressed interest in writing a feature on The House, Plain Vanilla was on bed rest, pregnant with number six. “You go, girl,” she told Lucinda. “You take us global. You be our shining face.”

  Lucinda knew something about being a shining face turned out toward the world. She had smiled and waved at strangers for years, had learned to echo her husband’s positions with bumper-sticker brevity. But this—go out in public to represent an initiative that, on the face of it, didn’t seem controversial yet somehow, she knew, would cross the sights of a loudmouth crackpot somewhere—this seemed risky. Like it or not, she realized that she was now exposed to those fickle political winds, this time without Zeke at her side.

  Zeke, however, was thrilled. He told her he was much happier to see her, not some sandaled vegetarian feminist hippie, become the voice of a cause with which he would be permanently linked, if only through his money. He asked his favorite PR guru to put Lucinda through a mock interview.

  And so it began, her beatification. She gave interviews to journalists from Mother Jones, the Boston Globe, even Glamour; they praised her for giving a sane face to the “pro-life agenda.” She was called pro-motherhood, pro-sisterhood, pro-family, the “right kind of Catholic.” (She still wore her small gold cross.) She declined to discuss abortion.

  Minor grumblings arose from adoption advocates, who felt that idealistic girls should not be encouraged to undertake a task for which they couldn’t possibly be prepared—and whose undertaking could not be reversed—but no crackpots emerged. Fortified by praise, singled out as she had never been while stumping for Zeke, Lucinda felt younger. She blossomed. She enrolled in social work classes. She took aerobics. She joined a quilting circle that included two gay men (vainly hoping this might bring her closer to Mal). She began to dress in festive clothing and jewelry from shops in Burlington frequented mainly by students. “Mom, you look fantastic, like you’ve moved to California,” said Christina, expressing rare approval. How gratified Lucinda was to win admiration from the child who had chafed most belligerently again
st the teachings of the church. (When Christina was pregnant with her first child, after three years of marriage and five years’ work as a tax attorney, she had calmly told Lucinda that she was grateful to live in a country where she could get the safe, affordable abortion she’d had in law school. “Without which, God knows where I’d be. Not married to Greg, that’s for sure.” Lucinda had been speechless.)

  But saints, like tyrants, fall hard. Saints are merely tyrants in the kingdom of virtue.

  “Take it easy, Dad. I know that’s not a word in your vocabulary, but easy.”

  Christina helps her father out of the car while Lucinda wrestles with the walker, unfolding and locking its cheap metal wings. Each of the women holds on to one side while Zeke fumbles for a grip.

  Even though she knows he’s stooping to keep his balance, acquiesce to this crablike contraption, Zeke seems disturbingly smaller to Lucinda. He dozed on the half-hour drive from the rehab center, and now, still, he says nothing.

  Once inside the front door, he glances around. He spots the hospital bed. “Christ, it’s come to this,” he says. Though it sounds like Frise, come to fiss.