Dear God. Mal’s contempt and resistance all over again; like son, like father. (Will Lucinda face her own dwindling with so little grace?)
“Zoe will come every day for the first week,” she reminds him. “She says if you do the work, you could be climbing stairs by Christmas, even sooner.” She sounds like she’s talking to a child. “Do you want to lie down? Are you hungry?”
“Calls,” he says.
Over Zeke’s tilted head, Christina rolls her eyes. “Dad, you’re not up to making calls. Everybody’s rooting for you, and David’s coming by tomorrow to fill you in on what you’ve missed, but as I said before, you’ve got to take it easy.”
Zeke begins to move on his own, but one of the walker’s wheels lodges in a crevice between two of the skewed antique floorboards. Stubbornly, he pushes it forward until it tips and falls, taking him with it.
“Dad!” Christina grabs for an arm while Lucinda cries out incoherently. Tears come to her eyes.
They get Zeke and the walker upright. “Sit, Zeke. I’ll get you a snack,” says Lucinda.
Once he’s seated in his chair by the fireplace, she goes to the kitchen. She leans over the sink and grasps the edges. Where is her strength, for heaven’s sake? She longs for the bygone readiness of prayer. She glances at the eggcup on the windowsill, the nest for her rosary. The beads are furry with dust.
Christina is right behind her. “Mom, Greg has a work dinner I can’t get out of. I have to leave in fifteen minutes.”
“Go, sweetheart. Don’t worry about us.”
“But I do.”
“Well, I give you permission to stop. Zoe comes first thing tomorrow morning. How badly can I mess up in that short a time?”
“I’ll get his things out of the car.”
Lucinda cannot remember the last time Christina came to visit when she didn’t have a pressing engagement to take her away ever so slightly sooner than would be ideal. Even now that Christina’s three daughters are grown, one in college, one in law school, one teaching English in India—soccer games, teacher conferences, orthodontist appointments relics of the past—still the obligations come thick and fast. Maybe Christina’s profession has conditioned her to guard even her “unbillable” time in units of five or ten minutes.
You are unkind and paranoid, Lucinda tells herself. Your daughter is a busy woman with a rewarding and complicated life. Wasn’t that the sort of life Lucinda had until a few years ago, when she stepped away from The House, turning it over to a director who wanted to “diversify” its mission?
She starts to shave slices from the sharp cheddar Zeke loves—then realizes that he’s not supposed to eat dairy products in the afternoon, because of some pill he’s taking. She puts the cheese back and takes out cured olives and a box of cranberry-studded crackers she found at the gourmet shop.
She hears Zeke calling incoherently from the living room. She answers that she’s on her way. She remembers the sound of cows and their calves bellowing back and forth from one barn to another during the weeks of weaning. When the last of the herd was auctioned off, she was glad to be done with that annual source of sadness.
He is still in the chair, pointing toward the phone. “Shejiz,” he says.
“Zeke?”
“MEH-shejiz.”
“Yes, I’ll check the messages,” she says. He must have noticed the blinking light. At least he’s observant. (She collects these precious positive signs like pearls scattered from a broken necklace: always searching for more, fearing that some may have slipped between floorboards, gone for good.)
She pushes PLAY. David, Zeke’s current intern, wants to know when he should come by. Zoe is confirming the first PT appointment. Jonathan wants them to know he’s thinking of them and will call tomorrow. He’s going out to a dinner party with Cyril as soon as he finishes teaching his last seminar that day. If Lucinda needs to reach him, she can try his cell. (He puts a meaningful stress on need; in other words, not if she merely wants to hear her son’s voice.)
Is Zeke tipping over or simply leaning toward the machine, to listen? Lucinda is relieved when he asks if there are other messages from before. His speech is still slurred, but she’s become a good translator over the past few days.
“That’s it. There’s mail, but nothing dire. David’s dealing with that.” She thinks again about Jasper Noonan. That message was specifically for her.
Lucinda returns to the kitchen and pours a glass of orange juice. She carries it to the living room along with the crackers and olives. She puts the food and drink on the small table beside Zeke’s chair, pulling it around so that it’s right in front of him. His hands quaver badly as he picks up a cracker, but he gets it to his mouth. When he lifts the glass of juice, it’s all Lucinda can do to keep from asking if she should hold it for him. A few drops escape, falling on his corduroy jacket. He doesn’t notice.
The grandfather clock chimes six times. Lucinda watches Zeke and tries to calm her face. He is looking around the room.
Except when he is reading, Zeke does not care for silence. This is the hour when, if he’s home, Lucinda listens to his rundown of the day’s feuds and compromises, the absurdities of legislation, the toadying of lobbyists. He always wants her opinion. He always asks about her day, too.
She feels the threat of tears. What will she do with all this unfamiliar silence? How will she fill it, with what kind of small talk? Or is she supposed to let Zeke’s brain rest, renew its focus? The problem with all this silence is that it tempts her deep into the catacombs of memory when she has no desire to loiter in the past; she wants to be assured of the future.
Why isn’t the phone ringing? Shouldn’t colleagues and friends who know Zeke is home be calling to check in, ask what they can do, when they can visit? Of course, they do not have nearly as many friends as they did the last time they faced the sort of crisis that summons casseroles and vows of dedicated prayer. Too many friends have died, many in the last year or two.
“Feez,” he says quietly. He’s glaring at the wall of paintings.
Help me, thinks Lucinda. “I heard Joe’s going to have a new show next month, at a gallery in Boston,” she says. “He’s offered to have us to his studio before he sends the paintings down. He’s been doing watercolors of Lake Champlain.”
Zeke frowns. “Towfeez.”
“The trophies? They’re in the den, you know that.” Is she supposed to tell him what he ought to know? “Did you want to look at them?”
He scowls at her. “Yeh, know zhat, Oothinda. Just …”
She waits.
“Tha letter. Moozeum.” He smirks. “Moo Zeum. Hah.”
Yes, the letter: from a dairy museum run by the Cabot people. They wrote a month ago, asking whether Zeke might consider letting them visit to look at family belongings related to the showing of their cattle; the museum is planning an exhibit on the history of agrarian fairs across the state.
“I’m glad you reminded me.” Then she does, because she can’t help it, start to cry. “Oh, Zeke, I’m glad you’re home,” she says, though how false she feels when she recalls what she was thinking at the hospital.
She had waited in the lounge where she was directed to wait. Zeke’s tennis partner, Mike, who’d been the one to phone Lucinda, had to get back to the capitol as soon as she arrived. By herself, Lucinda had waited another half hour, staring out the window at the parking lot. She noticed how many cars there were in dull, dispiriting shades of slate, green, and gold. Two red cars, a lime-green VW bug—but what had become of orange and purple cars, the many brilliant blues? Hadn’t cars been more colorful in the past, and what did this mean about the world she lived in?
Finally, a young doctor opened the door to the lounge. “Mrs. Burns?”
He crossed the room and beckoned her to sit beside him on a stale-smelling couch. He introduced himself and shook her hand. He said, “I have good news, Mrs. Burns. Your husband is going to survive. I need to warn you, though, that we have yet to see the extent of
the damage. He’s stable and sedated right now. We’ll be doing some scans of his brain. Even if we see significant changes, recovery is unpredictable.” He paused. “You can visit him briefly, if you like. But maybe you want to call your children first?”
Christina and Jonathan. It hadn’t occurred to her, in that suspended hour, to call either one of them.
The doctor smiled. “I’ve got to tell you, Senator Burns is a vigorous guy for his age. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but I’m feeling pretty optimistic. Hey, I’ve voted for him every time since I was old enough to vote.” He laughs. “Okay. From the look on your face, Mrs. Burns, I can tell you think that was yesterday, but it wasn’t. Your husband’s in good hands with me, I promise.”
She had yet to say a single word. This doctor, however good his hands, however many elections he’d ticked off Zeke’s name on the ballot, could tell nothing from the look on her face. He had no idea what had crossed her mind during the few seconds it had taken him to enter and cross the room. In that brief time, Lucinda had recognized a shocking flash of hope that the doctor would tell her Zeke was gone, passed on, dead. It was only a flash, fleeting and terrifying, like a bat swooping through the room (so fast it might have been a mirage, a vague disturbance in peripheral vision), but she will never forget it. Father Tom, endlessly merciful, would have said that what she’d felt was the desire for Zeke’s suffering, not his life, to end.
Sometimes she wonders if Father Tom was the supporting beam of her faith, if it began to slump as soon as he retired. But no; Lucinda knows the precise moment her certainty about the cosmos—or, more truthfully, her place in it—cracked and collapsed.
Five years ago, she was in Montpelier, heading to meet Zeke for lunch. An overweight, angry-looking young woman was walking toward her. Lucinda was careful not to meet her eyes—mentally, she had already passed the woman—but as they drew close, the woman stopped and blocked her path. “You.”
“Me?” said Lucinda, insipidly.
“Yeah. You. You ruined my life, you know.” The woman’s expression slid from menace toward contempt. “You and your fucking—oh, wait, your motherfucking mission. To fill the world with babies. Jesus. Meddling like that.” She pursed her mouth as if to spit. Lucinda flinched, shielding her face.
The woman did not spit. She simply stared for a moment, then smirked dismissively. “You can bet I’m not the only one, either.” Then she passed Lucinda, knocking her with a shoulder, setting her off balance. Lucinda stood in the middle of the sidewalk, immobile for several seconds, before navigating the last half block. At the restaurant (Zeke was, as expected, late), she went into the ladies’ room and dry-heaved over a toilet, unable to vomit or even cry.
She did not tell Zeke, or anyone else, about the incident; Father Tom was long gone by then. Especially disturbing was her failure to recognize the woman, yet she knew instinctively that the assault was not a case of mistaken identity. At The House, they made every attempt to follow up with the young mothers after they completed whatever tutoring or training programs they’d been guided through. Inevitably, a number of the women moved away or lost touch. In a few cases, Lucinda knew that the children had ended up in foster care. Of course this made her sad. But not until that day had she come face-to-face with a failure of her intentions—a flesh-and-blood failure.
You cannot save every soul, she’d admonished herself. What a grandiose notion! Yet she could not help feeling that something false within her had been unmasked: some naïveté rooted in her safe, relatively easy childhood. Since then, any poorly dressed or hostile-looking youngish woman heading in her direction makes Lucinda’s heart race, makes her cross the street or turn aside, pretending to look in a shopwindow or hunt for a phantom object in her purse.
Meddling like that. This is the phrase that crushed her.
When Lucinda was a child, her father was the manager of the local savings bank, entrusted with Zeke’s father’s accounts. Not many people in northern Vermont, back then, had trust funds for their children before they were even in high school, but Ezekiel Burns Sr. (known as Zeke the Elder, once a junior came along) had a way with investments. Most of his dividends he poured into buying more acreage, enlarging his herd (his fanciest breed stock imported from England), and advocating what businessmen would one day refer to as “branding”—not the kind that left hieroglyphic scars on cowhide. He traveled a lecture circuit down the East Coast and through the Midwest, promoting the premium products that came from Jersey cows, helping farmers form cooperatives. He orchestrated symposia on animal husbandry, everything from quality of feed and barn hygiene to studbook record keeping and show-ring standards. People who liked him called him enlightened; people who didn’t called him slick. Lucinda never saw him in what she thought of as farmer’s clothing. Milking, plowing, haying, repairing equipment: all such tasks, by the time she first laid eyes on her future father-in-law, were delegated to hired hands and to his sons.
All three Burns boys learned the manual rudiments of farming, down to castration and composting. Even after the lean years of the Depression (during which Zeke the Elder made a point of holding payroll steady), they had chores before and after school. Known collectively around town as the Heirs, they were pleasant-looking, smart, and well mannered. Zeke the Elder intended that all three should go to college, as he had not.
They were older than Lucinda by eight, four, and two years. The one she couldn’t take her eyes off was Matthew, the middle, dark-haired son, the one who looked most like his beautiful mother. (“Gypsy beauty,” Lucinda’s mother called the look of Mrs. Burns: hair true black, eyes a penetrating blue.) When Lucinda was twelve, she told her parents she wanted to join 4-H. Her mother laughed. They lived in town; the only animal they owned was Duke, her father’s aging boxer. Lucinda told them she had always wanted to raise rabbits (though she’d just come up with the notion). Her father approved of it as a financial enterprise, a lesson in business—so he and Lucinda’s older brother, Patrick, built a hutch in the backyard. With babysitting money, she bought herself a pair of Harlequins. They wasted no time in living up to their reproductive reputation.
As Lucinda had learned from an interview in the town paper, Zeke the Elder excused Matthew from milking duties in exchange for his attending the 4-H meetings in the town-hall basement to help the youngest members with their projects. (“Contributions to one’s community are an essential part of any sound business,” stated Zeke the Elder.)
At Lucinda’s first meeting, she stood quietly against a wall and listened to Matthew chat with a third-grade boy about “converting feed to flavor,” whether you were talking milk or meat; about how you could guess a cow’s diet by looking at her hide. Just before he left the meeting, she asked if the feed-to-flavor principle applied to rabbits. “I’m sure it would,” he told her, “but I’ve got to confess, I don’t know rabbits from raccoons. I’ll nose around, though.” He came to the next meeting with pamphlets from the co-op where his father bought the grain that kept his cows’ hides so glossy, made them gleam in the sun as they grazed his carefully seeded pastures.
Matthew gave Lucinda no more attention than he gave the other kids. She wasn’t foolish, and she certainly hoped she wasn’t vain; she knew she was too young to hope for more than a friendly hand, but a few years might change all that. The next summer, when she was thirteen, he volunteered to help her build a second hutch to house the kits she planned to sell. (Which ones became stew and which became pets, she didn’t like to know.) Her brother teased her relentlessly. Patrick was on the high-school baseball team with Zeke the Younger; he threatened to expose her crush. She didn’t care. If Patrick said anything to Zeke, how could it hurt? Zeke was just the little brother.
The following spring, Matthew helped her start a vegetable garden from seed, but over the summer she had to miss 4-H. When her father’s secretary left to have a baby, he decided that Lucinda could fill in for a month or two. He was a “modern” father, he maintained; Lucinda should go to college, aim t
o earn a living—though of course she’d want a family, too.
Confined to the stuffy bank—the window fans doing little more than move the hot, syrupy air in a vortex—Lucinda saw Mr. Burns at least once a week, when he came to withdraw pay for the farmhands. She listened hard to his casual conversations with her father or the teller, but she heard nothing new about Matthew. She couldn’t wait for the fall, when she would start high school. There, she’d see him in the halls; she would know if he had a girlfriend.
Matthew was a senior. He smiled or waved whenever they passed between classes, and if she timed it right, she could walk out right behind him at the end of the day. He and Zeke sometimes had one of the farm’s trucks, and they’d give her a lift into town.
Their older brother, Aaron, was up in Burlington, halfway through college. The village hummed that fall with news of his engagement to Dora Keene, whose father ran the Keene Canteen, the sandwich and provisions shop. While waiting for Aaron to return with his degree, Dora waited on her father’s customers: on Aaron and Matthew’s father, on Lucinda’s father, on teenagers who colonized the counter on Saturdays, drinking shakes made with the foamy, sun-colored milk from Aaron’s family’s well-nourished cows.
The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor that December. Aaron, almost the minute he arrived home for Christmas, enlisted in the army. Matthew vowed that at the end of the school year he would sign up, too. Zeke swore he’d join them the minute he turned eighteen—if his brothers and their friends hadn’t won the war already.
June was a time of sudden exodus: it seemed as if all the boys fresh out of high school were being spirited away en masse. Later that summer, Lucinda ran into Matthew’s mother at the Canteen. Summoning every ounce of courage, she asked Mrs. Burns if she might have Matthew’s mailing address. She wondered if Mrs. Burns looked down on her because she was Catholic, though theirs was a community where how hard you worked mattered much more than where you worshipped. Mrs. Burns told her Matt had written home to say that training was tough. Never having been away from the farm for more than a few days, he was pretty homesick. “I’d say the postmark alone will cheer him up,” she told Lucinda as she wrote the address on the back of a coupon.