And the Dark Sacred Night

by Julia Glass

  “Oh. So you were a coward because he was sick?” Walter crossed his arms over his bare chest. “Like you never got the bulletins on safe sex?”

  “Walter, that was so long ago, I can’t even reconstitute what happened and what didn’t. I’m knackered. Can’t we just go to sleep? You’re cheesed off because you didn’t get to toast Erik. And I know you worked hard on that toast.”

  “Erik? What does this have to do with Erik?”

  “Walter, this is beyond lunacy. We both drank too much of that posh champagne—”

  “Did not,” said Walter. “I am sober, and I am being honest with you. I am not a coward. Not about things like this.”

  “Things like what? Bloody hell.” Fenno tossed his book on the side table. “Tony was at that party. You never complain about Tony.”

  “Oh, Tony.” Walter rolled his eyes. “I can keep an eye on him. He’s very much around—and very dismissible in my opinion.”

  Tony was the man who had, in fact, been Fenno’s lover—rather disastrously—while Fenno was caring for Mal. “Bloody, bloody hell,” said Fenno. He got out of bed.

  “Running away?” said Walter.

  “Taking a piss and getting myself a glass of water. Apparently, my skills on the witness stand are to be tested. My veracity.”

  Walter stood and embraced Fenno roughly. He was taller and broader than Fenno, and there were times when the sense of being overpowered was deeply exciting—or comforting. At other times, it made Fenno feel claustrophobic.

  “Forget it, Cicero. Let’s just forget it. Jury, please disregard that testimony. Cross-examination is not what I had in mind for tonight.”

  But the memory of that exchange could not be struck from the record so easily, and over the next few years, whenever Mal’s name arose in conversation, Walter tightened his lips, assuming the look of a once-betrayed spouse. Or he’d mutter, “Ah yes, the man not taken.” When Fenno sparred with Lucinda over Oneeka’s abortion, he was almost relieved to part ways with her. And then, last winter, she rang. “Fenno, I’m going to tell you something you never knew about Malachy, and I’m going to ask you a huge favor,” she said in a rush, as if fearing he might hang up on her. “Mal had a son.”

  Cravenly, Fenno pretended surprise. This might have been the time to tell her about the box of photos, the conclusions he had drawn, but wouldn’t she be angry that he had concealed it from her? And he needed to know why she had chosen to tell him now, call him out of the blue. As he wrapped his mind around meeting the boy—the way-beyond-boy—he wondered how happy he should be about this news. He gave little thought to just how unhappy Walter would be.

  “Thank you, Fenno,” says Lucinda, raising her glass, her voice thick with impending tears. “This weekend is such a gift.”

  Daphne cradles her glass in her lap. “And this place is—well, I get why it’s so unique, and I’m not talking about all the Las Vegasy costumes.”

  They sit on the deck of the Red Inn, tucked inside the scorpion’s tail at the town’s terminus, the end of the Cape itself. Fenno and Kit balance on the railing, backs to the sheltered, shimmering bay and the spit of sand that curls toward the beacon of the lighthouse. Fenno wonders if he should have stayed behind at the house, even joined Walter and the children on their separate expedition. How easily he could have sent Kit and the two mothers off on their own—but Kit insisted that he act as their guide. He senses now that what Kit actually wanted was a chaperone, a shield.

  Dinner was an hour of careful banter, because of the children’s presence. Daphne talked about her teaching job at the high school, which led to talk about her own years in high school—the tension felt by all the boys about the Vietnam War, the early flirtation with smoking pot, the longing to flee to the anonymous abandon of San Francisco or Greenwich Village. Lucinda chimed in about how, when she was in high school, World War II had the boys tumbling over one another to enlist—how she sometimes felt that her husband’s political career was, indirectly, his way of compensating for having stayed home, “failing” to serve his country.

  Lucinda asked the children about their interests. When Fanny talked about playing the flute, Daphne interrupted to talk about the music program at her high school. Through the entire meal, Kit was virtually silent. Fenno saw him watching his mother and his rediscovered grandmother sidestep any subject that brought them too close to Mal. Once, when Lucinda hinted at her long-ago acquaintance with Daphne (“I was so worried you’d give up your cello”), Kit spoke up quickly, warningly, about how the music gene had skipped him. The children, however, were far more interested in the food—especially the two pies lurking on the counter—than in the adults’ conversation.

  Finally, when their forks were poised over plates piled with both kinds of pie, and two flavors of ice cream, Walter pointed at each of them and said, “Hold on. Are you saving space for fudge? Because that is a must when you’re in Ptown, my friends. And after dinner is when the sights are truly worth seeing. We have a tour that starts in about fifteen minutes.”

  Keeping up his part of the pact with a grace that impressed Fenno (and was clearly meant to do so), Walter enlisted the children to help him load the dishwasher, then herded them out the door. “I promise not to sell them to the first buyer,” he said to Kit while Will and Fanny went in search of sweaters. “They’re awfully cute and will fetch a high price, so I’ll be choosy.” Nervously, Kit laughed.

  The shallow chitchat continued as the four remaining adults walked west, peeking through hedgerows to admire other houses en route to the inn.

  But now they are seated, no children to eavesdrop, and though the deck is crowded, strangers shoulder to shoulder, there is an unsettling privacy within the tight square they compose. Fenno looks up and notes (also unsettling) that the stars are not on display; clouds have moved in, lowering the sky. The air is cool yet dense. An occasional gust of wind carries a napkin or a cocktail straw onto the sand between the deck and the lapping tongue of the bay.

  “Daphne, I need to say a few things right now, before I lose my nerve.” Lucinda’s voice quavers. “Thank you for coming. I know this isn’t easy. You did such an astonishing job of raising this boy—excuse me, Kit, if I can’t quite grasp that you’re a man. A father, too. Which Malachy couldn’t face. He … fell down on that. Daphne, that was hardest on you, I know. I prayed for you every day.”

  “Please,” says Daphne. “That’s all so far behind us. Let’s leave it there. I’m here for Kit. This is what he seems to want.”

  Fenno notes the chill of that seems. He can see that Kit notes it, too.

  “Mom, I get why you didn’t tell me, didn’t want to tell me, and I’m sorry that I pushed you. Except that I’m not sorry I know about Mal. Made the connection to his family.” The look Kit gives Lucinda reminds Fenno that they have met before now.

  “How I wish you could have known him,” Lucinda says.

  Daphne gazes fixedly between the two men, out at the water.

  Fenno says to Kit, “He would have been fascinated by your study of Eskimo art. He’d have been keen to grill you about it if he were with us now.”

  “But you realize,” Daphne says, “if he could actually be here, with us—if he’d lived that long, maybe hadn’t been ill in the first place—you’d probably never have known him, Fenno. From what I understand.”

  “Maybe he would have looked for me, long before now,” says Kit.

  “Maybe,” says Daphne, “but I doubt it. He’d have had to find me first, which would have meant forgiving me.” She looks directly at Fenno, as if she expects him to back her up, to affirm that Mal was unforgiving—and she unforgivable.

  Because the two women are sitting side by side, held firmly parallel in a pair of weighty Adirondack chairs, it’s easy for them to avoid looking at each other, to look only at the men—or past the men toward the postcard view of dark water collared by the lights along the shoreline.

  “If Mal had to forgive anyone, Daphne, it was me,” Lucinda says
.

  “Hey.” Kit raises his hand like a schoolchild. “Can we please not talk about me as if I’m some misdemeanor for which anybody needs to be forgiven? I’m about to face having a pair of teenagers who I’m sure will hold plenty against me! Crimes I don’t even know I’ve committed.”

  “Those children are wonderful,” says Lucinda. “I’m so thankful you brought them up to us at Christmas. Trusted us like that.”

  “Next time,” says Kit, “I’d like all of us to get together—Bart too, Mom. Maybe June and her family. I was thinking about Thanksgiving.”

  “We love hosting Thanksgiving,” says Lucinda. “Why don’t we—”

  “Oh no,” says Daphne. “No. I couldn’t let you do that.”

  By now, Fenno feels like a genuine intruder. He looks around the deck and promptly regrets his wandering gaze when it steers him to a man with whom he had a disastrous entanglement in the city before he was with Walter. Worse yet, the man is someone he met at Mal’s New York memorial service, someone who worked with Mal at the Times. Fenno tries to angle his body away from that side of the deck, which means that he’s pressing a knee against Kit’s thigh. He shifts again, torquing his body in two directions.

  “My son Jonathan cooked a spectacular meal for all of us last November,” says Lucinda. “I have a feeling he’d jump at the chance to do it again. And there’s so much I’d like to show Will and Fanny.”

  Daphne stares pointedly at her son.

  “Well,” he says, “I’m still not certain how to explain to the twins exactly how we’re connected. Not yet. But I want them to spend time with you and Zeke—and the cousins they don’t know are their cousins.”

  “I didn’t mean showing them things to do with Mal,” says Lucinda. “I didn’t mean rushing anything.”

  “I do wonder what they think,” says Daphne. “What they thought about that visit. Fanny is a very bright little girl. With very astute little ears.”

  “She also asks questions,” says Kit. “It’s Will who keeps what he knows close to the vest. If Fanny guesses something’s up, she’ll say so.”

  “All I’m suggesting, sweetheart, is that I think you should be careful not to rock their world.”

  “I have no desire to confuse them. I’m so glad just to know them,” says Lucinda. “But Kit, it’s you we’re the happiest to know. It’s you we’re so grateful to—have back.” Fenno detects that she is struggling to steady her voice, not to panic in the face of Daphne’s tangible resistance.

  Wishing heartily that he were somewhere else, Fenno cannot help glancing over his shoulder. Disastrous Entanglement is looking straight at him. The man nods, his bland smile unaltered, then turns back to his companions, exaggerating his amusement at a joke, resting a hand on his neighbor’s thigh.

  Fenno wonders if Walter is asleep by now—or lying awake, bargaining with his lonely resentment. “I think I might head back, if you don’t mind. You’ll find your way, won’t you? It’s a straight shot down Commercial.”

  “Please don’t leave,” says Lucinda. “I’m sorry if we seem to be holding you hostage to all this touchy-feely stuff, but I’m so glad to see you again, too. I feel Mal’s just that much nearer.”

  She’s right: he does feel like a hostage. But no one’s torturing Fenno or demanding hard answers of him. The shameless therapist isn’t here to ask, How do you feel about that observation? or Is it just too hard to speak about the emotions surrounding that loss? Of course it’s too hard; for bloody whom would it be easy? Sometimes he wants to say, Didn’t you see the place on the questionnaire where I checked the waterboarding option?

  A waiter insinuates himself between knots of people all along the deck, filling a tray with abandoned glasses. Do they want another round? “No, we’re fine,” Daphne says before anyone else can answer.

  Lucinda points across the bay, toward the lighthouse. “Can you walk out there? Or is that an island?”

  “You can, but it’s not for the faint of constitution.” Fenno points to the right, the horizon a necklace of lights muted by fog. “That’s a stone jetty—a breakwater leading to a beach and the lighthouse.”

  “You’ve been?”

  “I keep telling myself I’ll do it on the next day that’s not too beastly hot. There’s a curious memorial there, at the roundabout. A park with stone pavers carved in memory of … loved ones lost.” What is he thinking, mentioning what amounts to an AIDS memorial? “What’s curious,” he says quickly, “is that even pets appear to be commemorated. It’s a hodgepodge of sorts.”

  Lucinda nods. “I’m up to try it if the weather clears on Sunday. From what I hear, we won’t be going to the beach tomorrow.”

  Fenno is grateful that she’s pulled them away from the quagmire. But in fact, all the conversations around them do seem related to the incoming weather. No one is disputing that it will be severe; many are bragging about staying put, absurdly proud that they haven’t turned tail and fled.

  Fenno realizes that his guests are looking at him, expectant.

  “Well, Walter’s seen to it that we have plenty of provisions—knowing him, scuba gear and torches designed for underwater use. He may have procured an inflatable ark.” His laughter sounds phony (it is). “On a more pragmatic level, he found the cupboard containing the games.”

  “The question is,” Kit says, “are we a Monopoly crowd or a Scrabble crowd?”

  “I always liked the Game of Life,” says Daphne. “The orange car was mine, and I loved spinning that clackety wheel. I’d fill the car with those teensy pegs representing children. Oh, how little I knew!”

  When they started seeing Julian, possibly the only couples therapist in Lower Manhattan who did not frequent Walter’s Place (what vegan would?), Fenno assumed they would spend their sessions doing little beyond haggling out Walter’s anxieties about Mal’s role in Fenno’s past—and of course about the “Kit caboodle,” as Walter dubbed the incursion of Kit’s paternity search on their lives. To lean glibly on modern psycho-parlance, Fenno expected that they would work through this “issue” within half a dozen hours of talking, arguing, and mediating. Julian would put out the small fires, prevent them from coalescing into a conflagration. But Fenno was naïve to the osmotic ways of therapy, its tentacled reach into every crevice of a life—more complicated still, a pair of lives merged after decades apart, unprepared for their eventual conjoining.

  Walter, however, was no stranger to the process (yet another well-minted term of the era). He began their second meeting with Julian by reflecting broadly on how his having been raised by a grandmother, in the wake of his parents’ reckless death in a drunken car wreck, meant that at times he couldn’t help resenting how Fenno took for granted the “full monty of a nuclear family,” the cozy constellation in which he had been raised: mother and father contentedly married, living to ripe old ages, dying of natural causes; two sane, liberal-minded brothers who grew up to form their own happy families. (Walter was anything but close to his one sibling, a sultan of finance who lived in Marin County and deified Ronald Reagan. At least, Fenno liked to point out, his brother had been decent enough to vote against Proposition 8.)

  Fenno knew the full history of Walter’s signal traumas, and he admired Walter for the ways in which he had struggled to achieve independence, prosperity, and joy. But he knew it all by heart. So in the midst of Walter’s narrative, nestled helplessly in Julian’s bottom-numbing couch, Fenno found himself examining the various Asian artifacts fastidiously arrayed on every surface and wall of the therapist’s office, wondering if the ulterior motive behind the display was to prove to his patients that he had rubbed shoulders with enough Buddhists to claim enlightenment—or that he was good enough at his job to pay for numerous trips halfway around the world, with money to burn on buying art. One man’s midlife crisis was another man’s Hiroshige block print.

  Suddenly Fenno realized that here was Walter, describing Fenno’s family in detail—loving yet irritatingly all-knowing detail—not only as
if Fenno were mute but as if Walter were on intimate terms with every skeleton in every musty cupboard of the rambling house in which Fenno had been raised.

  “I was pretty nervous the first time I met them,” Walter said. “It’s our second Christmas together, and we fly to Scotland. A holiday, a foreign country, staying in the family manse with the in-laws: recipe for disaster soufflé. Or at least a Lawrence Kasdan film. But you know what? It’s fabulous. His brothers are like the brothers I wish I had: one’s a country vet, surrounded by a squadron of dogs, the smart pretty wife, the well-mannered kids. That’s David. And the other one’s a chef—he has a restaurant in France and this stylish French wife and these four beautiful bilingual daughters! I’m an instant uncle—‘Oncle Vol-taire’ in French. And we have this perfect week. Perfect.

  “Until I’m in the kitchen with Frère Chef and he asks me if I knew Mal. And I say, ‘Not really; did you?’ And on he goes about what a ‘super chap’ Malachy Burns was, how tragic his death, what a shattering loss for Fenno. And it turns out Mal visited there—at the manor house—at least twice.”

  Julian raised his hand. “Hang on a sec, Walter. Fenno, let’s hear from you. I feel at times as if we’re losing you.”

  “You are,” Fenno said tartly. “Because yes, Mal did visit Scotland with me. Twice, yes. One time he was in London for Christmas and simply came north to join me.”

  “ ‘Simply came north’?” repeated Walter, mimicking the burr. Then, seeing the expression on Julian’s face: “Sorry. I just hate how a disclosure like that—which seems to me major—is like some … passing tumbleweed to him.”

  “Mal was my friend. And more than that, all right, when he was in very bad shape, I felt I needed to keep an eye on him.”

  “Dragging him overseas?”

  “I didn’t ‘drag’ him anywhere.”

  “This Mal,” said Julian. “I take it he was a figure of extraordinary color and intelligence.”

  “And style. And worldliness. And superiority to the rest of mankind. Oh, and did I forget sexiness?” Walter glared at Fenno. “So it bothered me—okay, it hurt me—that after all your protests, I get to find out from your brother how important he really was to you.”