The second time Kit asked his mother about his phantom father was at the beginning of his senior year in high school, when she told him she would be moving out—and expected him to move with her.
He had stayed late on the second day of classes to attend the first cross-country meeting. It was nearly dinnertime, yet as he approached the house, he saw Jasper heading toward the trail that wound to the top of the hogback. When Kit asked where he was going, he said, “Gotta seize the last long days of summer, seize ’em by the throat.” But he looked grim, as if someone had just seized him by the throat.
In the kitchen, Kit’s mother waited at the table with two glasses of iced tea. She did not ask about his day. She said, almost before the screen slid into place behind him, “Kit, sweetie, I’ve made a big decision. I’m moving back. I can’t make this long-distance thing work anymore. I’m worn to the bone. If it feels like I’m letting you down, I’m sorry.” She spoke swiftly, breathlessly, clearly having rehearsed her lines, fearful of interruption.
Kit hung his pack on its hook and faced her across the table. “But you’ll be back for weekends.”
She looked at him for a moment, as if making up her mind just then. “No. I don’t think so.”
“Don’t think so?”
“No. I won’t be. We won’t be.”
“We?” Had Jasper agreed to move, too?
“Please sit,” she said. Reluctantly, he obeyed her. Immediately, she reached across the table. When he kept his hands in his lap, she withdrew hers.
“Kitten,” she said, “I shouldn’t have let the decision wait so long. I know you’ve started your classes. But you and I are both moving back. You’ll do fine. There’s a place for you on the team, I’ve already made sure of that.” She smiled proudly. “Your times are better than most of the best boys they already have.”
“Moving out, you mean,” he said. “Well, I’m not.”
“Sweetie …”
“I’m not! I don’t have to. I don’t.”
The look she leveled at Kit was half threat, half fear. “You’re my son, and I’m your mother.”
“And Jasper’s my dad.” Why wasn’t he part of this conversation? Kit remembered the argument three years before, practically the very same one, at the restaurant. Jasper had made her see sense.
She looked at the stove, as if remembering a pie or a cake that might be done. Kit followed her gaze; the oven wasn’t on. She said, “He’s not your father as much as I’m your mother.”
Kit felt his legs shaking. His voice shook, too, when he said, “Since when is it like some kind of quantitative thing? We’re not talking math.”
“It’s not math,” she said quietly. “It’s … biology. You were born to me, not to Jasper.”
“Did Jasper say I have to go?”
“Kit, you are almost an adult. But not yet. This decision is mine.”
“Why not Jasper’s, too? I’ll bet Jasper doesn’t want us to move.”
“He doesn’t. You’re right. But this has to do with me.” Hastily, she added, “And you. With us.”
“I’m not talking more about it till he gets back,” said Kit.
His mother regarded him as if he had slapped her, as if her pain were physical. Kit felt himself grow harder, not softer. He willed himself to stop shaking. “So if Jasper’s not my father, then tell me who is. Tell me once and for all who is. Or who was. Or could have been. Whatever.”
She closed her eyes and stood. She took her empty glass to the sink. Without turning around, she said, “You’re right. Let’s wait for Jasper to return. You need time to absorb this. I should have made this decision a lot sooner. That’s my fault. I understand your anger.”
No, she didn’t. Of course she didn’t. Kit left the kitchen quickly. He took the stairs two at a time, all three flights leading to his room. He wished he were wearing boots, not sneakers, so his footsteps would sound vehemently through the echo chamber of the house, proxy to his protest. He lay on his bed, listening to his mother move pots and pans around, turn the water on and off, open and close the fridge. He heard the crinkling of foil, the percussive assault of a knife on a cutting board. She did not put music on, the way she normally would have.
When she called him to come down and eat, he ignored her. He heard her start to climb the stairs, hesitate, descend. He lay there, hungry, angry, determined to listen for one thing only: Jasper’s return.
Jasper returned at nine; the numbers on Kit’s alarm clock glowed in the dark. He rose and rushed out his door, down the many stairs, as if afraid that Jasper might go out again, this time for good.
His mother and stepfather stood in the kitchen, facing each other across the table. “I’m not moving,” Kit said to Jasper. “Am I?” He refused to look at his mother.
“Oh, sweetie,” she said. “I know how upset you are …”
“He’s not the only one,” said Jasper.
Kit’s mother started to cry. “I have tried. God knows I have tried.”
“Tried what?” said Jasper. “To have your dandy cake and eat it, too? None of us gets it easy, Daphne. Not me, not you. Not even good old Kit here.”
“This isn’t talk for him to hear.”
“Why the heck ever not?” said Jasper. “He’s no tender edelweiss. He’s not your precious baby, not anymore, no ma’am.” Jasper turned to the stove and ladled soup into a bowl. He set it on the table, loudly. He looked at Kit, his gaze stern. “That’s for me. You want some, too?”
Kit nodded. “Thanks.”
As Kit’s mother stood to the side and watched, the boy and the older man sat down to share a late dinner. After a few spoonfuls of soup, Jasper looked up and said to her, “He stays. If he wants. Absolutely. Up to him is what I say. And I am—legally, by the way—his father. Guardian, what have you. And guard him I will, from this nonsense if nothing else.”
This time, she was the one to leave the room abruptly, flee up the stairs. Later, from his crow’s nest, Kit heard her crying. He could tell that she had retired to the empty room once shared by Rory and Kyle.
But she did move, the following Sunday. She hired one of her seniors to drive a small truck in tandem with her car; Kit recognized the boy from a band performance he and Jasper had watched the previous spring. Every morning before the move, Kit could see that she’d been crying the night before. But he said little to her, nothing to appease her or mislead her into thinking he would join in her betrayal of Jasper. That’s how he saw it.
He said nothing of consequence to Jasper, either. The night after his mother drove off (her cello case propped in the front passenger space, the child who would never have refused to go, even if it had a voice of its own), Jasper made steaks on the grill. He said to Kit, “Next weekend, I’ll drive you over to stay with her.” He aimed a forbidding look at Kit. “You’ll go every other weekend at the very least. If it means missing meets, dropping the team, that’s what you’ll do. That’s the sacrifice you’ll make for her, and you will not complain. I’m glad you’re staying—I think it’s best, no matter what your reasons—but you won’t break her heart completely. Enough of that goin’ on around here as it is.”
That was the last time Kit heard Jasper say more than a sentence about his wife, who was already, though Kit didn’t know it, filing for a divorce. There was so much he pieced together later: years later.
The following week, Kit dropped out of cross-country. By the third weekend he spent with his mother, he figured out her real reason for leaving (or her incentive): Bart, the principal at his mother’s school, a guy who had shaken Jasper’s hand dozens of times at all the concerts, plays, and graduations they attended with Kit’s mother. That Christmas, after she invited Bart to come along to Nana and Papa’s for the caroling and the eggnog, she announced to Kit, in the privacy of her old room, where coats were stacked high on the twin beds, that as soon as the divorce came through, she and Bart would be getting married. Nothing fancy, she assured him; just a civil ceremony (as if he could poss
ibly care how big a party there’d be, what his mother would wear, what vows she would say in front of what higher power). And then she would move into Bart’s house. “And that will be your new home, too, whenever you come back from college. Bart is very fond of you. Bart has the makings of a terrific dad.”
Which he would be to Kit’s half sister, June, who was born just after Kit’s freshman year at Beloit. His mother was thirty-seven years old, a perfectly normal age, by the standards of her generation, at which to have a baby.
Soon after hearing that she was pregnant, after piecing together his mother’s actions and what he could decipher of her emotions, he understood—as he had when she became engaged to Jasper ten years before—that this was something for which she had been hoping all along. Now, looking dispassionately at his mother’s life, he can see how she must have spent most of her young adulthood trying to compensate in deliberate choices for the accident that produced Kit.
Each time Will turns in his sleep, Kit sees the mattress shift overhead, hears the slats creak faintly. In the past year, Fanny has surpassed her brother in height, but he’s grown stockier. His body has begun to look distinctly male in its dialogue with the ground. On the soccer field, he plays low and fast; his feet, small for his age, are nimble.
Will is the age Kit was when his mother married Jasper. Twenty years in the future, Will may tell a serious girlfriend, I was nine when my mother made my dad move out. She couldn’t stand that he never found out who his real father was. She thought it would make him stronger. (Or She thought it would fix their marriage.) Just as Kit had told his own comparable story to Sandra, and to a few girlfriends before her. It will be late one night, Will and the girl—the young woman—leaning shoulder to shoulder on a lumpy futon after a party (or, face it, in a tousled bed after sex). They will be adding beads and charms, even precious stones, to the complex chains of their respective autobiographies.
The childhood stories Kit has told about himself most often feature, among other milestones, the move after his mother’s marriage to Jasper, the calm he discovered in running, his pride at learning how to train and then drive a pack of sled dogs (though he hasn’t driven a sled in decades), and his shock, during his first year away at college, when he found out his mother would be having a baby.
There is also the story he tells if someone asks, Why art history? Unusual for a guy, isn’t it? Sometimes he suspects that what they mean is Unusual for a guy who’s not gay.
Twice, before Jasper, Kit’s grandparents gave his mother, as a birthday present, a weekend in New York City. Her birthday is in November, so both times she chose the weekend adjoining Veterans Day, allowing her time to travel by bus. The first time, Kit was four or five; this was the first time his mother was away from him overnight—three nights at that. Nana let him eat foods his mother refused to buy: Cheetos, Froot Loops, Fresca, Devil Dogs. The conspiracy they shared (enhanced by the metabolic joy of so much sugar and salt) took the edge off his anxiety. Nana let him sleep in a cot next to the bed she shared with Papa.
The second time, when Kit was eight, his mother took him along. That Friday was cold: flurries mottled the windows of their bus as they traveled south through Massachusetts, arriving in New York after dark. Kit’s first clear visual impression of the city was Port Authority, by far the largest enclosed space he had ever seen. A pigeon—indoors!—swooped back and forth over their heads as they made their way down several escalators and out toward the street.
The taxi with its black interior; the long vertiginous sweep of the avenue carrying them forward, straight as a ruler; the chain of traffic lights unreeling rhythmically, red to green to yellow again and again, as far ahead of them as Kit could see through the plastic partition behind the driver; the tall brick house that claimed to be a hotel, the flowery room at the top of three long flights of stairs: every bit of it was new. Like snapshots tucked in an album, these experiences are still in sharp focus when Kit calls them up.
His mother had tickets for two concerts and a musical play. One of the concerts was in a small theater, not much larger than the auditorium in Kit’s school, but the other one took place in a hall higher than it was wide, nearly as vast as the bus station. They sat in seats so far up that to look down toward the distant stage, at first, made Kit feel as if they must inevitably fall. Surely they would be sucked into the vortex by the pull of all the bodies tiered beneath them. Leaning even slightly forward made him feel dizzy. But when the music from the orchestra rose, with astonishing clarity, it seemed to still the spectators all at once, to pin the audience firmly in place.
His mother’s sense of enchantment was contagious. Just as the first instruments spoke up, Kit could feel her arm, against his, trembling. “This is Brahms,” she whispered. “Beautiful, beautiful Brahms.”
That night she wore a red dress Kit had never seen, with lipstick to match. She had twisted and pinned her hair tight against the back of her head. Kit had watched her do this in their hotel room, her arms bent unnaturally over her ears. She had sighed with exasperation as she did it. Now, each time he looked at her face, he was startled by her bright mouth and darker eyes, the jewels swinging from her shapely translucent ears.
At the intermission, she insisted they return all the way to the bottom. “Let’s look at the people!” she urged. What a dense crowd it was, and what a din they made. Kit was too short to see much more than a shifting collision of jacketed and sequined torsos. His mother held his hand, but she didn’t speak to him. She looked in every direction, as if she expected to meet someone. She did this at the end of the concert, too, when once again they joined the chattering perfumed wave of bodies flowing down the stairs.
She behaved the same way in the neighborhood where they were staying. Their hotel stood on a street of similar buildings, brick houses joined side to side, with tall windows and absurdly small front yards bordered by black iron fencing. Here, the trees stood higher than the buildings, sometimes touching above the narrow streets. On Saturday morning she announced, “Let’s do some wandering, Kitten. This is such a perfect part of the city just to explore, just to see what we might see.” It was sunny, noticeably warmer than it had been in New Hampshire, but Kit grew tired of zigzagging to and fro, without a clear destination. His mother looked constantly at street signs, as if to keep them oriented—yet they passed along the same row of shops three times.
Kit pretended his toes were cold and asked if they could go inside somewhere. They had eaten breakfast, but he was hungry again before noon. So they sat in the window of a tiny restaurant with dented tables and wooden benches, eating pastries and drinking cocoa. While Kit’s mother reminisced about a field trip she had taken to New York City with her high-school orchestra (“We sang in a concert hall that I don’t think exists anymore”), she looked past him out the window.
All of this Kit still remembers clearly, more than thirty years later, but what he remembers best is their visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“I say we head for Egypt,” said his mother, once they had climbed the gargantuan stone staircase and entered yet another space made for giants. (Was it the quantity of air so many people required to breathe, was that why these places were so huge, bigger even than any of the churches Kit had seen in New Hampshire?)
“Here come the mummies,” she said as she led him down a series of windowless halls. “I read that they have just about the world’s most amazing collection of mummies. Outside Egypt, I guess.”
Kit knew plenty about the pharaohs and the pyramids from social studies. He wasn’t wild about any of it. It seemed as if all that remained of those people was everything to do with their death, not their lives. Now, in this extraordinary place that so obviously thrilled his mother, he was reluctant to hurt her feelings by saying that he didn’t really want to look at mummies.
He asked her, “What else do they have?”
She stopped and looked down at him. At first he worried she was angry, that mummies were the only reason the
y had ridden the subway for so many stops, walked so many blocks, to come here. But she laughed.
“Kitten, what don’t they have here!”
Was that a question she expected him to answer?
But then she said, “They have pictures and sculptures and jewelry and rooms full of furniture, and—wait, I almost forgot—they have suits of armor. Armor! Do you want to see armor? I think they even have armor for horses.”
He didn’t care for war much more than he cared for death, but he agreed to look at the armor. Armor for horses: that had a certain appeal. On the way to the armor, however, his mother became lost, and they found themselves in a room filled with brightly colored pictures of fields, rivers, flowers in vases, boats on the sea, people with faces of scarlet or blue or painted as a tumult of purple and orange. Kit slowed, arrested by the force of all that color. And here (unlike the halls of the mummies), sun was permitted to enter. Light soaked the room from a wall of windows, making the color even richer, even more mesmerizing.
Kit’s mother let go of his hand. He walked from picture to picture, around the entire room, not missing a single one. She followed. For the first time, she didn’t try to explain or tell a story about what he was seeing. Finally they stood, side by side, before a picture showing cyclones of paint in every conceivable shade of violet and green, with quavering slashes of blue and buttonlike blotches of red.
Kit was unsure whether he thought the picture was good—you couldn’t call it pretty, and it didn’t look terribly “real”—but he couldn’t stop looking at the colors, at the way the paint stood out from the surface of the picture. The paint looked wet. Was the painter crazy in some way? Possibly a little blind, like Papa when he couldn’t find his glasses?
“Mownay,” his mother said.
Kit thought she must mean a particular way of using paint. He did not match the word mownay with the name of the painter on the label. He didn’t ask his mother any questions; her world was music, not art. She seemed as surprised by the mownay as he was.