And the Dark Sacred Night

by Julia Glass

  Not that Lucinda knew a thing about what happened at the camp until the letter she received in October: this completely unknown girl writing to tell Lucinda that she was pregnant with Mal’s baby. Dear Mrs. Burns, What I have to tell you will come as a shock, and I apologize for that.… Had there been a second Malachy at the camp? She took out the programs she had saved from the two concerts she and Zeke had attended.… Yes, there she was, this Daphne Browning, Violincello, but that did not mean …

  Should she call Mal, at his job in Burlington? She pictured him in an office filled with strangers, answering the phone for someone else. But first Zeke should hear about the letter—the preposterous claim. (“Mrs. Burns, he’s in a legislative session that might last the rest of the day; is this an emergency?” Of course it was an emergency. But no, she told the secretary. And what had she planned to do—read the girl’s assertions of love and devotion over the phone to Zeke?)

  All afternoon, as Lucinda waited for him, the letter lay open on the kitchen table, indigo cursive on cream-colored paper folded twice, top and bottom reaching up like pleading arms. The letter dared her to disbelieve it, dared her to flee the house and pray it would vanish in her absence.

  Zeke arrived home at nearly eight o’clock. She handed him his old-fashioned and sent Jonathan upstairs to do his homework. No TV that night; because she said so. She led Zeke into the den and closed the door.

  He sighed. “Jonathan in some kind of fix at school?”

  She simply handed it to him. He read it quickly, still standing, letter in one hand, drink in the other. “Lord Almighty.”

  Lucinda could do little more than stare into space, her arms folded tightly against her chest. She couldn’t even scold Zeke for his language.

  “There is so much we cannot take at face value here,” he said. “Just what the hell went on at that place?”

  “You can’t forget those amazing concerts, Zeke. They had to be playing music most of the time, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Did we meet this girl? Did we know he had a girlfriend there? Christ, has he ever had a girlfriend? He didn’t even go to the prom!”

  Lucinda tried to remember whom they had met. At the two concerts they attended, the young musicians had huddled together, mostly aloof from the adults. The parents had talked politely among themselves, sharing a sense of elite satisfaction that their talented children were mature enough not to follow the Pied Piper movement toward rock and roll—and all the other bad behavior that went along with music like that.

  Zeke drained his drink. “You haven’t called Mal.”

  “No.” She realized that this was what had to happen right then. She thought of Mal as more her son than Zeke’s, yet she had no idea how to broach a subject like this.

  Zeke asked her to get him another drink and to leave him alone in the den. “I cannot have this conversation with you listening, I’m sorry.” But she didn’t want to listen.

  Half an hour later, Zeke emerged and demanded a third drink. “One to get the news, one to confirm it, and one to tell you where we go from here.”

  Lucinda went upstairs to make sure Jonathan had turned out his light. She looked in at him, still reading under the quilt with the red planes, and she wished that she could keep this one, the last one, a child forever. She made him promise to put the book down at the end of the chapter. She closed his door.

  She found Zeke in the kitchen, eating a brownie he had cut from a tray on the counter. “Those are for the parish bake sale, Zeke.”

  “Most of them are,” he said. “Unless I decide otherwise. At the moment, my cause is more urgent.”

  “It’s true?”

  Zeke took a sip of his third drink and winced at the clash of flavors. “He’s known about this for a couple of weeks. The girl called him. He says he’s been ‘paralyzed.’ He swears it was just once, just the one time. A mistake, which he regrets.”

  Lucinda, though she had been a “good girl,” a virgin when she married, knew full well that this wasn’t likely to be something you did just once, not if you gave in. She knew the times they were living in. It also dawned on her that the very thing these parents assumed had kept their children “safe”—their intense focus on complex beautiful music, their prodigious hours of rehearsal—might in fact have left them wishing for greater release, wilder abandon, in the spaces between their precociously brilliant work.

  “A mistake with consequences,” she said, deciding it was pointless to argue with Mal’s version. “He does understand that, doesn’t he?”

  “He is not going to be a father,” Zeke said. “Not this young, he’s not.”

  Lucinda laughed bitterly. “Well, it looks like he is. Biology has a big say in this matter. Did he miss that class when he skipped ahead?”

  Zeke’s expression was one of pure sadness. She thought he would reprimand her for being sarcastic. He said quietly, “Arrangements can always be made.”

  She thought about this for a moment. “Adoption.”

  Zeke shook his head. “I shouldn’t speak with you about this, but it’s not as if I would hide it from you, either.” He told her about the grown daughter of a colleague, her visit to a clinic in Montreal.

  “Zeke.”

  “Lucinda, this is your son’s life. And though right now I couldn’t give a hoot about her, some girl’s life, too.”

  “No, it’s the life of their son. Or daughter.” That’s when it struck her that this girl’s pregnancy was destined to produce her first grandchild. “Oh, Zeke.”

  “The bottom line, Lucinda, is that the person who makes whatever decisions there are to be made has ultimately got to be this … what’s her name?”

  “Daphne.” Whose letter now seemed to Lucinda not insolent but brave.

  “We must have met her parents. I’m betting they’re educated people.”

  “Zeke, please don’t try—”

  “I am going to handle this fairly. I am not going to threaten or pressure—”

  “But you’re going to offer money! Is that what you’re going to do?”

  He stood up from the kitchen table and put a hand on her shoulder, intended to calm her. “I didn’t say that.”

  “But that’s what you’re going to do, isn’t it? Try to buy this poor girl off?”

  “This ‘poor girl,’ from what I understand, is no less responsible than Mal.”

  “Neither of them is old enough to be ‘responsible’ for anything!”

  “Lucinda, that’s my point.”

  “This is in God’s hands, Zeke.”

  “According to your faith, my soul is lost already, so let’s leave God out of this for now.”

  “God doesn’t step out of the room, Zeke, like some jury that isn’t supposed to hear the lawyers’ sidebar.”

  “Am I actually going to hear a sermon now?” said Zeke. “Really?”

  They talked in circles for another half hour, until Zeke declared they should go to bed, “sleep on it” (he might sleep!), and he would handle everything in the morning. He went upstairs first. When she heard water running, Lucinda took the letter, including the envelope with the return address, carried it up to her sewing room, and tucked it deep in her scraps basket. She cut and ironed pieces for a quilt until the first intimations of dawn.

  A few hours later, when she got up, Zeke was searching the den and the kitchen for the letter. She told him she’d find it while he was at work; he mustn’t be late.

  As soon as his car turned from the lane onto the road, she called directory assistance and obtained the number of the girl’s home in New Hampshire.

  An end run, Zeke and his partners would have called it. Once she knew she had secured the trust of the girl—who wanted that baby; who wasn’t looking for a “procedure” of some kind, thank heaven—Lucinda wrote a long, impassioned letter to Mal. She drove straight from the post office to Saint Joseph’s. In the false anonymity of the confessional, she asked forgiveness for defying her husband’s wishes and quite possibly her son’
s. God’s eternal imperatives, however, dwarfed those wishes. They were incontestable.

  By the time Zeke came home from work that night, she had set a plan in motion. “This isn’t my decision or yours,” she said. “It’s hers.”

  “And God’s, I’ll bet. Right? Is that what you told her? You brandished the damnation card?”

  Lucinda walked out of the kitchen.

  “You will regret this,” Zeke called after her.

  She walked the fields for two hours. When she came in, Zeke was eating canned soup and talking business on the phone. She waited for him to hang up.

  “I won’t ever regret this,” she said. “And someday you will thank me.”

  “Will Malachy thank you?” His voice was so quiet, she was chilled. The conversation was over.

  If there was one thing Zeke knew from both farming and practicing law, it was how to cut his losses. For weeks, she would sometimes catch him looking at her as if she were a foreigner, an alien being who’d beamed right into his house from outer space. He did not go to Mass with Lucinda until many months later, when she finally insisted. She was going to pray for the happiness of the new mother and baby. “This is your grandchild,” she reminded Zeke, and though he shook his head, she had to believe that in some corner of his soul he, too, rejoiced.

  “Leg shkilling me.”

  “Hang on, Zeke.” Lucinda puts her book aside and turns on another lamp. It’s nine-fifteen.

  She pushes the button that magically jackknifes the mattress, allowing Zeke to sit up. She massages his cramped leg.

  “Shleeping in clohjz,” he mutters.

  “David wore you out. But he was pleased with how much you accomplished. Why don’t I get your pajamas?”

  He nods. He leans back and closes his eyes. “Dreamed brother.”

  She turns around. “You dreamed about your brother?” She sits down again. She doesn’t ask which one.

  “Zjuh,” he utters. “Brother-zjuh.”

  “Both of them.”

  “Haying. Shree of us. Rainj coming and Mashew’j goofing off. Won’t lishen to Aaron. Aaron waj alwayj bosh.”

  “I remember,” says Lucinda. “I mean, I remember your stories.”

  He stares at Lucinda gravely. She hates how watery his eyes have become. He says, with contemptuous precision, “Don’t treat me like an old man.”

  “We’re both old,” she says, “though we can do our best to act otherwise. I was thinking today about what would happen if I had a stroke, too. Or fell down the stairs. What Christina and Jonathan would do.”

  This earns her a grudging smile. “Chrishtina’d take me. Jonathan you.”

  “I’d have more fun,” she says. “I’d get to see San Francisco, go to dinner parties with artists and intellectuals; what does Cyril call them, the culture queens? The velvet mafia? You’d be stuck with the lawyers and eco-freaks. I’d have a garden with climbing jasmine and palm trees. You’d be cooped up indoors half the year.” She thinks of the plantings she saw as she walked around Jonathan and Cyril’s Berkeley neighborhood, the climatically illogical mix of jasmine and cactus with tulips and roses. The air was ethereal in its variegated sweetness.

  “No,” says Zeke. “You’d be shtuck in bed like jish. Maybe view of palm treejh.” He closes his eyes.

  Lucinda asks if he wants dinner. He seems to consider the effort it will take, and then he says he wouldn’t mind another sandwich.

  On the way upstairs to get clean pajamas for Zeke, she sees the four flower arrangements she banished to the long bench by the front door; they look like patients waiting to see a doctor. She will take them to the church tomorrow, even the gladiolas sent by Father Jess (or by his latest secretary; Lucinda no longer visits the parish house often enough to remember her name). She thinks of the countless flower arrangements that have come up that farm lane following news of a dozen deaths. Weddings, too. Matthew, she thinks, then veers away. She mustn’t forget Zeke’s evening pills.

  After she helps him into his pajamas, she makes sure he goes to the bathroom. In the kitchen, she moves the documents Zeke has to sign from the table to what they call the later-box, on the back counter. Zeke is silent while she makes them grilled ham-and-tomato sandwiches. The sound of sizzling butter fills the kitchen in its comforting way. She finds a jar of watermelon pickles.

  Lucinda waits until they’re seated, relishing the smell of their hot sandwiches, before she pulls the sheet of paper from her pocket and lays it down between their plates—the one with the phone numbers.

  “Zeke, I have some amazing news.”

  By the end of the war, their village had lost eight boys. Aaron Burns was the first, killed almost exactly a year after Pearl Harbor. Mrs. Arnold, a client at the bank, guessed before anyone knew; she was on her way to make a deposit when she found herself stuck behind an unfamiliar car that moved slowly, hesitantly, along the road toward town, finally stopping at the entrance to Sanctuary Farm. As she passed the car, it turned down the lane. The driver wore a uniform. “I have a hunch he was the bearer of sad news,” she told the teller who took her deposit.

  Arriving home from school, Lucinda heard it from her mother, who’d heard it from her father when he came home for lunch.

  Zeke was out of school for close to a week. Just as abruptly, Dora wasn’t at the Canteen. Other girls, the ones who had boasted what heroes their boyfriends would be, looked tearful and worried. The war was now a real war: a hastening of death, not just a temporary absence of loved ones or a cause for compulsory thrift. Even farm equipment was rationed. At Saint Joseph’s, a Mass was dedicated to Aaron Burns; on the board in the vestry, parishioners tacked up prayer cards wishing his family solace and blessings, dropping their nickels and dimes in the box. That the Burnses weren’t Catholic didn’t matter.

  Lucinda was a sophomore. As far as most people knew, she was a serious student with her mind on work, not boys, but in the bottom left drawer of her desk she kept her letters from Matthew Burns. They weren’t love letters, but she saw the slowly accruing stack as evidence of a solidifying friendship that, like a sapling, would imperceptibly grow into something stronger. You turn around one day and, presto, the sapling’s become a tree. Those letters were like the widening rings in the trunk that represent the necessary seasons of growth.

  She sent him packages of socks, candy, and small souvenirs: a brazen maple leaf pressed in wax paper, a scalloped coaster from the Canteen, a program from the glee club’s Autumnfest concert, a pennant from the Thanksgiving football game (played that year by an ever-so-slightly-greener-than-usual crop of boys). Matthew was somewhere in Europe: he had described the countryside and local farms, the weather and the way people dressed. He told her about his two best friends and a stray dog their unit had adopted; they named it Ajax, after the great warrior. (When he stopped mentioning the dog, Lucinda didn’t ask why.)

  Matthew was granted a furlough of two weeks, through Christmas. His homecoming was anticipated with mixed emotion; it would be anything but a triumphant return. He would be suffering along with his parents and Zeke, through a holiday normally filled with joy. He would also be reminded of a fate that could just as easily have been his—and might still.

  But Lucinda’s emotions were hardly mixed. From the day she knew he was back (someone in the bank confirmed seeing him in his father’s car), she waited for his call. It would come later; for now, his family would be a closed circle. She imagined his kind, beautiful mother, crying her eyes out. Lucinda had already sent Mrs. Burns a note, saying how sorry she was, how they were all in her prayers.

  On the third day of his leave, Matthew was spotted by some of the kids on their way home from school, but no one approached him, because he was sharing a bench on the town green—never mind that it was freezing cold, inches of snow on the ground—with Dora Keene. She was crying into her mittens. He had an arm around her shoulders. This report came in the following morning, as everyone shed boots and coats at their lockers, rushing to make their first cla
sses.

  Poor Dora. Were people writing notes to her as well? How awful to be receiving letters of condolence along with Christmas cards.

  On the fifth day, a Saturday, Lucinda carried her father’s lunch to the bank. He had called to say he was too busy to come home. Waiting outside her father’s office, along with Zeke the Elder, was Matthew. His severe haircut revealed ears that were larger and fleshier than those she remembered; they looked sunburned, odd in the middle of winter. He was also thinner in a way that made him look taller—and there, catching sight of her as she walked into the bank, were his same blue eyes. Those hadn’t been changed by the war.

  “Lucinda James, my best pen pal!” he exclaimed. Matthew’s father gave her a smile she recognized as the one grown-ups lavish on children they find adorable or entertaining.

  Matthew leaned toward Lucinda and kissed her on one cheek; perhaps he’d have hugged her if she hadn’t been carrying her father’s tin lunch box. Through the open door to his office, Lucinda saw him talking on the phone.

  He hung up and waved them all in. She watched him enclose the right hand of each man between both of his, first the father, then the son. “We are all so shattered at the news,” he said. “I’m sure you’re tired of hearing people say that Aaron will be remembered for his sacrifice, even if it’s true. Whatever I can do to make things easier, please put me to work.”

  Lucinda had managed to utter nothing more than a stuttered hello to Matthew. Except to glimpse his father’s patronizing smile, she had ignored Mr. Burns altogether. She had behaved like the child he thought she was.