Fenno said quietly, “You knew he was important. You know that. You also know he’s been dead for decades. Decades.” Fenno looked at Julian, as if to a court of appeal. (Bugger, was he beginning to care what this stranger thought?)
Walter sighed. “The bottom line is this: spouses have no secrets from each other. I have no secrets from you!”
“Mal’s having met my family wasn’t a secret.”
“Walter,” said Julian, “just what is a secret to you?”
Walter paused. “Anything Fenno knows I’d want to know.”
The three of them were quiet.
“Sometimes I have this feeling,” Walter said, “that he operates on the philosophy that ‘what Walter doesn’t know won’t hurt him.’ And he knows how I feel about Malachy Burns.
“Whether it’s rational or not, okay?” he said when he saw Fenno’s expression. “That man’s gloomy shadow hangs over us at times, and I’m sorry, but it gives me the creeps. So now this business with his secret kid? The fact that it’s suddenly Fenno’s deal, too? Talk about a bombshell.”
“The ‘bombshell’ you refer to is not falling on us,” Fenno said.
“Well, we are in the path of some major shrapnel,” Walter retorted. “And that’s why we are here.”
Fenno glanced at Julian and saw a spark of amusement before he said, “Then that’s our work. But I’m afraid our time is up.”
In the dead of night, Fenno and Walter are awakened simultaneously by the sound of the first raindrops striking the roof, less than two feet above their heads. Fenno hears Walter sigh, then whisper, “Here we go. Bring on—what’s the silly name they’ve given her? Honoria? Hepsebah? Though I think she’s been downgraded. I think we’re due for an anonymous hissy fit.”
“How worried do we have to be?” asks Fenno, knowing that Walter will have consulted every online weather maven, every satellite photo of the aerial maelstrom approaching.
“The backshore will get the worst of it, but first thing tomorrow we should close the shutters up here.”
They listen for a few seconds. The wind is competing with the rain.
“How are you weathering the human storm?” whispers Fenno.
“I’m an oak tree,” says Walter. “Creaky, but standing. Or maybe the eye is passing over. Maybe I should be bracing myself.”
Something metallic careens loudly down the street: the lid to a dustbin; a hubcap. Once it’s passed, Fenno can discern the sound of waves breaking at the rim of the bay, behind the houses on the water side of Commercial.
“I’m having a hard time keeping track of who’s related to whom and how,” says Walter.
“Five people, four generations. Not easy.”
“Insane.”
“I’ll be relieved when they’re gone,” says Fenno.
Walter shifts onto his side, facing Fenno on the snug mattress. “Och, ye’re not keen on the instant rellies, lad?” Apparently he can whisper even with a burr.
Fenno suppresses a laugh.
“Or maybe you’d prefer them à la carte,” Walter says.
“The notion was bringing them together.”
“A good pair of kids. You’re the surrogate grandfather, aren’t you?”
“I’d say you’ve poached that role, and please run with it,” says Fenno, “but I don’t think we should be discussing this, even in a whisper, even in the middle of the night. This house is all ears.”
“All cracks and crevices, you mean.”
The same thought occurs to both of them.
“Have you spotted buckets anywhere?” says Walter.
“If nothing else, we have a multitude of beach towels.”
“And a dryer.”
“If the power holds.”
Walter rests a hand on Fenno’s chest. “Well, at least it’s not our house, if it blows away.”
When Fenno wakes again, he can hear at once that everybody else is up. Walter must have closed and latched all the inside shutters on the second story; this is why Fenno slept late. The bedroom, lit only by chinks of light between the slats, is gloomy. Trees groan, the rain sounds as if it’s roaring through a sluice rather than falling from the sky, and thunder resounds in the distance.
Downstairs, Daphne calls out, “Right foot, red! … Left hand, blue! … Right foot, red—no, a different red!” The children hoot and giggle.
Fenno sits on the edge of the bed, bending forward so as not to strike his head on the dormered ceiling. He snaps on a lamp. It’s half nine, and they are, without a doubt, being pounded by a tempest. Whether or not it merits a given name hardly seems germane.
Walter comes into the room. “Don’t scold me. I let you sleep in. Those children—did I call them charming? They were bouncing around at six o’clock, so I made French toast. Rain blew under the back door, but I have it dammed, and Felicity was singing her scales like we’re looking at the End of Days. I think she sang herself hoarse.”
“Walter, don’t make me give you a medal.”
“Oh, sweetheart, the chits are piling up, believe you me.”
Now the children are calling Walter.
“Save me. They want me to play Twister.” But he calls out that he’s coming and hastens back downstairs.
Fenno dresses quickly; it must be thirty degrees cooler than yesterday. Maybe they’ll use the hearth, though they haven’t tried it yet, and the last thing he wants to do is burn the place down.
In the living room, Kit and Lucinda are reading yesterday’s New York Times. When they look up and smile, he has a glimpse of their literal kinship.
“Quite a stooshie out there,” says Fenno.
“At least we know this house has stood for a couple hundred years,” says Kit. “That’s reassuring.”
“Well, until the day it doesn’t.” Daphne’s come into the room, holding the cardboard spinner against her chest. “The children need more players.”
“Tell you what, Mom. You play, I’ll spin.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Kit. Have a little respect for your elders and their joints.”
“Can we talk them into a word game?” says Lucinda.
“Fanny packed Bananagrams,” Kit says. He goes in search of his daughter, leaving Fenno with the two women.
“Do you fancy a fire?” he asks, regretting the offer at once. He will have to decipher the elaborate note describing how to work the antique damper. Before anyone can answer, he is saved by Walter, who calls his name from the back of the house. His voice sounds quietly urgent.
In the kitchen, the radio is tuned to WOMR, the announcer listing flooded roads and the locations of emergency shelters for the Outer Cape. Walter has already begun to assemble lunch makings on the counter. But now he stands at the entrance to the screened porch, looking out. “Get over here,” he whispers.
Fenno joins him. A towering tree in the neighbor’s backyard has bowed to a forty-five-degree angle, quite possibly aimed at the front corner of the house in which Fenno and Walter are standing. It might miss the house, but it will not miss a power line that runs from the street to the house. The tree remains poised at that angle, as if time has stalled—though the wind continues to gust, flailing sheets of rain every which way. The porch furniture is soaked.
“Holy moly,” says Walter. “What if it goes?”
“Oh, ’twill go,” Fenno says. “Its path is the only thing in question.”
“Terrific!” says Walter. “Four generations of one family crushed by tree of terror! Two middle-aged queens smooshed as well!”
“I’d say we’re fine if we stay at the back of the house,” says Fenno.
“Oh my God, are we going to end up sleeping on the floor of some high-school gym? ‘Refugee’ is not in my repertoire.”
“Anyone up for Bananagrams?” Fanny’s come into the kitchen carrying a small yellow sack shaped like a floppy banana. “Dad’s going to teach Mrs. Burns. Didi’s reading. She says her book’s too good to put down.”
Walter goes into the living room a
nd declares that everyone needs to gather in the kitchen. “I’m baking brownies,” he says, “so it’s going to be the warmest place to hang—and the place to lick the beaters and bowl.”
The game is an each-to-his-own variation on Scrabble, and the kitchen grows quiet as the five players begin. Walter studies the box of brownie mix. Daphne sits at the far end of the window seat and resumes reading her novel.
Fenno asked Walter to turn the radio off, so as not to alarm the children. From what he heard, no one’s been killed, and nothing major’s been swept out to sea—not yet—but the storm sounds almost worse as background to the newscasters than it does beyond the confines of the house. The dune shacks have been evacuated, and “advisory warnings”—quaint redundancy—to stay off the roads and bridges are broadcast repeatedly for the benefit of citizens too daft to reach this obvious conclusion on their own. Otherwise (but for the threatening tree) it might as well be just another rained-out Saturday in Ptown.
Briefly, Fenno imagines cliques of men dressed as princes, dwarves, and wicked queens stewing in their motel rooms along Route 6. What games will they be playing? Walter would find a good vulgar joke alluding to Bananagrams. In the midst of pottering about with his assigned letters, Fenno stops to watch Walter at the counter as he stirs together the brownie batter. Fenno knows that he will endure their meetings with Julian made indefinitely if that’s what it takes to make himself show this man how flat life would feel without him.
The storm remains fierce through the afternoon. Walter and Fenno take turns glancing, furtively, at the neighbor’s tree. Miraculously, it remains in its death-defying stance, apparently reluctant to complete its fall. Also miraculously, they have not lost power. Yet looking out the window so often, Fenno has the ominous feeling that they are the only inhabitants within shouting range. The four houses he can see from this one show no signs of activity.
Felicity, who has a habit of singing scales when it rains (sounding like one of those trannies on Commercial trying desperately to channel Barbra Streisand), has mercifully quit. The children have lost interest in the bird, largely because she does not speak, so she sulks on her cage, plumage fluffed, uttering the occasional halfhearted squawk. Fenno puts her on his shoulder when they sit at the table to play games.
They play SpongeBob Uno, gin rummy, and the amusingly antiquated Careers. At Walter’s instigation, they attempt a round of Fictionary; Will complains that he does not enjoy the game or consider it “fair,” because it favors his sister’s talents. They eat countless sandwiches and a whole batch of brownies. At five, Walter proclaims that the weather calls for sherry. He digs into their host’s stash of liquor, finds a bottle of Harveys, and dusts it off.
“Time to build a fire,” he says to Fenno, “and you get the job. I’ve had it with cowering in the kitchen.” He hands Fenno the directions on using the flue.
Walter has given over his laptop to the children, who are hunting down bloopers from some movie they recently saw. Every few seconds, they shriek with laughter, and Felicity, back on her cage, provides an echo.
Kit goes upstairs to take a nap; he’s volunteered to make pasta primavera for dinner. Walter goes upstairs as well. “Remember: cremation,” he whispers to Fenno. “In case that tree gives in.”
Lucinda and Daphne, however, remain in the living room, each absorbed in her book. Fenno kneels at the hearth and goes through the directions, step by step. Once he gets a small blaze kindled, he lingers long enough to make sure the smoke is headed up the flue.
“Heavenly,” says Daphne.
“Thank you,” says Lucinda.
Fenno goes to the kitchen. Huddled at the screen, mesmerized, Will and Fanny look as if they’re warming at a hearth all their own. They do not look up when Fenno passes them to check the leaning tree: no, not an inch. Its smaller branches fret in the wind, but the trunk remains staunch in its arrested fall.
He wants to join Walter upstairs, but his upbringing tells him that one of them should be awake to look after the guests—and the fire in the hearth. He offers to make the children cocoa, and at this suggestion they finally notice his presence. “That would be awesome!” says Fanny.
“Thank you,” Will says pointedly, poking his sister.
Gratitude, thinks Fenno: how often has he expected gratitude and been disappointed? The greatest favors he’s done for the people he loves have by no means made them closer. And why should they? He does want something in return, though; he can’t help it. He should be ashamed of himself, but there it is. He doesn’t believe that sinners will be punished or that saints will find some otherworldly reward, so why should he expect any sort of quid pro quo? (How uncomfortable he had felt when, working for Lucinda in New York, he saw her lead the girls in prayer. He felt oddly indignant; what right did she have to impose her assumptions about divine justice on those tender young women who had no idea how many forms of injustice awaited them once they had their babies? Much as Lucinda wanted to even the scales, she had no such power. Who did?)
As he stirs the milk, he hears Lucinda’s voice, raised just enough that he can catch her words: “That isn’t accurate, Daphne. I did nothing to keep you apart. You may not know this, but for a while my son turned his back on me.”
“I was the one he turned his back on,” Daphne replies. “For good. All those years he could have relented, just a letter, a phone call … nothing.”
“It was your decision to cut ties.”
“By then I knew I’d never hear from him. And you were the one who told me …” Daphne’s voice dips to a murmur.
Fenno glances at the children. They remain hypnotized by the screen.
Should he close the sliding door to the living room, let the women have it out, bury their grudges? He stands at the threshold, out of the women’s sight lines.
“All right,” Lucinda is saying, “then let me accept the blame. He was so young, and maybe I ought to have been more forceful.”
“You couldn’t have forced him to do anything. He’d have been miserable. Well. I guess I’d have been miserable, too—wouldn’t I?”
If Lucinda answers, Fenno doesn’t hear her.
“We can’t talk about this now,” Daphne says quietly. “And you know what? We shouldn’t talk about it at all. I have no desire to talk about it, none. I thought I’d reached the point where I’d never have to. A long time ago. Sorry. I think we have to be honest with each other.”
Fenno hears a sudden hissing.
“The stove!” Fanny calls out. “The cocoa!”
The milk is boiling over.
Fenno grabs the handle of the pot and yanks it off the heat. What a bloody mess. The milk has run down between the coils of the electric burner. It continues to sizzle, emitting the stench of charcoal mixed with sour milk.
“There’s more milk,” he says. “Not to worry about that.”
Lucinda and Daphne stand in the doorway, their shoulders almost but deliberately not touching. “Well, here we all are,” says Daphne. “Stuck on a sandbar in the middle of a hurricane—and starting a fire, from the smell of it.”
“As I said, not to worry.” Fenno sponges the top of the cooker, determined to stay calm.
“I’m going to follow Walter’s lead and take a nap,” says Daphne. “Doing nothing all day is wearing me out.”
Lucinda sits at the table with the children, watching them with hungry affection. Fenno feels sorry for her, to see the fulfillment of one yearning lead her on to yet another.
“What do you say to corn chowder?” he says. “All those uneaten ears from yesterday.”
“Let me help,” offers Lucinda.
“That would be super.”
He puts her to work stripping kernels from the cobs while he heats a new batch of milk, giving the task his full attention.
“I’m very glad,” she says as she works, “that circumstances have brought us back together. You and I.”
“I should have written you ages ago, to apologize.”
“No, no. I meddled with something that was none of my business.”
“Your convictions are your business. I disappointed you by ignoring them.” He spoons cocoa powder into a pair of mugs boasting sponsorship of two different environmentally chivalrous organizations. “But really, what happened was Oneeka’s decision, not ours. We were hardly her parents.”
“When I ran The House, my worst critics accused me of having a parent complex, of wanting to mother half the world.” Lucinda’s smile is hard, almost a grimace. “I thought, And so? Who would call that a sin? That was back before the very notion of sinning began to confuse me. Or before I could admit that it did.”
Fenno carries the hot mugs to the table and tells the children that they must close the computer while they drink their cocoa.
As he puts the pan in the sink, Lucinda says quietly, “I’m letting go of so much these days. I feel a lot lighter for it.”
“Nothing like almost losing your spouse to put things in perspective.” Fenno winces at what he’s said. Losing a spouse, at least so late in life, is surely nothing next to losing a child.
But she says, firmly, “You’re right about that.”
Fenno walks casually to the back door. No change. (Is there any law of physics which would allow the tree to stand up again, regain its root-bound status in the earth?)
“The corn’s all set,” says Lucinda. “And you know what? I’m just going to forge ahead and make the chowder myself. Will? Fanny? You’re going to be my sous-chefs.” She turns to Fenno, who’s quickly moved away from the door. “You. Go amuse yourself. Find a good book, enjoy the fire. Or go take a nap. What do you Brits call it? A kip? That’s what this weather was made for: reading and kipping. Heading off to other, sunnier worlds.”
Fenno could have kept the bookstore alive if he had been willing to move it to a different neighborhood (possibly a different borough) or to conjure a scheme combining his business with another. The last standing children’s bookstore in Manhattan assured its longevity by joining forces with a cupcake vendor. (In fact, mused Fenno, how shrewd to raise children who might henceforth affiliate literature with chocolate sponge and sprinkles. Red velvet Robinson Crusoe. Sword in the strawberry-shortcake stone. Onward and upward to Ivanhoe iced with coconut custard, lemon meringue Lolita.)