by Julia Glass
“Wild,” says Kit.
“Not your usual night at the philharmonic,” says Sandra.
“These days you have to be catchy, do something exotic,” says Daphne. “There was a concert like this one when I was here. Malachy said that if the program had a title, it would be ‘Dare Me to Sing It and I Will.’ ”
Kit laughs. He hears Zeke comment quietly, “Couldn’t get much closer.”
“Is this all right for you?” Kit knows, because it frustrates Christina, that Zeke refuses to consider a hearing aid. He assumes that sitting close to the stage, for Zeke, is good.
“Fine,” says Zeke. “Not a complaint.”
Involuntarily, Kit puts a hand on Zeke’s knee. “Good.”
And now the pianist comes onstage, a slight, wiry-haired man in a tuxedo that, when it catches the light, looks more blue than black. Applause; silence; urgent clearing of throats. Only when it is completely silent again—or as silent as an early summer evening in the country can be—do the singers enter, from opposing directions, joining hands like a bride and groom eager to say their vows. And isn’t this a lot like being in church? Aren’t the spectators worshippers, devotees to a particular kind of cultural cult?
Kit turns to study the expressions on the spectators’ faces: amusing and slightly absurd in their rapt uniformity. They are like small children in this moment of composure, vessels waiting to be filled with joy. They are happy. They are safe. Except that in fact—he glances to one side at Zeke, to the other at his mother—they are all just as fragile as ever.
He shouldn’t have had the second glass of prosecco, yet he knows that if he closes his eyes and surrenders, he will feel the same way everyone else does. Carefree, lucky, smiled upon by fate if just for a few fleeting hours. The music will be a welcome illusion, like a salty sea on which floating takes no effort.
He looks over at the students—the “campers”—and knows that, for them, the experience is wholly different because of their aspiration. The couple onstage (singing in Italian, something bawdy and teasing) might be their teachers, the artists whose fire they hope to borrow if not steal. Yet they look as earnest in their wonder as the adults do.
Seeing his mother glance in that direction, too, Kit realizes that the summer she spent here was surely the first time in her life that she felt genuinely powerful, the way before her clear and sunny, the world her opalescent oyster. Malachy Burns must have felt that way, too.
Listen to the music, he scolds himself. Just listen. Be your ears and nothing more.
Kit had spent a long, cold, bruising day in Zeke’s attic, after which he had shoveled snow off the porch and served the two of them omelets and soup. It was March, and he had been going back and forth to Vermont for nearly a month: relieved to have the work but disoriented every morning by the brilliant light, the narrow mattress, the frigid floor beneath his feet. The first thing Sandra said in her nightly call was “Someone named Bruno phoned. Do you want his number?” Being Sandra, she didn’t ask who Bruno was. Having no news of her own, she called the children to speak with their dad. Kit told himself it was a good thing that Will and Fanny seemed antsy when they came on the phone; he was interrupting whatever they were doing. They didn’t miss him too much.
It took no feat of recall for Kit to know who Bruno was. Bruno and Raven taught at the Rhode Island School of Design; they had ties at Brown as well. RISD and Brown: a true job for Kit at either place would be more than a long shot—more like a laugh—but Providence was a place with a number of schools where he might talk his way into something. It helped that Bruno felt certain Kit and Jasper had saved his life. That day, thawing by the fire, stoked with painkillers inadequate to the occasion, Bruno had clung to Kit as diversion: “Talk. Tell me anything. Your story—tell me that.” So Kit told Bruno his story—or the story of his work … his not-work, his unwork, his maybe-never-work-to-begin-with.
Bruno had begged Kit to stay in touch, and after a couple of months, after another Christmas freighted with too much thinly veiled anxiety, after a stiff drink, Kit had e-mailed his CV to Bruno. Bruno wrote back that he would “keep an eye out.” Maybe he’d meant it; maybe not. Kit let it go at that.
But he had.
“So I’m pretty proud of myself, pal, because get this,” said Bruno when Kit reached him from Vermont. “The museum’s getting a big but crazy-random collection of outsider art, from this guy in Spokane whose mother went to RISD like sometime back around the Civil War. It’s the mother’s collection; the son is pretty clueless about its contents. Turns out a lot of it’s tribal—Native American, but Eskimo, too. Maybe Inuit?”
“Probably.” Kit waited, afraid of hs own eagerness.
“You know, I have to say, the term outsider gives me the skeevies. Smacks of empire mentality, don’t you agree?”
“Academia as the baseline,” said Kit, barely breathing.
“Right. So listen. The collection’s uncatalogued. A mess, but now our mess. Arriving here in May. Paperwork is a guaranteed nightmare, repatriation issues up the wazoo. All the Canadian stuff. But what I hear is we’ll keep most of it—the museum. So this lightbulb went on in my head—that you, with your background … Probably a freelance thing—you know. So I sent your CV to the curator. You have experience cataloguing? Appraising?”
Kit stood beside Zeke’s dining table, covered from one end to the other with file boxes and folders, Kit’s laptop an island in the flotsam. “As a matter of fact, I have a cataloguing job right now. But nothing permanent.” Nothing permanent: how true of everything, really.
He did not tell Sandra until he’d spoken to the curator and knew that she took him seriously, would meet with him, give him a look at the collector’s manifest. “It’s like some eight-year-old’s list for Santa,” the curator scoffed. “Handwritten, torn. There’s crayon! She had an eye, but … eccentric would be tactful. The son’s not much better.”
Since late May, his two jobs overlap. Both are ephemeral, and at times they feel mostly clerical. Highbrow scut work. Lists to make and remake, filing systems to devise, software to learn. But the very different surroundings keep boredom at bay, even amuse him. Providence is a city whose bipolar nature makes Kit feel strangely comfortable: scruffy yet elegant, it’s a small-stakes fiefdom where B-list mobsters and Ivory Tower bureaucrats have worked out a symbiotic hold on power—petty power, the hardest kind to share. He works in a sleek, flashy building that flanks a pillared Greek façade—but sleeps in a closetlike bedroom he rents from a colleague of Bruno’s, at the back of an undistinguished three-decker building in a Portuguese neighborhood. He eats dinner in a bleakly bright restaurant that offers ample servings of pork, cod, and potatoes for a song. Two days a week, Kit is content to live on oversalted fish and meat in sauces shiny with fat. Funny, he thinks: not all that different from Inuit food.
At the museum, he rules in solitude over a basement room kept cool, dry, and dim in deference to the sacred pampering of art. Beyond the table he uses to examine most pieces, there is hardly space to stand among all the crates and folios the shipping company constructed to contain the artwork. In the donor’s house, they were exposed for decades to winter damp, summer heat, unfiltered sunlight. Never mind. Now they’ll be “safe.” They will be treated as if they have finally come home when, in fact, they couldn’t be farther away.
Like most art collections worth preserving, this one has its standard-bearing masterpieces, its what-was-she-thinking dross, and its closeted gems. Among the gems, in Kit’s eye, are the contents of a colossal portfolio: a cache of drawings by a group of artists from Cape Dorset. He’s read about these artists, but this is the first time he’s seen their work outside journals and art magazines.
Some of the drawings are six feet across, most of them rendered in colored pencil, the thick toothy paper and the pencils part of a grant from a famous manufacturer of art supplies. Whether grateful or bemused, the artists worked with what they were given. Some were in their seventies, some in their t
wenties.
Several are panoramic townscapes: meandering rows of blunt, soot-colored buildings surrounded by constellations of bundled figures driving snowmobiles and pickups. Though the images are flat, lacking any guile or subtlety, they remind Kit of Brueghel in their gull’s-eye view of community life. Tiny citizens carry spears, gut fish, skin seals, but they also take out garbage, play basketball, shop, mail letters, pump gas, drink and dance in bars. The artists are clever to mix traditional and modern pastimes; this is what collectors like to see in work of this kind. The collision of cultures. They may not recognize their condescension, but the artists do—and if they profit, no offense need be taken.
Other artists have chosen to draw the animals they know; the animals have always been Kit’s favorite subject in the art he studies. It seems to him both logical and wondrous that people unschooled in the Western tricks of sculpture can make seals, bears, whales, owls, and foxes feel so tangibly alive, or frozen in time, whether the medium is mineral, wood, or bone. (Is Kit, like the collectors he disdains, condescending to feel this wonder? Maybe so.)
In this two-dimensional medium, the animals are every bit as authentic. In one drawing, a five-foot-long whale contains, Jonah-like, a sleeping polar bear. Within the bear nests a family of seals, which in turn enclose a flock of eider ducks in flight. Confined within each bird is a man decked out for hunting. The hunters are both dwarfed and engulfed by the animals and birds. So many creatures, yet most of the picture comprises the plain white surface of the paper; only the most sinuous, minimal lines, in blues and greens and grays, define the creatures themselves. Kit has fallen in love with this drawing and wishes he could own it, see it every day. There is so much tenderness in the care with which the artist made his lines: the soft folds around the whale’s one visible eye, the bear’s furling claws, the strokes that give spine to each feather.
One day Bruno visited Kit in his subterranean lair. Kit was formalizing descriptions of these drawings, their provenance, their market value according to galleries in Toronto and Vancouver. Lying on the table was one of the drawings Kit now privately thinks of as Arctic Brueghel.
Bruno leaned over the drawing, issuing grunts of amusement and admiration. “Yikes. A land of no trees. No place for me, tell you that.”
“It’s oppressive, if trees are what you know, what you take for granted.”
Bruno nodded vigorously. “You know this part of the world, yeah?”
“Not really, but I’ve been there. As a tourist.”
“I’d be homesick for green in no time. Green-sick!”
“If you grew up in the woods,” said Kit, “it feels like you’ve gone to the moon.”
“Houses are made of what, tin?”
“Some. Asphalt shingles, fiberglass, recycled shipping crates, and salvaged boats—but they import building materials, too. It’s a perfectly connected world. Well”—Kit laughed—“imperfectly connected.”
“As we all are,” said Bruno. “Man, as we all are.”
They say good-bye to one another in the parking lot. Zeke fell asleep in the second half of the concert, and though he woke during the thunderous applause at the end, he is drowsing again by the time they get to the car.
“That was something, at intermission, wasn’t it?” Christina whispers to Kit as he folds the chair and lifts it into the back of her car.
“I think he was thrilled, though tomorrow you can be sure he’ll say something cynical about it.”
Christina laughs quietly. During intermission, one of Zeke’s past colleagues from the senate recognized him. Gradually, a number of Zeke’s fans gathered around him. He insisted on standing and walking with them to the bar; Kit watched from afar as Zeke enjoyed their affectionate laughter, glad-handing, probably their recollections of his achievements—perhaps Lucinda’s, too.
But Kit was distracted by his mother’s tremulous emotions. Spotting a woman she recognized near the stage, she seized Kit’s arm. “It is. It is her. I can’t believe it.” She pulled him through the crowd, Bart and Sandra following. The woman was older but arrestingly stylish. Her silver hair was cut in a razor-sharp pageboy. She wore a purple sequined sheath—short, showing off legs that defied her age. When Daphne approached her, spoke to her, it took the woman just a moment to place Daphne as one of her former students.
“You played ‘The Swan,’ ” she said. Svahn. Was she Russian? “I remember. You were an exceptional swan or I would not. I am telling the truth.”
Daphne told the woman about her playing in the Dartmouth ensemble. She did not mention her teaching. Kit held his breath, then realized that of course she wouldn’t say a thing about Malachy. (Had he been memorable, too?)
When they were seated again, Daphne said, “I guess she was just in her thirties then, maybe younger. We were so myopic about our teachers. Not that we weren’t in awe, but we needed them to be on the way out.” She smiled through the second half of the program.
“Are you sure you can drive back this late?” he asks Christina now as he closes the cargo door after securing the wheelchair.
“Please. I drive constantly, twenty-four–seven. Life of carpools, of chasing depositions from Boston to Bangor. And now Dad. I’ll be driving the day I die. Probably drive myself to the funeral home.”
“Tell him I’ll see him at the farm tomorrow night,” says Kit.
“Thank you, Daphne. That was amazing.” Christina opens her door. She hesitates visibly before adding, “And thank you for sharing this piece of my brother’s life. I forgot about his being here.”
Daphne hugs Christina forcefully. “You are welcome. You are so very welcome.” She’s been tearful since the end of the concert, especially since leading them along a roundabout path, a detour on which she discovered that a building she remembered well—an old barn—had been razed and replaced.
“Oh,” she said, as if someone had offended her. “Look at this. Now they sleep in real dorms. They probably have televisions. Computers. Who knows what luxuries.”
“It’s called progress, Mom.”
“No, Kit. No.” She wiped her eyes. “When I was here, the key to our work was regress. If there’s such a thing. All we had was music.”
And one another, thinks Kit.
They wave off Christina, and then, finally, Kit’s mother pulls him into a prolonged hug. “Kitten,” she says, “this was something we should have done a long time ago. I mean, just because this place is a part of me. Forget the rest.”
He lets her hold him, unsure what he should say.
Walking to their car, one of the last few in the lot, Kit and Sandra look at each other and let out a collaborative sigh.
“Are you all right?” says Sandra.
“Define ‘all right.’ I don’t think I’ve been all right in years.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Well, maybe I do. Let me sleep on that.” The truth is this: every new revelation, every new relationship, brings new confusion as well. Sometimes he feels like a mouse being coaxed through a laboratory maze. There’s no guessing what’s been planted around the next turn, or the next.
Sandra unlocks the car. Kit asks her, as he did Christina, if she’s sure she can do the driving. (Could he? Doubtful. The wine has worn off, but the entire evening has left him feeling raw, fretful, ready to howl at the moon.)
“I’m fine.” She clicks in her belt, then looks at him and says, “I got it. The Rutgers job. The memorial garden.”
“Oh God, that is so great,” says Kit. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“I just found out. They texted me sometime during the concert.”
“Modern life. Did I actually call it progress?” Kit laughs. Soon, no one will be able to remember a time when there was such a thing as “between” or “away” or “off” in the context of work. (Though if he thinks of his mother back when he was a child, there were days she seemed to work—playing her cello, planning her lessons, teaching at school—from early morning till well after
reading Kit a bedtime story.)
“I have to refine the design, call my plant sources, all that. And I somehow convinced them I know a lot about fountains. Because of course there’s a fountain. Where there’s sorrow, they almost always demand water.” She drives through the gate, the exit from Eden. “But the thing is, by September, I’ll be spending a lot of time there.”
“You’ll need me for the kids.”
“Or someone.”
“I ought to be back on the street by then.”
“Back at home, you mean. I hope that’s what you mean.”
“Hope. Word of the moment,” he says, trying to sound light-hearted.
“But look. Say you found a job in Providence, or Vermont—just about anywhere—I’d be fine with moving. Things change.”
“Or get desperate.”
“Stop. Really, Kit. The good news is, we’re flexible.”
“Flexible,” says Kit. “I’ll go with that.”
“And lucky.”
Sandra’s father loaned them money to pay for a new roof; last year, when their situation did seem more desperate than flexible, Sandra insisted they prepare to sell the house. They talked about moving out to Oregon, staying with Sandra’s parents for a while; Sandra could work at the nursery. Kit knows this is still a possibility, and it wouldn’t be the end of the world—but now he feels more tightly bound to the Northeast.
“I’m poking around at private schools,” he says. “But Mom thinks I should go for certification. She’s all for public.”
“Of course she is.” Sandra’s tone is hard to read. Over the past year, she and Daphne have been working hard at remaining amicable; anyone can see this.
Their car travels alone on a winding road where trees knit together above them, blocking out whatever light the stars and moon might offer. Sandra clicks on the high beams.
“What was your favorite song?” he asks. “Tonight.”
“You’re asking me to choose? Between Bach and Tom Waits? Ravel and the Beach Boys?”
“You know what? That was incredible. Maybe that was my favorite.” The married singers had performed, in all its hymnal sweetness (gazing into each other’s eyes), “God Only Knows.” Kit stops himself from saying that this is one of many songs he knows involuntarily well, because it’s one his mother taught in her class years ago, playing it over and over at home, asking him—and Jasper—for their impressions, too. He stops himself because he doesn’t want to bring up his mother right now—not yet. He isn’t ready to talk about the events or emotions of the evening, not even with Sandra. Instead, he says, “I read somewhere that Paul McCartney loved singing that song as a lullaby to his children.”