“Please,” she says, “no more bombshells.”
His expression, yet again, confounds her. Does he mean to look so serious, as if he is about to break terrible news to her?
“Zeke, you’re scaring me.”
He hands her the envelope. “Open it.”
Lucinda holds the envelope in her lap and closes her eyes briefly. She feels the warmth of Zeke’s thigh against hers. Her hands are cold from her time in the barn; there were no gloves in the pockets of the coat.
“All right then.” It’s one of those interoffice messenger envelopes, printed with columns of lines on which to write the names of the serial recipients, closed with a red string that winds around a small cardboard disk. She hasn’t laid eyes on one of these objects in ages. Does anyone use them anymore?
She pulls out a sheaf of photographs, some in color, some black and white. A young boy on a sports field, wearing a baseball glove. The same boy, a bit older—thirteen? fourteen?—eating ice cream with another boy, in a playground. And then, again, wearing a black robe and mortarboard, mingling with other young graduates under a tree.
The boy is never quite facing the photographer, never quite close enough to the camera to see all that clearly, but by the fifth and final photo, Lucinda knows who he is, because she’s recently seen pictures of him, on her computer, as an older but still-youthful man.
“When did these come?” she asks Zeke. “I don’t understand. Did David pick these up with the mail when he came by yesterday? I asked him to leave the mail on the front table.”
“Not David. Not mail.”
“I don’t understand.”
Zeke seems to be inspecting his hands, which he holds in his lap. She can tell that he is trying hard to keep them still. He says, very slowly, to get each word right, “I paid a detective. I paid to know. Back when.”
Lucinda continues to look at the photograph of Kit the high-school graduate. “Zeke.”
“For Mal.”
“What do you mean, ‘for Mal’? What are you talking about, Zeke?”
“Mal wanted to know.”
“He never told me that!”
Zeke’s expression is unmistakably sad. “When he got sick. Was when.”
Lucinda picks up the envelope and the photographs and tosses them back in her husband’s lap. She gets off the mattress and stands. “What are you telling me? That you and Mal, behind my back, tracked down this boy, photographed him, kept some sort of … dossier? A secret file?”
“Yes.” Zeke watches her, one of his eyes nearly closed, the muscles too tired to hold the lid open. Lucinda thinks that if he hadn’t had a stroke, if she’d found this out and he were well, she might have hit him. She has never hit him.
“For Mal,” he says. “Not for you.”
Lucinda begins to cry. “This is the worst Thanksgiving of my life.” She turns away from Zeke. But she doesn’t want to go upstairs; she is afraid of running into Jonathan when she feels so undone, so betrayed.
“Not, it is not,” Zeke says forcefully. “Bullshit.” That word comes out clearly.
Lucinda faces him again.
“You are being shelfish. Sel-fish,” he corrects himself, spitting as he nails down the consonant. “Saint Lucinda. Don’t like you thish way.”
“Don’t hurt me more than you have,” she says.
“Lishen to me,” says Zeke. “Mal wanted to know. Know the child was well. Alive. Cared for. You undershtand me? Under stand?”
“Of course I understand. Does that mean I’m supposed to feel just fine about this?”
She cannot look at him. She looks instead at the rows of trophies in the case that was moved from the living room decades ago. Some of the trophies are old enough to have been won by Aaron. Why do they still display them? They should have been put in the attic a long time ago; sold as novelties; melted down.
“You think,” says Zeke, “you failed as a mother. Wrong about that. Wrong. And wrong that you should have … know … everyshing. Thing.”
She realizes that the anger she hears in Zeke is directed mostly at himself, not at her: at the frustration of not being able to speak freely and clearly. It occurs to her that he is the one most unsettled by having to live with these long silences. How do you peacefully contain a self with opinions that cannot simply tumble forth? Words for Zeke have never required exertion. She sits down beside him again and rests a hand on his nearest leg. “Stop talking for a minute,” she says. “Just relax for a minute.”
“Keep talking if I want.”
“I know what you’re going to tell me, and please spare yourself the energy. Mal is gone, and Jonathan is here. Christina, too, of course.” She sighs.
Something else occurs to her then. Christina is the child who has kept the fewest secrets from her—who has told her more than Lucinda thought she wanted to know. She wishes above all that she did not know about Christina’s abortion—yet if a mother thinks she somehow deserves to know everything, then she will have to know things that keep her up at night, won’t she? Jonathan, her youngest child, moved the farthest away and, for the longest time, kept his life a cipher. Now here he is, making sure she knows about the things that matter most to him. The people who matter most.
“Allowed, you allowed to be angry at Mal,” says Zeke. “Don’t at me.”
“But you’re my husband,” she says. And what does she mean by this? That he is the one who deserves her anger? That it’s his job to tell her everything he knows about their children? Is it?
She thinks of the last months of Mal’s life, when he was weak, so thin it was an agony just to look at him. She remembers how manic she became with forced optimism, determined faith, exuberant wit. Each night, she fell into bed exhausted from maintaining the bright, energetic façade necessary to endure every minute of every day. By then, Mal had no job, fewer and fewer of his friends came to visit, and he rarely left his apartment—oh, that beautiful apartment, the home of someone who had seen the world and knew exactly what he liked, what memories he wanted to behold every day in the objects and patterns and books around him. That winter, Lucinda moved to New York and found a separate place to live. She saw herself as her son’s handmaiden, his final confidant. This was a delusion, and his last act toward her was a ruse.
To give himself the time to take his life, without fear of her barging in, he arranged for a good friend—Fenno McLeod, the man who really did take care of Mal at the end, who was his final confidant—to escort Lucinda to an elegant party, a fund-raiser of some kind, dinner and dancing. Her son, who claimed he was sending them in his place, knew how much she loved dancing.
If Mal had thought her capable of forgiveness, of letting him go, he might have told her the truth, given her a chance to say good-bye. But he was right: she would never have given in. She would have guarded him against himself, fiercely. She would have thrown away all his pills, planted herself at the door of his bedroom, stayed awake for days on end, anything to keep him alive: to keep him. She would have claimed it was about honoring God’s will; that, too, would have been a ruse. It would have been about honoring her will, her earthly possessiveness.
“I am a terrible mother,” she says to Zeke.
“Moments we all fail,” he says. “All us. Fall short.”
She remembers her first formal date with Zeke, when he drove to Middlebury to pick her up at her dorm and take her out for dinner. It was during the spring of her freshman year. Over bowls of Indian pudding, he asked her what she thought about his never having gone to war; if she thought he was, to any degree, a coward. He asked her to be completely honest.
The question came out of nowhere, with a blunt, awkward urgency. They had been discussing something suitably bland for a first date—her classes, the gossip from their town, his father’s success at business—so she was shocked. Later, she realized it was a frighteningly intimate question. But what she said that night was “You did your duty by staying on the farm. Someone had to do that, and you were the one. I hope
nobody tries to make you feel ashamed of it, because that’s the person who’d be a coward.” She was relieved to have kept her composure, but did she really believe this?
He told her she hadn’t answered his question. Did she wish he’d been tested by war? Wouldn’t it have made him seem braver? Didn’t women feel safer with a man who’d had to fight for his life?
“Maybe that’s true. A little,” she said. “But I’m glad you’ve never killed anyone. That would scare me some, to think about that.” This was true.
When he drove away, after seeing her back to her dorm, she didn’t know if she would hear from him again.
She says now, “I’m cold. Let’s get under the blankets here. No, stay where you are.” She fusses with the quilt pinned under Zeke’s weakened legs, pulling it out from beneath his feet, up and over them both.
“Jamas?” he asks her.
“You want to change? I’m too tired. Way, way too tired.”
“Shleep like this,” he says.
She reaches over and turns off the lamp on the desk. (Is that where Zeke kept the photographs? Were they there all along? Did he sometimes take them out and look at them; wish, in his secular fashion, for the same things she prayed for when she knelt between the pews at Saint Joseph’s?)
“Cyril leaves tomorrow night, but Jonathan will stay for a couple of days.” She thought of the outburst upstairs. “I hope.”
“Thinks I like playing chess. Makes me.”
“You don’t?”
“Don’t.”
“Zoe thinks it’s good for your mind.”
“Mind’s fine. God shake.”
True, thinks Lucinda. His mind is fine. She says, “So maybe the three of us can have an adventure. If Jonathan drives, we could go to Montreal for lunch. Have some really good French food. Is that too ambitious?”
“Wanted to take you to Italy again. Idea I had … for shish.”
“Yes, before this,” she says on his behalf. “But you know what? I wouldn’t want to go back. I’d rather we go somewhere we haven’t been before. And we will. You know where we’ve actually never been and should definitely go? Niagara Falls. Everybody has to go to Niagara Falls. Once at least.”
When Zeke doesn’t answer, she turns to look at him. Just like that, he’s already asleep.
AS SLOWLY AS THE first weeks had passed, that was how quickly the summer began to burn away once the time of their initiation loomed close. They coaxed and bullied their sonatas, concerti, cantatas, and fugues to a more acute state of perfection than they had ever pushed the most important recital piece. If they had once been sculptors, now they were diamond cutters.
On her best days, Daphne felt as if the cello were her Siamese twin, joined to her body at her left ear, where its neck thrummed under the dictate of her fingers, and at the tenderest part of her thigh, where its voice rose from the hollow of its belly. When Natalya finally escorted them to the Silo, to rehearse in the open air, Daphne discovered how much more care and diligence she had to lavish on strings and bow, which sagged in complaint at the humidity.
That final week, they hammered down every segue in Carnival of the Animals until it resembled the perfectly rotating carousel that Natalya had asked them to envision, each creature passing before the listener with equal pageantry. Thursday, she released them at ten-thirty. She instructed them to leave their instruments in the studio—no overnight obsessing allowed—and to sleep late in the morning. She would arrange for breakfast to be delivered there exactly twelve hours hence. They would play the piece through only one more time.
Daphne touched Malachy’s shoulder as they walked out into the soft, sweltering darkness. Except when a thunderstorm scoured the air, nearly every night was hot now, the heat as thick as custard, clamorous with insects and saturated with the pungence of mown grass, pinesap, and the minerals exuded by the evaporating lake. Lightning pulsed silently, in all directions, along the seam fastening the sky to the horizon.
“Swim?” she said.
Others had the same idea—especially with the promised luxury of sleeping in. They started toward the dorms to change.
“That does make sense,” he said.
“But our place?” she said, lowering her voice. “Let’s just go. Now.”
When they lagged behind the main group, Seth turned back and slowed as if to wait, but then he leered at them and mimed a big smooch, waved them off with a laugh.
As always, it was empty, as if the only purpose of the place was to wait for them and no one else all the long hours they worked, ate, and slept. The surface of the lake seemed to quaver with expectation.
But they had never gone swimming here, not together. Even in late July, the water was bracing, though Daphne didn’t mind; she was used to similar lakes near her home in New Hampshire. “Have you been in at all this summer?” she asked him. “I’ve never seen you go in.”
“By myself. At dawn sometimes, when I wake up too early. Farm boy that I am.” He sat on a rock. Would she have to go in first?
They had no suits, of course. Daphne hadn’t forgotten this detail. In the second or third week, she had gone skinny-dipping with the night owls—the fast crowd, mostly the campers from New York City—but there had been drinking, too, and the last thing she wanted was to get herself sent home. She had never joined them again.
What she had in mind now, however, would take more fearlessness than breaking any of the rules. Just don’t think about it, she told herself. She stripped to her bra and panties and, without turning to look at Malachy, leaned down at the edge and pushed herself off in a shallow dive. Several long strokes away, she turned around, treading water.
Malachy’s arms enfolded his knees. She couldn’t see his expression, but she knew he was watching her. “You’re a graceful swimmer,” he said.
“I love the water. It’s beautiful tonight. It’s warmed up a lot this week.”
“So you say.”
“Come in. Come on.”
He stood slowly. He turned his back to her, and at first she was afraid he would leave. But then, taking his time, he removed his shirt and trousers, draping them over the rock. His white boxers gleamed against the woods behind him. He came to the edge and dove, more vertically than she had dared.
Just as she worried that he ought to have surfaced already, she felt a surge of colder water against her legs. He came up beside her. She cried out.
“Keeping the upper hand,” he said. He swam away, staying parallel to the shore. She followed him until he stopped. Their arms brushed underwater.
“You know what you are?” he said.
“What am I?”
“You’re dangerous,” he said cheerfully. He bobbed up and down as his arms milled the water around him, requiring her to keep a small distance between them. “You are a beautiful danger, Daphne. You scare me sometimes.”
“How am I dangerous?” Though what she wanted to hear was how he found her beautiful.
“You just are.” His voice obeyed the rise and fall of his breathing. His shoulders broke the surface now and then. “I’ve written a limerick for you.”
“Oh no.”
“Not to worry,” he said. “It’s respectful.”
She waited.
I once knew this cellist, Miss Browning,
A swan with whom I enjoyed clowning.
But at night when she bloomed
I felt blissfully doomed.
Far from shore, in peril of drowning.
Daphne faced him. They were still treading water, growing winded. She said, “That’s respectful?”
“Well, not of me.”
“Let’s forget about being respectful, okay?” Abruptly, she swam for shore. She pulled herself up on the rock, realizing they had no towels. Now the air felt cold, and she shivered. “Come back,” she called out, “before you do drown!”
When he emerged, she saw how the summery cotton of his underwear clung to his penis and hipbones. His chest was narrow and hairless, his rib cage deeply
furrowed, his nipples large and startlingly dark.
She said, “You’re the beautiful one.” She couldn’t help it.
She felt him resist, just briefly, before he kissed her. But then, to her relief, it seemed easy, even instinctive, this much of their skin meeting, the sensation of water streaming from their hair and finding its way along the contours of their nearly naked bodies. Finally, she thought. Finally, finally this. After all the talking, the practicing, the teasing, the almost-this, now and finally this. She had no idea what would happen next—or rather, she did; she simply had no idea how.
When they came apart to breathe, she said, “I’m so in love with you,” though she hadn’t meant to. “I am so in love with you, I can’t not tell you, I don’t care if I’m the first one to say it.”
He held her gaze. He wasn’t smiling, but smiling would have seemed trivial to her. “You are amazing, Daphne. Sometimes I think I won’t know what to do without you when we leave this place. Sometimes I can’t believe we’ve ever been anywhere but this place.” He sighed. “It’s so strange, isn’t it? This whole summer. Good strange, but … weird strange, too.” He sounded alarmingly sincere, the habitual irony drained from his voice.
“Of course it’s strange,” she said. “But that has nothing to do with me and you, how I feel about you. That—I mean us—we’d feel this way anywhere.”
“Would we? Can you really tell what’s real here and what’s not?”
She squeezed his shoulders, hard. “This is real.” She didn’t care if she sounded angry.
He ran his hands up and down her arms. “Daphne, I take things slowly.”
“You? Slow?” She thought of the way he played the most relentless passages of the Bach sonata, how his flute cast notes into the air like a furious scattering of seeds; or what about his quick-witted irreverence? He was anything but slow—or, for that matter, modest. And then it dawned on her: he was a virgin, too. He felt the same fear she did, except that for a boy the fear was doubled.
For the first time, he was the one to kiss her, the kiss more insolent than tender. As she had wished, respect was off the table. He spread his hands across her buttocks and pulled her against him.