Again Fenno sat beside Kit. After a moment, he drank the water himself. Perhaps he should refill the glass with whiskey. He laid a hand on Kit’s back. “Walter’s with Fanny and Will.”
Kit sat up and wiped his eyes, though he did not cease crying. “Please call Sandra. I can’t drive the children home.”
“I’ll do that.” Crikey, thought Fenno. Bring another player into the drama?
When Walter came downstairs, he and Fenno went into the kitchen. It was four o’clock. Food, thought Fenno. Food was the only sane, dependable option he could think of. He told Walter about Kit’s request.
“So call her now,” said Walter. “You have their home number, don’t you? You do that, and I’ll search the bathrooms for some approximation of Valium. Why am I such a clean-living individual?”
Fenno opened the refrigerator.
“What are you doing?”
“Seeking solace,” said Fenno. “What were we going to eat?”
“Burgers,” said Walter. “Burgers and dogs. The definition of summer. Mac ’n’ cheese for Fanny. I was going to make icebox cake.” He shook his head. “Never mind. Pizza is what we’ll be having.”
Sandra, with whom Fenno had spoken only once before, quite briefly, turned out to be, like Walter, a listener. She did not ask unnecessary questions. All she wanted was his assurance that her children were fine. She would be there by noon the next day. She asked to speak with Kit. Fenno carried the phone into the living room. Kit took it, and Fenno returned to the kitchen.
Walter appeared in the doorway empty-handed. “Percocet, three years past the expiration date. And some mysterious drug prescribed to the wife, probably hormones. And a truckload of Q-tips. Come the revolution, these folks will have clean ears.” He walked to the porch. “If that blasted tree had fallen on the house, this would never have happened. Go ahead!” he shouted at the tree. “Make my day!”
An hour later, Fenno found himself keeping a reluctant vigil beside Kit’s inert body. Was he asleep or paralyzed with sorrow?
Shamelessly, he stared at Kit: at his flat torso, twisted against a cushion; at the pale legs that protruded from his shorts; at the unruly hair matted with perspiration, blond streaked with gray. Who was this man, really? Fenno tried to remember Mal’s legs, hair, the shape of his torso before the wasting. They hadn’t been lovers, but Fenno had seen Mal naked, in the helpless exposure brought on by disease. He had helped Mal clean his own body, take off and put on his clothes, climb into a bathtub, climb out again.
When he heard Kit snore lightly, he sighed with relief. And then it occurred to him that while Lucinda had felt the deep satisfaction of finding Kit after believing for so long that she had permanently lost him, for Kit it was the other way round. Kit had never known that Lucinda was there to begin with—and then, having only just found her, lost her for good, far too soon.
And that, Fenno realized, glad that Walter wasn’t there to witness his own tears, is what losing Mal had been like for him—though Fenno, unlike Kit, hadn’t even realized what it was he’d found until he had managed to lose it.
He went into the kitchen, unable to bear even the company of a sleeping companion. He was pouring a glass of whiskey for himself when he heard a muffled ringtone in the living room. Kit’s mobile, on the floor beneath a fallen cushion. Fenno took it into the kitchen. Perhaps Sandra had decided to leave at once and needed directions.
“Kit! I just wanted you to know I got home safely. Not even too much traffic.”
“Daphne? It’s Fenno.”
“Oh! Hello there. Thank you again.” Her voice became oblique and courteous. “What a beautiful place, and how kind of you to bring us all together.”
“Daphne, this is difficult to say,” he began.
Unlike Sandra, she hungered to know every detail; too tired to resist, he complied. When she asked to speak with her son, he told her that Kit was out with the children, fetching pizza. “Can you call back tomorrow? I think that’s best, with all that’s happening here.”
“That poor woman. Her poor family.”
“Her daughter is on the way. The rest of us are coping.” As if. “There is a lot to do, I’m afraid,” he hinted. He could hear Walter’s voice on the front lawn.
He had barely ended the call when Will opened the door. Walter entered, carrying three enormous pizzas and a plastic bag clearly containing a liter of wine. Fanny held a large box from the fudge shop. She looked at Fenno and said, as if she wasn’t certain, “Six kinds?” She understood that the indulgence was hardly a matter of reward or celebration.
Walter led the children swiftly into the kitchen, instructing Will, in a whisper, to close the sliding door.
A storm of energy, Walter set the table for four, found jazz on the radio, lit candles, poured wine and lemonade. “Fenno, would you get some pizza on everybody’s plate before we expire?”
Once the two men and the two children were seated, he said, “Fanny, can I ask you a favor? We don’t say grace, but I’m wondering if you’d recite that poem again.”
“The one about the wild geese?” Her pride seeped through her bewilderment.
“I was thinking the one about everyone singing.”
She sat up, raising her chin. She might have been admiring her young face in a mirror. “ ‘Everyone suddenly burst out singing,’ ” she began.
When she finished, Fenno said, “Siegfried Sassoon.”
“Yes!” exclaimed Fanny, pleased.
“Poems by men in trenches,” whispered Walter, but only Fenno heard; the children were lunging at their pizza. Walter had accomplished, more or less, what he had doubtless intended: to reassure the children that the sky was not falling—even if their father lay on the couch looking as if he had been crushed by something far weightier than a cloud.
Walter suggested to Will that there just might be a baseball game on the radio—though didn’t they all despise the Red Sox? They could jeer instead of cheer. He got up and skimmed the stations until, sure enough, they were in Fenway Park. “The Orioles!” he exclaimed after listening intently for a few minutes. “All right, we’ll root for them.” Never mind that Walter couldn’t have cared less about baseball.
Fenno had the brief illusion that here they were, parents as well as partners, having slipped sideways into a parallel existence where everything was a different, happier version of normal.
By the time Mal’s sister drove up to the house with her husband, it was past midnight. She was subdued and resigned, well past hysterics. Christina and Greg had driven from Logan Airport to the hospital in Hyannis. They had identified Lucinda’s body. She told Fenno that much, and she asked if she could go to bed. Fenno showed them to the den where, the night before, her mother had slept. He didn’t tell her this; he had already packed Lucinda’s things in her suitcase and put it in the closet off the living room. He silenced Lucinda’s phone.
They pull up in front of their apartment building in the middle of a scalding afternoon. They spoke very little for the last two hours of the journey, Walter dedicated to the intricacies of traffic approaching the city, both of them slipping into resignation, well aware that normal responsibilities must resume—and that they aren’t through with the fallout of how their holiday came to a crashing end.
Double-parked, they go through the tedious relay of guarding the car while lugging possessions up the stairwell, Felicity last of all. Walter will return the car to the leasing agency; Fenno will open windows and turn on fans.
Once everything is inside the apartment, he frees Felicity; she flies her well-practiced circuit of the living and dining rooms, returns to the kitchen, and settles in a fuss on the summit of her home cage, empress and sentinel both.
Fenno wheels his suitcase into the bedroom and hoists it onto the bed. He begins unpacking: soiled clothing into the hamper, shirts and trousers into the cupboard, plimsolls on their appointed shelf.
Taking up the bottom half of the suitcase is a polystyrene bag containing the gift inte
nded for Kit. He had meant to bring it out in Lucinda’s presence. He was also conscious that by relinquishing it, he might earn a morsel of goodwill from Walter.
The quilt has lived in Fenno’s bottom drawer, beneath swim trunks in the summer and waffled undergarments in the winter, ever since his move to Walter’s flat. It’s a stained-glass window of silks and velvets, a sumptuous, glittering flummery of patchwork fashioned from remnants of party frocks that Lucinda had intended to discard. Mal loved to tell the story of how he had chanced to be visiting his parents at the time, how he persuaded his mother to turn them into a bedspread rather than give them to the jumble sale funding her church. (“Evening gowns for an establishment that promotes the wearing of sackcloth? Mom? I’d call that a felony, a crime against beauty.”)
Mal referred to it as his “insomnia quilt”: invoking the kinship of sleeplessness that he shared with his mother had been the key to her compliance. He had slept—and not slept—beneath it for years. During his final months, it had covered his body while he pined with fever, clung to the telly for distraction, cursed the bone pain and nausea, and probably, when no one else was with him, wept in panic and fury at the imminence of death. The night he chose as his last, he asked Fenno to fold the quilt and put it away, worried that the messiness of dying might ruin it. Afterward, Fenno had kept it, but even before Walter, he had never been able to bring himself to spread it across his own bed. It would always remind him of a funeral shroud.
He need not share such details in the letter he will write when he ships the quilt to Kit. Not just yet, however; he’ll give it a month. Which reminds him that, like it or not, he should call Kit, check in on him, this evening.
Kit slept through much of the day on which Sandra arrived, on which Christina and Greg drove hither and yon to answer questions, fill out forms, arrange transport of Lucinda’s body once the coroner’s office agreed to release it. Thank heaven there had been witnesses. Had there been the slightest hint of suicide, everything, for everyone, would have been ten times harder.
Fenno was also relieved that Christina had already met Kit and Sandra, and the twins, if only once. Still, the twenty-four hours they spent packed into that borrowed house with people they barely knew (and who barely knew them) were a trial for all. For Fenno and Walter, that long day swiftly and efficiently annulled the salutary effects of all the leisure and letting go they had accrued over three long weeks (as if they were building some kind of spiritual savings account!). Walter finally lost the cheerful determination bolstering his ceaseless efforts to entertain, distract, and nourish.
The last two nights, after everyone else departed, Fenno and Walter went to bed without reading or talking. They slept with a vengeance and rose quickly each morning, hardly touching. Sex seemed irrelevant, even heretical.
Death to sex, death to reading, death to plans of any reasonable sort, thought Fenno. Death to everything but death. Yet aside from whatever might happen to his relationship with Walter once everyone else had gone their separate, shell-shocked ways, his greatest concern was Kit. Before they left, Sandra treated her husband gently but firmly, forcing him to do errands with her, play cards with the children, take a family outing to a nearby beach. (No one suggested Twister.)
Wednesday morning, Sandra and Kit packed up their two cars. The twins would ride with Sandra.
“We will certainly stay in touch,” Fenno said as they stood together on the lawn. He was the only one to see them off.
“I hope so,” Sandra said. “I mean that.”
“I’m so sorry,” Kit said. “I’m just so—sorry.” Fenno heard the silent obscenity omitted in the presence of children.
“We’re all sorry; sorry is the sorriest of words for what we are,” said Fenno. “But like it or not, we’re tied together by that sorriness. And I don’t mind that. We’ll see one another; we don’t live so far apart.”
Sandra nodded. “We will.”
Fenno said to Fanny, “Do you have your collection of stones?” The table where she had arranged them was empty.
“I took them back to the beach. I only borrowed them.” She sounded as world-weary as the grown-ups.
“What about your books? Walter would be unhappy if you forgot them.”
“Yes,” she said primly. “We have the books.” Will was gazing out the opposite window, already leaving.
The conversation had to end. They had to drive away. Fenno directed them out the hedgerow. He waved, however pointless the gesture. He hoped he hadn’t lied to Kit and Sandra. If Walter, when all was said and done, declared that he never wanted to see them again, Fenno would never see them, either.
He looks at the clock on his side of the bed. Odd to think that it’s been ticking away here, oblivious to his absence from home, for weeks. Perhaps he should walk to the post office and fetch their accumulated mail. No: let it wait till tomorrow. Nothing in the post could make much difference to him now.
He lays Mal’s quilt on Mal’s chair. He feels a stirring of anger. Mal claimed to have “organized” the effects and remnants of his life before so deliberately leaving it behind. As it turned out, he’d done a bloody poor job of it, hadn’t he? Fenno laughs bitterly.
In the kitchen, he looks inside the refrigerator: nothing but condiments. Walter is diligent about keeping it clean, free of spoiled or redundant foods. He even removed the pitcher that filters their drinking water; upended, it waits in the drying rack to be refiltered and refilled. Maybe there’s ice cream in the freezer. Alas, just a pair of pork chops, a pound of butter, a package of double-A batteries, and the bin of vaporous ice that Walter will empty noisily into the sink when he returns. He will not tolerate out-of-date ice cubes.
With all the windows open, Fenno hears the ecstatic shrieks of children in the sprinkler at Bleecker Playground. Time away from this sound has made it newly notable; in a week, it will fade once more into the complex embroideries of the city’s everyday clamor.
The landline rings.
“The car’s returned,” says Walter. “But I have to go straight to Bank Street. Two waiters are quitting this week. Grad students. I think they knew all along they were going back to school, but they swore to me they weren’t. Remind me to stick with actors. So reliable and selfless.”
“You want me to unpack for you?”
“No. But come for dinner at the bar. Nine-thirty?”
“Haven’t you had enough dinners with me the past month?”
“Creature of habit, what can I say? Shortcake of the day is blackberry. I am not missing that, and neither should you. But would you please get the mail?”
“Yes,” says Fenno. “I’ll go now.” He dreads the hot walk to the P.O., but never mind. On the way there, he’ll begin to compose his letter to Kit, the one he will send with the quilt. He promises Felicity to buy her a mango on the return. Gently, he moves her inside the cage to her favorite perch, closes and latches the door. He goes to the loo for the sunscreen he just unpacked.
Returning through the bedroom, he pushes his emptied suitcase to the back of the cupboard. Before closing the door, he looks up and sees it, on its high shelf: the red box that he stole from beneath Mal’s bed, the one containing letters and photographs related to Kit. The framed label, in Mal’s handwriting, reads CHRISTOPHER. He takes the box down and sets it on the bed. To this day, he has resisted the urge to read the letters to Mal, from Lucinda and Daphne. There are just a few—their postmarks before and just after the beginning of Kit’s life—but they are the reason that Fenno has never known what to do with this box. Whom might he betray or wound with what were obviously secrets? And of course, that was before he met Daphne. (How could he ever have imagined he would?)
For all his protesting otherwise, Fenno knows full well that he was closer to Mal at the end than anyone else. Surely Mal would have told him about Christopher if the boy’s existence had not been a deeply private matter—wouldn’t he? Fenno has not lied to Walter: he and Mal were never lovers, not in the technical sense. Bu
t Fenno relives, more often than he should—sometimes, helplessly, in dreams—one of their last times together: sitting on the beautiful quilt, side by side against the pillows on Mal’s bed, some forgettable Masterpiece Theatre episode plodding along on the telly. By then Mal was so thin, his skin so easily bruised, his bones so close to the surface, that Fenno touched him only when he required help to move. That day, Mal fell asleep and slumped against Fenno, full length: his head on Fenno’s shoulders, knees over knees, one translucent hand, slender and weightless as a bird’s wing, curled on Fenno’s belly. For an instant, Fenno feared that he had died—but then his breathing became noisy, sawlike in a reassuring way.
Fenno froze at first, though gradually, after a few minutes, he allowed himself to relax. The heat of Mal’s slight body—its fever like a protest against its diminishing—bloomed through his own, till Fenno, too, slipped into sleep. He awoke only moments later, aware that he was fully aroused, erect beneath Mal’s hand. Mal slept on. For an hour, until Mal awoke, Fenno stayed perfectly still, not even reaching for the remote to mute the irksome drama on the screen at the foot of the bed. He would gratefully have stayed like that for days.
Perhaps Walter can help him decide whether to give the box to Kit, letters and all. Will it seem better or worse that his father kept track of him from a distance both cold and safe? Walter will look at it more objectively than Fenno could; more wisely, too. One way or another, it’s time for the box to go. It doesn’t belong here. It never did.
The clock tells him there’s still time to reach the P.O. before it closes. Good. He can buy a proper box for shipping the quilt.
Then he’ll go to the restaurant. Walter won’t have more than a few stolen minutes to sit with him at the bar. He rarely does. The all-seeing Ben will catch Fenno up on a month’s worth of gossip. He will order Hugo’s nightly special. (He hopes it’s the Idaho trout.) He will eat blackberry shortcake.