“There's one,” said Katharine. “Don't I see one? Over there.”
“You've always had sharp eyes,” Edward said proudly. “She finds four-leaf clovers, too.”
Katharine was famous for this. She could sit down on any lawn, at any picnic, and casually pluck up the magic things. “Here's another,” she'd say brightly, while her children, on their hands and knees, scrambled fruitlessly through the grass.
“‘Thank you, she said modestly,’” said Katharine.
Actually, Julia thought, they're charming.
Affection flooded through her for her elderly, struggling parents, who were trying to make their way through each difficult day, who were beset and confused by the changing world, handicapped by their failing bodies, finding solace in humor and each other.
Julia, cocooned in the Hudson's Bay, felt the anxieties and irritations of the day falling away. The dinner and the argument were over, the kitchen was clean, the dishwasher rumbling and steaming. Above them rose the dark limitless sky, before them lay the deep benevolent mystery of sleep. The world seemed calm.
She couldn't protect Steven from his grandfather, who was complicated and demanding—as was she, as was everyone—and who loved him. In fact, Julia was suddenly proud of Edward and his absurd, infuriating antagonism. It was some essential thing. It was part of what he was, what charged and animated him.
The black sky stretched up into deep space. Julia wondered again how to paint it, how to capture its warm blue-blackness—not true black, but a velvety purply black. Maybe layers of transparent glazes, built up slowly like Jan van Eyck's soft, gauzy skies—though his were daytime ones. Few artists did the night sky: Whistler. Douanier Rousseau, The Sleeping Gypsy. O'Keeffe, the one of the sky and stars from underneath the tree. How to manage that soft breathing mysterious quality of the nighttime air, the sense of expanding space?
Julia thought of her handsome Jack, and felt the familiar flick of anxiety. She wondered where he was right now: not, presumably, sitting on a quiet porch overlooking the sea, waiting for the heavens to reveal themselves. Or maybe he was doing just that. Waiting for chemical stars to burst inside his brain. Handsome, bad-boy Jack, with his glinting, merry, sidelong glance. Jack, leaning back in his chair, throwing his head back to laugh. Jack's laugh.
She wanted to hear Steven's news of him; she was sure they'd seen each other in New York. She trusted Steven. He looked after his brother, and he knew Jack in ways she never would. Kids nowadays lived in another world, you'd never know what it was like. (What was it like?) They would never let you in. But Steven was reassuring about Jack. He's still a kid, Steven always said.
Jack played in a rock band; she'd watched him perform. Onstage, bathed in the exotic glow of the overhead lights, he was a star. She'd seen him up there, shifting his hips, giving that slow, knowing smile. Tossing his hair back from his eyes. He was so thin, that sexy, narrow torso, the flat stomach, the long elegant limbs. He was a hunk! It made her laugh. How did your own child become a hunk? It made her proud. What were you to think, his mother?
Whatever Steven had to say about Jack, she didn't want it said in front of her parents. She didn't want them to discuss Jack. Edward would turn authoritative and judgmental. It would be like her lack of money; he'd act as though Julia had deliberately chosen to have a son like Jack. Her father would have a list of reasons for Jack's situation: too much television, not enough discipline, the divorce. As though she'd had a choice about divorce, or as though she could go back now and do things differently.
Maybe they had been easier on Jack than on Steven, somehow things seemed to slacken with the second child. They'd done everything properly with Steven, the first time, but it seemed as though once they'd done it, it was done. It had seemed unnecessary to do it all again, and they were too tired. Had that been it? What were they thinking of? Now it made no sense. It was a blur to her now, a patchwork mosaic, all those years of the children's growing up. There were scattered moments that stood out: coming in to find the entire bathroom soaked, including the towels hanging on the racks, the boys in the tub together, shrieking, bright-eyed, their bodies rosy. The time Jackie fell out of the tree in Central Park and came home holding his poor dangling arm, his face pinched with pain. It seemed as though their childhoods were the same, but they had turned out two such different people, Steven so earnest and responsible, and Jack—well, Jack was not so much. Not so earnest and responsible. What had happened?
Probably Jack had stayed up too late, watched too much television. Too many video games, with their flickering psychotic lights, their vertiginous vistas and violent tasks. His brain had certainly been fried, if that's what video games did. She and Wendell hadn't given him any— one or two, maybe—but in New York you couldn't keep your children from doing whatever it was they wanted to do. As soon as they were safe on the streets they were gone, and so was your authority. Jack had spent hours on video games at his friends' houses.
But Jack was a sweetheart, her heart's darling. His life was unsettled, but whose in their twenties was not? Steven was in flux, too. And if they were looking for blame, what about Wendell leaving his family for that awful nitwit, why mightn't that be the problem? Why wouldn't it be Wendell's fault? In any case, wherever the blame should be assigned, it was not for her father to assign it. Julia would not hear a single word from Edward about Jack.
Her father looked intently at the dark sky, scanning it for movement. He could still see perfectly well, though his feet were clumsy, and his hands—that had once tied off microscopic blood vessels and stitched filament-sized nerves—were now like paws. The thing was to keep going, never admit weakness or defeat. His eyes were still good, and his hearing. He didn't have a hearing aid. Carter Johnson, who was exactly his age, had a flesh-colored plastic snail curled behind each ear. You could hear them, that high insect whine, and he was always fiddling with them, looking troubled, turning them up and down. They didn't seem to help him at all.
All this was partly genetic, but it was also taking care of yourself. He'd never let himself run to flab. He got out every day and walked. He was fit and hale for eighty-eight.
He kept thinking he saw the flicker of a falling star, but as soon as he focused, it was gone. Staring made his sight unreliable, things glimmered mysteriously on the perimeter of his vision. He was vexed at missing Katharine's star, he didn't like missing things. Katharine's vision was good, too—they were both doing well, apart from her hip.
Her hip—but Edward couldn't bring himself to consider Katharine's hip. When he'd first met her it had seemed insignificant. She'd been lithe then, and active. Over the years, though, it had steadily worsened, and he'd been helpless, unable to stop its encroachment, despite the operations and therapy. Katharine never complained. Sometimes, at night, he'd rub her back, and sometimes she wept silently. They both pretended it wasn't happening. If she broke out into sobs she apologized. He knew it was from the pain, and from relief so sharp it felt like pain. He rubbed her shoulders and told her it was all right. He'd been helpless to help her.
There was one, a bright liquid streak in the darkness. He announced it, but by the time he spoke, it was gone. Staring at where it had been, he wondered if he'd really seen it. Was he beginning to imagine things? The thought made him fearful. Dementia: it lay ahead for most of them, humans. He was afraid of failing, his whole physical plant turning decrepit. This was why he walked daily, why he busied himself with Julia's plumbing. He was determined to stay vigorous. He was fighting off decay, resisting the pathetic downward slide into decrepitude. It happened against your will. Tom Lounsdale's children had banded together, like a mutinous crew, and taken away his car keys. Tom could do nothing, and his voice had cracked when he told Edward the story.
Edward would disinherit his children if they tried this. The idea of it set him into a boil. He would not let other people determine his life. (Though his body was turning to dust.)
Katharine looked up into the night sky.
The blanket was too heavy, really, but she did not want to hurt Julia's feelings and sat quietly beneath it. All this was beautiful, the quiet sounds of the