by Julia Glass
Lucinda sees the stack of CDs, along with her player, by the bread box. She never brings them downstairs. “They were Mal’s.”
“I know.” Jonathan looks confused; she realizes she’s frowning.
“It’s fine, fine,” she says. “Use what you need, play whatever you like.”
At least they made coffee. She pours herself a mug and returns to the den. Zeke’s eyes are closed, so she moves quietly, setting her coffee on the desk. She should go upstairs and dress, find a space in the kitchen to make breakfast.
“We tell jhem today.”
“Tell them, Zeke?”
“Kit.”
“No, Zeke, tomorrow. When Christina’s here.”
“Tomorrow.”
“Thanksgiving.”
“I know,” he says impatiently. “Thought shwaz today.”
“You’d think so from the level of chaos. But I guess I’ve always started the food this early, too. I feel redundant, though, and I hate it.”
“Think you do.” He makes the guttural sound she recognizes as a tattered remnant of his hearty laugh.
“So now there are two of us.”
“Kit,” he says.
“Zeke, I can’t believe it—that we’ll see him after all these years. You—you for the first time.” She wonders if he’s up for it; she should consult his doctor, but she doesn’t want to hear that this encounter might be stressful. And Christmas is still a month away. “It’s all right with you, isn’t it? That he’s coming to meet us. Here.”
Zeke nods, his eyes still closed. “Handshum boy.”
Is he thinking about Mal now, or Jonathan? Jonathan’s in good shape, but he’s never been as good-looking as his siblings. His face cannot quite reconcile his mother’s delicate chin with his father’s jutting brow. Or maybe Zeke’s thoughts have drifted to Cyril, with his thick blond hair and Devonshire-cream complexion. (“When I first saw him, I thought I’d fallen down a wormhole into Chariots of Fire,” Lucinda has heard her son say more than once.)
“I’m glad Cyril was able to come,” says Lucinda. “I just wish Christina’s older girls could make it, too. I wonder if Hannah and that boyfriend are thinking about getting married.”
“Kidj take time now,” says Zeke. “More careful.”
Lucinda thinks inadvertently of Daphne and Mal, how very uncareful they were. “Should we have been more careful?” she teases.
Zeke opens his eyes. “War shped thingj up. Carpe diem et shetera.”
“We did everything sooner. As if we had no time to lose.” After losing so much else. And yet, if she thinks back to the war years, she does not remember any greater awareness of her own mortality, only the worry that her ongoing life might be changed unpredictably. As one of her classmates put it in French class, “If the Germans win, will we have to learn German instead? Will we eat things like bratwurst and cabbage?” Even when Lucinda’s brother shipped out, she didn’t think much about the possibility that he might die. Only decades later did she understand her mother’s wanderings through the downstairs rooms so late at night. Patrick had survived, of course, only to die of skin cancer in his sixties (all that Pacific sun, or so reasoned the doctor who failed to cure him). At least their parents were gone by then.
Lucinda hears a heavy metallic object hit the floor in the kitchen. Much laughter, alongside the overture to South Pacific, the movie version. Mal’s collection includes the Broadway version, too. She knows them both by heart.
“Let me get breakfast. I’ll bring it in here,” she says. “I don’t think we’re safe in there. Sounds like a combat zone.”
“Eggjh. Thank you.” Zeke closes his eyes again.
The chefs give Lucinda permission to cook breakfast in “their” kitchen; Cyril clears a miserly swatch of countertop. Jonathan is singing “Some Enchanted Evening,” exaggerating Giorgio Tozzi’s Italianate ardor. This is not the son she remembers from his teenage years, the child who earned Bs in nearly every subject, played no sports, hung out with girls, and spent much of his spare time reading biographies and organizing a stamp collection in tiny wax-paper packets. She had worried about him for so long.
Nowadays, with all the information thrown at parents (at least in the liberal Northeast), she might have guessed that he was gay. But Jonathan, unlike his brother, made efforts to keep his parents in the dark. He brought young women home from college, never claiming romantic involvement yet acting, around these charming girls, in ways that left Lucinda relieved and hopeful. “I went through a whole barbershop of beards,” he joked in his wedding toast to Cyril.
Once he moved to California, in his late twenties, he rarely came back to Vermont. The first time Lucinda and Zeke saw him out there, he looked as if he was leading a contentedly solitary life. Lucinda can remember thinking that if she had raised him fully in the faith, without the dilution of his father’s indifference, he might have become a priest.
He did not tell them the truth about his life until the week after Mal’s funeral. He was thirty-five years old.
They were in the car, just the two of them, returning from grocery shopping. The last mourners had drifted away; the refrigerator was empty. Jonathan was to fly back west the following night. They had ridden in silence for the entire ten minutes, Lucinda dumbfounded and sedated by grief, glad of one thing only: that she was done having to talk with strangers who had apparently been close to Mal. (Why had she never met them before?) When Jonathan pulled up to the house and turned the engine off, she was inert. All that spring and summer, there were times when she felt as if she had no joints or muscles, no physical means with which to move about the world. She could lie in a bed or sit on a chair unable to recall what it felt like to rise and hold herself upright on her feet. It was like paralysis, she imagined—or no, maybe the opposite, since paralyzed people could remember standing, balancing, moving forward, with an exquisite sense of longing. She was indifferent to motion.
Jonathan turned to her and said, “So before I go back, I have to tell you something. The timing is terrible, but it’s now or never.”
She didn’t even look at him when she said, “If it’s bad news, sweetheart, you’ll have to put it on hold.”
He said, “It’s just that I finally have to tell you that I’m gay. Too. There wasn’t ever a good time, and now there couldn’t ever be.”
Lucinda’s first emotion was anger. Out of her mouth came a sound of irrepressible disgust. She was no longer so naïve as to think this was something he hadn’t known for years—years during which Jonathan could surely see that his brother’s coming out hadn’t changed him in his parents’ eyes. Jonathan had no reason to be fearful.
“I know how this must hit you, Mom, especially now,” he said, gripping the steering wheel of Zeke’s old Volvo.
“Mal knew this?” she heard herself say. Which was really to say, had Mal withheld this from her? Because of course he must have known.
“I think he suspected. But I figured you and Dad couldn’t take it—two of us, both of us … you know. I didn’t want Mal to bear that burden.”
“He didn’t know?” But if Jonathan hadn’t told Mal … “Do you mean to tell me that all these years, the years your brother was sick and dying because he was gay, you hid that from him? How could you?”
“Mom, I didn’t ‘hide’ anything. Look, I live on the other side of the country, and we were never close. But to tell you the truth, it only got harder to tell him once he told us he was sick. You have every right to yell at me. You think I’m coldhearted. But here’s the thing: I’m negative. I don’t think that would have helped him at all. I think he’d only have felt more alone.”
“You, a pessimist? And what kind of an excuse is that?”
Jonathan looked baffled. Then he said, “Negative—Mom—what I meant was that I don’t have the virus. I’m not sick. I tested negative.”
Lucinda was stunned. Here is the bad news, here the good. Except that she could not absorb the good news in any way signaling relief.
She understood now—perhaps—why Mal had often referred to his brother with a tone of dismissal or even scorn. She knew they hadn’t been close, but maybe now she knew precisely why. Mal was too smart not to have guessed.
“And I wasn’t as brave as Mal, okay? Neither as talented nor as brave.” It was Jonathan’s turn to sound angry.
“I would never compare you,” she said. “Certainly not now.”
“Well.” He laughed coldly. “If I were you, I’d be comparing like crazy. The son you lost versus the one you’re left with. Raw deal.”
“Oh, Jonathan.” How could she be enduring this conversation? “I cannot take this in right now. Or take it in graciously.”
“I must seem incredibly cruel. All I can say is I’m sorry. It’s just, if I didn’t do this, I think I might never be able to come home again. I’d suffocate. From my own cowardice.” Jonathan looked as if he might cry. The car, sitting in the sun, had grown uncomfortably hot. Lucinda could smell the large slab of salmon they had bought to grill for dinner.
“I haven’t told Dad yet. I wanted to tell you first. How you feel matters most to me.” Then he did cry. And still, God smite her vain indignation, she couldn’t stifle her fury. Never mind the brute irony: that this son came to her first, before telling his father. She got out, took two bags of groceries from the backseat, and carried them into the house. Jonathan followed a few minutes later, his composure restored.
As they put the food away, Lucinda said, “I hope you have someone loving in your life. And I hope you’ll introduce him to us if you do. I don’t think Mal ever had that. A real partner.”
“He had so many good friends, though.”
“Not the same thing, sweetheart. I hope you know that.”
“Of course I do,” Jonathan said coldly, and they let it rest there.
That was so long ago, years before he met Cyril.
Lucinda eats two pieces of toast while she scrambles eggs for Zeke. She spoons the eggs onto a plate, then slices a banana into a small bowl and scoops vanilla yogurt on top.
Jonathan and Cyril appear to be cooking far too much food, but Lucinda keeps this thought to herself. She will try to behave as if she is the guest and they are the hosts. Really, she’s lucky they are doing all the work.
Her son comes over and puts an arm around her shoulders. “I see your sidelong glances, Ma. Let me reassure you, we’ll have this place cleaned up by the end of the day. Table set and everything. We want tomorrow to be totally relaxed. Totally! All we’ll have to do is stuff and roast the turkey and bake the bread pudding. So try to ignore the pandemonium.”
“Thank you for doing all this,” she says.
“We are thrilled to be doing all this,” insists Jonathan. “Your kitchen is twice the size of ours, so we’re having fun with it. Nothing like a big old farm kitchen, designed to turn out meals for dozens of hardworking men!”
“He’s right,” says Cyril. “We are envious.”
Lucinda looks around at the scarred wooden counters and dull blue linoleum, the outdated appliances, the rusting can opener screwed to the broom-closet door. “Well,” she says. “It has served a lot of feasts in its day.”
She arranges Zeke’s breakfast on a tray and takes it into the den. He’s pulled himself up to a sitting position on the sofa bed, but she wonders if he can manage eating off his lap. “Do you want to go into the dining room?”
“Here,” he says. “And no huffering. You get dreshed.”
Upstairs, Lucinda puts on corduroy pants and takes out a turtle-neck sweater. If she’s to be banned from her kitchen, maybe she can go out on her snowshoes. Or maybe, it occurs to her, she could drive Zeke to the movies. Unless he doesn’t want to risk conversation with people who will no doubt recognize them. For the second time in a week, she puts on her bra with such acute consciousness of her own dexterity that her fingers fumble at matching the tiny hooks with their respective apertures. Is there a synapse of the brain that handles this specific task? What does it handle for a man—loading a gun in the dark?
The syrupy crescendo of “Younger Than Springtime” rises from below.
“Don’t I wish,” she tells her mirrored self. In the calendar of her life span, she is just about exactly where she finds herself this month: in late autumn, surprised by a sudden storm, a storm that only seems untimely. Is she facing her own metaphorical Thanksgiving? The gratitude before the last decline, the toss of the calendar into the recycling bin. What a maudlin train of thought!
When she returns to the kitchen, Jonathan is standing in the center of the room, wearing a flowered apron that belonged to Zeke’s mother, arms outstretched, eyes closed, singing “This Nearly Was Mine.”
“ ‘So clear and deep are my fancies of things I wish were true—’ ” He opens his eyes and sees her. “Mom!”
Cyril turns from the sink. “He thinks he’s Carreras. I’m putting on something less obnoxious when this ends. Definitely less sing-along-able. Do you have any Gregorian chant, Lucinda?”
Jonathan sashays toward Cyril, holding out the corners of the apron. “Gayer than laughter, what can I say?”
Lucinda picks up the case. “This is my favorite song in the show.” Though it wouldn’t have been when she was much younger. It’s an old person’s song, a song with a panoramic view of the past.
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard it before,” says Jonathan.
“And you’re not going to hear it again. Not if I’m around,” says Cyril.
“Are you finding everything?” Lucinda asks. After Cyril assures her that they are perfectly self-sufficient, she tells them she is hoping to get Zeke out of the house for a few hours. The energetic repartee of the two younger men is not only wearying to her but oddly worrisome. Perhaps their sprightliness, especially here in her house, merely reminds her how old both she and Zeke have grown, but still she feels as if Jonathan, however happy, just isn’t himself. Can persistent happiness change someone, fundamentally? Well, why not?
Persistent unhappiness changes you, this she knows—but not as much as it does your sense of purpose. She thinks of the contemptuous young woman on the street in Montpelier. Meddling like that. She hastens back to Zeke.
Why does it feel as if she begrudges Jonathan his obvious happiness? This terrible thought did not occur to her until she watched Jonathan and Cyril proceed (radiant with glee, nearly romping) back up the aisle after their wedding vows. Zeke squeezed her arm. She felt the profound relief of a mother seeing her child engulfed by joy, but she understood, too, exactly why she couldn’t quite join in. She wished that it were Malachy’s wedding. She wished that Mal could have been the one standing there in the field with his true love: Mal in the white suit, Mal against the white sky and the sunstruck surface of the bay, Mal in the blanching flashes of camera after camera sealing the moment to hold it far into the future. Even if he’d still had to die so young, she wished she had been able to witness a moment like this in his life.
There must have been two hundred wedding guests on that hill, so happy for Jonathan and Cyril that they cheered, as if the two men had won an athletic competition, not solemnly promised to be together forever. Lucinda felt as if all these strangers loved her son more than she did. What was the matter with her?
After Mal’s death, numerous friends and fellow parishioners told Lucinda that she must learn to “let him go.” They might mean that she should let him go to God, let him be released from his pain, or relinquish her possessive grief. What it meant to her, however, was that beyond accepting his death, she had to understand that from then on he would belong as much to others as he did to her. She had loved him too much, perhaps, more the way she ought to have loved his father. And God forgive her if, in helping all those girls have those unexpected babies, learn to be mothers far younger than they should have, she had been trying to undo that death.
“Can you finally, after all these years, stop calling me that?” Christina is extracting herself from Jonathan’s embrace.
&nb
sp; “Oh, Teeny, lighten up,” says Jonathan. “I love how you grew so completely out of that nickname.”
Greg is hanging up coats, Madison is carrying bags to the kitchen, and Christina’s two Labs are thrashing their bargelike bodies against the furniture. They act like bumper cars, as if their objective is to make a contact sport of being indoors. Lucinda finds it amusing that in the midst of her daughter’s admirably disciplined life, she cannot seem to make her dogs behave, but she is not so amused by her worry that one of them may knock Zeke off his feet.
Christina catches Lucinda’s look. “I know, Mom. But by the time I realized we should put them at the kennel, it was—down, Ferris! No!” She follows the dog into the living room. “Dad, hey, you look great. I said down, Ferris!”
“Dog’s fine,” says Zeke. Ferris, his front paws up on Zeke’s thighs, is avidly licking his face. Zeke is petting him.
“That is so disgusting, Mom. Don’t let him do that. Yuck,” says Madison, returning from the kitchen. Cyril comes in behind her, and for a moment, all of them stand awkwardly around Zeke, who finally says, “Could use a little dog shlobber, lighten shings up round here.”
Relieved laughter. But now the second dog, Jimbo, is careening in circles around the room.
“Stop NOW!” shouts Greg in an artificially deep voice, spreading his arms wide, like a scarecrow. Jimbo instantly responds, crouching by the fireplace.
After an awkward freeze-frame, Lucinda says, “Well. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody. I’m so glad we’re together.”
Jonathan, too soon in Lucinda’s opinion, takes drink orders. Cyril, carrying a large tray of hors d’oeuvres, pauses near the coffee table with a glance at the dogs.
“Christina,” says Lucinda, “could you please put those beasts in the den?”
“Mom, they’ll be fine. They’re just working off all that cramped-up car time. Greg’s got them trained not to eat off tables.”
Cyril, obviously more trusting than Lucinda, sets the tray down on the coffee table. Instantly, the dogs crowd in, but they merely sniff, whiskers grazing the cheese. Greg commands them to follow him to the front hall, where he makes them lie down after an absurd amount of menacing talk. He sounds as if he’s doing a bad imitation of Arnold Schwarzenegger, minus the Austrian accent.