And the Dark Sacred Night

by Julia Glass

  “Did she tell you I worked for her after Mal died? For a while, she had a place for girls in the East Village. It’s gone now, thanks to Al Qaeda’s bloody hatchet job on the city’s social-welfare budget, but she charmed me into working there a few years. Training programs. One of the girls worked at my shop.”

  “That part she didn’t tell me. Wow.”

  She wouldn’t have, thought Fenno. She wouldn’t want to remember the argument they’d had when Oneeka, already mother to a six-year-old girl, just beginning to find a measure of independence, enjoying her job at the bookshop, got pregnant again. The argument took place after Fenno paid for the abortion. Foolishly, he told Lucinda. Foolishly, after the brusque end to their phone conversation (I’m sorry, but it’s too late now anyway.… So you never considered asking me, never considered the life of that baby, not just a child but a sibling?), he never wrote to salvage their friendship—in part because anything that distanced him further from Mal could only make life more harmonious with Walter.

  “The Catholic thing—I can’t imagine growing up with that,” said Kit. “Lucinda doesn’t talk about religion. I guess she respects that my mother raised me without church. Or maybe she’s just biding her time.”

  “No,” said Fenno. “You’ll never catch her soliciting souls for the Vatican. She’s one of those Catholics who’s privately ashamed of the pope, the way you might be ashamed of a father who has a violent hobby. It’s just that she saw me as somebody loyal to her mission. Most of the time I was. Or I was when it looked easy. I don’t know. Maybe you just can’t stay friends with someone you feel has good reason not to forgive you.”

  Once again, their glasses were empty. Fenno had drunk too much and said too much, and already he knew his punishment: no matter how much water he drank, he was destined to wake with a searing headache.

  “I should take you to your room. I didn’t even ask if you were hungry. Walter bought some special cheese and sausages.”

  “Food was the last thing on my mind. The scotch—that was essential.”

  They took their glasses to the kitchen. Fenno had turned out all the lights except the one above the cooker. He was shocked at the hour displayed on the clock. He whispered, “Sleep in, please.”

  “Oh, but the children won’t. It’s fine. I need all the waking time I can get with you—and Lucinda, when she gets here.”

  “And your mother.”

  “My mother,” said Kit. “Well, that’s something else. She’s been very unhappy about all this, but she’s trying to accept it. I’d better tell you now that I more or less bullied her into coming.”

  Kit’s mother would be the girl pictured, with Mal, on the newsletter from that music camp, which Fenno had found with the photos of Kit as a boy; with the letters he had exerted all his willpower not to read. They remained in the box he had hidden away in the commotion after Mal’s death. He told himself that to give the box to Lucinda could only cause her further pain. In a way, it contained only clues, not hard evidence, but looking at them, anyone but the most willfully daft would have surmised that the boy was Mal’s son and that Mal’s mother had played a part in whatever drama surrounded his birth. Other, collaborative clues emerged when Fenno remembered oblique remarks that Mal had made about parenthood, about the perils of first love. To this day, that box sits beneath another of comparable size which contains a pair of dress shoes Fenno hardly ever wears.

  He led Kit upstairs. On the way to the guest room, he pointed at the alcove just under the peak of the roof, at the top of a short ladder. “Your children are up there.”

  “That was part of the Underground Railroad?”

  “Oh, I rather doubt it. Walter makes up fanciful things he considers entertaining but harmless.”

  They laughed, quietly. Fenno went into the bedroom up front, where Walter slept on his side of the mattress, smaller than the one they shared at home. Voices still echoed down on Commercial—happy voices, ribald voices; whispering, yodeling: visitors to the town who, like Kit, wanted to stay awake for as much of their time here as they possibly could. It was time outside of time.

  Walter spoons the salads into their hosts’ colorful Italian dishes. “Praise be! You remembered to buy some genuine meat this time,” he teases Fenno as he fans out slices of gingered pork loin on a platter. Walter maintains that most people eat greens and vegetables only as a bargain with themselves for eating real meat (poultry a distant consolation prize). “And most normal people will choose steak over chocolate any day. Though I can testify with confidence that the ones who order steak just about always order chocolate to follow.” He maintains that the fundamentally carnivorous nature of mankind is the number one reason that his restaurant has flourished, outlasting every food fad of the past twenty years. (“Do you remember the cilantro epidemic? The blackened catfish era? Blackened everything? Egad.”)

  Kit and his children are on the lawn. Kit and Will toss a football back and forth; Fanny is counting and classifying her beach stones on a chaise longue.

  “Set the table for everyone,” says Walter. “Heard from the ladies yet?”

  “Lucinda’s on the half-six ferry from Boston. I’ll meet her at the pier.”

  “Do not even think of taking the car through that tsunami of tourists.”

  “I’m not daft.”

  “Jury’s out on that till Monday, buster.”

  Felicity clings to Fenno’s shoulder as he shuttles plates and cutlery to the table against the kitchen window; the house is too small for a dedicated dining room. He feels the prick of her talons on his skin through his shirt. As soon as he comes to a standstill, surveying the table to see what he’s missed, she begins grooming herself, stropping her wing feathers one by one through her beak.

  “Shall we discuss the forecast?” Walter says.

  “I’m afraid to ask. Are we doomed to indoor fun?”

  “We might be doomed to basement fun. Though all we’ve got here is a dirt crawl space filled with spiders. A monster storm is due to wallop us tomorrow night. Unless it doesn’t. It’s one of those will-she-won’t-she tropical divas. Either way, rain and more rain. Worst case, Cape Cod becomes the next Atlantis.”

  Fenno looks at Walter. “You’re having me on.”

  Walter shrugs. “You know what drama queens the weatherpeople are. But no, sweetie, I am not making this up. Want me to show you on my laptop?”

  “No, I don’t.” To Fenno’s secret delight, there is no television in this house, and though there’s Wi-Fi, he refused to bring his own computer. Walter, a neophyte devotee of Facebook, would probably rather have left Fenno behind than forsake his brand-new MacBook.

  “It’s one of those fast-moving storms, so it might be violent but brief.” Walter yanks the cork from a bottle of wine. “Like sex with a few scoundrels I knew in the olden days.”

  Fenno gives Walter a sour glance. “Please mind the visiting children. And grandmothers. A great-grandmother, if my genealogical skills are accurate.”

  “Have I ever embarrassed you, Mrs. Vanderbilt? Don’t answer that.”

  Fanny careens through the kitchen door. “Didi’s here!”

  “Didi?” says Walter. “Didi LaVida? How did she find us!”

  Didi LaVida, formerly Donald LaPlante, is one of the most conspicuous regulars at Walter’s Place. Walter would be able to recite her favorite dishes and describe her most recent escort.

  “My Didi.” Fanny looks at him, for the first time, with less than adoration.

  “Would that be your dad’s mom?”

  Walter is restored to his pedestal. “Come outside! You have to tell her about the Underground Railroad!”

  “I’m getting dinner ready, sweetheart. Fenno?” Walter raises his eyebrows at Fenno as Fanny runs back the way she came.

  A third car is wedged into the scattering of peastone beside the lawn. Seated on the chaise with her back to the house, a woman is examining Fanny’s stone collection, the girl kneeling on the ground, handing select specime
ns to her grandmother. Kit and Will stand behind Fanny, watching.

  The woman turns her head at the sound of the screen door clapping shut. She looks almost too young to have been a grandmother for nearly a decade. But that, as Shakespeare would say, is the rub. The crux of the matter. The knot in the cord. Her smile is quizzical, uncommitted. It startles Fenno to see in her expression that she has thought about him and that she wishes him to see this.

  “Daphne. I’m glad you came.” He offers his hand.

  She stands and takes it. “Kit is stubborn when determined.”

  Like his father. Though stubbornness is hardly a rare quality, especially in men. Fenno offers to fetch her baggage.

  She leads him to her car. She is the kind of slim called willowy. Her long hair, still half blond, is shot through with micalike glints of gray and springs haphazardly free from a plait that’s been crushed against a car seat for hours. Her dress, clingy but long, is the color of blackberries.

  Fenno tries to see her through Mal’s eyes—but how many years ago was that? He stops himself from doing the sums, calculating everyone’s shocking age.

  “I’ve always wondered about this place,” she says as she opens the car door.

  “Let me.” Fenno reaches past her for the small suitcase.

  She pulls out a posh shopping bag tufted with tissue and curlicued ribbon. He takes it as well. It’s large but light: not the customary vessels of wine or jam.

  Kit joins them, reaching for the suitcase. Fenno gives in. “All right then. I hope you don’t mind that we’ve assigned your mum to the other bed in your room. Quarters are a bit tight. Lucinda can have the foldaway in the den, downstairs. Though we could juggle it up, put the women together and—”

  “No,” Daphne says. “I’m happy to bunk with my son. We shared a room until he was five.”

  Kit frowns slightly at this disclosure. He takes the suitcase into the house and up the steep colonial stairs. The children follow, eager to show off their allegedly historic lair. “Come see where they hid the slaves!” says Fanny.

  In the kitchen, Walter is arranging hors d’oeuvres on yet another platter. “Reality-TV-show contestant number two? How’s it looking so far? Keeping up with the Kardashians yet?”

  “You will wear me out before they do.”

  Walter laughs his stage laugh. “Wearing you out is not a challenge these days, let me tell you that.”

  “Any chance we could prattle about the weather again?”

  In fact, Walter’s beloved laptop sits beside the microwave; taking Fenno seriously, he hits the touch pad and presto, the dark screen becomes a multicolored, enigmatically patterned map of the country, the meteorologist’s MRI. Walter points to the telltale spiral of a hurricane off the mid-Atlantic coast. Walter twirls his finger in imitation of its conjectured path. He does his well-practiced rendition of the theme to Jaws.

  “Sounds like you’re hoping it will hit us.”

  Walter shuts the laptop. “Of course not. But we need to make like Scouts and be prepared. So I went out this morning for batteries, extra flashlights, and jugs of water. Proud of me?”

  “Wouldn’t we just get in our cars and leave?”

  “As if we’d be the only ones. We’d end up being blown off the Sagamore Bridge, along with the rest of the lemmings stuck in traffic.”

  Fenno wonders if Walter is hoping to sabotage this gathering, despite his promise in the therapist’s office that he would take none of it personally, that he would see himself as Fenno’s rock-solid present, at which he would never have arrived without the igneous past inextricably stratified throughout.

  “The past is never really past,” said Julian, the therapist Walter insisted they see. “Which is why psychotherapy exists in the first place. Do you know that song, ‘What a Wonderful World’? You do, I’m sure,” he said when Fenno looked willfully blank. “Louis Armstrong? We hear it so often that it’s become about as moving as a beer jingle. But it’s beautiful. Have you ever listened to the lyrics, closely? The list of things that prove how wonderful the world really is? I’m taken every time by this: ‘the bright blessed day and the dark sacred night.’ ”

  The therapist paused for their reaction. After a beat, Walter said, “Well, I am definitely the day, and boy is he ever the night.”

  Julian laughed with what sounded to Fenno like calculated warmth. “That’s funny, Walter, and we should revisit that thought. But what I mean is that the past is like the night: dark yet sacred. It’s the time when most of us sleep, so we think of the day as the time we really live, the only time that matters, because the stuff we do by day somehow makes us who we are. We feel the same way about the present. We say, Let bygones be bygones … water under the bridge. But there is no day without night, no wakefulness without sleep, no present without past. They are constantly somersaulting over each other.”

  After that homily, Fenno nearly freed himself from the overly plushy couch and the overly Buddhafied office. Julian’s bony yet lustrously tanned physique (his clothing almost entirely white) put Fenno in mind of some desert cult leader—yet Fenno also knew, too well, his own phobias surrounding the confessional culture of his adopted country. Now several months into this ritual, he has come to accept that the weekly sessions with Julian give Walter a better place and time to vent his frustrations than their apartment at an hour far too late for sane, coherent discourse.

  Fenno hears the murmur of Kit and Daphne talking in the guest room above the kitchen. At least there’s a real ceiling here, in the newer part of the house; Fenno prefers to do his eavesdropping on purpose. He also hears the percussion of the children’s bare feet on the front stairs. They appear almost instantly in the doorway.

  “Are we allowed to be hungry yet?” asks Fanny.

  “Hungry? Hungry is what makes my world go round,” says Walter. He hands her a plate of biscuits, cheese, and sliced pear, all surrounding a bowl of chocolate-covered almonds. “Take it outside, and do not feed the wildlife—by which I mean all those boys dressed as girls on the sidewalk. They bite.”

  Will giggles.

  Felicity, from her post on top of her cage, chuckles in response.

  After the children leave, Walter says, “Don’t look at me like that. I mean, do you think their dad gave them the PG-rated spiel on Ptown? This week of all weeks. Just think how many Cinderellas, Ariels, Jasmines, and Briar Roses, right this very minute, are teasing out their wigs at the Crown and Anchor. No hurricane’s going to put those crinolines out of commission.” It so happens that this is the weekend leading up to Carnival Week; the theme is Classic Disney.

  Fenno laughs. Walter’s wit has been described as indefatigable. It has also been described as tyrannical and tedious. But his gentle side is worth all the bluff and buffoonery. Walter is emotive, at times volcanic, but Walter is also wise.

  Fenno looks at the clock. “Oh, crikey.” It’s twenty past six. He runs out the front door and across the lawn; on foot, it will take him fifteen minutes to reach the ferry slip—and that doesn’t account for the painful weaving through crowds (worse yet, crowds in costume).

  Walter was right: the Disney princesses are already out in minor force. The sky is assertively blue, as is the bay beneath it: hard to believe that the weather could betray them anytime soon. Two men dressed as generic Prince Charmings are strolling too slowly in front of him, eating ice-cream cones, their polyester capes swishing capaciously from side to side. “Pardon me,” says Fenno, sidling around them. He does hate this particular stretch of Commercial, where the hedgerows surrender to an enervating succession of taffy and tackle shops, the entire district a farrago of trivial, disposable merchandise, crystal paperweights alongside flip-flops, scented candles shelved beneath kites. How cruel a cosmos where these places survive yet a bookstore founders.

  A fudge shop, he thinks as he skirts a line of people extending nearly half a block down from the door of a confectionery. That’s what he should open: a bloody fudge shop. Though Walter would wa
rn him about the meat-versus-chocolate equation. How about a brickle-and-bacon shop, then? Maybe he ought to have sold bacon and brickle alongside the books. Brickle ’n’ Bacon ’n’ Books! BacoBrickoBookshop!

  Fenno is working himself into a sweaty funk, not a good state of mind in which to greet Lucinda Burns, whom he has not seen in seven years. When they spoke on the phone about Kit, they were focused on a subject so emotionally momentous that to discuss their falling-out would have been counterproductive, retrograde—yet here it is in the front of his mind, the past somersaulting into the present, night intruding on day. Is it better or worse that he will greet her alone?

  He realizes that he didn’t ask whether she could walk for any distance. How has she aged? She is … is she eighty years old yet? He can no longer remember her age. Could he get a pedicab to take them back? He begins to perspire more heavily from nerves than from exertion.

  Walter was right: he is off his trolley to have arranged this weekend. Well, maybe he can keep company entirely with the nippers. He’s had the requisite heart-to-heart with Kit, whose nature—to his relief and to his chagrin—reminded him very little of Mal’s. Kit is a kinder or at least humbler man than his father; is that because he is a father? Whatever men acted as Mal’s stand-ins for Kit, it would appear they did a decent job. Or maybe being raised by a mother alone was the best fate possible. Fenno tries to imagine having been raised only by his mum, whom some people saw as more devoted to her rigorously trained collies than to her three sons. But they turned out fine. Fine enough.

  Arriving at the crowded pier, Fenno sees that the ferry came in on schedule. “Bollocks,” he mutters. He zigzags through the phalanx of passengers lugging their bulky belongings toward the town.

  He is nearly at the end of the pier when he sees her, standing patiently beside her rolling case. She doesn’t look so different. Her once-reddish hair is now thoroughly gray, pinned back rather than loose, but she looks fit, not the least bit stooped. She wears a gauzy lavender skirt and ruffled white blouse, still one of those rare women who do not look silly in clothing designed for a younger generation. He waves, but she is busy reading a pamphlet.