Here was a small velvet box containing garnet cuff links and studs. Here was a perfect malachite egg, a cherrywood metronome, a fountain pen well worn above its tarnished nib, a ceramic tile glazed with a tiger, a folding travel alarm clock, a set of ornately carved wooden spoons that looked as if they were made in Morocco or Turkey. Here was a framed photograph of Mal looking vigorous, well sunned, and completely at ease in his tuxedo, laughing, with the glamorous scarlet Felicity vamping on his shoulder. Mal’s left arm was bent, his fingertips concealed in the bird’s feathery ruff, one of the garnet cuff links visible at his wrist. Kit held it against his chest, breathing quickly in the stifling air of the attic. Each object emerged from a shroud of yellowed tissue, a gift. At the bottom lay a trove of programs (Lincoln Center, BAM, the Metropolitan Opera) with opinionated notes tucked throughout, the critic pulling no punches in private. Out of one fell a sheet of paper torn from a pocket memo pad, a scrawled verse:
O Jersey-haired Gilda Duprée,
Do you think we can’t tell you’ve gone gray?
Your high C is wobbly,
Your chins have gone gobbly,
Please say you’re retiring today!
Written beneath: Mean, mean, MEAN! Nod to her yrs @ Gbrne, Tosca ’82, etc. Mourn decline of etc. KTK her successor yyy.
Kit had seen his father’s handwriting, but not in its adult guise. Lucinda had shown him school compositions, letters from 4-H camp, the typical memorabilia of parents reaching back into a child’s childhood.
Christina was the one he approached for permission to keep the box from the attic. She said, “Do you really need to ask? Mal would have laughed at your Boy Scout virtue. Except he wouldn’t have called it virtue. He’d have called it something like punctiliousness or unimpeachability. Maybe his life was too short, but he got out of this burb in good order and made the most of it. Sometimes I wish I’d gone farther away than I did.”
Christina makes it clear to Kit, on a regular basis, that the role of Dutiful Daughter is not one she savors, no matter how much she loves her father. She counts on Kit to be a covert “sitter” to Zeke when he’s there; she visits two or three other days, and his physical therapist, Zoe, comes by twice a week as well. But once they finish the FCP, which (to meet the exhibition deadline) they must do by midsummer, Christina will have to suggest to her father that he move in with her and Greg—or to an assisted-living place. Kit has even thought about taking Zeke to New Jersey, but there simply isn’t room. And Zeke still has local visitors, even some who seek his counsel, who keep him in the legislative loop. To take him away from Vermont would be to deprive him of oxygen and light.
Not to mention that Sandra has her hands full now that Kit is a virtual nomad. For the two or three nights he spends in Vermont each week, he sleeps in a bedroom that was once shared by his father and Jonathan (the one member of his new family who understands the particular nightmare of failing to get tenure, all the downhill destinations toward which it points). Quilts made by Lucinda cover the twin beds: airplanes on one, turtles and frogs on the other. Kit sleeps in the bed by the window, under the airplanes, not knowing which bed belonged to which brother. He asks fewer questions than he’d like to, mainly because Zeke is so often the only person around to ask. Zeke has barely enough energy to answer questions related to the papers and trophies Kit is sorting—though he is at his most alert when doing so. At the end of an afternoon working in the barn, Kit brings the most important or mystifying documents to the house, takes a shower, wakes Zeke from his nap, and makes the two of them a simple meal in the kitchen. Then they sit down at the dining room table (now perpetually covered with musty papers) to puzzle out the day’s archival finds.
Zeke doesn’t seem curious about Kit’s life before they met. At first, Kit would wait, whenever they were alone together, for the older man to follow up on dropped remarks Kit might have made about grad school or his driveabout in Canada, his early years with Sandra. Perhaps it’s simply a matter, again, of Zeke’s limited resources—when they come together, they’re doing work that requires concentration and, for Zeke, the labor of a fading memory—but Kit suspects it’s more than that. Unlike Lucinda, Zeke does not reminisce about his older son, does not correlate tales of childhood quirks and talents with adult accomplishments—say, Malachy’s relentless domination of the grade-school spelling bee as the earliest predictor that he would become a writer, not a musician. Zeke respects the traditions and burdens of the past (would he be living on that farm if he did not?), but he is not a sentimentalist.
Kit, too, has limited energy. In addition to the time he spends in Vermont, he now spends another two nights a week in Rhode Island. He had hoped to be finished with the FCP by May, which is when he started work at the museum in Providence. Yet even if the overlap means he can spend little more than long weekends at home, he is relieved to be taxing his mind on chores beyond home repair (his skills there shaky at best) and even more relieved to see how much happier Sandra is. She seems to have embraced her skills as a master juggler, driving like a madwoman between meetings with clients, pick-ups of children, and shopping expeditions for shrubs, groceries, and camp supplies. Without a word to Kit, Zeke sent Sandra a check with a short note directing her to spend it on “getting children out of the house.” It will just about cover two weeks of drama camp for Fanny and a monthlong football clinic for Will.
But those activities have yet to begin. For this weekend, Kit, Sandra, and the twins are staying with Jasper and Loraina. Kit broke the news to his mother in an e-mail nailing down the details of their rendezvous. She did not mention it in her reply. What she did mention was that she and Bart were “still adjusting” to having the house to themselves, struggling with “the usual problems couples our age have to deal with, the textbook ennui.” The new dog, advised by friends of theirs who’d “been there,” was both a help and a hindrance.
But for now we’re okay, she wrote. Kit felt a spasm of panic at the thought that his mother might find herself alone. Did the restlessness or resentment or the “textbook ennui” come from her—or from Bart? (Surely not from dependable, corny, “Hey dude” Bart.)
The older Kit gets, the less confident he feels judging other people as spouses or parents. These days, driving past the home of the Naked Hemp Society, he finds himself more curious than contemptuous about their easily ridiculed New Age ways. Why shouldn’t they nurse their babies till age four? Why shouldn’t they want to keep their children away from factory-farmed meats, from clothing soaked in fire-retardant chemicals, from dull-witted burned-out public school teachers whose tenure is all too easily approved? Why not frolic naked in the sprinkler—under the full moon, perhaps? Why not turn one’s family into a small, nurturing country protected by a virtual moat?
Daphne produces from her basket a flowered cloth and napkins to match. Kit recognizes them from countless picnics stretching back into their years with Jasper. She produces as well two bottles of prosecco.
“Mom, people are driving.”
“Not me. Not Bart. We’re staying at a little inn down the road.”
“Lucky you.” Kit thinks of the drive to Jasper’s—scenic in the daylight but sure to be long and demanding in the dark.
“You indulge,” Sandra tells him. “I’ll drive us back.”
Gratefully, he says, “Well, maybe I just will. Indulge.” It’s good to see his mother look so happy with Bart, but he worries about other emotions this outing may inspire. At Christmas, when she told him she had bought the tickets, she announced, “It’s time to make my peace with that place. The place where you were conceived.”
Kit flinches when she speaks in such terms, but isn’t this what he gets after forcing her hand? He asked for the biological truth, and now he’s getting it, back to the very beginning. He tries to imagine, to picture in these fields, in that imperious manor house, on that stage glowing like a cosmic eye in the distance, not just his mother as a teenager but the man (the boy) who was (or, his mother would correct
him, could have been) his father. Gradually, over the past year, Malachy Burns has been coming into focus for Kit. He will always be, to some extent, a blur—from so many angles, his image remains obstinately shadowed, hopelessly smudged—but he is no longer a phantom. And there are so many shapes that phantom might have taken (a lascivious older man, a drunken acquaintance in a bar, a violent stranger) that it decidedly didn’t.
Christina puts cold grilled chicken, slices of French bread, hunks of cheese, and tomato salad on paper plates. She pours sparkling water for those not drinking wine. Kit decides to let himself be waited on. He sits next to Zeke and sips prosecco from an orange plastic cup. The air is acrid with the scent of the insect repellent they’ve sprayed on their clothing and skin—without it, they’d be miserable—but everywhere he looks, the splendor is staggering. The sun is about to set, the sky aspiring to Tintoretto. If he were seventeen in this place, he would fall in love with the first girl who crossed his path. This is Eden.
“So I should explain,” says Daphne. “Tonight is a celebrities-only concert. The campers are still practicing like crazy to get up there later in the season. I thought about getting us tickets for then, but I didn’t want to wait too long.”
Is she alluding to Zeke, to the worry that later in the summer might have been too late for him? His doctors are impressed with his progress, but there is always the risk of another stroke.
Daphne reserved tickets so early that the program had yet to be determined. So it’s only by happenstance that they will be hearing a famous pair of vocalists, a husband and wife who perform together.
“How do they manage?” says Bart. “I’m always glad I don’t play an instrument. The thought of being coerced to harmonize with my wife …” He laughs loudly.
“But you do work together, every day,” says Sandra.
“Ah, but we run different parts of the show. If we were in the same room all day, every day … well, Katy bar the door.”
“I hear you,” says Christina. “Greg and I once joined forces on a class-action suit against a paper company, a pro bono thing. All I can say is, thank God they settled. And Dad”—she looks at Zeke—“Mom used to say she’d count the minutes to the end of every campaign.”
Zeke is intent on eating his chicken. Kit leans over. “You holding out okay?”
Zeke glares at him. “Day I’m not ‘holding out,’ that’s the last day. I promise you.” He picks up his napkin and wipes the grease from his fingers and mouth with a defiant delicacy. He surveys the trees, the people scattered at other tables, on blankets and beach chairs. “Remember this place well. We came before Mal, too. Never dreamed I’d have a child here. Seeing him on that stage? My father—man you know from all those letters—would not have approved.”
“Of course he would have. He’d have been proud.”
Zeke shakes his head. “When I was a child, no music in that house.”
“Really?” Kit cannot imagine a childhood without music.
“Lucinda brought the music.”
Kit hears the dual meaning, intentional or not. Once more, he remembers that this man is his grandfather and that the man whose papers he is reading, classifying, filing, and so preserving was—is—his great-grandfather. An invisible scaffolding to his life has begun to reveal itself, like backstage machinery exposed at the lifting of a scrim. But is Kit any different for it? Could he know if he were? On one of the first nights he stayed at the farmhouse, he stole quietly into the upstairs bathroom with a photograph of Malachy, a formal head shot that he found in Lucinda’s sewing room (a room untouched since her death). Though no one would disturb him, he locked the door. He faced the mirror and held the picture next to his face. Yes: the eyes, the ears, the hairline. Maybe the chin. The mouth, no. But in this picture Malachy is younger than Kit; he cannot be anything but younger. What does it mean to discover your father when you are older than he would ever be? Kit worries that he is unable to feel sad enough. Too often now, he wonders what it is he should feel.
He glances at Sandra, who is talking to Christina about raising girls in such a shameless culture (a recurrent conversation that Kit does his best to avoid). How has she done such a successful job? Especially here, now, the last thing Kit wants to contemplate is Fanny as a teenage girl.
Daphne baked shortbread for dessert. Kit licks sugar off his fingers, tasting beneath it the bitter charcoal of the chicken.
Night is encroaching, gently, turning pools of grassy shadow from green to violet. Kit’s mother was right: without the sun, he’s glad to have a jacket. Collectively, their attention turns in the same direction when the cabled spotlights radiating from the stage go on, reminding them that they are here for more than a picnic. The stage itself gleams, the long piano a study in patience.
They pack up the linens and the leftover food. Kit drains the last of his prosecco and collects the disposable items in a plastic bag.
Daphne hands out tickets. “I think we have very good seats. I want to take a detour and look at the old studios. Come with me, Kit?” It’s plain to everyone that she is inviting Kit and no one else.
Nervous, light-headed from the wine, he follows his mother away from the general flow of people toward the stage. They take a gravel footpath into a thicket of birches. Daphne exclaims at the fireflies.
They stop for a moment, just to marvel.
“I don’t think we have fireflies,” says Kit. “Where we live, I mean.”
“It’s just for a week or two, did you know that? Then they’re done. If you don’t pay attention, you miss the show.”
They enter a clearing that holds a bunkerlike building, its only windows tucked along the eaves. The seams of its cinder-block construction are visible through a pristine coat of whitewash. Kit’s mother grasps the door handle, clearly expecting it to open. When it doesn’t, she backs up and stares at it, puzzled.
Kit points at the keypad. “Looks like you need a combination.”
Cupping her hands around her face, she tries to see through the window in the door, the only one at eye level. The interior is dark. “This is where we did most of our work. I suppose they lock everything now.” She laughs quietly. “Things were so open back then. We were trusted. Even if we didn’t deserve it.” She continues to gaze at the door, as if her wishfulness might coax it open.
Was he conceived here? Not that Kit wants to know; he most certainly doesn’t. He puts a hand on her shoulder. “Let’s make sure we get back in time.”
But she seems reluctant to leave. “We were so cocooned in this place.”
“Well, they worked you hard, so they took good care of you.”
“No.” She sighs. “I mean yes. That’s all true. Though boy was the food awful! But when I think about what was going on in the world outside these walls … Nobody talked about the war, about politics or Haight-Ashbury or riots or … I mean, the fast kids—the ones who came from New York, Chicago—they joked about dropping acid. But I doubt they’d seen more than the occasional joint. And the adults here—I suppose it didn’t help that most of them were foreign. What would somebody from Czechoslovakia or Vienna care about what we were up to in Vietnam?
“But you know, one of the musicians who played with me, his brother was killed in the war. He had to leave. And I remember feeling as if—as if somehow our acting so above it all, so ‘exempt’ from normal life, had put that brother in extra danger. Well. Silly.”
Kit wonders what his mother is driving at. He says, “I’m sure it’s the same now. Do you think the kids here now, this summer, ever talk about Afghanistan? The banking crisis? Rising unemployment?”
She seems to ponder this. “I’ll bet they do.”
“They’re all online, I guess. Connected to everything that way. But only because they can’t help it. It’s doesn’t mean they’re … more conscientious now.”
“Kit, I spend five days a week with kids this age. Everything is so different, believe me.” She pauses. “I guess I just wish that we hadn’t felt l
ike we lived in a parallel universe. Somewhere the usual laws didn’t apply.” She puts out a hand to test the keypad by the door. She touches a few numbers. But suddenly she’s the one to look at her watch and notice the time.
“Enough with the memories, right?” she says.
They head back the way they came, toward the noise of the crowd pressing toward the stage. When they reach the main path, they yield to a tight clique of teenagers passing by: confiding, teasing, and laughing; oblivious to anyone outside their bubble. They are dressed up, combed, and (where necessary) shaven, self-conscious but pleased at how they stand out.
Daphne takes Kit’s arm. “Look. That was me. I was one of them.” She steps into the path to follow. She speeds up to match their youthful gait, to stay close behind them.
“They are babies. My God,” she whispers when they slow down, having hit the edge of the crowd.
“So were you, Mom.” The fruity aroma of shampoo mingled with drugstore cologne emanates from the kids clustered before them.
Kit thinks of something his mother said a few minutes ago: that she spends entire days with kids this age, kids who yearn toward being (and half-believe they already are) adults. She spends most of her days with girls the same age she was when she made, and didn’t make, whatever decisions led to her having a baby: to Kit.
An usher takes their tickets and leads them to the center section, fifth row. Zeke, in his wheelchair, is parked on the aisle. The others move in so that Kit ends up between Zeke and his mother.
“Oh my.” Daphne holds out her program to Kit. He glances at the list of songs, many of the titles foreign, most but not all of the composers familiar: Handel, Schubert, Britten, Ravel, Bernstein. But among the familiar songs and composers are a few that take him by surprise. Maybe Sondheim isn’t so unconventional (a medley from Into the Woods), or Duke Ellington, but they will apparently hear songs by Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell, Barry Gibb, and the Beach Boys. The famous couple will also scat-sing a handful of the Goldberg Variations.