And the Dark Sacred Night

by Julia Glass

  Felicity put up an insolent, deafening fuss when Kit and the twins arrived last night. She was dozing on top of her cage, so when she woke to the invasion of visitors, she raised her wings and puffed up her scarlet feathers, threatening flight.

  The boy hid behind Kit, who raised an arm in front of his face.

  “Not to worry!” Fenno reassured them. He forced the parrot onto his sleeve. “You’re an evil sorceress, you know that?” he said as he stroked her. Once she had muttered her final complaints, Fenno put her back on the cage.

  The girl walked cautiously toward the bird. “Can I touch her?”

  “Fanny, introduce yourself, please,” said Kit.

  She blushed and held her hand out to Fenno. Walter took Fanny’s suitcase and said, “She’s a cranky old biddy, that bird, and it’s past her bedtime, but we’ll make sure you get acquainted tomorrow. Come upstairs and see your digs, which are pretty amazing. You too, bro,” he said to Will. “You’re in the hideaway. There’s a rumor it was used in the Underground Railroad. I’d sleep there if I could fit.”

  “We studied that last year! That’s cool!” exclaimed Fanny, and without another glance at their father, the children followed Walter. My very own Pied Piper, thought Fenno, who had fallen for Walter much the way children did: here was someone you simply knew you could trust, who might nag or infuriate or sulk, but whose greatest charm lay in the most durable of virtues: loyalty.

  Left alone together in the kitchen, Fenno and Kit did everything not to stare at each other. Whatever anxieties they had harbored about this meeting, their curiosity would finally have its way.

  “She’s stunning,” said Kit.

  “She is.” Fenno stroked Felicity’s neck.

  “She belonged to my father?”

  “For a couple of years, until he became ill and couldn’t keep her. His doctor said there were … issues of immunity.” Felicity watched the newcomer closely but let herself be lulled by Fenno’s affection. “I lived across the street; my shop sold bird-watching gear as well as books. He took a gamble that I might be willing to adopt her.”

  “I remember. She’s the reason you met.” Kit reached a hand slowly toward the bird, but she scuttled to the peak of her cage.

  In the one letter Fenno had written to Kit, he’d told the story: how the Audubon prints in the store had given Mal an avenue on which to approach Fenno for an outlandish favor; how taking on Felicity had brought Mal into his life and then, inadvertently, lured Fenno deep into Mal’s, just as it began to falter and dwindle.

  Kit hovered by the table, glancing around. “This house is seriously old.”

  “The front portion was built in the late seventeen hundreds.”

  “Not so old if you’re British, I guess.”

  “Old enough,” said Fenno. “Older than the house I grew up in. We’re not all lairds of drafty castles with parapets and moats.”

  “I love all the rafters. The beams.”

  “Wait till you go upstairs. Walter has to bend down to pass through the bedroom door.” He paused. “But it’s not ours, this house.”

  “Yes. You explained.”

  More slowly than usual, to give himself time, Fenno moved Felicity inside her cage to settle her for the night. He changed her water, emptied and rinsed her food cup, scratched her ruff one last time, and adjusted the cover. “Let me get you something,” he said to Kit. “Tea or coffee? Wine, whiskey?”

  “I should see about the kids.”

  “If you don’t mind, Walter loves playing godfather. Down to making certain they floss.”

  They heard Fanny’s laughter from upstairs.

  “He’ll be reading to them,” said Fenno. “I realize they’re not so wee, but Walter’s been known to force fairy tales down the gullets of adolescents. He’s a lapsed actor. Needs his daily dose of stage time.”

  Kit laughed uncertainly. He held on to the back of a chair with both hands, as if he were on a boat or train and might otherwise lose his footing.

  Fenno would have liked nothing better than to join Walter in the sleigh bed beneath the slanted ceiling and drift into sleep against the nocturnal shrieks and murmurings of strollers on the other side of the privet: young bucks and partygoers ebullient in the town’s warm, salt-steeped air and frothy permissiveness. As much as Fenno had tried to protest Walter’s plan, after a fortnight in this place, its paradoxically ingenuous cheer had softened his prudish resistance.

  But Fenno suspected that Kit wanted a chance to be alone with him, ask certain questions before the women arrived. Walter was the one who had suggested that if the children would let him usher them to bed, he could discreetly follow suit. (“I do not,” he said, “need to stay up till all hours hearing about the lives of the saints.”)

  Kit asked, “Did Walter know my father?”

  So, thought Fenno, now it begins.

  “By neighborhood reputation. But that was before Walter knew me. Mal made an impression. As he meant to—something like Felicity here. Me, I was more of a … bystander.” Fenno paused. Did it sound as if he pitied himself?

  “You know what? I’ll say yes to whiskey. That’s a rare choice for me.”

  “Rare choice for a rare occasion.” Fenno went to the cupboard where Walter had stocked up on liquor.

  Kit’s laughter came more easily now. “I guess you don’t do this every day. God, I hope not, for your sake.”

  “If I did, I’d be doing a better job of it than this.” Fenno went to the cupboard for a glass—two. Whiskey was a rare choice for him as well.

  He led Kit to the screened porch behind the kitchen. Up front, the living room had no true ceiling; one could see pinstripes of light passing between the floorboards of the master bedroom above. From the bedroom, conversely, one could hear every sigh, every mote of punctuation, threading the conversation below. In a way, the house wasn’t terribly conducive to guests.

  They sat down facing each other, but at first their attention was on their drinks. They sipped delicately, almost in unison. Fenno listened to the intermittent tattoo of insects colliding with the screen. Kit spoke first. “It is so bizarre to be here. To state the obvious. You’ve been so kind to me when I’m probably intruding on your life. Lucinda insisted that you would be glad to hear from me, meet me, but I want you to know I take nothing for granted.… More and more that’s the case.”

  “Lucinda’s right. I was glad to hear from you. You should know whatever you can about Mal. Your father.” Something else occurred to him. “Your children’s grandfather.”

  “They still don’t know the story, exactly why we’re here. I hope Walter—”

  “Not to worry. Walter has the tact of a butler in situations like this.” Crikey, thought Fenno, what situations like this?

  “I’m afraid to ask the wrong things,” said Kit. “I did look up his reviews. The Times has everything archived now. Lucinda sent me pictures.”

  “There are no wrong things to ask. If you mean about how he died, how sick he was for so long, you can ask me all about that. Better me than Lucinda.”

  “I don’t want to hear about his illness. I didn’t even get to know him then, never mind when he was healthy. The worst thing is knowing that I could have. Known him before he was sick, I mean. But just to have known him at all …”

  Fenno tried to imagine Mal meeting Kit while he was still healthy—which was, of course, before Fenno knew Mal. Kit would have been a teenager then. But that was immaterial. The Mal whom Fenno had known wouldn’t have been able to bear meeting Kit; he wouldn’t have volunteered to face his own guilt. While Mal was alive, Fenno hadn’t the faintest hint that—as Fenno’s dog-breeder mother and even Mal himself would have put it—he had “sired a child.”

  “Mal was an incomparably clever man,” said Fenno. “But lest you wonder what you missed, he wasn’t cut from fatherly cloth.”

  “I guess that’s obvious,” Kit said sharply.

  Yes. Of course there would be anger. After a moment Fenno said, “P
lenty of gay men become fathers. Or surrogate fathers.” He thought of Walter’s stories, both comic and catastrophic, about the time he had invited his teenage punk-rocker nephew to share his flat and work at the restaurant. Thank God Walter had exorcised the fatherhood fantasy before they came together.

  “I’m not talking about his being gay,” said Kit, “though maybe that’s part of why my mother didn’t want me to know who he was. I just mean—I mean there are a lot of fathers who take on the job, or even a tiny bit of it, or maybe not very successfully, but they do it because whether they like it or not, they are fathers. My mother refuses to see it that way—she’s one of those nurture-over-nature people. Maybe I’m a literalist, but I’m sorry: make a kid and you’re a father. Biology doesn’t lie. Lucinda told me he knew that I existed out there in the world, right from the start.”

  This was not a declaration Fenno wanted to hear, but why should the conversation conform to his wishes? To Kit, he was a conduit, an opportunity; Christ, he was a bloody priest.

  “I’m sorry. You’re right,” he said. “But part of what made Mal so successful was …” Fenno hadn’t known how dodgy it would feel to risk saying the wrong things—nor how insidious this conversation would be to the way in which he remembered Mal. He had known Mal in life for only a few years; as a memory, Mal had been with him for twenty.

  “Mal was the sort of man people described as ambitious, determined—if they didn’t like him, as arrogant, tactless. Cheeky. It wasn’t just that he pushed hard at what he did or that he was a perfectionist. I think—and I only understood this after he died—that he cleared a wide track before him. He didn’t want to face the unpleasant surprise around the next corner.” Or maybe this became true only after he had stumbled onto the worst surprise of all. Maybe Mal, before knowing Fenno, had been more spontaneous, more open. “Anyway, to do that, he had to eliminate all obstacles.”

  That wasn’t the right way to put it; he knew this from the look on Kit’s face. Fenno had just painted a portrait of someone you might call ruthless.

  “Acknowledging that he had a son out there somewhere, yeah, well, that would have been a pretty serious obstacle,” said Kit.

  Fenno took a gulp of his whiskey. “I’m not doing a very good job here.”

  Kit sighed. “Please don’t see it as a job. And I have to tell you, I’m not where I was when I spoke to you a few months ago.”

  “You’re angry now. Is that the difference?”

  “Sorry.” Kit shrugged. “Weird how dime-store psychology turns out to be true, whether we like it or not.”

  Fenno would have laughed if he had known this man better.

  “I should probably crash,” said Kit. “The traffic was horrendous. And I was mad that Sandra decided, at the last minute, she couldn’t come along. It’s not that she didn’t want to meet you. She has a deadline she’s worried about.”

  How unlike Mal Kit seemed, in his apologies and modest desires. Why shouldn’t he be in a roaring rage over Mal’s refusal to face his existence? Had Fenno deserved to know, too? Or would Fenno’s knowing about the son have been just another “obstacle” to Mal’s plans? He thought of Lucinda, whom he had come to know and like through the last months of Mal’s life (through his protracted death, to put it bluntly), and only now did it dawn on him that Kit was a secret Lucinda had carried for her son, all those years. Fenno had known Mal to be self-centered, even self-righteous, but now he saw these qualities as less ambiguous, not so easily forgiven. Mal may have died a terrible, unjustly early death, but that misfortune did not absolve him. Now Fenno, too, was angry at Mal.

  “Listen,” he said, “I’m not sitting here thinking that my memories of your dead father are like some shrine you should be visiting with reverence, some hallowed place of worship. But now I’m afraid you’ll get up tomorrow, pack those children in your car, and hightail it home. That I don’t want.” What did Fenno want, honestly? To sit around spouting stories about a chap he’d known only while he waited for death to outwit him (hard as it had been to outwit Mal)?

  Kit stared at him as if chastised. Their glasses were empty.

  Fenno nearly told Kit that while he had never been Mal’s lover, he ought to have been. Not in a reckless, suicidal way but with all the tenderness that Fenno had been too frightened to show toward Mal. The worst thing was that even though Mal had never mentioned it, he knew. He trusted Fenno to help him die precisely because he knew Fenno was in love with him and didn’t want to lose him. To refuse Mal’s wishes would have meant to lose him for certain: to lose his regard. To honor them had left a paradoxical glimmer of hope: the hope of failure or a sudden change of heart.

  “I am refilling our glasses,” said Fenno. “You stay here.”

  In the kitchen, he listened. No voices or creaking of floorboards. He walked quietly to the living room and looked up: no seepage of light through the planks. Walter wasn’t waiting up. This was good; and then again it wasn’t.

  When he handed Kit his glass, Fenno said, “I should confess that I’ve been terrified at the prospect of bringing you all together here. For a while, I wondered what the deuce I’d been thinking. But I will always feel I owe something to Lucinda, a debt I can’t fulfill.”

  He told Kit the story of Mal’s end: how Mal had sent Fenno and Lucinda in his place to an evening of feasting and dancing in a far-flung corner of the city, a scheme to detour his mother away from his bedside long enough that he could take his exit in private. Countless times over the years since, especially on the always bleak, chilly anniversary in March, Fenno has marveled at how well he played his part that night and, more still, the next morning: how he let himself into Mal’s apartment, knowing that he was supposed to hope that he would find Mal good and dead, the pills and vodka deft in their collaboration.

  Yet Fenno unlocked the door that morning hoping that Mal had failed, if just this once. Because how could a man so adept at so many things, so formidably sharp in his wit, his intellect, his perception of where each person stood in the orbit of his life, be anything other than somehow immortal? Surely Mal was destined to be one of those wizened, quick-tongued, stylish-to-the-bitter-end ninety-year-old urban sages. Fenno had done what was asked of him, followed his directions perfectly (another instrument of Mal’s powerful will), yet even so, against all logic, he was crushed when what he found in Mal’s bed was indeed the corpse that Mal had wanted him to find.

  But he left these sorry self-aggrandizing details out of the story he told Kit. Kit drank his whiskey and looked not at Fenno but out through the screen into the dull void of shrubbery and woods behind the house.

  When Fenno had finished, it was hard to tell if Kit had been paying attention. A long silence drifted between them.

  “That is so awful and so sad,” said Kit, “but what’s really awful is how it feels so completely unconnected to me.”

  “Because it was. You didn’t know him.” Fenno felt strangely unconnected to the story as well; he had told it so many times over the years that the words had come to feel like distant cousins to the memories themselves.

  “He chose not to know me. That’s what I keep reminding myself. But I didn’t know that for most of my life. When you don’t have a father—or no; when your mother withholds from you who that father is—then one thing you have to imagine is that he doesn’t know you exist. She kept it from him, too, and that’s not his fault! How could he know any better? But you figure he’s got to find out—or one day, when you’re grown up, you’ll find him. You’ll know how.”

  “As you did.”

  “Except”—Kit laughed mockingly—“except that I might never have done it if I hadn’t been pushed.”

  By Sandra. Fenno knew this part of Kit’s story. Sandra whose work kept her from something as important as this weekend. Something else, Fenno feared, was going on here. But it wasn’t his place to ask.

  “You’re talking,” said Fenno, “to someone who’s had to be pushed toward every important decision he’s ever
made. If no one had pushed me, I’d still be sitting on the window seat halfway up the big stairwell in my parents’ house, wearing trousers far too small for me, reading another book.” Except that now his brother David—with his wife and children—lived in that house. He laughed briefly at the image of himself, a grizzle-headed gimpy-jointed man, sitting cross-legged on that tapestried cushion (porcupined with years of hair shed by his mother’s collies), and would his reading have matured despite his never leaving that spot? Or would he never have moved past adolescence, advancing through time only according to how the childhood classics continued to eclipse one another? By now he’d be long through Lemony Snicket and Harry Potter. He’d have devoured already the Hunger Games trilogy, some of the last books displayed in the window of Plume.

  “I’m constantly in need of pushing,” Kit said mournfully.

  “Let’s stop being maudlin, shall we?” Fenno said. “You’ve met Lucinda.”

  Kit smiled. “At Christmas. She’s wonderful. And you know, I do have her. And Zeke—though I wish I’d met him before his stroke. My children don’t quite understand who those old people are—Sandra says we can’t rush it. Ironic, coming from Sandra. But we’ve told them a half-truth—that they’re new relatives we discovered. They don’t know enough about genealogy to ask the right questions. Though I think, any minute, Fanny will get there.”

  “Lucinda told you we were friends for a while.”

  “Were?” Kit paused. “She said you are friends. That’s why she could put me in touch with you, she said.”

  “Are. Well. I’m glad she said that.”

  “You don’t agree?”

  “I did something—I condoned something—no, I actually encouraged something that appalled her. I don’t know how much you know about Lucinda, the work she did for years.”

  “Unwed mothers. Single mothers: I guess that’s the politically correct term now for girls like my mother.” Kit leaned backward into the palm-patterned couch. He laughed. “You think she wouldn’t mention that to me?”