Before You Know Kindness (2004)

by Chris Bohjalian

  But then, of course, there was that other Spencer--the gentle and loving and almost farcically good-natured man whose sincere consideration of animals made him such an impassioned and (in small doses) charismatic champion of their rights. How he had loved Catherine when he was courting her here in the country at nineteen and twenty! It was so obvious and genuine and touchingly over the top. Breakfast in bed. Bouquets of lupine and wildflowers. Enduring hours of defeat at her hands on the Contour Club tennis courts. Nan had heard stories from Spencer's parents of the lengths to which he had gone to rescue raccoons as a child, to shelter birds with broken wings, to nurse ailing dogs and cats and (once) a neighbor's ugly ferret. Nan needed only to recall Julys past and how Spencer would read to Charlotte and Willow for hours before the children would go to bed to be reminded of her son-in-law's strengths. He would use voices so rambunctious and theatric that Nan would be left wondering why he hadn't wound up an actor. Moreover, as busy as he was--he seemed to be traveling all the time--when Willow and her family would visit New York, it was invariably Spencer who would take the girls to a Broadway musical or a children's ballet. He didn't always make time for the small things, Nan knew, such as teaching his daughter the names of the trees that grew in Central Park or showing her how to press a fallen leaf between wax paper in the fall, but then her husband, Richard, had rarely done those sorts of things with his children, either.

  The difference--and this was what alarmed Nan periodically--was his utter unwillingness to listen to others, and the way he would dismiss those who disagreed with him when it came to matters of food and meat and animal rights. All too often he seemed more interested in animals than in humans. Than in his own family. Moreover, sometimes he seemed interested in animals in the abstract--as issues and causes--rather than as individual creatures with whom he might feel a special bond. It was as if he'd lost somewhere that little boy who would rescue a raccoon because it was furry and soft and he saw in its eyes the simple spark of life.

  The irony in Nan's mind was that there had been a time when Spencer had not simply eaten like a regular person, he'd actually been a rather good cook. A chef, even! He was nineteen and he was dating her daughter, and the two of them spent the summer (the first of many) with her in New Hampshire between their freshman and sophomore years of college. It was only a year after Richard had died, and Nan was very glad to have a man around the country house so there would be someone to empty the kitchen garbage and change the lightbulbs in the ceiling fixtures--real man's work, in her opinion. Her daughter, Catherine, was a waitress at Gerta's Edelweiss Garden that summer, a restaurant with postcard-perfect vistas of the ski slopes at Cannon and the new condominiums at Mittersill, while Spencer worked in the kitchen at the Steer by the Shore, a steak-and-seafood restaurant, which in lieu of a view had both a dining room big enough to accommodate bus tours and the area's first dessert bar--a novelty back then. Spencer started there over Memorial Day Weekend as a dishwasher but, through a combination of pluck and luck and the sudden arrest of the restaurant's second chef for cocaine possession, had ascended with meteoric efficiency. By the Fourth of July it was young Spencer McCullough who was slicing the chicken breasts and cooking the lobsters and making that delicious stuffing with the secret ingredient that tasted an awful lot like Ritz crackers and that Spencer protected like a spy. That summer she would not have been surprised if someday when he finished college Spencer had enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America or Johnson & Wales with the hope of becoming a serious chef or restaurateur.

  Of course he hadn't. By late August, when he and her daughter were done with their jobs for the summer and the boy--and in so many ways then he really was still a boy--went home to see his family in Westchester before returning to college, it was clear that he would continue on the more predictable white-collar path taken by all of her children's friends.

  And, in truth, why should she have expected him eventually to go on to cooking school? It wasn't as if Catherine ever again wanted to have anything to do with either a restaurant's kitchen or its dining room.

  Spencer still enjoyed cooking--that was clear--and he certainly enjoyed cooking here in New Hampshire. The problem was that he now cooked like a--and there was only one word for it--weirdo. She shuddered when she thought of the odd beans and curds and funguses that he considered legitimate sources of nutrition.

  Behind her she heard the screen door clap shut and for a split second it had sounded to her like a gunshot, and she thought suddenly of the deer and her idea to remove the signs that forbid hunting on her property. She turned around and saw her two granddaughters racing toward her, Willow in a blue terry-cloth cover-up and her cousin in only that minuscule string thing that both Catherine and Charlotte insisted was a bathing suit. She sighed and then prepared herself for her daily battle with the older girl: The child might have only the merest hummocks for breasts, but she still could not arrive at the Contour Club dressed like a lap dancer. It was just that simple.

  Chapter Three.

  John Seton was lying happily on the floor of his living room in Vermont, a wisp of black bang across his eyeglasses, watching enrapt as his son pedaled the pudgy water balloons that passed for his legs like an upside-down bicyclist. Patrick was not quite five months old, and any day now John was sure that his cherubic baby boy was going to dazzle him by overcoming his turtlelike inability to roll over and start spinning like a dervish on a ski slope. It could happen this very second, if only because the child might grow tired of feeling the Dijon mustard that in the last moment he had let loose into his diaper with the power and sound of a fire hose.

  Upstairs he heard Sara in the boy's nursery, and he presumed she was getting the baby monitor off the nightstand and throwing a couple more onesies and doll-sized socks into the baby's suitcase. He and his wife--260 pounds of grown-ups--would share a single overnight bag, while their thirteen-pound eleven-ounce son would have to himself a piece of luggage the size of a steamer trunk. The clothes the boy wore might not be big, but he sure needed a lot of them. And then there were the pillows and the blankets and the menagerie of stuffed animals from his room here so his crib in New Hampshire would smell like his crib in Vermont.

  The boy stared up at the ceiling and gurgled contentedly. He smiled at something John could neither see nor understand, and John smiled back. Then he sighed. Young Patrick was not going to roll over today--at least not this morning--and so he scooped his son up and carried him to the bathroom to change him.

  As he passed through the kitchen with his boy in his arms the phone rang. He wanted to let the answering machine get it because in all likelihood it was either his office or Sara's answering service, and today was supposed to be a day off. They were driving to his mother's in New Hampshire, and they were hoping to leave by nine thirty--ten at the latest--so that they could stop by the club and surprise everyone while they were having lunch or whacking tennis balls or whatever it was that Mother had the girls doing at boot camp today. But he knew that if he didn't answer the phone Sara would. She'd only been back at work for two months, and so she was still in that professional's postpartum phase in which anything she did with one of her patients was more satisfying--and, in truth, easier--than hooking up a Hoover (either Patrick or the pump) to one of her breasts, or waking at one or five in the morning to feed the child, or trying (and failing) to quell the aneurysm-inducing stress that both of them felt when one or the other was trapped behind a hay wagon or dump truck and they were late for Patrick's 5:30 pickup at the day-care center in their village. The place was run by two women who were loving and gentle and kind during the day, but like werewolves were transformed into something unspeakably ugly at precisely 5:31. The family of any child remaining at the Mother's Love Nurture World at 5:45 would be charged an extra half day; three tardy pickups in a month and the child was subject to dismissal.

  With his one free hand he picked the receiver from the wall like an apple and heard the secretary he shared with two other public defe
nders on the other end of the line.

  "Hi, John. Sorry to bother you. I didn't know if you saw the newspaper yet."

  "No," he murmured, shaking his head despite the reality that the woman couldn't see him. Patrick happily grabbed his nose with fingers that still resembled tiny pinchers and made a sound like a giggle.

  "I hear Patrick," Sally said.

  "Yes, you do."

  "You sound like you have a cold."

  "No. I have a baby who thinks my nose is a rattle."

  "Oh, that's cute."

  Actually, John thought, it was more painful than cute: The baby was trying to move his skull the way he himself had a moment earlier when he'd been shaking his head, and he was surprised at the amount of strength in that small hand and arm. The kid couldn't roll over yet, but his motor skills for exactly this maneuver had been perfected with weeks of practice on a stuffed animal the size of a butternut squash that he and Sara had christened Drool Monkey.

  "What's in the paper?" he asked.

  "Dickie Ames was busted last night. It was another DUI--"

  "Oh, Jesus, he didn't hurt anyone, did he?"

  "No. But he took out a fire hydrant. And because it was the zillionth time--"

  "It was not the zillionth time," John corrected her. Sally was an excellent secretary, but she was twenty-three and her tendency to speak with adolescent hyperbole sometimes annoyed him. "It was, I believe, the third."

  "Well, he blew a mighty impressive point-one. And, oh by the way, he was driving with a suspended license: He wasn't due to get it back until the week after next."

  John wasn't defending Dickie Ames, but he needed the man to be a credible witness in a misdemeanor assault in a bar. Ames was a drinking and deer-hunting pal of Andre Nadeau and was supposed to explain to the judge at a bail review on Monday that Nadeau was acting in self-defense when he'd broken a heavy glass beer mug against the side of Cameron Gerrity's face in a fight--which, John believed, was exactly the truth. It was self-defense. Gerrity may have been the one to wind up with the thirty-four stitches in his cheek and a nose that would look forever like a boxer's, but John was quite confident that Nadeau had been provoked. Ames saw it all and he said so. Besides, there were extenuating circumstances John hoped the judge would consider. Nadeau was a single dad. John had seen him with his boys, and although Nadeau may have had a problem with drinking (yes, like his pal, Dickie Ames) he certainly didn't have one with aggression. He had no history of pummeling people in bars. He had no history of pummeling people anywhere.

  If given the chance, Dickie Ames was also going to tell the judge what a fine father Nadeau was to those two boys and that whenever he had been together with the family at deer camp, the man was loving, gentle, and preternaturally responsible--especially when it came to teaching a couple of junior high school kids not to kill themselves with the family arsenal the grown men used to kill deer and moose and bears and any other mammals they happened to stumble across in the woods. John liked Nadeau--and not simply in the protective, fatherly way he liked all the pathetic drinkers and substance abusers and petty thieves who wound up at the office of the public defender. He liked Nadeau because the guy was raising his boys pretty much on his own since his wife had left him. The man had offered to take him deer hunting at his family's camp this November--help him track and kill a 250-pounder, perhaps--and John had readily agreed. Nadeau liked him, too, and respected what he did as a lawyer: He wouldn't mind that John was a complete moron in the woods and was still learning to hold a rifle and hunt. Nadeau had even told him about a friend of his in Essex Junction, a gunsmith, who would be able to remove the bullet--cartridge, to be precise--that seemed to be stuck in the chamber of John's rifle. It had been there since last November, since the last day of John's first hunting season. Periodically he'd tried to extract it since then, retrieving the gun from the locked cabinet in the guest bedroom and cycling the bolt over and over, but the bullet had never popped out. His older friend, the justice Howard Mansfield, had suggested he simply shove a ramrod down the barrel and force the live round from the chamber, but there was no way in the world John was going to try that little maneuver. That was exactly how newcomers to the sport--especially newcomer flatlanders--blew off their fingers or hands. He'd considered simply driving to the edge of the forest and discharging the weapon into the sky, but he feared that perhaps whatever was causing the bullet to lodge in the chamber would prevent it from leaving the barrel as well. The thing just might explode in his face. He understood he'd have to deal with the bullet before hunting season, but since he only used the rifle during those two weeks in November he hadn't seriously focused on the problem until Nadeau suggested his buddy, the gunsmith.

  He sighed now so loudly at the reality that Dickie Ames had spent the night behind bars that Patrick turned his little boy eyes on his father's face. At least, John told himself, he wasn't Dickie Ames's lawyer, and he took some comfort in this.

  "Anything else I should know about?" he asked Sally. "Sara and I were about to leave."

  "I don't think so."

  "Well, thank you."

  "I guess you didn't need to know about Dickie Ames. I guess it could have waited."

  "No, you were right to call. I appreciate it."

  "Tell you what: For the rest of today I'll only call you if I have good news."

  "You have the number at my mother's house, right? The cell phone never works over there."

  "I do."

  He thanked her once again, pulled his nose from between Patrick's viselike fingers, and then continued on his way to the bathroom on the first floor of the house. After he had changed his son's diaper, he decided, he would toss the gun bag with his Adirondack rifle into the trunk of the car. On Monday they would be driving through Essex Junction on their way home from his mother's, and he could drop the weapon off with that gunsmith.

  JOHN'S WIFE, SARA, hadn't spoken to Catherine and Spencer since Memorial Day Weekend, when they had all met at the Seton summer home to plant the vegetable garden, the cutting garden, and the beds and beds of berries: strawberries in a western field, blueberries along the house's southern foundation, and raspberries to the east. John and his sister, Catherine, seemed to speak weekly, however, and the two siblings spoke at least that often with their mother.

  At first Sara had taken it as a compliment that she was allowed to call the family matriarch Nan while Spencer, Catherine's husband, had to call her Mrs. Seton. It was almost comic: Spencer had known the woman since he was eighteen, and still he was required to address her with Victorian courtesy and old-money solemnity. He and her husband each received Valentine's cards from Nan in February, and even after all these years the one to Spencer was signed "Sincerely, Mrs. Seton." It was only after she and John had been married for a couple of years that it dawned on Sara why she might be allowed to refer to her mother-in-law as Nan and Spencer was not: Perhaps it made Nan feel younger--as if the two of them were girlfriends--if they called each other by their first names.

  As she and John and their baby drove now to New Hampshire, Sara decided that although she wasn't dreading the weekend before her, she wasn't looking forward to it, either. She was beginning to feel that her own house was getting back into some kind of order for the first time since before Patrick was born and she would have enjoyed a weekend at home. Moreover, the child was cutting a tooth--though he was sleeping right now in his infant car seat in the back--and poor John was exhausted. Could barely keep his eyes open at the dinner table last night and had spent most of the morning lying on the floor with the baby.

  She was also troubled by the sheer amount she had felt compelled to pack. They'd be in New Hampshire a whopping sixty-eight to seventy hours, but between the excessive athleticism her mother-in-law cheerfully inflicted on the family (she had to remember tennis rackets and golf clubs and bathing suits, though she wanted to play neither golf nor tennis nor swim in that frigid alpine slush that Nan called a lake or that club pool that reeked of chlorine) and the
accrual of health and beauty aids--sunscreens and powders and shampoos and lotions and teething gel and ointment and hair glitter and, alas, even lipstick for Willow because Nan had them all going to the club on Saturday night for a soiree of some sort and Willow had said on the phone that Charlotte would be wearing lipstick and so she wanted to wear some now, too--it felt to her as if she were packing for a monthlong expedition into a lost world without drugstores and shopping malls.

  She thought she might be overthinking this because she was a therapist, but the problem with Nan--and with John and Catherine and, yes, Spencer when they were all together--was that they could never just . . . be. They didn't sit still well as a family. When she and John had been younger they'd smoked a little dope, and sometimes she longed to buy a bag of the most mellow stuff she could find and bring it with her to Sugar Hill. Sedate the whole bunch of them so they'd all sit on that wraparound porch and just stare at the beauty of the lupine. Maybe open the windows, point the speakers outside, and listen to music on that antique record player Nan kept in the living room. Play some of those old Sammy Davis Jr. and Mel Torme albums that her daughter had presumed were oddly flat Frisbees when she'd been a first-grader.