by Julia Glass
“Easy for him. He could do all the harmony on his own.”
Kit realizes that he is still holding the program. “Do you think we should take Will and Fanny to something like that? An outdoor concert?”
“Only if we balance it with a Giants game.”
“Will should be able to find entertainment outside a stadium.”
“Should. Now there’s a loaded word.”
Yes, thinks Kit, and how. Here it is again: worrying over how he should feel about recent events, rather than knowing what he genuinely does. It’s as if he’s living an unremitting dream, watching himself from the dreamer’s distance, a witness unable to intervene. He feels a growing affection for Zeke—yet he cannot vanquish his guilt. To be with Zeke is also to be without Lucinda, who would surely be there still, with her husband, if Kit had not barged into their lives. He feels gratitude toward Fenno McLeod—yet the quilt and the box of letters and pictures, which Fenno sent with a letter telling him more about his father, only sharpened Kit’s guilt. Here were swatches, literal swatches, from Lucinda’s bright, generous, celebratory life.… What was he to do with this memento? He will always love his mother, yet now that he’s muscled his way into knowing things she withheld—in a way, pulled filial rank on her (Malachy may once have been her lover, but he will always be Kit’s father)—he feels as much sadness for her sacrifice as he does admiration. Tonight’s outing only deepened that sadness. Never mind that it looks as if she’s happy: as if love, whatever form it takes in her marriage to Bart, will prevail, at least for now.
Sandra’s voice emerges from the silence. “Do you suppose the children will be in bed? I somehow doubt it.”
“Loraina can’t get enough of them, can she?”
“Don’t be fooled,” says Sandra. “Jasper’s the one who’d change the locks.”
The clock in the dashboard tells them it’s ten-thirty. They have at least another hour on the road, though Sandra tends to drive faster than Kit. “I could phone and find out. Put down my disciplinarian foot,” he says. “But they can sleep late. Can’t they?”
“Except that now I have to get back sooner, start making calls. They can’t exactly stay here with you.”
Sandra always remembers the logistics. Because yes, the kids will return with her to New Jersey, while Kit returns to Zeke’s for another couple of days in the sweltering barn. Another visit or two and that work will be done.
“So tell me about the garden.” He saw Sandra’s earliest sketches, but he’s been away from home too much to have paid close attention.
“God knows if I’m up to it. Right this minute I’m terrified I’m in way over my head.”
The garden is as much a recognition as a memorial—and, Sandra says (though only to him), an act of political correctness. Rutgers is hardly West Point, so the number of graduates lost in a decade of skirmishes and roadside bombs is—so far—negligible. More than three dozen alumni, however, died on September 11. The garden will be a walled enclosure, intimate in scale, though the donor has wealth on a scale that is anything but. So while the job is “small,” says Sandra, she’ll be free to choose unusual materials and plantings. Despite the acutely different climates, she will hunt for horticultural crossovers between the Middle East and New Brunswick. “I do have a good source of opium poppies,” she says. “A client who loves to share her seeds. Garden-club insurgency.”
Kit pictures the cinematic field of poppies in The Wizard of Oz. Jasper began reading the Oz books aloud to Kit as soon as he and his mother moved in. He had read them to Rory and Kyle when they were younger; sometimes, if Jasper was reading to Kit on the sofa, they would loiter about for a minute or two and listen. Jasper’s deep sawtooth voice was the perfect storyteller’s medium. Just last night, he read to Will and Fanny; Fanny had brought along the third Harry Potter. He will have read to them again tonight.
The twins are sleeping in Rory and Kyle’s bunk bed, which Loraina is determined to haul to the dump. (“If we put in an honest-to-God four-poster with a mattress that doesn’t reek of feral boy, maybe we could attract some actual guests!”) Jasper claims, however, that having children as regular visitors is a vote in favor of keeping the room as it is, moth-eaten cowboy rug and all. Kit knows that Jasper is hoping Kyle’s life will stay on the rails; maybe he hopes for just one more grandchild—this one living right around the corner.
The children were predictably delighted when they entered Jasper’s house. Kit can still remember the first time he saw it. But unlike nine-year-old Kit, whose mother warned him to “behave,” the twins ran up and down the stairs, peering into the various nooks with their various views, finally convening at the top, in the crow’s nest. “Can we stay here?” said Fanny, sitting possessively on the futon that Jasper installed once Kit moved out for good.
Kit briefly considered the image of himself and Sandra sleeping in the bunks below, and while there are still too many nights when they sleep together like siblings, he said, “No, I’m afraid not. This is my room.”
“How is it yours?” Fanny challenged.
“I slept here for ten years, or just about.” He glanced around, possessive in his own way. Above the desk where he did his homework hung the corkboard once crowded with his collection of art cards. But for a constellation of colorful thumbtacks, it had been empty ever since.
Fanny looked puzzled. Eagle eye that she is, she had already noticed, on the stone mantel in the living room, a picture of Rory, Kyle, and Kit. “Isn’t that you as a kid?” she asked. Kit had been startled by the picture; where had it come from? Since moving into Jasper’s house, Loraina has been softening its edges: not all at once, as Kit’s mother did, but by stealthy increments: one month a rocking chair by the fireplace, next a fresh rag rug in the kitchen … but it looks as if she’s also exhuming artifacts of Jasper’s past, a past with which she has no quarrels.
Kit was naïve to bring the children for a weekend at Jasper’s without, as Sandra put it, “full disclosure.” He sat on the futon with Fanny and Will. “You remember how I told you that Didi was married before Papa-da?”
Will frowned. “No.”
Fanny turned to her brother and said, “She got a divorce. We know that.”
“Right,” said Kit. “Didi was married to Jasper. We lived here when I was your age.”
“But Jasper’s not your dad,” said Fanny. “Your dad died.”
Once again, Kit wondered when he would be able to explain to his children all the discoveries of the past year—all these new people in their lives, these new places they were visiting. Kit is also certain that Fanny, though she hasn’t said anything, is taking note of the emotional hum that rises and falls around her father these days. He can still detect in her the wariness both children felt after his collapse in Provincetown.
Fanny and Will have friends with stepfathers or stepmothers, so this part was relatively easy to explain. (Welcome, he thought, to the era of the fragmented family as norm. What was the correct term these days? Blended: that was it. The Naked Hemp Society flashed across his inner screen once more. The correct term for that kind of family he knew: intact.)
“So why’d we never come here before?” demanded Will. “This is a cool place.”
“Yeah,” said Fanny.
The two of them faced him squarely, allies in their accusation.
“You know, I should have brought you here a long time ago.”
Sandra gasps and briefly hits the brake, startling Kit back into the world of the dark car, the late night. She drives on, but slowly.
“What?” cries Kit.
“A deer. It’s okay. Sorry. I just saw a deer at the edge of the road.”
“The last thing we want is to hit a deer,” says Kit. “Your car is the best one we have. Soon to be the only one, I’m guessing.”
Sandra is briefly silent, then laughs. “I’m thinking about the moose up over that fireplace. How it got there. Not stalked down and shot by some Davy Crockett type but hit on the road somewher
e near the camp.”
“By a drunken, lovelorn conductor, spurned by his first violin. Car totaled, nose broken, moose the consolation prize.”
“My God, that place. Some ‘camp.’ ” Sandra’s profile glows in the light of the too-many information systems showing off their data behind the steering wheel.
Kit imagines his children asleep in Jasper’s house. He thinks of them that morning, running in the meadow with the dogs. Will insisted on keeping the dogs straight, knowing their names. In addition to last year’s crew, there’s a litter of half-grown puppies. Kit watched from the open window at the kitchen sink, waking slowly to his first sips of coffee, as Jasper taught Will how to recognize each dog by its markings. “Not long,” he heard Jasper say, “and you get to know their personalities, their voices, same way you know the people in your life. I can recognize a dog in the dark just from the way he breathes, the feel of his fur.”
It pierces Kit so suddenly, with such unfamiliar certainty, that the impact on his body is as fierce as if they had hit that deer five miles back on the road.
“Kit?” says Sandra.
He leans forward, his palms on the dashboard, as if bracing himself, or trying to see farther ahead than the darkness will allow.
“Kit!” Sandra slows the car, begins pulling over to the narrow shoulder. “Kit, are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” he says. “Really.”
But she pulls over anyway. “Kit? Talk to me, will you?”
“Let’s go,” he says. “There’s nothing wrong.”
She sighs with obvious relief. She checks the rearview mirror and pulls back onto the road.
“Sandra.”
“Yes.”
“Remember when you made me leave, when you told me I had to go see Jasper?”
“I never made you go.” She’s silent for a moment. “But I needed you out of the house. I thought I might go crazy, living with you like that. You were like this resident invalid. I’d have been happy to send you off on a freighter to South America—I mean, so long as you came back.”
“You didn’t send me to Jasper on purpose? Specifically to—”
“Kit, that was the worst it’s been for us. Even worse than when we were trying so hard to get pregnant. I don’t even want to remember what I was thinking. I want never to feel like that again.”
Kit still has no clear prospects for a job, yet he has other prospects. And though he can’t say it out loud now, not even to Sandra (perhaps, for the moment, especially not to Sandra), he knows what he ought to have known all along: that Jasper is his father—or, as Sandra said when she kicked him out (because she’s wrong for once: she did make him go), the closest thing to a father he’s ever had. What, exactly, is a father if not a man who, once you’re grown and gone and out in the world making your own mistakes, all good advice be damned, waits patiently for you to return? And if you don’t, well then, you don’t. He understands that risk. He knows whose choice it is.
“Kit, are you sure you don’t need me to stop for a minute? We still have bottles of water in the trunk, from the picnic.”
“I really am all right,” he says. “But I’m glad you’re doing the driving.”
“We’ll be there in about ten minutes, I think.”
Yes; right again. Because now Kit recognizes a house by the side of the road. Only the porch light is on—revealing its surface to be a glossy buttercup yellow instead of a parched, peeling white—and the slumping barn that stood behind it is gone, had probably been gone for years; but this was a landmark for Kit on the long drive home from the stuffy, antiquated inn where his mother liked to go for special-occasion dinners. Jasper always drove, Daphne beside him. Kit sat behind them, in the early years squeezed between Rory and Kyle, then alone, an only child all over again. And if he hadn’t fallen asleep—if he was simply worn out from a night of rich food and public table manners, idly watching the trees and the occasional buildings pass them by—he’d know, when they passed this particular house, that he would be in bed within fifteen minutes. That house was like one of the stone inuksuks he and Sandra saw, and took so many pictures of, when they drove along Hudson Bay, newly in love, enchanted by everything unfamiliar. A signpost, a beacon.
Ahead is the turnoff. Before it was paved, the final stretch was bumpy; no one would have slept through the car’s jostling over the rough dirt road ending at the house. But in the early days, even up to an age when he was really too big for such coddling, he liked to pretend he was out cold, just so that Jasper would hoist him up and carry him into the house. Kit would will his body limp and keep his eyes firmly closed while Jasper paused at the base of the stairs to secure the boy’s weight against his chest and then, sometimes grunting at the effort, began the long climb—“Alley-oop and upward, my friend”—all the way to the top.
Acknowledgments
I want to begin by thanking Dana Prescott and Diego Mencaroni of the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, as well as Will Conroy and Patty Doar of the Arizona Inn. Their benevolence and sumptuous hospitality enabled me to write many, many pages of this book at two magnificent, tranquil retreats.
My friend and fellow novelist Edward Kelsey Moore, who also happens to be an accomplished cellist, shared with me a great deal of knowledge—not to mention beautiful music—essential to my inventing the life of a gifted young musician. I asked a hundred questions; he gave two hundred answers. Although many details of that invented life vaporized in final revisions, I thank Ed for hours of richly entertaining melodic diversion. The more personal experiences of two other friends also influenced my work on this book. I was deeply moved by their discussing in detail how shadow parents—those whose identities remain unknown—can exert a subtle but inexorable power over the entire course of a child’s life and relationships. Without your stories, G. and G., this one would be less authentic.
As always, I am grateful to my sons and their father, who witness firsthand the ups and downs, and the middling doldrums, during the years I spend pulling together a novel. My work is invisible, and they honor it entirely on faith.
The publication of this book also marks thirteen years of equally faithful support from my agent and my editor, Gail Hochman and Deb Garrison, who have stood by me from the start of my life as a novelist. They are the best of the best, always insightful, always truthful, always there. I cannot begin to count my lucky stars.
A Note About the Author
Julia Glass is the author of Three Junes, winner of the 2002 National Book Award for Fiction; The Whole World Over; I See You Everywhere, winner of the 2009 Binghamton University John Gardner Book Award; and The Widower’s Tale. Her personal essays have been widely anthologized. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Glass also teaches fiction writing, most frequently at the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown. She lives with her family in Marblehead, Massachusetts.