And the Dark Sacred Night Page 4
His mother had laughed. “Oh no, sweetie. Jasper’s what you call prematurely gray. It makes him look distinguished. Jasper’s just the right age, young enough to be youthful, old enough to be wise. He’s the right everything. Definitely the right guy for us.”
Jasper owned a “mountain sports” shop. The goods he stocked would alternate, seasonally, between ski equipment and gear for camping and biking. All winter long he gave skiing lessons at the local mountain and then, whenever the snow finally melted for good, led day treks for hikers and cyclists. He lived off a dirt road at the foot of a nameless hill not quite large enough to rate as a mountain; locals simply knew it as the hogback. Jasper’s house was a jumbled mosaic of windows, panes of different sizes and shapes framed by planks of wood so dark that the house looked as if it had survived a fire. By day, the windows mirrored the bluish pines that flanked three sides of the house and defied the wind that hurtled through the valley. At night, the house became a cubist shadow box, tossing triangles, squares, and trapezoids of gold across the meadow it faced. In winter, the longest season by far, fresh snow transformed the meadow into a vast tablet of paper, the lamps from the house casting on its surface a giant’s geometry proof. There were no curtains because, said Jasper, there were no neighbors. “A house without shame,” he’d say.
“A house he made all by himself,” Kit’s mother bragged.
At first, for Kit, it was a startling, unnerving place to live. It contained but a few interior walls, which leaked light through the seams between their knotty boards. They gave just enough privacy to define three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a mudroom, and a few closets. Most of the ground floor was open. The entire structure appeared to be held up by several rustic flights of stairs, without banisters or risers, that shuttled to and from these various rooms, each on its own discrete level. From the doorway to Kit’s room, the highest of all—the crow’s nest, Jasper called it—he could look down and see, through the cat’s cradle of stairways, clear to the bottom, where a stone chimney rose from a redbrick floor. At night, if he opened his door just a crack, he could peer down at his mother and Jasper as they sat together on the couch across from the fire: her head a smooth yellow orb, his a scribble of silver. Rarely did Kit hear their actual words, but he heard their laughter. How easily and often, for the first few years, Jasper made Kit’s mother laugh.
Jasper had no living parents, no siblings. “I fly out front, point man, clear sky all around me,” he’d say, spreading his long arms backward like the wings of a jet. When people who had never met him before asked what he did for a living, he described himself as a disciple of the elements, a scholar of snow. “Work that depends on outguessing the weather: never a dull moment there.”
That first winter, Kit learned to ski. Jasper honored his anxiety, along with his self-consciousness at finding himself on the Junior Hill with children half his age: five-year-olds who rocketed past them again and again, greedy for speed. “They are fearless, and I mean that literally,” said Jasper. “Okay for now, but Lord help those who still have no fear when they’re old enough to drive a motor vehicle, move to the city—hell, to kiss a girl.” He grinned at Kit. “That’s right, boy; you had better blush.”
Kit grew into skiing without ever welcoming that sense of risk. He would clutch his poles a little too tightly, squint so hard against the glare that later his eyes would ache and twitch. Each time he reached the bottom of a slope, he would expel all the breath he’d held in his lungs for the entire descent, one enormous visible cloud of relief. (In his twenties, having weathered a couple of implosive romantic entanglements, he realized that he enjoyed skiing the way you might enjoy the company of a charming but temperamental woman: careful never to let down your guard, to fall in love, because of what you stood to lose. You felt the true exhilaration of her company only after you said good night.)
But Kit understood that skiing was the best way to grow closer to Jasper, and it was also the best way simply to be with Rory and Kyle, whose lives beyond school were so crowded with friends, hockey, and homework that two or three days might pass in which Kit saw them only when he waited his turn for the bathroom before school. On winter weekends, the older boys taught skiing alongside their dad (their pupils the five-year-old rocketeers), but every so often Jasper would ask one or the other to “peel off” and take a few runs with Kit. Rory or Kyle would share the chair to the peak with Kit, then escort him down the cat track, the slow circuitous route around the backside of the mountain, with the best views and the least experienced skiers. Kindly if condescendingly, they tutored Kit, improving his turns, encouraging him to compress his posture, to build up speed for longer stretches. Of his two stepbrothers, Kit preferred the elder: the greater difference in age made his patronage less awkward. Rory treated him like a protégé, not a younger sibling. “Let go a little,” he urged Kit repeatedly, never losing his patience. As Jasper would say in his pep talk to adults, “There comes a moment when you just let good old gravity have its way. And eureka. Know what, folks? That’s the moment you become a skier.”
Well, good old gravity had its way with Kit when the academic dean and his department head, Clifford, decided to turn him out with the wolves. Sometimes he wonders if finishing his book on schedule would really have made a difference. Kit wasn’t good at committee work or forging ties with other institutions. (Cliff’s personal coup had been a student internship program at the Whitney Museum.) The part of his job that Kit liked was the teaching. Would most of his students go on to be curators, art critics, arbiters of taste in the self-important cultural circles of New York, Los Angeles, or even Houston? Maybe one or two or three would live out such dreams.
But that wasn’t the point of teaching what Kit taught, not as he saw it. The point was to give his students hours of indulgent yet rigorous thought about things made by people relentlessly withstanding the riptidal pull of moneygrubbing, disciplining children, growing old, worrying oneself sick about everything from traffic jams to terrorist attacks. Kit’s closetlike office at the university had only one window: a narrow rectangle no bigger than a gunport, high in a corner, impossible to open without the aid of a step stool. So over his desk, centered above his computer screen, he’d tacked a large glossy photo of his favorite piece, the picture he imagined as the cover of his book: a Nunavik sculpture formed from a magnificent caribou antler. All along its sinuous, wavelike surface, the artist had coaxed from the bone a hunting expedition: five bundled men pushing forward through deep snow. How astutely the sculptor’s tools had rendered not just their harpoons, tiny as toothpicks, but the bristled fur on their miniature hoods and even the gently collapsing boot prints defining their wake. Ahead of the men, out of sight around a turn in the antler itself, a family of seals crowded around a break in the ice, engaged in their own hunting expedition, oblivious to their imminent end.
A casual observer passing this piece in a museum might make the mistake of assuming that it was an artifact of “another time,” some imaginary capsule of virginal disconnectedness from so-called civilization. Leave aside that such disengagement from time and workaday pressures had never existed; this object had been made fewer than twenty years ago, its maker someone who might well have hunted seals but who might also have car payments, a mortgage, concerns about his cholesterol level or a child’s dismal grades in school or a wife’s addiction to mail-order shopping. The deepest source of marvel, to Kit, was how the artist, in spending hour after hour after hour in the making of this object, was in fact defying gravity—a gravity far more cunning than the elemental force that pulls you swiftly down a mountain.
Except that this romantic vision of his—the artist at work despite the pressure of material demands, of ordinary economics—wasn’t entirely accurate, either. Two decades ago, after falling for the austere quirkiness of the newest work he saw, Kit attended a lecture by an anthropologist who described how, in the 1940s, the Canadian government began relocating Inuit tribes to fabricated villages, forcing them to l
ead “modern lives”: lives dependent on money, packaged foods, and compulsory education insidious to the knowledge that had always connected them to hunting, fishing, and the other ways they’d made a collective living. They found themselves disoriented, rootless, and poor.
They began to make and sell art as a new way of feeding their families. If tourists (or opportunistic curators) wanted to poke around their streets and towns as if perusing dioramas at the natural history museum, they would want to take home souvenirs. In this case, art answered the call of materialism rather than defying it. The sculptures of seal hunting took the place of seal hunting itself. Whales were rendered in polished soapstone rather than butchered on a vast sheet of ice. Not that these fabrications were any less worthy of the label “art” than altarpieces commissioned by fourteenth-century burghers in Antwerp.
So when, alone in his office, Kit opened the e-mail informing him he was to be cast out alone on the professional tundra (Ian, his one real friend in the department, had done him the brave courtesy of warning him), he had no window out of which to gaze in despair and dread. He had only this picture to stare at, this painfully apt story about the plans we make for the future and the sudden surprises sprung by fate.
Briefly, he had envied those tiny hunters their simple, attainable goal: find and kill those seals, get them home to be skinned and cooked. Feed your family, sell the pelts. Sharpen that spear and start all over again.
He remembered the title the artist had given this work: On the Way Out.
He stood up from his desk and circled the small room. If he were brave, he would leave right then, for good. But instead he sat down again to finish grading papers on contemporary American sculpture. At the top of the stack before him lay an essay titled “Richard Serra, Man of Steel.” Oh to be a man of steel.
After Sandra goes upstairs, Kit sits at the kitchen table for another half hour. It’s as if she is literally correct and he is indeed paralyzed. He does not read or straighten up the clutter. He does not drink, if only because Sandra will know that he did—she knows these things, instinctively—and will see it as further evidence of his withdrawal. (And she would be right.) He tries not to think about his options as narrowed by his wife. So he thinks about his children. Is it true that something as murky as his refusal to confront his mother about his father’s identity could affect the lives of nine-year-olds who care more ardently about football and ballet, about fourth-grade fashion dictates, about Halloween costumes, than they care about the grandparents they do know? Forget about phantom relatives they never will know.
That’s hardly the point, Sandra would say. The point is that Kit is missing something crucial, like a limb or one of his senses. “It’s as if you don’t know that you should be in mourning, because you don’t know who’s died,” she said to him in the couples counselor’s office. (They saw the woman for three sessions: all they could afford.) The counselor suggested that Kit find a support group for adult adoptees working through the difficult emotions of finding their biological parents; she promised to e-mail him a list of websites. Kit did not bother to remind her that this wasn’t his situation. He has a “real” biological mother, and isn’t she enough? Have people forgotten, in this needy, narcissistic world—to quote a song his mother used more than once in her favorite class—that you can’t always get what you want? Maybe Fanny and Will should grow up understanding that less than everything is often enough, even plenty; that you can be a fully dimensional, well-grounded, largely content adult being without knowing everything you can possibly know about your “roots” (your pedigree back to the ark; your connection to early American history or British monarchs; your past lives, if past lives there are, and who’s to say otherwise?).
Yet now this is also true: after so much endless talk about this mystery father, the shadow he casts across Kit’s life has grown to the size of a monster storm cloud, a cumulonimbus. (Nor does it help that meanwhile the life over which that shadow looms appears to be shrinking.) At his angriest moments, Kit feels as if Sandra has willed into existence his own desire to find out.
Like any prudent and inadequately published academic, Kit applied for other jobs while going up for tenure. He was short-listed for a job in Tallahassee, and he had an offer in Las Vegas. He and Sandra tried to talk themselves into accepting such a move, though they knew they would pine for their respective coasts. While in Vegas for the interview, he was shocked by the alien quality of the air; was the imprecise yet omnipresent odor of photosynthesizing trees more essential to his well-being than he had ever known? (So much for falling in love with “differentness.”) Back then, Sandra felt it was better to gamble that he would land something just as good in the education-besotted cosmos of New England and New York. If she wishes now that they had made a go of the desert, she would never say so.
——
It wasn’t as if Kit grew up unaware that when you choose to teach, one way or another you are choosing a life of compromises. Once Kit and his mother moved in with Jasper, he saw a lot less of her during the school year—because when she had accepted Jasper’s proposal, she had also accepted moving an hour away from the high school where she taught—and where, two evenings a week, she stayed late to direct the band and the chorus. Her new life was based in Vermont, but she commuted back to New Hampshire five days a week, as if constantly revisiting the past.
Jasper was the one to help Kit with his homework, to make sure he did his chores: setting the table; feeding Jasper’s large, bearlike dogs (two huskies and a malamute); filling the bird feeders surrounding the house. Jasper was also the one to drive the three boys into the village, where Kit and Kyle attended the elementary school and Rory caught a bus to the regional high school. For the entire summer after the wedding, Kit had feared the change of schools—but Jasper’s small-town fame bestowed a certain stature on Kit as well. After taking attendance for the first time, his fourth-grade teacher announced that the new pupil among them had the grand privilege of living with Ski Bum Number One. For an instant, the laughter was terrifying—until Kit saw the looks they’d turned in his direction. Nearly all his classmates skied; nearly all had been taught by Jasper, who, in the eyes of the town’s youth, was kin to Daniel Boone.
On the three weeknights when Kit’s mother made it back in time for dinner, she was worn out. The return route took her nearly due west the whole way, so in the warm months she had to drive straight toward the sinking sun. In the cold months, when it was dark by four-thirty, the final stretch of road, winding into the mountains, was often slick with ice. She was elated to reach home. She would hug Jasper and Kit before so much as setting down her satchel with its freight of rosters, songbooks, and stray recorders. Monday through Friday, Jasper made dinner. His meals were plainer than the ones Kit’s mother made, and vegetables were scarce. “A man cooks as a man likes to eat,” he declared when she wondered aloud whether all the broccoli, peas, and beans in the world had withered away. The next night, he served beans from a can.
It took Kit a few months to notice how much less frequently his mother played her cello, the instrument he thought of as her other child: mute, undemanding, assured of her devotion. The way she leaned in so attentively as she played, the way she nearly cradled its robust yet fragile body, looked so much like the physical affection she gave to Kit as well. He saw this, from an early age, as a source of comfort, not envy, a broader canvas for his mother’s intent, expressive love.
When she and Kit had lived together, just the two of them, she often played after putting him to bed; three or four afternoons a week, she also gave lessons. Once, after he watched her play, alone, for some time, she told him that the cello was a way of bringing happiness into her life every single day. “Happiness doesn’t come easily, just because you want or even deserve it,” she said. “I don’t think you’re too young to know that. So you’ve got to find your own way to let that happiness in. Sometimes, when it threatens to get away from you, you have to reach out the window and pull it in
, like capturing a bird.”
On the occasions she did take out her cello, its solemn voice filled the lofty reaches of Jasper’s house much the way it had filled Nana’s church when she played for Uncle Andrew’s wedding. He wondered what it meant that his mother did not play as much as she used to, but maybe this wasn’t cause for worry. Maybe what it meant was that now happiness did come easily to her. Now she had Jasper to love, as well as Kit. She was busier; she was less lonely.
But by the time Kit entered high school—Rory gone off to college, Kyle soon to follow—he began to perceive his mother’s life, nine months of the year, as an emotional balancing act between gratitude and fatigue. Her laughter seemed less spontaneous, more like a performance. Summer was her season of renewal, a season of long mornings savored in bed, meals and baths taken slowly, afternoons spent gardening and cooking. She baked elaborate pies and cakes until the heat of July suffused even the cellarlike shade at the base of the house, forcing her to abandon the oven.
Yet even then, on the long days she could fill as she wished, she rarely played her cello. And after the first two or three summers, when she had gladly followed Jasper on the group hikes he led through the mountains, she stayed home, reading in the hammock on the deck or playing cards with Kit when he returned from day camp.
She did play music on the stereo—not just the classical pieces she knew so well as a musician but jazz and rock and newer, stranger kinds of music: Kit would always remember the first time he heard reggae, when his mother brought home The Harder They Come, and the day she put on Talking Heads, an album one of her students let her borrow. Though she could listen to Bach or Debussy for hours on end, still as a stone, face peaceful, eyes closed, fingers flickering on her lap, the class she loved teaching best was The Modern Song, one of those electives so popular at her school that only the oldest, smartest students made the cut. Each year, for the fall semester, she chose ten songs for these students to interpret and compare; each year, the selection changed. In the months leading up to the school year, she would listen closely to a few dozen songs, over and over, to decide which ones were worthy. She chose classics, like Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” Joni Mitchell’s “All I Want,” Hendrix singing “All Along the Watchtower,” Dylan singing “Tangled Up in Blue.” Most of the time, she included something by the Beatles or the Stones, by the Dead or Pink Floyd, by Patsy Cline or Elvis; but she’d be sure to throw in songs or performers that no teenager in rural New England in the 1970s or ’80s would know: Jack Teagarden, Johnny Hartman, Bob Wills, Tom Waits, Cole Porter singing obscure Cole Porter, Björk before she’d worn a stuffed swan to the Oscars.