Before You Know Kindness

by Chris Bohjalian

  Now Willow had her up and about. This wasn't the sort of athletic, good-for-you activity in which her family usually indulged here at the club, but at least it was something. A project. She gestured for Charlotte to wait just outside the wood-paneled door with the silhouette of a male golfer in knickers, while she slithered in first to make absolutely certain it was empty. Willow didn't believe there was a man in there because she had been hovering in the pro shop for close to ten minutes, carefully staking out the door. But she thought she should check--just in case. Charlotte was in no condition to be yelled at.

  "Coast is clear," she said, once she had confirmed that the room was empty. She had emerged partway from the doorway and glanced quickly out the club room's picture windows to make sure that her grandmother was still on the practice putting green and her own mother was still reading a magazine with Patrick beside her in his baby chair.

  The girls had heard about these urinals and their exceptional artwork--pictures, paintings, or photographs, no one would say--at the bonfire on Saturday night. Willow had never before had any desire to see a urinal because until then she hadn't even known such a thing existed. In the last five or six years, whenever she had traveled anywhere alone with her father and needed to go to the bathroom--in shopping malls, in airports--he had sent her into the ladies' room alone and stood guard outside the door. Even when she'd been three years old she was pretty sure that she had been using the ladies' rooms (though in those days, evidently, her father had ventured into the refuge with her, standing beside the mirrors and the sinks as her sentinel against abduction). She'd actually had to ask Charlotte precisely what one was, and when her cousin had described their design to her that evening she wasn't sure whether the notion astonished her more because it meant going to the bathroom with nothing but air between you and the person beside you or whether it was the freedom to go to the bathroom so casually. With such remarkable ease. Now that young Patrick was in her life she saw a penis with frequency, and its advantages--at least when it came to urinating--were apparent.

  No, she decided finally, it was the immodesty that fascinated her more than anything. It was the complete lack of reserve.

  "You coming?" she asked Charlotte, and the older girl nodded. She liked this reversal of roles. And so with one last glimpse around her to make sure no adults were nearby, she drew her cousin with her into the men's room, scooted past the corner wall into the bathroom area itself, and saw before her the urinals. There they were, mounted against the far wall, the two of them surrounded by a delft blue tile that looked more interesting or impressive than the pink tile that adorned the ladies' room. Still, the urinals themselves were disappointing: She saw nothing that resembled artwork, no glorious beautification, no flourishes that might elevate them beyond their purpose.

  She looked at Charlotte and saw the girl was nodding, a tiny smirk at the edges of her lips. Her arms were folded across her chest, as if she were trying to understand a painting at one of the grand museums across the park from her apartment in the city.

  "A guy from Franconia College did it years ago," Charlotte said finally, her voice even now a tad shaky. "One of those hippie guys who went to the school before it closed."

  Willow had gotten the sense from her parents that everyone who went to Franconia College before it closed was a hippie guy--or girl.

  "You know the painter. We both do," her cousin continued. "He's the man with that Rip Van Winkle beard in the bookstore in Littleton." Willow nodded. She knew exactly whom Charlotte was talking about. Every other day Grandmother took them to the nearby town of Littleton on errands of one sort or another, and inevitably they went to the bookstore. Willow guessed she knew it as well as any of the bookstores near her home in Vermont. There was a fellow who worked there in his late fifties, and he had a bushy beard the color of cigarette ash that fell to the middle of his chest. He was a quiet guy, but when you asked him a question about a book he knew exactly where in the store to find it, and whenever he recommended a novel to Willow there was a very good chance she would like it.

  She glanced back at the urinals, wondering exactly what she was missing--what the fellow had painted. She could tell the urinals were made of the same kind of porcelain as a regular toilet, and she'd never before thought about whether a toilet actually had to be painted. Individually painted, that is. The notion crossed her mind that perhaps urinals weren't usually white. Maybe they were some other color. Something that made them even more repulsive than they already were.

  No, that wasn't possible. They couldn't be more repulsive.

  "Did you think the bugs were real?" Charlotte was asking. "I did when I first saw them."

  "Bugs?"

  "The flies!"

  She turned back to the urinals and understood for the first time what those black smudges were that hung slightly below the midpoint of each smooth-hollowed porcelain wall. They were so perfectly centered that she'd presumed they were merely a manufacturing logo of some sort. She took a step closer, and then another. Sure enough, the black marks were flies--rendered, she saw now, with the exactitude of a naturalist, right down to the tiny hairs on the bugs' legs and the intricate lacework on the insects' wings--one on each urinal.

  "Why a fly?" she asked Charlotte. "Do you know?"

  "Uh-huh. Aim."

  "Aim?"

  "Aim. Some people at the club wanted to keep the men's room a little cleaner and they figured out that all men--even my dad, I guess--are hunters at heart."

  Willow looked down at the ground around the urinals and then at the walls beside them. Some men, she knew, were better hunters than others, and suddenly she was desperately glad that she was wearing her sandals.

  JOHN WAS UNSURE if he was pleased that he was about to be alone with Spencer for the first time since the accident. The photographer was finishing up now, and Catherine was taking a short walk in Hanover to clear her head. Hours earlier his mother and Sara had brought the three children back to Sugar Hill . . . or, if he knew Mother, back to the Contour Club. Just because her son-in-law had just had half his shoulder blown away was no reason that she and the two girls couldn't grab a quick swim or sneak in a brief golf or bridge lesson. By now, he guessed, his mother was on the practice putting green or the driving range, and the girls were doing something equally as wholesome and lively.

  There was a lot that John felt he had to say to Spencer, most of it apologetic and self-flagellating, though he did want to discuss as well FERAL's plan that he turn a lawsuit against the gun manufacturer into a public spectacle.

  Once the photographer had packed his camera bag and left, John sat down on the empty bed across from his brother-in-law and said, "You must be exhausted. That looked excruciating." The photographer had taken some shots with film and some with a digital camera, and twice he had insisted on showing John in the viewfinder the image of his brother-in-law's shoulder that he was preserving for the lawyer--a woman from New York City named Paige. Paige was flying to New Hampshire first thing Wednesday morning, along with that pompous attorney from FERAL. Keenan Barrett.

  "Excruciating is . . . 'bout right," Spencer said quietly. The nurse had replaced his bandages and the splint that held his arm flat against his chest. It had been evident that despite the painkillers, the process had been almost unbearable.

  "So," John began, deciding now was as good a time as any to ask the question that was standing in the room with them like an uninvited and slightly malodorous third person, "how angry are you?"

  Spencer considered his response for a moment before answering vaguely, "Don't know."

  "But you know how sorry I am, right? How desperately and sincerely--"

  "You're . . . sorry. I know that."

  "You have every right to be angry."

  Spencer swallowed and then gave him the tiniest of nods in agreement. John had noticed in the course of the day that Spencer was not merely speaking softly, he was answering in as few words as possible (and sometimes with no words), as if even the
act of speaking was at once painful and exhausting.

  "May I ask you another question? Are you angry because--"

  "Just angry, 'kay? I am . . . just . . . angry."

  "Because I hunt."

  "Yes."

  "Because I left a bullet in the gun."

  "Yes."

  "Because--"

  "Because I may . . . be . . . crippled. That seems reason . . . enough." It was the longest response he had heard from Spencer all afternoon, and the length--as well as the wheezy rasp--caught John off guard.

  "They don't know that for sure," he murmured, and he feared he sounded blindly--illogically--optimistic.

  Spencer rolled his eyes and then grimaced. "When did you start?"

  "Hunting? Last fall. I got interested in the summer, around the time we got Sara's amnio results and we realized we were going to have a little boy. A son. I've known lots of people in Vermont who hunt, of course, and I guess I'd always been intrigued. And so I took a course and some lessons--"

  "Not enough . . ."

  John sighed, knowing there was nothing he could (or should) say in his defense.

  "No. Apparently not. Anyway, I took lessons and I took the safety course and before I knew it, I was"--and he felt himself shrugging, as if he were commenting on a subject as innocuous as which necktie he had worn to work--"hunting."

  "You kill something?"

  "No. Not yet. Never, now."

  Spencer breathed in and out through his nose. It sounded a bit like a small plastic whistle.

  "When you feel a little better--and only when you feel better--let's talk about FERAL, okay? About what they want you to do."

  "I don't think so."

  "You don't think so?"

  "When it comes to . . . to that, we should talk . . . through lawyers."

  "God, Spencer, you know how sorry I am, don't you? I am--"

  "Go. Please."

  "You want me to leave?"

  "Yes. Thank you."

  "Look: I went hunting a couple times last November. I was one guy with one gun. I'm sorry about that. But it's not like I was electrocuting minks or sending the ham hogs up the chute at Tar Heel. I'm--"

  "John: Not now . . . okay?"

  "Okay," he agreed, stunned, and he stood. There was so much he wanted to explain to his brother-in-law--about why he hunted, what he had once (though no longer) hoped the sport someday might give to him and to his son. He wanted to explain to Spencer what was really in store for him--and, alas, for his daughter--if he made a public circus of a lawsuit against Adirondack. It would be more than just depositions and investigations. There would be thinly veiled threats. His daughter in news stories on television, in print, on the Web. He himself defined solely in terms of his disability. The media coverage might serve FERAL's agenda well, but it certainly wouldn't make his family's life any easier.

  And did he want to risk seeing his wife's brother drawn into the suit by the gun company? That, too, was a possibility, depending upon the state in which they brought the action. The legal wording was "contribution among joint tortfeasors," but in lay terms it simply meant that the gun company might drag him into this disaster as a codefendant.

  Currently the rifle was with the New Hampshire State Police. Assuming that the state's attorney decided not to file criminal charges (and John desperately reassured himself that no New Hampshire "live free or die" prosecutor, even if he were the sort of unforgiving Draconian sociopath he'd dealt with on occasion in Vermont, would charge either him or his niece with a crime), Spencer's lawyers would want it. And, he knew, he would give it to them before they subpoenaed it, because this was Spencer they were talking about. Then his brother-in-law's lawyers would have the rifle examined by experts of their own in a laboratory somewhere--probably that one in Maryland--and he would know once and for all just how incompetent he was.

  Or, to be precise, just how incompetent he would be made to appear to the world.

  Still, it wasn't the fact that he was about to leave without having discussed the lawsuit that most distressed John: It was that he had asked Spencer, his brother-in-law and his friend, if he had known he was sorry, and the experience had proven completely unsatisfactory. He understood now that he wanted to fall on his knees on the hospital room floor and actually beg his brother-in-law's forgiveness. He wanted, he realized, to weep. But he wasn't the sort of man who cried--at least in front of other people--and Spencer wasn't the type of man who would want to see such a spectacle. Nevertheless, he desired nothing more in the world right now than the chance to go back in time to Saturday afternoon and remove his rifle from the trunk of the Volvo. He would get that bullet out of the chamber--to think he could have fired the gun into the sky all along!--and then he would bury the weapon as deep in the fields of lupine as he could. He never wanted to touch a rifle again or venture into the woods with a gun. His brief excursion into the great northern forest as a hunter was over.

  Spencer, he saw, had turned his eyes toward the window and was still waiting for him to leave. And so he did. He mumbled that he'd be back in the morning, and then he left. It was only when he was in the hallway that he realized he couldn't go home yet--he couldn't, in fact, go home for hours--because he had to drive his sister back to Sugar Hill. He couldn't leave until she was ready. Until she had said good-bye to Spencer for the night. And so he sat alone in one of the chairs with the carrot-colored vinyl that squeaked near the nurses' station on Spencer's floor and rested his head in his hands.

  SARA LAID PATRICK on the towel in the grass in the shade and pulled off the zippered bodysuit he was wearing so she could change his small diaper. Once it was off--the outfit had a large patch of an ostensibly playful-looking automobile to the left side of the zipper, with wheels that resembled eyes--she contemplated her son's tiny shoulders. As if he were a doll, she gently lifted his right arm like a lever, then spun it slowly in its socket. The baby cooed and smiled up at her. She smiled back. She didn't want to pull Patrick's arm over his head and replicate the movement he would make someday soon when he threw a cereal bowl onto the floor for the first time or heaved Drool Monkey from his bed, because she was afraid she might hurt him. But she saw the exact movement in her mind: She saw the shoulder moving under a shirt, the denim strap from a pair of overalls rising up off the cotton just below it. She saw those petite fingers coming forward with a whoosh.

  She couldn't imagine her brother-in-law, Spencer, not striving to be--and here was that word again, as much an adjective as a family moniker--vigorous. A part of that small but oh-so-vigorous Seton tribe. He was disabled now, that was a given, but she doubted that his physical therapists would ever understand that among the greatest handicaps confronting poor Spencer would be his inability simply to hang around with Catherine and John and, yes, Nan on their level: the level of people in perpetual motion, people who are constantly busy so they never have time to reflect on . . .

  On anything.

  At least when they were in New Hampshire.

  Sometimes she wondered what demons lived with them here that drove them to the golf course and the tennis court, the bridge table and the vegetable garden. To cocktail parties at the Contour Club, to nature walks up and down Sugar Hill. Nan was a particular mystery to her. Exactly what was it that she didn't want to think about? Nan was, apparently, somewhat better when she was home in Manhattan, but even there, Sara knew, she was always relentlessly busy--and she always had been.

  Over the years John had revealed to her much of his childhood, but other than the death of his father at a relatively--though not horrifically--young age, there was little there that seemed likely to scar either him or his sister or their mother. Unlike so many other Manhattan childhoods (or marriages) of the era, there wasn't any boozing or drugs (at least not to bacchanalian excess), there didn't seem to be any adultery. Obviously there was no wrenching divorce. It was actually a life so full of privilege and entitlement it was uneventful.

  No, not uneventful. Sara knew that behind it
s locked front door no home was routine. Not the house of her childhood, not the apartment of her husband's, not the world they were building together with Willow and Patrick. All households had their mysteries, their particular forms of dysfunction. She knew that John was going to suffer profoundly over what he had done to Spencer, and his anguish would transcend normal guilt in large measure because it was his own daughter who had first reached Spencer's body out there by the snow peas. John's father had been so completely irrelevant to his own childhood that he was intent on being a dad who was both present and perfect, and the fact that Willow had seen the grisly ramifications of the most egregious mistake he would ever make in his life was going to cause him serious pain. She remembered one time John offered her a partial litany of all the moments in his life that mattered to him that his own father had missed, either because he was at work or because he was dead (the former, in John's opinion, leading directly to the latter). There was the Saturday morning when he was eight when the county swim team time trials were actually held in the Contour Club pool, a grand morning in which he placed first in the twenty-five meter crawl, first in the twenty-five meter backstroke, and was a part of the second-place one-hundred-meter medley relay team. There was his fourth-grade transition ceremony from Cub Scouts to Webelos and the tie racks the boys had made from plywood and coated with oil paint for their fathers, all of whom were present to accept the gifts that June evening . . . but one. There was the eighth-grade citywide debate competition in which his school's team won a variety of prizes for both eloquence and good-natured feistiness. There were all the birthday parties that did not occur on either a Saturday or a Sunday, there was the first half of his high school commencement (thank God the family name began with an S), as well as the only high school musical in which he actually had a part with a solo and lines. And though John's father was present for his son's college graduation, he missed John's induction into the Phi Beta Kappa society the day before. Richard died months after John started law school and so he had a valid excuse for missing the moments when his son received his law degree, got married, and became a father for the first time himself. But that didn't mean that on some level John wasn't bitter--and determined to do better with his own children.