Before You Know Kindness

  "No, I--"

  "Yes, Spencer. That's all there is to it."

  Maybe if she'd said something less adamant he would have been less stubborn. Maybe if she hadn't interrupted him he would have said something else. Who knew? Certainly he didn't. "Well, I can't cancel it," he told her in response. "Not now. It's far too late for that."

  "You can cancel it. Absolutely you can. But you won't."

  "Catherine--"

  "No. I told you how I feel," she'd said, and she had actually climbed out of bed that moment, something she rarely did once she was settled under the sheets, and pulled out her suitcase from the back of the walk-in closet.

  "You're going to pack now?" he'd murmured.

  "I'm going to get a few things ready, yes. Enough to tide me over for a few days across town. Tomorrow I'll need to help Charlotte gather her things, and so I might not be able to focus on my needs."

  "Your needs," he had repeated, but that was as close as he'd come to saying something hostile.

  Now he watched his daughter hold Tanya back as they started east down Eighty-fifth Street, the road still in shadow and quiet since it wasn't quite 7 a.m. The air was chilly, and he was wearing his windbreaker in his usual fashion: His left arm was through the sleeve, but the right side of the jacket was clipped to his shirt as if it were an opera cape. He himself, of course, hadn't done the careful work with the safety pin: Charlotte had. He'd tried and failed.

  "Your mother and I made a decision about something last night," he said once they were well beyond their building's front awning. He noticed she no longer wore the scarves that had been a crucial part of her accessorization last year. Instead, this fall she seemed to be wearing the most simple and conservative headbands she owned. He guessed this was another element in her transformation into Mary Lennox. A part of him liked this new child a lot, but he also worried that she was taking it all a bit too seriously. Then, precisely because he himself was taking her accomplishment so seriously--and the opportunity it had presented him to be with her--he wondered how he would be able to run her lines with her daily. She was doing well, but the kid seemed to be on stage practically every minute of the musical: They still had a ways to go.

  "About what?"

  "Well, we disagree about the press conference this week, and she thinks it would be best if we spent a little time apart--"

  "You're separating?" She stopped so suddenly that the leash went tight as a clothesline and poor Tanya was yanked to a halt.

  "I don't know if I'd say that exactly. Your mother simply thinks it would be best while we iron things out if you two moved across town to your grandmother's. But I really don't know if I'd call it a separation, and there's no reason to think all this could ever end in divorce," he said, not happy with his obvious lies but convinced it was better to ease his daughter into this--break the bad news a little at a time over the course of weeks--than drop it all like a fireplace andiron on her foot.

  "You two . . ." she said, looking at him with eyes that had grown thin with rage. Tanya squatted and peed, half on and half off the sidewalk.

  "Us two . . ."

  "You two are so selfish! Do you ever think of anyone but yourselves?"

  He restrained his initial instinct to remind her that she couldn't speak to either of her parents that way and responded instead in his most measured tone, "Your mother has recommended we do this precisely because she is thinking of you. She's worried that I am going to lose control of this press conference tomorrow, and you'll be embarrassed."

  "So she thinks the solution is to move me to Grandmother's? Well, I'm not going."

  She turned and allowed the dog to pull her quickly down the street. He scampered to catch up, and once he was beside her tried to decide whether he should simply allow her to vent or tell her firmly why this was the best thing for her. The problem was that he himself didn't believe this was the best thing for her. And, speaking selfishly (Good Lord, is she right?), he did want her with him. They were having more fun together this month than they'd ever had when he was healthy.

  "It just doesn't make any sense," she continued. "First of all, you can't live in the apartment alone. Who would feed the cats? Who would feed you? You'd all starve to death. I mean, you can't even open a can of Pepsi on your own. You couldn't even put on your windbreaker without my help."

  "Oh, I'd get by," he said, though he honestly wasn't sure that he would.

  "No, you wouldn't. You still need people--a lot. And that's only one of the reasons why this idea is so dumb. We both know that bringing Tanya across town wouldn't be fair to Grandmother's dog. Not at his age. And it probably wouldn't be fair to Tanya, either. She's just starting to get used to our apartment."

  She was looking straight ahead, but he thought he detected a slight quiver in her voice.

  "And then there's me. I don't want to go there, period. It's not that I don't love Grandmother, because obviously I do. I mean, I stay with her part of every summer, don't I?"

  "Your mother and I thought you liked going to New Hampshire!"

  "I like it fine. But I don't want to live in her mausoleum of an apartment this fall. Especially not with the play coming up in November. Don't I have enough to deal with as it is?"

  He nodded, more to himself than to her because she was watching Tanya sniff at the side of a building as they walked. "So what would you propose?" he asked.

  "I'm not worried about this press conference. What are people going to find out? That I shot you by accident? Well, duh. Like every single person at Brearley and every single person in the apartment building already knows that. I screwed up," she said, and--there it was--he heard the tremor in her voice grow into a small sob and when he turned toward her he saw she was starting to cry. Instantly he knelt before her, a sudden ache coursing up and down his side because he had moved too quickly, and he used his one good hand like a football player to hold her. Grabbed her around her waist and brought her to him.

  "I screwed up and I shot you," she said again, crying fully now. "Fine. Well, now I'm not going to leave you alone. I don't care what Mom says, I'm not going. She can go if she wants, but I'm not leaving--and no one can make me."

  He held her as close as he could, even though the pressure against his sling-cradled arm was causing him literal spasms of pain, and the dog was resting her paws on his knees--he was poised like a baseball catcher, and the ledge of his legs was too tempting for Tanya to resist. The pain was considerable, but the real issues were that his daughter was crying, a response that he'd certainly thought possible, and that she was refusing to leave him, a notion he hadn't even considered.

  Suddenly, despite the fact they were on the corner of Columbus and Eighty-fifth, his eyes were tearing, too.

  NAN REMEMBERED a moment one morning in the vegetable garden in New Hampshire. It was either the day her children had arrived this past summer or the day before. She no longer knew which. She had been examining the damage caused by the deer and wondering how Spencer would react, and suddenly she had begun to worry about Catherine. She'd worried that Spencer was more interested in animals than in humans, and the thought had crossed her mind that someday her daughter would leave him and her marriage would end.

  Well, here it was. It was happening. It was playing itself out exactly as she had feared. Spencer was putting FERAL before his family, and Catherine was leaving him and--this part, she had to admit was an unforeseen twist--coming here. With Charlotte. And that new dog. Returning to the apartment in which she had spent a large portion of her childhood.

  "Why isn't Spencer the one who's leaving?" Nan had asked Catherine just now when her daughter had phoned with the news over breakfast. Apparently, Spencer was telling Charlotte what her parents were planning that very moment, while the two of them were taking the dog for a walk. "Normally, isn't it the husband who moves out?"

  "He's crippled."

  "Oh."

  Nan knew there was plenty of room for everyone--even Tanya, she guessed--but she was stil
l deeply troubled by the news that Catherine's marriage was hemorrhaging. She was also disconcerted by the unexpected reality that Catherine's arrival later today meant that she was going to have both of her children under her roof this evening.

  "That sounded like bad news," John said after she had hung up the phone. He had wandered into the kitchen in his pajamas, finishing a buttered English muffin as she had spoken with Catherine.

  "Yes," she said. "Very bad news indeed."

  Sara and Willow and Patrick had driven back to Vermont yesterday afternoon as planned, but John had decided to stay until tomorrow afternoon. Tuesday. He'd remained behind because he'd resolved at the very last moment that he would attend Spencer's press conference, after all. He'd concluded, for better or worse, that he couldn't stay away from it. He had no plans to be a bomb-throwing, deer-hunting anarchist. But if he had to be part of it, then he was going to witness the event up close and personal.

  When it was over, he would take a cab to LaGuardia and catch the 5:25 flight to Burlington.

  He hadn't yet told Spencer he was going to be present, and he hadn't decided whether he would call him at some point today or just show up tomorrow. Nan guessed that Catherine's presence here tonight might force him to call Spencer first. But you never knew. Catherine was so angry with her husband that she might be comfortable with the idea of her brother launching what Spencer might construe as a sneak attack.

  "It sounded like Sis is coming home to Mother. True?"

  "True," she murmured distractedly, her mind focused on the image that evening of John and Catherine and Charlotte and Tanya all here with her. And then she thought of Spencer alone on the West Side with his cats, and of Sara and Willow and Patrick in Vermont. How had it come to this? She'd thought when everyone had been together on Saturday that the cold war was thawing, but in reality all that had occurred was a shifting of alliances. She sat down heavily in one of the kitchen chairs, depression insinuating itself through the creases and trim of her nightgown--it was a dowdy piece of work, she decided--and coating her skin like a lotion. What would happen when she was gone? Really? Would anything like a family remain?

  "Can you give me the details?" her son was asking. She looked up at him. She didn't feel well at all, and she honestly wasn't sure she had the strength.

  CATHERINE WAS AWARE that the dog was sliding her water bowl along the trim that ran underneath the kitchen cabinets in the pantry, an idiosyncrasy that had struck everyone as cute on Friday and Saturday when the animal had initially shown the inclination but had begun to grow tiresome yesterday when first Spencer and then she had forgotten the bowl was there and accidentally stepped on the dish. Catherine didn't make an effort now to suggest to Tanya that she should give this practice a rest, however, because the minor inconvenience posed by a dog's overturned water bowl was absolutely inconsequential compared to the human meltdown she was trying (and failing) to halt. Charlotte was standing beside the refrigerator and screaming at her, yelling in a manner that Catherine hadn't witnessed in a good long time, the child's affected British refinement a mere memory, while Spencer was squatting beside their daughter, his forehead in his one functioning hand, looking as if he had given up completely any hope that he might be able to reason with her.

  "I am not leaving!" she was shrieking, her cheeks and her forehead so pink they looked sunburned, the tears descending down her face like twin waterfalls. "Tanya is not leaving! And you would be horrible if you left! Horrible! How could you even think--"

  "I will not be called horrible!" she snapped back. "You will not talk to me that way!" The words were out before she could stop them. She hated herself for sounding precisely like the angry mothers she saw snapping at their children in grocery stores, but she couldn't help it. She couldn't help herself.

  "You are! You don't care about Dad, you don't care about me! All you care about are your precious students and precious Eric--"

  "That is enough!"

  "Precious Eric, precious Gary, precious Hank--"

  She grabbed Charlotte by her upper arms and squeezed, trying physically to rein her in. She had a vague sense that if she didn't have something in her hands--even her daughter's shoulders, so small and frail underneath a thin cotton sweater and the blue blouse that she wore often with her Brearley skirt--she would slap the girl. Strike the child (strike anyone) for the first time in her life.

  "You're hurting me!"

  "Charlotte, you must settle down!"

  "Just go, then! You--just go! Get out!"

  She felt the girl struggling, but she wouldn't release her. It was, she realized, a test of wills, and her ability to reason was slipping away. She tried to think of what she wanted to say, but she couldn't. She understood on some level that when Spencer and Charlotte had returned from walking Tanya, they both had been crying. But then they were quiet, very quiet, the two of them. And somehow--in the space of, what, sixty seconds?--a little moment of domestic sadness had been transmogrified into this cataclysm of accusations and rage, and the bubbling up from deep inside their daughter's mind of all these . . . issues . . . that had nothing to do with her parents' problems. At least in Catherine's opinion, they didn't. Dr. Warwick might view it all somewhat differently.

  "Get out! You want to leave, well, leave!"

  "Charlotte," Spencer began, his voice muffled slightly because his fingers were still on his forehead and so he was speaking down into the tile floor. "Charlotte . . ."

  It was apparent he, too, wasn't sure what to say, but still Catherine was grateful that at least now she had an ally.

  "Charlotte . . ." he murmured once more.

  "What!" It was a screech, not a question.

  "You need to calm down. To stop yelling. Your mother and I--"

  "Don't you dare!" she said, and abruptly she wrestled free of Catherine's grasp and whirled across the kitchen, one foot flipping the water dish--which, inevitably, had wound up precisely in the girl's path--into the air like a giant tiddly-wink, sending the water into a spray that coated them all. "Don't change your mind! You said outside I didn't have to go. You said I could stay right here!"

  "Yes, Charlotte, you're not going anywhere," he said, and Catherine couldn't believe what she was hearing. The notion of Charlotte staying here was inconceivable. Unthinkable. Spencer could barely care for himself. How in the name of God could he care for their thirteen-year-old daughter, too? What was he thinking telling the girl she could remain with him at this apartment? More important, how could she--the child's mother--allow Charlotte to stay ensconced in the home of the man who was going to use her so shamelessly in a press conference tomorrow?

  "Spencer, did you just tell Charlotte she didn't have to come with me across town?" The horrible shrillness in her voice disgusted her.

  "Yes, I did."

  "Spencer--"

  "Mom, I'm staying! You can leave, if you want to--"

  "I don't want to! I'm not leaving--we're not leaving--because I want to!" she said, and some small part of her actually began to focus on how wet her stockings were. Thank God it was only water, because she'd never have time to change before school. "We're leaving because your father and I have agreed that it's best--"

  "Catherine, no: I don't want you to go, either."

  She turned from her daughter to her husband and saw there on his face an almost unrecognizable hangdog look of despair.

  "This isn't something we agreed on," he was saying. "It's something I am enduring because I don't know what else to do. But I don't want you to leave. You don't know . . ."

  She wondered what she didn't know, and she was about to ask him if only to give herself time to think. To refocus on this--and as the words formed in her head and she felt the chilly dog water on her legs she almost nodded at their rightness--sloppy mess.

  "What don't I know?" she murmured. "Tell me."

  "Neither of you knows anything!" It was Charlotte this time, still crying, still angry, her face still that ugly pink mask of despair, but at least she
hadn't shrieked this accusation. She'd actually spoken with sufficient quiet that Tanya nosed her way closer: The dog was seeming to decide whether it was worth the possible noise-induced hearing loss to venture any nearer this odd little group that constituted her new pack. "Neither of you knows anything," she said again, sniffing in a manner that was at once dramatic and necessary: All that crying had made her nose run like a softening glacier.

  "Charlotte," Spencer said. "What don't we know? Tell us."

  "You don't know," she said, shaking her head. "You two--and Uncle John and Aunt Sara--you don't know what I did. No one but Willow does. This is all my fault, and you two can't get a divorce because of me. You just can't"--her voice a plea now--"because I couldn't stand it if I caused that, too!"

  The girl's small sobs and sniffles made it difficult for Catherine to understand every single word, but she was getting the point. She crabbed over to her daughter and held her again, this time not grasping her shoulders as if she were about to shake some sense into her but instead enfolding her in her arms and pulling her head to her chest. The dog came over to the two of them and started trying to wedge her snout in between them, and Catherine didn't stop her. Any moisture left on her skirt or her blouse by a wet dog nose was nothing compared to the impressive stream of tears flooding against her chest.