After a moment, she said, “I’m sorry if I was too blunt.”
“It’s me who’s sorry,” he said. “Sorry for you. That’s so awful.”
“Yes. It is. But you know what? You have an aunt and an uncle—Mal’s sister and brother. I know they’ll be dying to meet you.”
“They know about me?”
“No!” she said. “Not yet. But how could they not? Want to meet you.”
Though what if everything Kit had to absorb now—gay father, dead of AIDS—made him change his mind about meeting even Lucinda? “Please forgive me if I assume too much,” she said.
“Wow.” He sighed loudly. “There’s no book on how to do this, is there?”
“Probably there is. But if there isn’t, I won’t be the one to write it.” Why was she making a joke of something so serious?
He was quiet for a few seconds. “I need to tell you that my mother doesn’t know I’m doing this. Finding you. She’s never wanted that.”
“You know what?” said Lucinda. “I’m yours to find. I always have been.” She resisted the urge to say that a part of her has been waiting, wishing, to be found. Is that why she’s outlived so many of her friends?
He whispered something she didn’t catch.
“Your mother will understand, Kit. I remember her. She’ll be all right. She’s—if she’s the girl I remember, she adapts to things. She couldn’t have raised you otherwise.” That part was true. But as for what Daphne wanted or would understand, that didn’t matter anymore. Lucinda felt a surge of a fierce, mean emotion: triumph.
“I don’t know, but here we are, right?”
“Yes, here we are.”
“So where do we go?”
“Toward knowing each other. I hope. If that’s what you still want.”
“Of course I do,” said Kit.
“So you,” said Lucinda. “You live in New Jersey. You’re married.”
“We have two children. Twins.”
Lucinda felt her triumph give way to wonder. “Twins!” she exclaimed.
So many Thanksgivings in Lucinda’s life are entwined with momentous events or revelations. She and Zeke announced their engagement over a just-carved turkey in this very house, during her senior year of college; a year later, they announced her first pregnancy. (Dora had two children by then.)
Eight Novembers passed without incident until the year in which Zeke the Elder died of a stroke the week before Thanksgiving. The meal at the farmhouse was canceled; it fell to Lucinda and Zeke, with three young children underfoot, to fit everyone into their modest house in town. Subdued but still hungry, people ate off their laps in three rooms; on one arm of her old sofa, now upstairs in the boys’ bedroom, she can still make out gravy stains where Matthew’s son upended his plate.
The next Thanksgiving was the first one Lucinda hosted at the farm. Zeke’s mother lasted alone in the house for three months before she confessed that she felt frightened living alone. The den became her bedroom.
Over yet another Thanksgiving, his first visit home from his first year of college, Mal came out to Lucinda. The two of them were washing dishes while everyone else slept off the excess food and drink. (That expression, “coming out,” was as foreign and irrelevant to her then as Tunisia had been before Aaron Burns died on a beach in that country.)
Mal had not gone to Juilliard. Because he hardly spoke to Lucinda during the year he worked for the record producer in Burlington, she was never able to talk to him about his decision to go to the University of Vermont instead. Zeke had told him about Lucinda’s support of Daphne, her promise to help with the baby however she could. It was hard, after that, for Lucinda not to see Mal’s turning away from his music as revenge, the dashing of her fantasies. This was absurd, she knew, yet the resentment Mal felt toward his mother was real.
“He might never lay eyes on that kid,” Zeke said to Lucinda after she received news of Christopher’s birth, “and still it will change his whole life.”
“He’s too young to see it clearly yet,” she said.
“See what clearly? That his mother wants to make sure he understands the consequences of giving in to human temptation? What he’s not too young to do, Lucinda, is cut you off from his life.”
“Sounds as if you wouldn’t care.”
“Frankly, I’m staying out of it. What goes on between you and Mal is beyond my powers of negotiation.” Zeke’s sarcasm silenced her.
The only sympathetic man in her life was Father Tom, who told her to exercise humility in the face of her son’s withdrawal. “God isn’t the only one who works in mysterious ways,” he said, smiling at the truth become cliché. “Our children do as well. Mal is a talented young man, and he will find his path. Perhaps he’ll teach music. Perhaps he simply knows that he’s not mature enough yet for life in a big city. New York—well, New York! When I go there myself, I feel like an ant. Which, I admit, is a useful perspective.”
Was that it? Had Mal simply wanted to stay near home? Lucinda would never know. When he finally spoke to her about something meaningful, the news he shared toppled anything so trivial as where he had chosen to go to college.
They stood side by side at the sink, the usual wash-and-dry assembly line. She asked him about a class he was taking in European cultural history, which he’d brought up over dinner in a conversation about French movies with Zeke. Silent at first—had he heard her question over the running water?—he finished drying one of the fragile, gold-rimmed wineglasses and set it aside with its mates. He put down the towel and faced her. “Mom, I don’t want to talk about European history. I’m behind on the paper I’m writing about Vienna, so I’d rather not go there anyway.”
“To Vienna?” she joked nervously.
“Funny.”
“What should we talk about?” She didn’t care what they talked about. After months of ignoring her letters, of calling home to speak only with his father, her son was finally, freely speaking with her. She had been prepared for him to dry the dishes without a word, then go upstairs to bed.
“I want to talk about my homosexuality. Or I need to. I don’t mean to shock you, but there’s no other way to do this. I’m not going to give you a bunch of wink-wink hints. Dad knows already. I talked to him Tuesday, when he picked me up. Moms are supposed to be easier—most guys start with their moms, or that’s what I hear—but not everybody’s mom is … religious the way you are. I know you’re thinking I’m damned to hell. If that’s what you believe, I can’t change it. If you want to talk about God, you’re wasting your time. Sorry.”
She wasn’t thinking about the fate of Mal’s soul—not yet. She was thinking that he had told Zeke two days before he told her. More upsetting, Zeke had said nothing to her, had not even seemed out of sorts the past two days (though she had not been alone with him at bedtime those two nights, staying up in the kitchen to cook).
She said, “Mal, sweetheart, I’m glad you can talk to me about this.” She knew she sounded anything but glad. She was thinking, or this was the gist of the storm occupying the space where her brain had been, You presume a lot, speaking to me so harshly after breaking my heart for so long with your silence.
She sat down at the kitchen table. “Please sit, Mal. I need you to sit down, honey.”
For once, her most obstinate child obeyed her. “I asked Dad how he thought you’d take this. He took it better than I thought he would. Though maybe that’s politics. I mean, he has to accept a lot of people for what they are, people other people would avoid. It’s their opinions he wants to change.”
Lucinda assumed Mal wanted her to laugh, so she did.
He didn’t even smile. He said, “I realized I needed to tell you this, now, for a couple of reasons.”
“You’re in love with someone?”
“No. I’m not getting ready to bring someone home to introduce to the family, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
She pictured him walking through the door of the farmhouse with another young man.
How could she face that? Had Zeke, who took the news so calmly, imagined such a scene?
“Did you just realize this?” she said.
“No.” He looked directly at her, and she had to struggle to meet his gaze, which had steered clear of hers for so long. Her son’s gaze, when serious, was almost foreboding. “How long I’ve known isn’t important. Part of why I took the year off was to try to … get clear about it before … well, whatever comes next.”
“But Daphne—” Immediately, Lucinda knew she’d said the wrong thing.
Mal frowned. “That was a mistake. A mistake in every way. I am never going to be a father, and I made that exponentially clear to her. So by involving yourself …” When he sighed, he sounded so heartbreakingly boyish. Lucinda thought of Father Tom’s advice: to accept Mal’s anger with humility.
He slumped in his chair and teased at the fringe of a woven place-mat. “I wasn’t going to talk about this. Even though, I guess, this is one of the reasons I needed to tell you. The fantasies you probably have.” He sat up straight and pressed his long hands—hands God had made to play a musical instrument, Lucinda was sure of it—flat against both sides of his long face. He squeezed his eyes shut and mussed his hair, as if waking himself up. He made a sound of muted desperation. When he finally looked at her, he said, “I’m not making as much sense as I planned to. Well, does one ever? And come to think of it, not much of the past year has made any sense to me.”
“But you are,” she said. “Making sense.” She wanted only to keep him talking.
“I thought I would never forgive you for what you did, but I love you, Mom, so not forgiving you isn’t an option. Life is too complicated right now, or maybe too simple. I’d have crashed and burned at Juilliard—or anywhere I had to go on doing nothing but drilling myself mad trying to be a Great Musician.”
But you are, you could be, she wanted to argue.
“I need to be selfish now, and I need to be honest, too. Steer clear of bullshit. But now you know what it is I’m concentrating on.”
“Life,” said Lucinda, and when she said it, she was filled with admiration. She realized her son was more valiant than foolish, whatever he was doing with the gifts he had, even if he set them aside for a time, hid them under the proverbial bushel.
“Well, Mom, you could put it that way,” he said. “That’s one way to put it.” He smiled at her, with genuine if cautious warmth. It felt to Lucinda as if they were meeting each other on a narrow bridge across a wide river or canyon that had divided them far longer than the year of wounded feelings. “Let’s finish doing the wineglasses,” he said, “and let’s go to bed. And let’s actually get some sleep. No quilting allowed. I’ll be listening for the machine.”
“No quilting,” she said. “I promise.”
Cyril’s arrival, late on Tuesday night, seems to intensify Jonathan’s joie de vivre. Lucinda is already in the sofa bed (with its wonderfully dense new mattress) when she hears the two men enter the house, Jonathan making more noise shushing Cyril than Cyril might have made had he been talking.
She puts on her robe and goes to greet them. She hugs Cyril in the dim front hall. She says quietly, “It would take an airstrike to wake Zeke. Come into the kitchen and have a cup of tea. A glass of wine?”
She sees Cyril hesitate but decide to accept, perhaps out of courtesy.
“It’s only nine-thirty back in Berkeley,” he says once they’ve shut the kitchen door. “I’m still wide awake. So wine would be fantastic, thanks.”
“Aren’t you exhausted by that ghastly security nonsense you went through in Boston?” says Jonathan, pulling his chair close to Cyril’s. Lucinda pours them each a glass of red wine. Jonathan pushes his glass away, but Cyril takes a sip and nods with pleasure.
“Hey, they didn’t lose my luggage. That’s always something.”
“That’s cause for rejoicing,” says Jonathan. “These days, I think the airlines want you to feel grateful just for arriving at your destination alive.”
Cyril laughs quietly but looks at Lucinda. “How’s he doing?”
“Making progress. I think. He’s discouraged about how hard it is to express himself. But it’s looking like he’s all there—his mind—as if he just has to push his way out of a stuffy, windowless room.”
“To have his faculties intact—that’s a real blessing.”
Lucinda feels genuinely liked by Cyril—she likes him, too—but sometimes she has the sense that he cannot stop thinking of her as “religious” and taking care not to offend her. When the two men called, on speakerphone, to announce that they were going to get married, Zeke pointed out that same-sex marriage had been legal in California but not anymore; did they realize that?
“Dad, I think we know the laws of our own state,” said Jonathan, “especially as they relate to biases that affect us directly. Biases we refuse to condone. We know that the state would see what we’re doing as a commitment ceremony, but to us it will be a real wedding. Your wedding to Mom in the church? That was just as ‘symbolic’ to the state of Vermont as this one will be to California.”
“It’s not symbolic if you believe it’s a sacrament,” Cyril said at once. And then it sounded as if he was leaning closer to the phone. “Lucinda, I just want to say that I respect your Catholic views on this matter. I know you’re pretty liberal, which I love about you, but I don’t want you to be uncomfortable. There’s this one priest—I guess he’s an outlaw of sorts, but he holds Mass in the Castro—well, I was thinking that maybe we’d have him be part of the ceremony.”
“I don’t want you doing that for my sake,” said Lucinda. “It’s your day, and I’ll happily play whatever role you like.”
“Mother of the groom,” chimed in Jonathan. “That’s a no-brainer. The orchid corsage, the great hat, the usual.”
“Mother of a groom,” said Cyril.
“Of the older groom,” said Jonathan. “The one who was almost an old maid.”
“Oh, stop,” said Cyril, who was five years younger. “We’re both getting long in the tooth, and the point is, Zeke and Lucinda, that’s something we want to continue to do together.”
The wedding took place last July, on a grassy hillside with a dizzying view of San Francisco Bay, Jonathan and Cyril wearing white suits. Lucinda liked Cyril’s parents. His mother was English, with the muted accent of someone who had lived in the States for most of her life; the father was an architect. At the rehearsal dinner, Lucinda sensed that the fathers of the two grooms were watching each other, quietly competing, convinced that many of the guests wondered how they honestly felt about watching their sons marry other men. Each gave a toast that was almost embarrassing in its self-conscious balance of humor and liberal-minded bravado.
Even when Lucinda had asked Zeke, in their suite at the Claremont Hotel that morning, how he honestly did feel about the wedding, he had smiled tersely and said, “With all we’ve been through, like it or not, we were catapulted long, long ago into a world no one could have pictured back in our 4-H days.”
Was he referring to Mal, going through the hell-on-earth of AIDS, the disease itself and then the political fallout (for her personal; for Zeke professional, too), or was that her imagination? Was it pathetic that nearly every intense emotion she had experienced over the past two decades circled back to the life and death of her older son? He was dead by the time Jonathan came out to her—Mal’s death spurred his confession—and as Lucinda lurched through the days of her horribly altered life, she would sometimes stop to wish that the greatest challenge of her life, and of Zeke’s, had been facing up to having two gay sons, but two gay sons who would outlive them. That—oh that would have been easy!
Zeke is sitting on the edge of the sofa bed, his walker beside him. “Honey? Are you all right?” Lucinda sits up.
“Ruckish in air,” he says, but he gives her the one-sided smile she’s beginning to accept as a version of normal.
How she slept through it, while Zeke did not, is a wonder to
Lucinda. Maybe because, finally, she’s sleeping on a comfortable mattress. Zeke is right: there’s quite a ruckus coming from the kitchen. Laughing, singing, the repeated roar of a blender. It’s seven o’clock in the morning.
With painstaking care, Zeke pulls his legs onto the mattress and lies down beside Lucinda. He sighs. His hands lie limp on the front of his thighs. His eyes are closed, so she stares at him briefly. Zeke is an old man, his throat a rumple of flesh, his face dappled with nutmeg age spots. Were they so prominent before now, or is it just that he’s pale from lack of sun?
He will have to retire. She’s suddenly certain of this; is he? Less than a month ago, one reporter called him an “inspiringly vigorous octogenarian.”
That Zeke’s mind may be as sharp as ever isn’t entirely good news; he is lucid enough to be despondent about his diminished prospects. When the doctor agreed to discharge Zeke earlier than he would have liked, he warned Lucinda about patients who set impossibly high standards for themselves. “The all-or-nothing patients are the hard ones,” he said. “Sometimes, if they can’t return to what they see as ‘one hundred percent,’ they give up, and then they go into a downward spiral. You have to help him be realistic.”
Lucinda pats Zeke on one knee. “I’ll be right back. Sleep if you want.”
When she enters the kitchen, she says to Jonathan, “I know I said your father sleeps soundly, but not this soundly.”
He and Cyril turn toward her from the long wooden counter where they are chopping vegetables, grating cheese, and filling bowls. The oven is on, and a dozen serving platters are out on the table. “Mom, we got carried away.”
“We’re so sorry, Lucinda,” says Cyril.
“Never mind. Zeke’s in the den now.”
“Can we play music?” asks Jonathan. “We love cooking to music. And I found that great collection in your sewing room.”