“I’m a friend of Ralph’s—Fenno McLeod. I’ll just go wash up downstairs and then I’ll explain,” he says. So this is the hanger-on with the funny name. Fern recognizes his alluring accent as Scottish; this, she supposes, is why he did not alarm her (as if Scotland doesn’t have its share of psychos).
After brushing her hair and putting on sandals, she goes down as well. She pours two glasses of lemonade. She finds him on the front porch, rapping his sneakers against a stair to dislodge clumps of soil.
He glances up. His hands and face are clean. “I’m not behaving logically. I’m sorry. I’m used to making myself at home.”
“Oh go ahead. I’m like a guest twice removed. I don’t even know your friend Ralph, so please. Save the explanations.” She hands him a glass.
He thanks her. “Well, not for Tony I won’t.”
Fern laughs. She sits on a white director’s chair (too much of the furniture here is white, she decides; it feels like a test of some kind). She would ask this man how he knows Tony—through Ralph? and just who is this Ralph?—but he does not laugh along with her. He sits on the top step and stares at his hands on the glass of lemonade, then toward the driveway, at an old Volkswagen bus. Sky blue and white, it looks remarkably new.
Fern hasn’t seen one of those cars in ages; it’s like a postcard from her childhood. There’s a silk sunflower wired to the antenna and, on the driver’s door, a large reflective Celtic cross. Scattered along the side are several bumper stickers. Three are bold enough to read from the porch:
IF YOU WANT PEACE, WORK FOR JUSTICE.
PERPETRATE PHOTOSYNTHESIS.
LIFE. WHAT A BEAUTIFUL CHOICE.
(
This one twice, front and rear.)
She looks again at Fenno McLeod, the man who drives this highly declarative vehicle. Seeing her amusement, he says, “I’m not—it’s not mine.”
How quickly, Fern thinks, we can fear we’ve been politically typed: by a word, a pair of shoes, a haircut, a bumper sticker on a borrowed car. “Well, whoever owns it has to be a character of some kind. Someone who doesn’t mind about the zeitgeist.”
Now he does laugh. “Yes. That’s absolutely true.”
“A woman,” says Fern. “Your mother?”
“Not mine, but mother to a horde of people who desperately need a mother. Or need a good one.”
“Including you?”
Fenno McLeod smiles at the bus as if at an irrepressible secret. “To me, she’s more like a well-intentioned mother-in-law. She acts as if I’m hers, but she treats me well.” He drains his glass and sets it down.
Silently, both of them look at the glass. The moisture on its surface is gray with dirt that must have remained in the fissures of his palms. He says, “I came here to bury my dog. If you don’t mind, I’m afraid I’d better finish. The heat . . .” He looks again at the bus.
“I’m sorry,” says Fern. Then the screen door slams behind her.
“Well what a surprise!” Tony stands above them in his bathing suit and T-shirt. He looks ruddy, as if he’s had too much sun. “Fern, meet Fenno. Fenno, Fern. Hey, I sound like Letterman botching the Oscars.”
“We’ve met,” says Fern.
“I’ve just driven out from the vet’s,” Fenno says. “Rodgie’s kidneys failed.” He pauses, as if to give Tony a chance at another bad joke. But Tony looks suddenly attentive, even sad.
“Poor Rodge,” he says.
“Ralph always said I could bury him here, next to Mavis. Absurdly sentimental, but I couldn’t just consign him to the surgery rubbish.”
“Poor old Rodge.” Tony sighs, but he moves no closer to Fenno.
“Yes, very old. The last of my mother’s collies. The last of Mum, I kept thinking in the midst of all that traffic. Well.” He stands.
The men exchange warmer smiles. Fern feels a stale, tiresome envy stir. Fenno goes to the bus, opens the back, and lifts out a bulk wrapped in a blanket. He heads around the back of the house.
“Need anything?” calls Tony.
Fenno calls back, “In about fifteen minutes, Ralph’s Glenfiddich. I’m sure you know where it’s kept by now.”
“Well,” Tony says to Fern, “good thing I bought two dozen ears and the family-size barbecue pack. . . . And hey, now the party’s complete.”
A small, nondescript car pulls in behind the bus, and out springs (there is no other word) the boy Fern has been dreading.
“Look at you, look at you, all shiny from the beach!” the boy calls to Tony. “Hello hello,” he says melodically to Fern. He bounds up the stairs and holds out his hand. “I’m Richard. And I love your shade of yellow.”
Fern looks down at her dress. “Sun,” she says idiotically. Looking up, she sees the kiss planted on Tony’s cheek and the sharp flicker of Tony’s eyebrows, as if a protocol’s been breached. But he does not pull back.
“Which we all worship, don’t we?” Richard replies to Fern with a genuine smile. He is immediately likable, never mind his nubile glow and exhibitionist energy. He has that riveting saffron-haired, blue-eyed coloring, freckles like shrapnel but muted by a careful tan, teeth incandescent, chest too perfectly smooth and shapely. He might be twenty-four. (Didn’t these boys make Tony feel old? This one makes even Fern feel stiff in the joints.)
When she stands, Richard exclaims, “Oh, and expecting too! Wowie! Congratulations!”
“Thank you.” Fern picks up the empty glasses and takes them into the house. She runs water to rinse them, to drown out any insinuating words between Tony and Richard.
But like a puppy, Richard has followed her into the kitchen. “I’m ready to chop or whatever. Put me to work!” Tony stands behind him, looking amused and annoyed.
“It’s five-thirty,” he says. “This isn’t Nebraska.”
“Oh I can wait. Just want to be sure I’m helpful!” says Richard. His tank top (tight) advertises a dog walk to fund cancer research. He wears tiny gold crosses in both ears and, on one wrist, a band of braided rope. When he sees Ralph’s dog (looking woozily up from his bed), he cries out, “There he is!” and rushes over to kneel and fuss. “What’s his name?”
“Druid,” Tony says with a smirk. “Like whatever happened to Spot and Rex? Good old doggy-dog names.”
“Oh but that’s a cool name! Druids were wise and mysterious. They built Stonehenge,” says Richard as he strokes the happy spaniel. “Hello, you’re a handsome boy! . . . And what a beautiful coat you have, Druid. Someone takes good care of you, oh yes!”
Fern cannot read Tony’s face. He seems to be tolerating these effusions as you would a younger sibling’s naive behavior.
“Now
this
is a
nice
springer, you can tell. Don’t see that often these days,” says Richard. “Sudden rage syndrome just about ruined the breed, you know. All because of one stud back in the seventies, an AKC champion bred entirely for looks.” He shakes his head. “I’m no fan of the AKC, I can tell you that.” He stands and looks brightly toward Fern, apparently unperturbed that no one’s acknowledged his statement.
“Shall I take it out?” says Fern as she sees Tony take a glass and a bottle from a cupboard. She is afraid of being left alone with this eager guest, afraid he’s the type who will lose no time at probing, in all his burly innocence, toward some murky corner of her heart.
“You’ll make a better graveside companion,” says Tony. He fills the glass with Scotch.
As she approaches the hedge, Fern sees Fenno stamping down the surface of the grave. Somehow, she’s disappointed not to have seen the dog before he was buried.
For the second time, he accepts a glass from her and thanks her. “I should plant something,” he says, looking down. He splashes Scotch on the dark naked soil. “My father, right now, would recite a bit of Burns. Disgracefully, I’ve forgotten every line I ever learned. Proof that I am thoroughly and finally an exile.” He raises the glass toward the grave and drains it.
“You’re staying for dinner,” says Fern, hoping he’ll take it as fact.
“I’m not doing any more driving today, that’s certain.”
“Stay over,” she says. “Tony won’t mind.”
“I hardly need Tony’s permission. He has the place because of me.”
“And I get the feeling the room I’m in is yours.”
“Nothing here is mine; Ralph’s just a very old friend. We work together—practically live together, too. We walk in and out of each other’s lives like a pair of old unmarried sisters.”
Fern is about to comment that he hardly looks like a spinster when Richard’s voice interrupts her.
“Hello down there!” he calls out from the porch. “I am so sorry about your dog, about Rodgie! I hear he was truly a fine old soul!”
Fenno shades his eyes. “Who’s that?” he says quietly.
Richard is crossing the lawn at a clip, right hand outstretched, face set in a look of almost tearful sympathy. Fern turns aside because she is about to start laughing. As she turns, a tall man comes through the hedge. He looks at her with expectant pleasure. Another member of the face-lift brigade, she assumes (here to borrow a cup of . . . brandy? dinner mints? dried porcini?), until he says, “I hope you’re taking good care of my brother. He needs it!”
Richard stands beside Fern, speechless for the first time since his arrival.
“I thought I’d have to come fish you out of the surf,” says Fenno. Fern recalls now that she heard two voices outside when she woke up.
“I got a bit carried away and lost track of time. My God but it’s bloody lovely here!” He picks up the shovel with one hand and strokes Fenno’s back with the other. He looks at Fern and Richard again. “Oh dear, do introduce me,” he says, and as Fenno does, there is something about his tone, his expression, that makes Fern wonder if this brother—Dennis (younger, taller, more handsome and joyful)—has somehow deposed or outpaced him.
“My, my, a real swah-ray.” As one, they look up toward the house. Tony leans over the porch rail, grinning. He looks like a monarch or the Pope, taking for granted that they will applaud.
SIXTEEN
S
OMETIMES FERN THINKS
that she thinks too much about family. She lives, it’s true, in a time and place of rampant psychotherapy (in which she spent several years herself), but even so, she cannot help looking at people in a perpetual context of mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters. Especially brothers and sisters.
Often, she imagines herself as wearing several leashes, each quite long but held by another member of her far-flung family. She senses various pulls and tugs at various times, never feeling altogether free.
Though Fern has always been a perfect daughter in her parents’ eyes—they tell her so too often—this status costs her something in the eyes of her siblings. She isn’t the youngest, yet they sometimes make her feel like the least sensible, the least sure, the least anchored. The one who’s squandered her talents, ill used her opportunities.
Arcadia, the Olitskys’ nursery, still thrives in the pretty town where Fern grew up, tucked back in the Connecticut Berkshires. Her parents are the rare couple living a mutual dream, even if it’s one that made their children subtly resentful: resentful at being crowded into a charming but tiny house in a town where all their schoolmates were richer; where, every summer, they had to work in the family business and wait on those schoolmates’ parents, loading coiled hose and fertilizer into their trunks, digging holes in their lawns for new trees. Fern’s mother, in addition to helping her husband nurture saplings, rosebushes, and hothouse succulents, makes exquisitely tasteful dried wreaths, keeps bees and sells their honey. An almost pagan disciple of Mother Nature, Helen Olitsky named her offspring Heather, Fern, Forest, and Garland. Saying grace at every dinner of their childhood, she would thank God for various minute blessings of the day, then look up briefly, smile at each of them, bow her head again and say to her lap, “Thank you, most of all, for the garden of my heart.”
Gar, the baby, is the one who has stayed to take over the nursery. It’s easy to see that he loves it, that he inherited every green gene his parents possessed, has an inborn feel for the elemental (he will taste soil readily, as if it were wine, and tell you its composition). But he tends to lord it over the rest of them, to wield his old-fashioned fealty like a deed—preparing them, Fern is sure, for getting the most when their parents die. The year Fern went to Europe was the nursery’s worst—drought, gypsy moths, and a random IRS audit. Gar was barely in high school, but even now, he never lets Fern forget that she basically jumped ship. She has long since stopped defending herself.
As if letting his name set his course, Forest moved to Montana, where he preaches a love of nature that requires no cultivation, only protection. He lives in a sparsely furnished cabin at the end of a long dirt road, without neighbors or, to Fern’s knowledge, a lover. The managing editor of a struggling left-wing newspaper, he is a perfectionistic wordsmith. Forest would never refer to Lyme’s disease, Canadian geese, or the Klu Klux Klan—and he would have a hard time not correcting those who do. When Fern and Jonah took a week of vacation to visit him, she was amused to find on his refrigerator an article called “The Endangered Semicolon” (held there by a magnet shaped like the also-endangered red wolf). “Has it made the government’s list?” she asked merrily.
Not that he was humorless or stingy. He took Fern and Jonah on a number of wonderful expeditions, each planned with care. But when she stayed up with Forest one night and tried to discuss the work they suddenly had in common, he said, “Yes, design is very important, but in the end you have to remember: There’s style, and then there’s substance.”
The night before they left, he drove them an hour into Bozeman, to treat them to dinner at a restaurant regarded as Montana’s finest. Coming from New York, Fern and Jonah knew this effort to impress them might be overblown, but they said nothing. Their silence felt to Fern like sweet collusion—when they had had no union of any kind for weeks. In fact the food was very nice, and Fern was thrilled to see her favorite dessert on the menu. “Tiramisu at the Continental Divide!” She touched Jonah’s knee under the table, the wine having filled her with a warmth she longed to share. “Do you know what it means? ‘Hold me tight.’ Isn’t that romantic?” she said to Forest.
To which he replied, with a reticent smile, “Actually, it means ‘pick-me-up.’ I suppose because it contains espresso.”
Embarrassed, Fern removed her hand from Jonah’s knee. She told the waiter she was too full for dessert. She and her husband slept that night, as they did back home, on opposite sides of Forest’s extra futon. Unfairly, she knew, Fern blamed Forest for dousing in her, on purpose, a rare, precious spark of conciliation toward her husband.
With Heather, Fern is the closest and also the most contentious. For their entire childhood, they shared a room. Heather was the athlete: swam, played field hockey, fenced. At schoolwork, she was comfortably mediocre. After high school, she went to a small vocational college where she majored in “leisure studies.” Fern used to look down on her for this—but does not feel so smug since her sister has become the chief U.S. commerce and tourism rep for Tuscany, shepherding elite groups of journalists and merchants to Italy six times a year. Her kitchen is always stocked with extraordinary sweets and cheeses, her closet with sophisticated shoes. She lives on Lake Shore Drive with her husband, a financial analyst, and their two athletic, well-mannered sons. Heather met Eli at her first job, in a travel agency, and likes to say that he gave her a “head start on life.” If Eli is there, he’ll shoot back, like a soaring badminton birdie, “And this lady booked me on the Concorde to Love.”
For the odd weekend, Fern likes to visit, almost more than her sister, her sister’s wondrous life. It’s a small, happy planet on a speedy orbit around its own benevolent sun. Heather is also generous, if myopically so; she always insists on taking her little sister shopping on that Moneybags Mile or whatever it’s called. Fern, who stopped resisting long ago, will return to New York with a silk dress or cashmere jacket, an item she may wear once a year to the rare dress-up lunch with a client.
The problem with Heather is that she’s made herself a junior mother to Fern, though Fern is only two years younger. Ever since Fern’s move to New York, Heather has kept up a constant critique of her sister’s love life (not even sparing Jonah): “Honestly, honey, the boys you pick, they’re all so . . . ingrown or something. Is it that city? Does it just turn everyone into a narcissist or what? I don’t mean you, of course. . . . But look at Eli. Hardworking, civic-minded, wakes up happy every day. Now, Fern, can you tell me that a single one of those broody guys I’ve met wakes up to greet the day with a smile?”
“So introduce me to one of Eli’s happy pals,” Fern has replied, not entirely joking. But Eli’s friends, like Eli, are married, perpetually necktied, and have a small round area at the dome of their skulls where their hair has been subtly, permanently flattened by the yarmulkes they wear so often—like medals for their responsibility and goodness—to all the right occasions.
Had Heather seized on the secret of their parents’ translucently peaceful marriage? Fern feels a wrenching envy at this thought, a sense of having been left behind. Who is the smarter sister now?
“OH MAIZE—BRILLIANT!—OR CORN,
yes, that’s what you call it,” says Dennis. Fern shows him how to peel away the husk and silk, twist them off in a single motion. “I’m having an authentically American experience—shucking corn! And here I am in need of tutoring; wouldn’t my students have a laugh?”
Fern asks him what he teaches. They are sitting on the back porch stairs with a bag of corn between them, another for the husks at their feet.
“Cooking, as a matter of fact. I’m a guest instructor at this culinary institute place. Teaching a class titled—not my title!—Trends in Culinary Cross-Pollination. And am I ever the impostor!”
“You aren’t a chef?” asks Fern.
“Indeed I am. I have a little mongrel of a restaurant in France—have you ever been to Aix? These American food blokes—not really critics, more like collectors—happened in last summer when I was having a bang-on day. What do athletes call it—the zone? I was in the zone. So the food blokes stayed till closing time and chatted me up and invited me over for a month. I’m crashing on my brother’s couch and having a fine time pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes. I cook almost strictly French, I’m hardly a basher of traditions, but these chaps heard my accent and imagined haggis provençal or mouton Marmite or some such concoction. Though I do have a ‘trifle française’ using eau de vie in place of sherry, with apricots and fromage blanc.”
She tells him it sounds delicious; he answers that indeed it is. Like Richard, this man has a luster that in itself must make him popular—besides which he’s very good-looking: tall, with straightforward rectangular features (face, torso, hands) and the kind of expressive physicality that women find reassuring. His cheeks are perpetually rosy, suggestive, authentically or not, of modesty and sweetness.
“Are we missing out on a four-star meal?” says Fern. “You ought to have told Tony what you do.”
“Oh no. Nothing a chef likes better than being fed, and I’ve been fed quite nicely hereabouts. Though I will confess, I do not begin to comprehend your dairy products. We Brits are backwards in the cow department, except for clotted cream and double Gloucester, but bloody hell, these bricks of yellow rubber! My students force-fed me a thing called Philadelphia, more like a nursery paste . . .”
Fern has settled contentedly into nodding at this banter when Richard comes out of the house bearing a platter. “Hello! I’m here to collect the ears!”
“Hear, hear,” says Dennis.
Fern transfers a dozen from her lap. The corn is yellow and white, the kernels opalescent and well aligned. “It’s so early, but it looks wonderful.”
“Oh this’ll be from way down south, nowhere close by,” says Richard.
“Ah, what the jet plane’s done for the human tastebud,” says Dennis.
Leaving the two men to share their pleasantries, Fern goes inside.
Fenno is setting the dining room table with gold-rimmed plates. She watches him from behind; he moves slowly and deliberately, as if it’s a ceremony worthy of contemplation. She realizes he must be slowed by his grief, by weariness. When she asks if he’d like help, he looks up, startled.
“Napkins.” He nods at the sideboard. “Top left. The purple ones.”
Half the drawer contains antique silver napkin rings, long cellophaned candles, and a stack of the delicate glass cuffs that Jonah’s mother taught her to call bobeches. The other half is filled with fabric napkins, flowered and plain in a dozen colors. “This is someone’s second home?” says Fern.
“Not quite. Ralph’s auditioning for retirement. Next winter will be a dry run.”
“To see if he goes nuts from the isolation.”
“More likely from the cozy, communal drunkenness.”
“Not exactly a dry run then.”
Fenno’s laugh is polite but distracted. He points her toward wineglasses and candlesticks. They circle the table in tandem, taking turns at different places. Across the bowl that Tony filled with roses from the garden, Fern steals glances at Fenno. His face at rest has a mournful set, his nose long and narrow, mouth a downcast crescent. For a gay man on Long Island at the end of June, he is oddly, perhaps defiantly pale. She suspects, approvingly, that he is not part of this scene, of boy-watching with binoculars from Victorian porches, of bringing home charming strangers for candlelit dinners.
Tony leans into the room. “How are we doing, dears? The chicken’s all done and sucking up its juices. Water’s boiling and aching to get at that corn.”
Fenno looks at Tony with pointed indifference as he twists the last candle into its pedestal. “And plates are pining to be licked.”
They have been lovers, she’s certain now, and not in the transient, calculating way that Tony and Richard are lovers. When Tony retreats, she says, “How long have you been here—in the States?”
“Twenty years. More.”
“Here to stay.”
He smiles. “Sometimes I still pretend otherwise.”
The speakers on top of the sideboard emit a faint hum.
“The new Van Morrison, the one who’s seen the light of God,” says Fern after just a few notes. “Tony’s current favorite.”
Fenno raises his eyebrows. “Curious, some of his tastes.” In the look he gives Fern, she sees him guess her history, too. They are even.
Through the doorway dances Richard, holding aloft the platter of steaming corn. Dennis follows, carrying, with equal flamboyance, the chicken and grilled asparagus. They set the platters at opposite ends of the table. Tony comes in last, with two bottles of wine and a loaf of garlic bread swaddled in a linen towel. Fenno lights the candles. The five of them stand back, somewhat shyly, regarding the table like an altar. Tony says, “Little mother at the head.”
“All right, but I refuse to serve,” Fern says.
“Don’t worry, don’t worry. It’s every man for himself, in utero or out.”
To Fern’s left sit Dennis and Fenno, to her right Tony and Richard. The table curves out in such a grand way that it’s hard not to feel like a hostess, like someone in charge of the conversational tides. The men’s faces are orange, their eyes gleaming as they lean in, helping themselves and deferring politely all at once, filling their plates only after Fern’s been coaxed into taking far more than she should eat.
“A notre santé,”
says Dennis, lifting his glass.
“Chinny chin chin,” says Tony.
After a round of appreciative murmurs, Richard looks up from his food. “Is this summer or what?” he says, his lips glistening with butter. His plate is heaped with vegetables and bread, no chicken, and he’s drinking only water. Of course, thinks Fern as she bites directly into her meat, such obstreperous health does not come free.
“Well heaven bless the jet plane if this isn’t local fare. And your chicken marinade is
magnifique,
” Dennis says to Tony.
“So, Fenno’s brother with the fine French accent, where’ve
you
been hiding?” says Tony.