Fern wants to ask what makes his cruelties so much crueller, but she says simply, “Well, you’ve been through a lot more than I have.”
“Oh?” he says lightly. “According to whom?”
She hesitates, but then she thinks, How could it be a secret? “Dennis told me about your lover . . . who died. It wasn’t like he was gossiping, he just—”
Fenno leans toward her, and the hammock quakes again. “He wasn’t my lover . . . though he ought to have been.” He laughs at the morbid absurdity in his statement. “My dear, dense brother, so exuberantly ignorant of so much . . . I used to think of him as lighthearted—and he is that; in fact, I think he’s the rare creature who has no secrets, nothing to weigh him down that way—but now I’ve begun to think of him as a touch light in the brain. Yet look at how much he’s got right in his life. And love—though once I didn’t think so, he seems to have got that right above all.”
He shifts again, grimacing, and stretches his legs out straight, along one edge of the hammock. One of his feet settles lightly, unavoidably, against Fern’s hip. “Before you came out, I was finishing off the wine and looking at this view. I know this view well, yet I’ve never seen it quite like this. I was thinking how some of us live up here and some of us live down there”—he gestures grandly toward the house on the beach—“some of us have the infinity of the ocean at our doorstep, others the platitude of a nicely groomed hedgerow. Ah yes and some of us, lucky dogs, see cascading stars while the rest of us see none and think, disdainfully, that they must be an hallucination.
“Some of us get love just . . . exactly . . . right—as right as it can be—and others get everything else right
but
.” He smiles flatly. “Not a bad view from here, is it? But we’re always looking over somebody’s shoulder.”
“Well, but they’ll be the first ones flooded in a hurricane,” she says, realizing immediately that the joke is all wrong.
“And so bloody
what
.” Having spoken so harshly, Fenno nudges her hip with his foot. The gesture feels affectionate, and she is reminded of sitting on her red velvet couch across from Stavros. “Listen, I am hardly bemoaning my existence. Oh no. I’ve come to see just how rich it is. Prudent or no”—he reaches down with one arm and holds aloft an empty wine bottle—“let me barter a secret of mine.”
Fern braces herself; now he will talk about the lover’s—the not-lover’s—death.
He says, “You asked me if I liked children and I told you that I do. In fact I have children of my own—two. Though they aren’t
my
children. Do you remember how Dennis mentioned our brother David, how he nattered on about David’s not being able to have children? Actually, I’d never known why . . . but there’s a tangent I won’t follow.” He sighs.
He tells her a remarkable story about giving sperm to his sister-in-law because her husband couldn’t conceive. He tells her plainly, in just those words. He tells her he knows he was second choice (who wouldn’t prefer the straight brother, the twin you loved before you even learned what love might be?). He tells her about going to a clinic stocked with blue-ribbon porn—straight porn—and then, on his way out, passing a wall papered solid with snapshots of tiny babies, all fragile, ugly, bewildered by new life and flashbulbs—but priceless beyond words to people he would never meet.
“Months later, I get a call that here they are, these messianic twins, and I’m happy for the parents, pleased with my good deed, but not until I get the birth announcement in the post—the photograph, a boy and a girl, both just as splotchy-faced and dumbfounded-looking as the babies on that clinic wall—do I realize how instantly priceless they are to
me
. On the back of the snapshot, their mum wrote, ‘Oh Fenno, you will never know!’ Just that.
“I knew,” he says, looking out at the ocean, “that she was too exhausted and overwhelmed to write me the letter of momentous gratitude I expected as my due, and I knew that what she meant to convey was that I would never know how deep her gratitude was, how much she will always love me for what I gave her . . . but when I read it again, running my fingers over those little faces too many times, like one of Tony’s students learning how to read, when I read it again I thought, Or does she mean that I will never know this particular joy, the joy of those little lives entwined in mine? Though of course she didn’t mean that. Of course not.”
He pulls his legs back into his chest, tightens the blanket around his shoulders. “You know, I am precisely that fabulous godfaggot you described. I take them those imaginative presents, add faithfully to a fund for their future, but there is no way I can be in their lives as I sometimes dream. When I first lay eyes on them every time, put my arms about them if they’re not too shy, I think, This is
my
daughter, this is
my
son, and I have this addled fantasy of whisking them off like that evil dwarf in the fairy tale. . . .”
“Rumpelstiltskin,” murmurs Fern.
“Yes. That’s the sort of character I’m always in danger of becoming.” He looks back at her. “I see my secret babies only once or twice a year, but I’ve got this fantasy that one day, like every child, they’ll need to run away from home, and here I’ll be, the reputedly—and only reputedly—wild uncle across the ocean. . . . And whether or not they ever seek refuge that way, I have plans to take each of them on an eccentric holiday—to the jungle, the North Pole, the Indian ruins out west . . . whatever strikes their fancies when they’re old enough to fancy such things.” Whether they would ever know that he was their biological father—that was something about which his brother and sister-in-law could not yet agree. “I understand my brother’s insecurity, even perhaps his prudishness. That’s just who he is,” says Fenno. “And maybe it’s for the best, keeping matters simple.”
He tells her that for a while he was sorry he hadn’t insisted on being at the birth; he’d like to have held his babies then. But there are certain intrusions to which he isn’t entitled. And this, he confesses, is part of what he looks forward to in helping Oneeka, learning what it might have been like. “You’re right about that,” he says to Fern. “Of course I expect to be given some sliver of responsibility, if just for a day or two. I crave it.” He pats his shirt pocket, as if it contains an engagement ring.
Fern looks at the sky, trying to determine the hour. It is not yet brightening, but the clouds, just a few, look a bit more vivid. This is the time of night when, absent a storm, the wind seems to rest and the clouds stand so still that they look as if they are painted on a ceiling, like the sharp dwarfish clouds in pictures by Henri Rousseau. Fern thinks of her favorite:
Carnival Evening,
in which two costumed lovers—small, ethereal dark-faced figures—stand in a wood of leafless trees. How she misses painting.
Fenno follows her gaze and murmurs something that sounds like “Hour of the quilt.”
“What?” Fern says gently.
“Private nonsense,” Fenno says. “You should be in bed, both of you.”
He stands and helps her to her feet. Her legs are stiff and numb, so she leans against him for a moment, and perhaps he interprets her physical dependence as a plea of some kind. “Never talk yourself out of knowing you’re in love,” he says, “or into thinking that you are.”
“Mind what you love,” says Fern. “That’s what my mother preaches.”
From the living room, after saying good night, she spies on him through the window as he resettles himself in the hammock, wraps himself close in both blankets and closes his eyes. He’s smiling.
“WHIPPED CREAM.
What we need here is that whipped cream from last night.” Tony is leaning into the refrigerator, clanking jars from side to side, searching.
“Gone. Used up,” says Fern as she enters the kitchen, still in her nightgown.
Fenno looks up from the table. Tony closes the refrigerator door. Both men look thrilled to see her, and she wonders if they have a hard time being alone with each other. Tony says, “How did we dream?”
“We didn’t. And we are praying there’s still coffee.” She looks out the front window: Richard’s car is gone. Dennis is still audibly asleep upstairs.
“Abso-loo-maw, petite mare.” He pours her a cup and pulls out a chair. It’s ten-thirty. On the table is a plate of muffins and a Sunday paper; hours ago, Tony will have been into the village and back. Fenno’s hair is wet. The
Book Review
sits by his plate. In a wall socket beside the toaster, his phone (his reliability, she thinks) is busy recharging itself.
“Now don’t stuff your faces, because milady has invited us down to the manor for brunch.” Tony looks at the clock and then at Fern. “Right this minute, as a matter of fact. So time to gussy up.”
Fern shakes her head. “Believe me, she wants you all to herself. But I’ll be expecting an invitation when you house-sit next summer while they’re off to the Serengeti. Or isn’t that the proper safari season?”
“Hard for you to believe that I merely like the woman.”
“In fact, though she seems perfectly likable, you’re right.”
Tony just smiles; he radiates the afterglow of good adventurous sex. Fern looks at his captivating face and remembers the agony of loving him. But she remembers as well the last thing he said to her that night, almost exactly ten years ago now, as she held open the door to her room in Paris. She had just told him to get out of her life, and he said, sounding almost casual, “You think everybody wants some one person, everybody’s looking for that singular, whatever-you-do-don’t-die-before-me soul mate. Well, everybody isn’t. I’m not. You just won’t pay attention to that.”
“Well maybe I am looking for that. And maybe you were never in the running,” she said, the sharpest insult she could grope for in an instant.
He had shrugged, unscathed. “To each his own,” he’d said.
Fenno is telling Tony that he has to get back to the city, that someone named Felicity will bite off his head if he doesn’t get back soon.
“Would you mind taking me? I should get back, too,” says Fern.
Tony pretends shock. “You are both abandoning me? And that cute wastrel brother of yours?”
“You have Druid,” says Fenno, “and that’s what a sadist like you deserves. The company of a loyal, aging mute.”
“Me, a sadist?”
Fern folds her arms. “The way you treated that poor guy Richard?”
“Oh please. ‘Poor guy’? He’s one of the charmed.”
“And you—you’re one of the damned?”
Fenno opens the
Book Review
. He smirks, as if this dialogue is all too familiar.
Fern stands and touches Tony’s shoulder. “Mustn’t be late for your first date.” She walks with him out the back door.
On the porch, Tony kisses her cheek. “When you get back, tell that nice boy he’s going to be a father, will you?”
“I will, but how do you know he’s nice? You haven’t met him.”
“Hey, sometimes you know these things.” He pauses, then looks her in the eye. “I predict you’re engaged by next week. He’s no fool—you’ve never loved a fool, have you?—and you, Miss Veritas, you are a catch. You are sublime.” He kisses her again, this time at the edge of her mouth, and she says nothing, letting his rare but honest affection sink in.
She watches him sidle through a flowerbed, pulling up the tiny weeds that sprouted overnight. Three gladiolas have opened: two red, one white. With a pocket knife, he severs them carefully near the base of their stalks. As he walks down the lawn, the flowers mimic perfectly his slim, alert posture and shameless, colorful outlook on life. Fern feels a deep pull of tenderness and forgiveness. Just your motherly hormones, Tony would say.
IN THE POLITICALLY FESTOONED BUS,
they start for the city with the windows wide open; the car is much too old for conditioned air. Dennis groans as he climbs in back. Yet he sounds indomitably cheerful as he exclaims, “Wearing my favorite hairshirt!” Having been coaxed out of bed to leave, he falls asleep again almost at once.
Fern loves how high up they are, seated on the puffy old seats with their blue and silver upholstery (a plaid you’d expect on Bermuda shorts). A rosary swings from the rearview mirror, and Fern’s sun visor bears yet another slogan:
HAPPY IN HIS HANDS.
“Someone is definitely Catholic,” she says as they leave the shelter of Ralph’s mapled lane. She clicks tight the old-fashioned lap belt.
“She founded the center where I volunteer. It’s called Aunt Lucie’s Place. She’s the Aunt Lucie—though she doesn’t live there. She orders us around from Vermont and Washington, if you can believe it.”
“Could I visit sometime? Are visitors allowed?”
“On one condition. They have to be Aunt Lucie’s guests. And let me warn you: If she meets you and likes you—and in your case she will—she will own a piece of your soul.”
“Well, good luck to her if she can find it.”
“We could use help on the paper’s design . . .”
Fern laughs. “Yes, and I’ve still got four months just yawning with free time.” She wonders what he remembers of their confessional hours on the hammock. She’d like to think she will see him again, yet even the talk of her visiting this Aunt Lucie’s Place does not convince her; it may be nothing more than idle chat to tide them over until they part for good.
Ten years ago, she’d have been falling in love with this man by now, and while it would have been an obvious mistake, and while her heart might have been bruised if not broken, her reasons for loving him would not have been wrongheaded. Like her, he is an agonizer. Like her, he feels the atmosphere about him too acutely: the stealthiest shifts in wind direction, ozone level, barometric pressure. Sometimes it’s almost too much to bear.
Only when it was too late had she examined the similarities she was drawn to in the men she loved: in Tony, her passion for looking at things, turning them round in the eye and trying to give them meaning; in Jonah, her shameless love of old-fashioned pastimes and objects. (The moment she’d fallen for Jonah she remembers all too well: under a pink tent at someone else’s wedding, a turn in a dance when he smiled and pulled her assuredly, graciously toward him.) She believed that what Tony offered her was a life of constant surprise, quite unlike her parents’ life; Jonah, in the ruins of those hopes, offered a life of constant safety, quite like her parents’ life. And Stavros?