Kit gives him a pair of well-practiced thumbnail portraits: a girl’s girl who loves to act and sing and (no doubt to her grandmother’s delight) is beginning to play the flute. The boy, equally true to gender, does the sports thing on a couple of teams, roots hard for the Yankees (forgivable at that age), desperately wants a dog. Daphne’s pushing Kit to give in; she and Bart are contemplating a dog themselves. (Probably one of those poodle-doodles, Jasper almost says.) But there it is: the woman who links them, who’s been hovering nearby since Kit’s arrival, plunks her trim butt (probably still trim) right down at the table.
“How is your mother?” Jasper makes his voice cheerful. Get this part over with; might as well.
“Good,” says Kit. Jasper can see him trying to figure out how much to say. He speaks quickly, also pushing for upbeat. “Still teaching. In the same house. Playing in a chamber group that’s actually pretty impressive. A couple of faculty members from Dartmouth—music faculty—plus someone retired from a big-city orchestra. They’ve put out a couple of CDs. I mean, you know, that they sell at their concerts. A hobby, really, though she’d kill me for saying so out loud.”
Or saying so to me, thinks Jasper.
Kit insisted on shopping for groceries that morning, then making dinner. They’re eating spaghetti with clam sauce and the kind of modern salad that Jasper thinks of as rich people’s weeds: a frilly jumble of teeny-tiny leaves, pink and purple as well as green, that catch too easily in your teeth. Kit brings with him the convolutions of the modern world, from its novel medical theories to its newfangled foods. (This much garlic, thinks Jasper as he wipes his plate with his whole-grain roll, is going to wake him up in the middle of the night.)
Kit bought a six-pack of Bass ale; he’s on his second one and seems to be letting down his guard. It helps that Jasper was pleased—surprisingly so, and it probably showed—at the work Kit did on the house that afternoon. Jasper will join in tomorrow, oversee the repair that takes more craft and finesse, replacing the insulation and the timber. Lifting and nailing the timber is a two-man job, three if Jasper’s wise. Sometimes, in the midst of a physical task, his right hip cramps up and locks. (Damned if he’ll go for that replacement his doctor keeps suggesting.)
“Your sister, how about her?”
Kit hesitates before answering, probably wondering why Jasper would go this far to be polite. He’s never met June.
“She got married last year. She met the guy at a craft fair where he was selling jewelry. He’s a silversmith. They live in Bath.”
“Maine.”
Kit nods. “I think she might be pregnant already. Mom’s hinted. But they have this … girl kind of secrecy between them.”
“Girls do that. Make sure men believe they’ve got secrets, whether or not they do. Don’t you think? Part of what keeps us wanting more, looking for hidden treasure.” Jasper means this lightly, talk as filler, but all of a sudden Kit’s looking frightfully serious. Divorce, thinks Jasper. Here it comes.
Saved by the phone, thank God. He leaps up and practically sprints to answer it. At first, he mistakes the small voice as that of his grandson in Colorado: “Hi. Can I speak to my dad?” In the background, a woman admonishes the boy for not identifying himself. “This is Will Noonan,” he says quickly. “Is he there please?”
“A minute, young man.” At which Kit is the one to vault from his chair. “Your boy.” Though the boy, thinks Jasper with ludicrous pride, has his name.
“Hey there, you!” Kit says into the phone. Jasper is almost embarrassed by the change in his manner, his sunny, eager voice. He sounds like a prison inmate allowed one conversation with the outside world. But is Jasper any different when Rory calls out of the blue?
He stacks dishes in the sink, sponges off the table and counter. He can’t help eavesdropping. Kit talks a good long time with each of his children; then his voice stiffens up, just enough to notice, and it’s clear he’s talking to Sandra. They talk practicalities: the children’s homework habits, the state of the car, something about a computer, something about a call Kit needs to make (a call he’s clearly been putting off). The bureaucracies of family and household. The bureaucracies of two people standing on either side of a barbed-wire fence.
When Kit returns to the kitchen, Jasper says, “Home fires burning bright?”
“Yeah.” Kit nods emphatically. “Sandra’s a marvel when it comes to maintaining order. I think she does it better when I’m gone.”
“You make her sound like a civil servant.” Jasper opens the freezer and searches the contents longingly. A pint of Cherry Garcia would be heaven. Instead, he contemplates low-sugar Popsicles and Tofutti Cuties, tiny imitation-ice-cream sandwiches that vanish down his gullet in two bites.
“Well, without those skills of hers, I’d be lost,” says Kit.
“She has other skills, I presume.”
“Many. Too many.” He looks more rueful than proud.
Jasper fishes two Cuties out of their soggy, frost-encrusted carton and offers one to Kit. “So I’m getting the drift that you’re not here because you’re in some kind of trouble. Like, running from the law.” He laughs, to make sure that Kit (who seems a shade humorless) knows he’s joking.
“Trouble isn’t the right word.” The tiny package gives the boy something else to focus on.
“But you’re not here on a lark.”
“A lark? Nothing’s a lark these days. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing with my life, if you want to know the truth.”
They unwrap their miserly portions of pseudo–ice cream.
“I do want to know the truth. In part because I’m nosy,” says Jasper.
Kit bites into the sandwich and makes a face.
“I know. Tastes like old snow between wafers of drywall.”
“Good Humor bars don’t taste a whole lot better. I’ve tasted them in recent years,” says Kit. “They’re not like we remember.”
“Very little is.” Jasper waits for Kit to finish eating.
Kit folds the wrapper into a square the size of a nickel. “The kids think I’m up here looking for a job.”
“And you’re not. Or are you?”
“No.”
“But you could use one.”
“Look. I came here to see you, Jasper, but I also came to find something out that I couldn’t bring up on the phone. Especially since I haven’t talked to you in so long. Which is totally my fault, and stupid.”
“Because I have so much wisdom to impart.”
“Don’t underestimate yourself.”
“Hold that thought.” Jasper gets up. The urge to pee is typically sudden. In the bathroom, his face appalls him yet again as he confronts it in the mirror over the toilet. Daphne made him put the mirror up, and he’s never bothered to take it down. He got rid of most things she left behind, but this thing he’d anchored good and fast to the wall. She didn’t realize what it’s like for a guy to take a piss while confronting how he looks to the world at large. Of course, thirty years ago the spectacle was, in retrospect, merciful. Tonight there’s a grease spot, a bull’s-eye of sloth, in the center of Jasper’s shirt and a swipe of chocolate on his scruffy chin (or the swag of flesh that claims to be a chin). He hasn’t shaved in two days because he keeps forgetting to buy new blades, and the light overhead exaggerates the crater in his nose where they dug out that sinister mole. His eyebrows look like they’re trying to send up smoke signals. Christ, it might be better to head the same way as Rayburn, losing touch not with people but with actuality. In actuality, Jasper looks one step shy of homeless.
Back in the kitchen, Kit hasn’t moved from the table. He’s unfolded the Cutie wrapper and smoothed it out. He’s trying not to look anxious.
“How about I make us a real fire,” says Jasper. “Temperature’s dropped these last few nights. You warm enough up top?”
“Yes.” Kit follows him into the living room, settles into the couch. He spreads his hands across the worn cushions. “Everything’s so f
amiliar. The way I remember it, but it’s still so strange to be here.”
“Yeah, same old same old. One day I’ll sink so far down in that old thing I just won’t be able to get up. They’ll find my skeleton gazing into a fire that burned out years before.”
Jasper wonders how well Kit remembers the house when its crude wooden surfaces were tempered and brightened by Daphne’s collection of concert posters, watercolor landscapes, and the flowery rugs hooked by her mother, all the “homey touches” that had replaced his first wife’s similarly inessential things. The only nod to decor in the entire room is a gigantic topo map of the Green Mountains hanging over the mantel. Laminated but never framed, it’s an item they couldn’t sell at the shop, not even half price. One night Loraina drove it over in the back of her truck. “It spoke to me,” she said. “Hey, it called out as I was leaving. Give me to the clueless dude with the bare walls.”
Jasper kneels by the fireplace and shoves kindling under the logs he laid in place that morning. “Let me guess. You suddenly remembered the adoption and came to see if I’m leaving you my vast fortune when I croak.”
Kit doesn’t laugh. Jasper rolls the Sunday sports section into a cone, lights it, holds it above the logs to prime the flue. A greedy draft sucks the flame up the chimney. He lights the kindling.
As he rises from his haunches, his hip kinks. When he finally joins Kit on the couch, he’s shocked to see how fearful the boy looks. “Will you just get that anvil off your chest?” he says, trying for paternal wit.
Kit persists in looking at the fire. He speaks in a clogged tone, like he’s confessing a crime. “I came here wondering what my mother might have told you about my father—the guy who got her pregnant. I know you might not know who he is, but Sandra swears you must. It sounds ridiculous, to sit here and ask you something like that after all these years, after … and it must seem ridiculous that I’d care at this point, because—”
“Your mother must have told you something,” says Jasper, cutting short the boy’s apology. Jasper hates cowering in people as much as in dogs.
Kit groans. “Nothing. She’s refused to tell me every time I’ve asked. Not that I’ve asked so often. But still. I mean, it’s like she’s offended.”
Jasper prods a log that threatens to tumble forward. He’d guessed several reasons for Kit’s visit, not a one of them close to this. He grapples toward memories, barely in reach, of the evening on which Daphne, quite formally—banishing all emotion—told him the story of the summer she became pregnant with Kit. She and Jasper had been seeing each other once or twice a week for two months, and though it loomed overhead that whole time, like a demolition ball suspended from a crane, Jasper had been careful not to broach the hot-potato question that Rayburn had already posed to him: So who begat the brat?
Once she told him, Jasper came to realize that his “discretion” might have looked to her like some cruel sort of test. As he waited for her to volunteer the story, it never occurred to him how terrified she might be that once it was out in the open, the reality of the details might make her seem tawdry, chase him away. So her confession only drew him that much closer; made him want to protect her from everything, even her past mistakes.
Looking at Kit, at the blatant fear of rejection in a face shaped just like Daphne’s, fair and freckled too, Jasper recalls that that conversation occurred in this very room.
“I’ve lived forty years without knowing,” says Kit, “and in a way, what the hell difference could it possibly make, right?”
“She never told you, all this time? That really so?” Jasper is genuinely amazed.
“Did you know she wouldn’t tell me? Or did you assume I knew all along?”
“At the start—when you moved here, the two of you—I knew she wanted to keep this to herself. Needed to. And she wanted you to feel a part of us, mix it up with Rory and Kyle. Made sense to me. Back then it did,” says Jasper. “Your mother had a lot of … I guess you’d call it pride, when it came to this detail—pretty thorny detail—of her life. Acted like she didn’t give a hoot what people thought. What they might imagine.”
“But she had to,” says Kit. “How could she not?”
Jasper shrugs. “On the one hand you are talking the sixties. The days of anything-goes. But you’re talking rural New England, too. Place of keep-it-zipped. Well, at least your mouth.”
The fire cracks loudly; a log releases a pocket of sap, sizzling.
Jasper stands. “You don’t mind, I’m going to have one of those beers you bought. Want another?” He heads for the kitchen.
Daphne made Jasper promise—swear, guarantee, on pain of losing every pleasure she could give—that he would never tell Kit what she told him that night. He wasn’t lying when he told Kit that her secrecy made sense at the time. He’s stunned, though, to know that she continued to withhold this simple bit of knowledge from Kit all the way into his life as an adult, as a father of his own children. Jesus but the woman could be cruel. This he knows. But he made her a promise, and almost out of brutish superior pride (not to be outdone by hers), he still feels bound to keep it—at least as long as there’s the risk she’ll find out he went back on his word.
Which only goes to show, he can hear Rayburn say, that she still has a hold on your gullible, lamebrain heart. Other parts of your anatomy, too, buster.
To buy time, Jasper speaks slowly. “You know, Christopher, I remember when I met you, that day we went to the state fair, rode the bumper cars, walked through the dairy barns, ate the cream puffs. Remember that?”
Kit forces a smile. “Do they still make those cream puffs?”
“Damn right they do. Had one this summer. Two. Take that, Dr. Forster.”
Kit waits, his respect for Jasper calming him down. And yes, thinks Jasper, here is the very thing about Kit’s nature that summoned this particular memory.
“What struck me first thing about you was your patience. Little boys aren’t patient like that. We waited in line after line, and it was the worst of August days, Christ it was miserable out there in the sun. But you just waited like some little … mystic or I don’t know what. And there was Kyle, jumping from foot to foot, whining about thirsty, hungry, boring—normal obnoxious behavior. Rory, I don’t recall where he was, but he wasn’t with us that day.
“But you. Never a complaint or a sign of losing your little temper.”
“I was probably too scared to act impatient,” says Kit. “Scared of you and Kyle, what meeting you meant. I had a good idea, even though Mom just called you ‘new friends.’ I do remember that day.”
“Yes.” Jasper smiles at Kit; blushes, too, unable to dodge the smaller pleasures emerging from the memory (that skimpy dress of Daphne’s, her green eyes and their recurrent promise of later). “I couldn’t help sizing you up, maybe just as scared as you. If I married this woman, you’d be my responsibility, too, and just who were you? Come right down to it, I’d be marrying you, too. So I had an eagle eye on you those first few times we met. And I thought to myself that not only were you patient, but it’s like you were waiting for something. And listening. You were a listener, that I picked up on. Some patient people are just plain out to lunch. Cows waiting for the call at milking time. None too sharp.”
Kit laughs.
“Not you, though. Nothing got past you, was my impression. You were taking it all in.”
As if he’s doing that very thing now, Kit continues to smile at Jasper but makes no reply.
Jasper’s running out of distractions from the much more urgent subject at hand. Turning to the fire, he adds two logs, bullies them into position with the poker. “I like this wood,” he says. He points out the window, into the dark void beyond their reflections. “Old apple tree, from the end of the meadow. You boys liked to hide up there at chore time. Finally gave up the ghost. A shame. Fruit trees don’t live forever.” He gestures at the gash in the corner of the room. “Guess the big old pines don’t, either.”
Silence. Kit, ever th
e listener, is still waiting. When he gives in, his voice is barely audible. “But you know the answer. Right?”
“In part,” Jasper admits.
“One thing I’ve been afraid of is that Mom … is that it wasn’t something she … that she might have been forced.”
“Raped, you mean?”
Kit nods. His eyes shine.
“Not at all, no,” Jasper says. “No, it was normal, healthy teenage lust. A two-way burst of passion. The old firecracker. Ordinary that way.”
Kit wipes his eyes on a sleeve. “Oh.” He laughs nervously.
“Your mother was in control—or thought she was. Like so many smart girls think. Boys, too. When they give in to their wildest urges despite the best of advice.” Jasper thinks of Kyle’s impulsiveness, his perpetual resistance to good advice; at least he never got a girl pregnant (though would Jasper know if he had?).
“So who was the guy?” Kit’s voice splinters with emotion.
“Hold on. Here’s where I have to tell you I never learned his name.” Kit’s expression turns bitter. Jasper leans toward him. “God’s truth. As your mother said, what use was that information to me, the name of a fellow I’d never meet, a fellow she hadn’t seen since it happened, had no intention of seeing again?”
“So in fact you don’t know anything more than I do. You know nothing.”
Christ, if looks could freeze-dry your innards.
“Hold on. It’s not so black-and-white. She told me a couple of things.”
“What things?”
“She had some contact with the family.”
“What family? You mean my father’s family?”
Here is where Jasper must tell or part ways with the truth—maybe just take a minor detour? Daphne told him that she had a relationship of sorts, for a few years, with the mother of the impregnating fellow; Daphne referred to her, coldly, as the Other Grandmother. The one thing he remembers is that the woman was married to someone distinguished. That name he did know—used to know—and with some effort he could probably jimmy it loose from the lower mine shafts of memory. But surely the woman’s dead by now. What is the point?