by Julia Glass
She stands by, like a maid, until she sees that Zeke will be able to manage (if barely) with the meal. David takes a few bites of his sandwich, then shoves it aside to make room for work. He’s looking down now, not watching Zeke as he slowly raises a chip to his mouth.
“Well then,” she says, “I’ll leave you two to your own important devices.”
“Aye-aye, Mrs. B,” says David.
Lucinda is tempted to take the stairs at a run, so happy is she to be free of her husband’s trembling hands and obsequious intern. She goes straight to the back room that serves as her sewing room and study (Zeke’s bedroom when he was a boy). Laid across a card table are the wax-paper templates for the quilt she’s making Jonathan and Cyril: a traditional wedding quilt, white on white, all grapevines, the leaves and fruit in relief (though logically—she hopes!—two men in their fifties hardly need their union blessed with a symbol of fertility). She aims to finish it by their first anniversary, next July.
She takes the sheet of notepaper with Jasper Noonan’s number out of her pocket. She looks at the telephone; this one still has a receiver joined to its base by a corkscrewed cord. She refused to let Zeke replace it; the connections are always clearer than on the cordless phones. Some new things do not improve on their older models.
The phone at the other end of the line begins to ring. Lucinda leans on the table, weight on her elbows, feet secured in the rungs of the chair: a defensive fetal position, she recalls from her training in body language, one of many courses she took when she started her work at The House.
After several rings a man answers, “Dad’s place,” out of breath.
“Jasper Noonan?”
“Hang on.” Not far from the phone, he bellows, “Dad!”
She hears clumping; muttered words; a door closing.
“No, not Loraina!” calls out the man who answered.
And then, “Noonan here.” He, too, is out of breath. Already she hears his age in his voice. It’s a well-used voice, saturated with woodsmoke.
“Jasper Noonan, this is Lucinda Burns. You left me a message a few days ago.” At first, she hears only harsh breathing.
“The senator’s wife, yes?”
Oh no. He’s a reporter after all. Of course he is. “I’m sorry,” she says, “but Senator Burns isn’t doing interviews. He’s home, he’ll be fine, but he’s very busy. If you’d like to reach his office, I can give you that number.”
“Whoa. No, ma’am. It’s you I’m looking for, and I hope you’ll bear with me if I’m clumsy with the news I have. I’m guessing you’ll want to hear it. If not, I’m going to owe you an apology.”
She hears him sigh, as if he’s changing his mind. “Please go on.”
“Mrs. Burns, would you remember Daphne Browning? Her son, Christopher? Would you have a connection there?”
The sound that escapes from Lucinda’s mouth is shrill. “Yes,” she manages, worried that if she says nothing, the man will hang up. That mustn’t happen. She winds the cord more tightly around her fingers.
“Are you all right, Mrs. Burns?”
“Dear God.”
“Is that a yes? I’m sorry to shock you like this.”
“Just please go on, would you please?” Tears stream over her cheeks. What if Christopher is dead? (In a spiteful reflex, she wonders whether she would care if Daphne is dead.) “He’s my grandson. Or he … was. He is, if he’s—is he all right?” She did not know her voice could rise to such a pitch.
“Should I worry if you’re alone?” Jasper Noonan asks her.
“I’m not,” she says quickly. “I mean, I’m alone in this room. It doesn’t—I’m fine. Talk about Christopher.”
“Well, just as you say he ‘was’ your grandson, he was my stepson.”
“Was? Was?”
“Wait up there! I mean to say, technically, he still is. Even if his mother’s not married to me anymore.” Behind him, Lucinda hears the sound of hammering. Also a radio or a record: jazz, a lovelorn trumpet.
“Mr. Noonan, please just let me know if Christopher is alive and well.”
“Good Lord, sorry! Yes. Yes, both. He’s just, he’s decided … he’s looking to find out about the man who was his … biological father’s the correct term, I’m told. And forgive me if I’m busting a confidence here, because Daphne kept the whole thing a secret, even from me in a way, but by some fluke I remembered—which amazes me—remembered that you’re a grandmother to Kit.”
“Yes. I am. His grandmother.” She looks around desperately for something with which to blow her nose. She takes a strip of orange poplin from the basket where she keeps her smallest scraps. “Excuse me. Please wait.” She disentangles her hand from the cord, lays the receiver down on the quilting templates, and blows her nose, though now she is crying ceaselessly.
She picks up the receiver. “Mr. Noonan. Mr. Noonan?” Her ears are clogged, from blowing her nose too violently. “Just talk, Mr. Noonan. I’m fine, even if I don’t sound fine.”
He curses under his breath. He yells at his son to stop hammering and take a break. And would he turn down the damn radio?
“I’m going to walk upstairs with this phone, Mrs. Burns. This is not a conversation I rehearsed.”
“How could you!” She finds herself falling in love with this stranger. “Just say whatever. Whatever you can.”
“So I hate to do this sort of snooping, but I needed to know some things. So I went on the Internet and found out about your son. I saw his Web page, the one he’s got for his students. And I thought I would just e-mail or call him, but I didn’t know whether … Look, all I could remember from Daphne had to do with you, how you helped her with Kit in the beginning.”
“I guess until she met you.”
“No, no, I came along later. It was just her wanting to be … independent. Daphne was always like that. To a point. But never mind her.”
“Is she … did she die?”
Jasper Noonan sighs. “She jumped ship, is how I put it. Kit stayed with me another year, till college. She’s got her own life, Daphne, she’s fine, but let’s just … I’m just making this call for Kit. It’s Kit who …”
Like one of those science filmstrips of a blooming rose or a sinking sun, Lucinda begins to picture a rapidly aging little boy, college already sped by, so that he’s … how old now? Her hands are shaking almost as badly as Zeke’s, and her mind won’t make the calculations, though it’s done so at various idle moments before now. He’s … is he forty? More? He cannot be that old—yet, equally implausible, she is more than twice that age. How can she have lost all those years?
But her mind is rushing ahead like a fool toward an unseen cliff. What if Kit wants just to know about his “biological father”? He wants only the knowledge, the genealogical facts, not the complications of meeting anyone new. His search might be a matter not of desire but of delicate urgency: a child in need of bone marrow, a spare kidney. What if that’s why Jasper Noonan is the one calling her? After all, he mentioned Jonathan.
“Mr. Noonan?”
“Yes, Mrs. Burns.”
“Call me Lucinda, Mr. Noonan. And please just tell me what Kit needs.”
“Needs?” He pauses. “To know his … ‘roots,’ I guess. Used to be, people hid this kind of thing, right? Kept it under the rug.” Again he pauses. “Christ, listen to me. I’m supposed to be the messenger here, not the philosopher.”
Caution begins to enfold her heart like a fog. Who exactly is this man with whom she’s having this intimate conversation?
“Are you still there … Lucinda?”
“I’m here, and I’m falling apart a little.”
“Falling apart’s okay. I’d fall apart big time, news like this on top of what you’re going through with your husband.”
She thinks for a moment. “Did you ever meet him—Zeke?”
“No. But I saw the paper. I hope he’s recovering all right.”
“Thank you,” she says. “Is Kit there? Would he spea
k with me?”
“I left that message while he was here, but he’s gone home. Only reason I was the one to call is I worried what might happen if, in case …”
“In case I didn’t want the connection.”
“That’s the thing.”
From downstairs in her own house, Lucinda hears the scraping of furniture. No outcries, no indications of a fall. Is David leaving already?
“Mrs.… Lucinda?”
“Yes?”
“I didn’t tell him about Jonathan. Just told him I knew about you. I asked him to wait till I spoke to you. He did call me this morning.… ”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Noonan, that I didn’t try you sooner. My husband’s been … I’ve been—” Again, the instinctive caution of the politician’s wife censors her. As if the entire state doesn’t know about Zeke’s stroke. Probably, by now, about his urinating on the Chinese rug.
Why does he keep mentioning Jonathan? Never mind. Be direct, she tells herself. She has dealt with strangers’ emotions; she was trained to do it.
Into the pause seeps distant music: country this time, no longer jazz. “Should I call him? Call Kit?” she asks.
“Yes!” he says. “If you would. He … it may sound absurd after all these years, but I think he’s waiting. Not to rush you.”
“All I want to do, first, is talk to my husband.” Which wouldn’t have been easy even in better circumstances.
“And maybe Jonathan,” he says.
“Jonathan?” She finally gets it. “Mr. Noonan, Jonathan isn’t Kit’s father. No. My other son. Malachy. Who’s gone. He died.”
Jasper Noonan’s sigh is so long and heartfelt that Lucinda feels ashamed she told him so much, so bluntly.
“My dear woman. I am so sorry.”
“A long time ago now.” Though all that “long time” has done is move the pain to a more distant room. When she enters that room, though she does so less often, the pain still blinds her with its keen, diamondlike brilliance.
“I’m sure it makes little difference. Time,” he says. “I’ve got two sons.”
“I would tell you to take good care of them, but I imagine they’re old enough that they have to take care of themselves,” she says.
“Mostly you’re right. Mostly.”
The protracted silence separates yet joins them. In the farther reaches of Jasper Noonan’s house, Lucinda can just make out the words of a song. Some twangy-voiced singer wails about the virtues of his long-dead father. Good God.
“That was your son—who answered the phone?”
“Number two,” he says, oddly brusque. Is he impatient to get off the phone? Lucinda finds herself desperate not to sever the thread of their fragile connection, peculiar though it is.
“Nice to have them at home sometimes, isn’t it?” Where is she going?
But he reels her back in. “Lucinda. I think now’s where I give you Kit’s number. I’ll call him just to say we spoke—that you’ll call. He says you should call after nine o’clock at night—if you would. He says to tell you he’s always up till eleven. That work for you?”
“Fine!” To make this call, though she can’t yet imagine how to do it, she would stay up till all hours of the night—which, in any case, she often does.
“Bear with me while I go downstairs again. Number’s on my desk.”
As Jasper Noonan goes downstairs in his remote house (though according to their shared area code, it’s not all that remote), as the music grows louder, someone downstairs in Lucinda’s house picks up the phone, taps in a number.
“Hello? Someone there?” David’s voice (unguarded, impatient).
“David, it’s me. Is everything all right?”
“Oh yes, Mrs. B. Sorry to interrupt you. My cell’s acting up, but—”
“Lucinda?” Jasper.
“Hang on,” says Lucinda. “David, I’ll let you know when the line’s free.”
“Sure thing.” He hangs up.
Lucinda’s heart beats so hard that she cannot believe its palpitations aren’t visible through her blouse. She apologizes for the interruption.
And then she has it: the telephone number of her long-lost grandson.
“You’ll call him tonight?”
“Or tomorrow,” she says. “I want to tell Zeke.”
“Naturally.”
She’s pushing herself to say good-bye when Jasper says quietly, “Do you want me to tell him about … I’m sorry, what was your other son’s name?”
“Tell him the story about his father is complicated. Tell him he needs to ask me and I’ll tell him everything.” Selfishly, she wants this for herself—not that she wants to inflict pain, but the details have to come from her.
“Sounds best that way,” says Jasper. “And hang on to my number, would you? Call me for any reason. I know Kit. Or I used to know him, and now I know him again. A stroke of luck I owe to you, in a roundabout way. For which I thank you.”
“No, Mr. Noonan. I’m the grateful one here.”
“Jasper,” he says. “Please.”
“Jasper,” says Lucinda. “Tell Kit I’ll call him by tomorrow night.”
The sun is on its way down, the snow warming toward a buttery pink. If she watches for long enough, can she actually perceive the lengthening of the shadow cast by the enormous, empty barn? Of the original outbuildings, it’s the only one Zeke left standing after he sold the last of the herd, after Mal and Jonathan complained that they’d had enough of showing cows. (As sixteen-year-old Mal announced, “We’ve put in our time on the family legacy.”)
The barn is important to Zeke as a symbol of his father’s achievement—which he extols as the groundwork for his own. He spares no expense to keep it painted (pure white from the ground to its red-shingle roof) and properly buttressed, even if it’s nothing now but a city of swallows. During the time Lucinda sits facing the view, the sun sinks just enough to shine directly in the window. On the table before her, it sets alight a porcelain dish filled with straight pins, dispersing splinters of phosphorescence all over the walls and ceiling of the room, across the front of her blouse. She is shivering.
“Mrs. B?” David’s calling up the stairs.
“Oh, I’m sorry! The phone’s free now,” she calls back. She feels permanently fastened to her chair.
“I think I’m headed out, if it’s okay by you.” He’s waiting.
She puts both treasured phone numbers, written on the same sheet of paper, back in her pocket. Somehow she’s able to rise and go to the stairs. The look David gives her from below is a new one, an ever-so-covert smile.
“How’s Zeke? How was it, going over the things he’s been missing?” she says when she joins David near the front door.
“He’ll be up to speed in no time, Mrs. B.”
This is such an absurd speculation, such a fatuous lie, that she nearly laughs in David’s face. “He’s still in the kitchen?” she asks.
“Going over a few things I’ve left him to sign.” He lowers his voice. “Maybe you’d help him with the actual signing. Just steady his hand a little.”
Lucinda takes David’s coat off the rack and hands it to him. Suddenly, she wants him gone. “Drive safely. There’s black ice where you get back on the road. I’ll need to get it sanded.”
After he leaves, she goes to the kitchen. Zeke, his back to her, is hunched over the table, a pile of documents before him. Lucinda says loudly, “Well, your young intern thinks I’m having an affair.” But when she rounds the table, to wash the dishes left by the sink, she realizes that Zeke is sound asleep in his chair.
She forgot to ask Zoe about when to wake him and when to let him sleep. She wants, more than anything, to pick up the phone at the stroke of nine, but she needs to figure out how to tell Zeke what she’s found out—and she needs to wait till he’s rested. She voices a silent apology to Kit, but one more day can’t hurt.
As she rouses Zeke and guides him to the living room, Lucinda cannot resist the vain thought that Kit owes
his very life to her as much as to his mother—and the corresponding shame at the way in which she betrayed her husband. It was a necessary betrayal; that conviction will never falter. The uneasy question is how it changed Mal’s life, altered his path. If he were still alive, he would be fifty-nine years old.
How proud they were when Mal was accepted to that famous music camp. To prepare for auditions, he had worked with his flute teacher four afternoons a week for two months. Only then, as she eavesdropped on these lessons from the kitchen, did Lucinda realize that her son had real talent.
Because the camp was in Vermont, most of the young musicians came from New England and New York, but a few came from farther away, even from Europe. Some were prodigies who, not even finished with high school, had already left conventional schooling behind. Zeke would never have allowed Mal to take that risk; to him, Mal was just a boy who loved to play his flute and, having played it with such dedication for nearly ten years, had forged his own talent, a source of pleasure and self-discipline more than a “gift” pointing him toward a predestined profession. But Lucinda, as she mingled with some of the other parents and mentors at the camp’s orientation, began to envision her son on the stages of concert halls in cities all over the world.
Mal was barely sixteen, but because he had skipped sixth grade, he had already graduated from high school. A common refrain on his report cards was how “old” he seemed for his age. At his flute teacher’s urging, he had applied to conservatories as well as nearby colleges, and halfway through that summer he was offered a place at Juilliard. Lucinda was elated. But to her surprise, Mal wrote her a letter to say that he had decided to take a year off. One of his instructors at the camp knew a New York record producer who had a satellite studio in Burlington; the man agreed to hire Mal as an office assistant. Lucinda was even more surprised when Zeke approved. “Any business experience is money in the bank of pragmatic living,” he said. “Especially if my son’s going to make a bid for Carnegie Hall!” Later, Mal would say that he never believed he had what it took to be a marquee performer, but Lucinda had to wonder if she and Zeke were to blame for letting themselves believe all the flattering nonsense about their son’s exceptional maturity. It is still unbearable to imagine how Mal must have felt when he learned just how badly he had let them down.