Before You Know Kindness Part 3

Five

Spencer McCullough had been watching the lakes with their impenetrable Native American names-Winnipesaukee, Sunapee, Squam-outside his plane window for almost ten minutes now, and so he knew they'd be on the ground any moment. Even in a fifteen-seat puddle jumper, the Friday afternoon flight from LaGuardia to West Lebanon was barely an hour. He glanced across the aisle at Catherine, saw she was focused on an article in her magazine, and turned back to the window. He thought of the garden. It wasn't its size that excited him: Anyone with enough time on his hands could plant a third of an acre of carrots or beets or squash. It was the garden's variety. Granted, he had appeased his mother-in-law and Sara and John-who, because they lived in Vermont, presumed they knew more than he did about growing vegetables in the faux tundra of northern New Hamps.h.i.+re-by planting rows and rows of the basics. But there were also yards of surprises interspersed in the dirt and clay, and he couldn't wait to see them. White icicle radishes. Kohlrabi. The arugula and the endive that he understood his daughter, his niece, and his mother-in-law already were eating and the blue Hubbard squash that by the fall would look like the pods from which aliens always seemed to spring in the camp horror films of the 1950s.

He could never, of course, have a vegetable garden on West Eighty-fifth Street. They lived on the ninth floor of a building full of co-op apartments.

Even when they had lived in Connecticut in the first years after Charlotte had been born, however-their postpartum foray into suburbia-he couldn't have had a garden like this. It wasn't that there hadn't been the time when he was home or that they hadn't had the s.p.a.ce-though that was more limited in the suburbs than it was in northern New Hamps.h.i.+re. It was the deer. Those beautiful animals with their big dark eyes, their white plumelike tails, and their ridiculous Vulcan-like ears. He had tried three times in the four years they had lived in Long Ridge to have a vegetable garden, and each time the deer had devoured it. Eaten whatever they wanted, despite his attempts to deter them. Eaten the lettuce, despite the tobacco-tea-chewing tobacco in water, really-that he had sprinkled on the gra.s.s that bordered the garden. Eaten the flowers on the string beans, despite the garlic and Tabasco concoction he had doused on the plants themselves (a remedy that proved as bad as the ailment, since the smell had made the few plants the deer hadn't bothered to gobble completely inedible). Eaten the peas and the beet greens despite the old bathwater. The deer had ignored the mothb.a.l.l.s he put in his yard (the nuclear option, in his mind, since mothb.a.l.l.s contained naphthalene), and the myriad animal urines-bobcat, wolf, his own-that he showered along the perimeter. Alas, nothing could dissuade the deer that wandered contentedly in the night through those suburban backyards from eating whatever they wanted.

But, then, what did he expect? Sometimes he would ask himself if he honestly believed that he could outsmart an animal so perfect in terms of its evolution that its bone structure hadn't changed in four million years. A mammal that-unlike so many others-didn't become a mere fossil to study in the Ice Age but actually flourished in the midst of cataclysmic environmental transformation. Spencer understood that deer could eat virtually anything that grows up from the dirt-and, when pressed, had been known to stomp fish in shallow water to eat them-and were capable of living almost anywhere. Deep woods. Cleared farmland. The suburbs. Cities. The whitetail existed in the coldest reaches of northern Alberta, in the scorching heat of New Mexico, along the Pacific coastline of Peru. Its cousins, the blacktail and the mule deer, filled in those western corners of North America where the whitetail was absent-the Nevada desert, the California seaboard-with the result that there were few crevices on the continent where there weren't deer of one kind or another.

Nevertheless, Spencer had convinced himself that New Hamps.h.i.+re would be different. In all the times that he had been to his mother-in-law's-the summers when he'd been a college student, weeks at a time ever since-never once had he seen a deer on her property. Two decades ago he'd seen them occasionally from the highway when he was returning home from Echo Lake, but he guessed those sightings were ten miles from Sugar Hill, and he knew from his work that deer tended to live most of their life in a world no bigger than a couple square miles. If there was enough food, some whitetails would spend a whole season in a few hundred acres.

Moreover, he presumed he saw deer off the interstate near Echo Lake because there was no hunting allowed in the state park. And hunting was the key. Neither wolves nor foxes nor drought nor mountains of snow could diminish a region's deer population for long. Only man could do that. All that hunting in the fall beyond the borders of the state park, Spencer guessed, kept the deer herd small and would prevent the creatures from sidling up to a Sugar Hill garden and eating the spinach. They knew the signs of a real real predator when they saw one. predator when they saw one.

An irony, of course, was that Spencer himself would never kill a deer. Nor would he ever eat one. He hadn't touched meat since he was nineteen years old. He'd never hunted (and he knew he never would), and he positively did not approve of someone else taking a Savage 99 or a Browning A-Bolt or whatever it was that they used, and firing a bullet into a deer: Like the lobsters he'd slaughtered-like the hogs and the chickens in their minuscule cages in those deplorable factory farms, the air itself an unbreathable miasma of excrement, like the mink who were electrocuted or clubbed for a coat-they felt pain. They felt pleasure. They had parents.

But if two centuries of deer hunting in New Hamps.h.i.+re had diminished the herd to the point where he could plant the vegetable garden of his dreams-and have the satisfaction of knowing that his daughter, his mother-in-law, and his niece were savoring its bounty-so be it.

His family had never had vegetable gardens when he'd been growing up, not on any small (or large) square of land beside any of the houses in which they'd lived in a variety of suburban neighborhoods north of Manhattan. Not in Hastings or Rye, not in Stamford or Scarsdale. Not in either of the smaller houses in Hartsdale or the large Tudor one his mother had loved in New Canaan. They moved a lot, it seemed, for a family in which Dad never once relocated cities for work or even changed corporations. Bill McCullough worked, in fact, between the eleventh and the eighteenth floor of the same building on Madison and Twenty-third Street for forty years-working every single day for the very same insurance company-until his wife was diagnosed with lung cancer at sixty-two and he retired at sixty-three to help care for her. She died after a gloomy, febrile, excruciating seven-month battle-more with the chemotherapy and the radiation than with the disease itself-and he, well aware of the life expectancy for a now sixty-four-year-old widower, followed her quickly. A series of strokes at weekly intervals beginning nine months after her funeral. He spent a month in the hospital, unable to speak, then move, then breathe. Charlotte had been in kindergarten at the time. They returned from Long Ridge to Manhattan soon after that, though Spencer didn't really believe there was a connection.

As a child Spencer hadn't understood why his family moved so often and why he went to so many schools. Why he had to figure out so many unspoken dress codes-each one more subtle than the one that preceded it-between the seventh and twelfth grade. Obviously his father wasn't wanted by the law, and he traveled almost not at all for business. Still, Spencer didn't spend a whole lot of time with him growing up. And when he did, his memories were mostly about silence: His dad appearing once in a while-almost like a vision-in the small bleachers at the baseball field when his Little League team had a game. His dad tying a necktie in the mirror in the front hall of the house in...in either Rye or that first one in Hartsdale, Spencer couldn't be sure...before leaving unusually early for work one morning and whispering conspiratorially that they shouldn't wake his mother. His father falling asleep at nine thirty at night in front of the television set in the family room, alone, an unfinished scotch and water (mostly scotch, despite the ice cube that had melted) on the table beside him.

Sometimes Spencer and his sister, a girl only eighteen months younger than he, would water down the bottles of Cutty Sark and J&B Rare. They'd measure where on the schooner's sails the scotch was on the Cutty Sark label, pour out between half an inch and an inch, and then replace it with exactly as much water and-if they had noticeably diluted the color-a drop or two of their mother's dark apple cider vinegar.

He had few memories, he realized, of his father and his mother ever chatting with each other when he was a child. On some level, they loved each other: He saw just how much when his mother was dying. But other than he and his sister-and a shared tendency to drink way too much and then grow acrimonious-they really had very little in common. They never divorced, and it was only in college that he decided they probably should have. After all, he had an abundance of recollections of the two of them squabbling in six or seven different houses, and he wondered if everyone would have been happier if the two of them had separated.

Later, as a grown-up, he conjectured they might have moved so many times when he was a child because it gave his mother-a woman much smarter than his father-a way to fill her days. She could pack and unpack and redecorate, and perhaps she wanted something to do more than she wanted a divorce.

What Spencer lacked in close friends, he had tried to make up for in pets. He was never a brooding child or even a churlish one. But he did keep his emotional distance, because eventually that distance would become geographic and-to an eight- or a ten- or a twelve-year-old boy-prohibitive.

Thus there were, invariably, the dogs and the cats. He had both as a boy. In every neighborhood there was a golden lab that was pregnant or a stray cat with a litter of kittens in someone's garage. Only rarely did his parents deny him one. It actually became a part of the family lore, the stories his parents would tell their new acquaintances at c.o.c.ktail parties in their new towns: The boy and his dogs. And cats. The boy who would rescue a racc.o.o.n. His mother regaled his mother-in-law with that tale the day they were introduced.

In New Canaan the menagerie peaked at three dogs and four cats. Then his father accidentally backed the Impala over the sleeping mutt that looked a lot like a springer spaniel. His parents fought and soon (once again) they had moved. In truth, Spencer knew, it had nothing to do with that dog.

It was odd, but he was convinced that one of the things that had led him to stay at Sugar Hill for entire summers in college after Catherine had first drawn him north was the reality that Catherine's father had pa.s.sed away, which meant that her parents would never be squabbling there. Sometimes he thought this was an even more visceral part of the property's attraction than the fact that the house had been built by Catherine's great-grandfather and had been a stable part of the Setons' family life for four generations.

He gazed once more at Catherine, and once again she didn't look up. Her mouth was open just the tiniest bit and curled into a barely perceptible smile-as it was often when she daydreamed or read-an expression that always had held for him the power of an erotic summons: It seemed to suggest pleasures that were libidinous, secret, and wanton. Her hair, the russet red of an apple in fall, was hiding her eyes like drapes as she flipped through the pages in her lap, and he was torn between the desires to touch her and to leave her at peace. He wanted to murmur aloud that they were almost there, but the engines on these small planes were so noisy that he would have to shout, and somehow that would wreck the intimacy of the moment. Besides, so often this month with Charlotte away in the country, whenever either of them had opened their mouths to discuss anything that wasn't of the most prosaic nature (dinner, the location of the joint checkbook, whether he should bring an umbrella to work), for reasons he couldn't quite understand they wound up fighting.

Sometimes Spencer feared he was growing into a middle-aged bully-a verbose version of his occasionally sullen father-and he couldn't figure out why his simple desires for competence and order so often seemed to transmogrify into anger. Packing this morning had been a perfect example. Catherine had placed her empty suitcase on the bed beside his without noticing that his flat travel alarm had been there in a curl in the bedspread, and he had wound up spending twenty-five minutes searching for the clock before discovering it underneath her bag. Then, his mood fouled by the unplanned scavenger hunt, he heated up the last dregs of the coffee in a mug in the microwave, only to discover that Catherine had already dumped the dregs of his organic soy milk down the drain so the refrigerator wouldn't reek upon their return. And though he certainly appreciated her foresight, he wished she had asked him first because he absolutely loathed his coffee black. Finally, just when he had all of his clothing folded perfectly flat in his suitcase, Catherine asked him if he could squeeze into his bag bottles of their shampoo and conditioner and a few items Charlotte had asked them to bring north-including her riding helmet and boots because it sounded like the girls would have a chance to go on a trail ride in the next week or two.

"I can't fit her riding helmet in my suitcase," he'd said, and the iciness in his voice had surprised him. Where had that come from?

"The helmet's hollow. Stuff it with your socks and underwear. Then it'll fit."

"And the boots?"

"The boots are small."

"And covered with dirt and manure."

"They aren't."

"I took her last. Remember?"

"Of course I do. You do it so rarely."

Suddenly they sounded like his parents in one of their habitual, second-scotch skirmishes. Except it was the morning and he and Catherine hadn't been drinking. "My point is that I know exactly the condition of the stable in the park. It's filthy. And so the boots are filthy," he told her.

"Why didn't you clean them off then? Or ask her to?"

"I did clean them. I didn't disinfect them. It never crossed my mind they'd have to share close quarters with my clothes."

"Fine, I'll put them in a plastic bag in my suitcase. You take the helmet."

And so he had removed his s.h.i.+rts and his pants-khakis and shorts and even a pair of golf slacks-from his suitcase, stuffed the helmet with his underwear and socks, and then wedged everything back inside his very well-traveled American Tourister twenty-inch Cabin Carry-On. It wasn't nearly as neat as it had been, and so he'd spent the rest of the morning seething-more at himself than at her because he knew he had overreacted. But the end result was the same: a tense and wearisome silence. He retreated into the quiet of their two cats, pulling a dining room chair over to the living room couch on which they were dozing in the sun and noiselessly running his fingers over their fur. Then he reread for the third time the note they would be leaving for the teenage girl on their floor who was going to feed the animals and change their litter box. It was a complicated set of instructions, because it wasn't easy to keep a cat vegan.

There was no dog in their life and he wished that there were. Unfortunately, once in a mood of self-righteous obstinacy, he'd proclaimed their apartment was too small for one. He'd insisted it would be cruel to coop one up for a whole day there. He no longer believed that (had he ever?), but he was, he knew, disablingly-perhaps self-destructively-stubborn.

Now on the plane he resolved he would behave better. He reached across the aisle to feel (at once so like and unlike that of a cat) the soft down on Catherine's wrist and her arm, bare even in the chill of this claustrophobic pa.s.senger cabin. Lightly he stroked the skin just above her thumb and along the back of her hand. Though the house in New Hamps.h.i.+re belonged to Mrs. Seton, he had been coming here for two decades, and it was as close to a familial motherland as he had: a place with memories and roots that transcended the itinerant nature of his own suburban upbringing. He loved the house, he believed, more than did his wife and his brother-in-law, who had known it their entire lives and now took it for granted, and at least as much as his mother-in-law, who slipped into a life there each summer with the same blissful sigh she'd exhale when she'd plunge into the crisp waters of Echo Lake.

He gave Catherine's hand a small squeeze, but she continued to read. She was still angry with him. Once they were on the ground and he wouldn't have to shout, he would apologize to her for being a...a jerk. Yes, that was right. A jerk.

From the intercom speaker above them he heard a series of scratchy, incomprehensible prerecorded syllables-there was no flight attendant on this route-and he knew it was the message reminding them to have their tray tables locked in their upright positions and their seats fully forward, because they were about to land.

AT THE RENT-A-CAR COUNTER, while a good-natured wisp of a teen girl printed out the forms for the vehicle they were taking for the next week and a half-a minivan almost (but not quite) large enough for the extended family and their golf clubs-Catherine Seton-McCullough used her cell phone to leave a message on her mother's answering machine. She wanted to let her know that they had landed and would be at the house in about ninety minutes. Five o'clock at the latest. No doubt everyone was still at the club, taking whatever lessons Mother had lined up. while a good-natured wisp of a teen girl printed out the forms for the vehicle they were taking for the next week and a half-a minivan almost (but not quite) large enough for the extended family and their golf clubs-Catherine Seton-McCullough used her cell phone to leave a message on her mother's answering machine. She wanted to let her know that they had landed and would be at the house in about ninety minutes. Five o'clock at the latest. No doubt everyone was still at the club, taking whatever lessons Mother had lined up.

Spencer had apologized and she was grateful. But only to an extent. She still wasn't exactly sure what she should say because she was filled with a nauseating, almost debilitating sense of dread that her marriage was...winding down. And she was scared. She could no longer see anything behind Spencer's eyes but annoyance-and Lord knows how she hated this word-issues. She taught English and literature to high school girls at the Brearley School on the Upper East Side, and this spring the headmaster had brought in a consultant who called herself a corporate interdependence trainer and the woman had used that word- She taught English and literature to high school girls at the Brearley School on the Upper East Side, and this spring the headmaster had brought in a consultant who called herself a corporate interdependence trainer and the woman had used that word-issues-as a euphemism for both actual crises and petty discontents. Instead of challenge, challenge, a word that Catherine knew other consultants depended upon as their subst.i.tute for weakness-as in "We have myriad strengths and a couple of small challenges to address"-this trainer savored the businesslike spitefulness of a word that Catherine knew other consultants depended upon as their subst.i.tute for weakness-as in "We have myriad strengths and a couple of small challenges to address"-this trainer savored the businesslike spitefulness of issue issue. Like agenda, agenda, it was a word that purported to sound neutral, but in truth was two syllables with inherently negative connotations: There really was no such thing as a it was a word that purported to sound neutral, but in truth was two syllables with inherently negative connotations: There really was no such thing as a good good issue. It gave the woman the conversational upper hand with the school's teachers and administrators, implying at once that the faculty and staff had problems, while suggesting that she would never approach them in a manner that was overtly condescending. Patronizing? Yes. Condescending? Only if you thought for a moment about what the doctrinaire pedant really was saying. issue. It gave the woman the conversational upper hand with the school's teachers and administrators, implying at once that the faculty and staff had problems, while suggesting that she would never approach them in a manner that was overtly condescending. Patronizing? Yes. Condescending? Only if you thought for a moment about what the doctrinaire pedant really was saying.

Well, clearly, she and Spencer had issues, issues, and they had only gotten worse since Charlotte had left for her grandmother's house in the country. Catherine had expected the time alone would give the two of them a chance to reconnect. They'd go to movies and dinner together, just the two of them, and perhaps he would relax and they would talk about...about everything. What demons were driving his temper. Why he could be as confrontational with his wife and daughter as he was with a.s.sociations of big game hunters. Why he had become so focused on work that he could practically ignore Charlotte for weeks: He would jet to Was.h.i.+ngton (a presentation on the evils of biomedical animal research to the minions of some Senate committee) or Omaha (a press conference about the practices of a company that specialized in mail-order steak) or Sarasota (something about the treatment of circus animals) and then talk to his daughter when he returned home with about the same conversational involvement that he demonstrated with telemarketers. What happened to the days when he would whisk Charlotte off to a concert or museum or one of the Broadway shows that she loved? Patiently help her use the Internet to research school papers about the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955, the dolphin's glorious brain, or the reasons why we have seasons? and they had only gotten worse since Charlotte had left for her grandmother's house in the country. Catherine had expected the time alone would give the two of them a chance to reconnect. They'd go to movies and dinner together, just the two of them, and perhaps he would relax and they would talk about...about everything. What demons were driving his temper. Why he could be as confrontational with his wife and daughter as he was with a.s.sociations of big game hunters. Why he had become so focused on work that he could practically ignore Charlotte for weeks: He would jet to Was.h.i.+ngton (a presentation on the evils of biomedical animal research to the minions of some Senate committee) or Omaha (a press conference about the practices of a company that specialized in mail-order steak) or Sarasota (something about the treatment of circus animals) and then talk to his daughter when he returned home with about the same conversational involvement that he demonstrated with telemarketers. What happened to the days when he would whisk Charlotte off to a concert or museum or one of the Broadway shows that she loved? Patiently help her use the Internet to research school papers about the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955, the dolphin's glorious brain, or the reasons why we have seasons?

Likewise, he was neglecting her, too. His wife. In the two weeks that Charlotte had been in the country, Catherine had barely seen her husband before eight or eight thirty at night, an hour that felt particularly late because she was through with work until the middle of August, when she would begin preparing her cla.s.sroom in earnest for the fall. She saw friends and she played tennis and she read on the gra.s.s in Central Park. But she didn't see much of her husband.

Sometimes she found herself flirting. She would flirt with Hank Rechter, the fifty-five-year-old headmaster of a school on the West Side-not, thank G.o.d, Brearley-when she would see him jogging near Belvedere Castle late in the afternoon. It was an amiable flirtation because he was a neighbor in their building who was as happily married as everyone supposed she was, because his smooth business suits fit his wondrous shoulders like slipcovers, because he never seemed to sweat when he ran. Because he always found a way to touch her with his fingertips that was at once chummy and rakishly inappropriate. Sometimes when he would see her in the park he would sit down on the gra.s.s beside her, and she sensed that she was speaking to this man in the sort of breathless, whispery voice her husband no longer heard.

On occasions, she knew, she had flirted that spring as well with Chip Kinnell, the widower father of her fourteen-year-old Bronte scholar, Lindy Kinnell, stretching out their parent-teacher conferences and their visits in the hallways on those mornings he would bring his daughter to school. Kinnell was a rarity in the arbitrage circles in which he traveled: He read fiction that didn't have spies and submarines in it and could talk with Catherine-abstractedly fingering a purple Hermes tie patterned with, of all things, baby ducks-about the books he was reading now and the books he had read aloud to his wife while she was dying.

At least once, she feared, Charlotte had watched her in a conversation with Chip and grown suspicious. But suspicious of what? She was doing nothing wrong. One afternoon Charlotte had eavesdropped on a discussion she was having with Eric Miller, another English teacher (a younger younger English teacher; Catherine was almost certain that Eric hadn't hit thirty yet) at Brearley, and it was clear that her daughter hadn't understood that sometimes a harmless flirtation only enhances a friends.h.i.+p. Deepens the camaraderie. English teacher; Catherine was almost certain that Eric hadn't hit thirty yet) at Brearley, and it was clear that her daughter hadn't understood that sometimes a harmless flirtation only enhances a friends.h.i.+p. Deepens the camaraderie.

It was, however, completely innocuous. All of it. All of them. At least that's what she told herself.

And she couldn't help but believe that if Spencer hadn't become so d.a.m.n mercurial, she wouldn't have begun taking small comforts from the attention that Hank Rechter, Chip Kinnell, or Eric Miller paid her. She wouldn't have paid so much attention to them. She wouldn't have talked to them about...meat. Yes indeed, Hank and Eric and Chip were carnivores, and they knew what her husband did (everyone knew what her husband did) and they would tease her about it. They would make jokes about souvlaki and s.h.i.+sh kebab, and Eric would try to interest her in the Sabrett hot dogs that were sold from a cart outside on the street.

She hoped this coming vacation would offer a meaningful reconciliation with Spencer, though she had to wonder how you could reconcile with somebody who didn't even know you were apart. Earlier this week she had imagined that with Spencer away from work in Sugar Hill-in a corner of the world that he loved-she would be able to talk to him. Perhaps he would talk to her. Perhaps they would finally work through their...issues. Now, however, she doubted that would happen, at least in quite the way she had supposed. Now she guessed if they talked about anything, it would be because she had chosen this week to see if dread could be transformed into something like relief when she broke the news to him that she simply could not continue any longer as she was-as they were-and she wanted change. Counseling, perhaps, though even counseling was a capitulation, a collapse of her adolescent imaginings of what her marriage would be. And maybe she wanted something more than counseling or change. Maybe she wanted out. Yes, that was it, all right. At the moment, at least, after his appalling behavior when they were packing this morning-the clock, the coffee, his retreat to their cats-she absolutely could not stand what their marriage had become and she wanted out.

Reflexively she picked her tennis racket up off the top of her suitcase so she would have something to do with her hands now that she had stowed her cell phone away, and much to her surprise she found herself volleying in slow motion. She'd played a lot of tennis that summer with her friends who were women, and she realized that she was looking forward to playing now with her brother and-if they were speaking-with Spencer. She was looking forward to playing with men. When she'd been younger she'd been an exceptional player: a high school standout in New York, ranked in Ma.s.sachusetts when she was at college. She'd learned to play summers as a child at that goofy club her own grandfather had helped found near their country home in Sugar Hill, hitting b.a.l.l.s for hours at a time with the different young adults who would parade through there year after year masquerading as tennis pros. Most of them were college students-and, she knew now, mediocre tennis players at best-but to a nine-year-old they seemed the height of glamour and sophistication and talent, and she had only fond memories of her afternoons on the clay courts in her shorts.

Her first summer here with Spencer, when the two of them were working at area restaurants, she'd destroy him on those very courts at least every other day before they'd go to work in the late afternoon, and the fact that he never seemed to mind endeared him to her. He could volley with her to help her keep her stroke in shape, but he rarely took more than a game from her each set they played, and she didn't believe that he ever once broke her serve.

It was funny: The man could not bear to lose an argument-would not lose an argument-but he was perfectly content losing to her at tennis. To his brother-in-law at golf, to his mother-in-law at badminton. Suddenly, she found this athletic acquiescence of his disturbing. Suddenly, she found all of him physically less attractive than she once had. He seemed wide-faced these days, especially now that his hair had rolled back to the top of his head, and his ears looked like uncooked Chinese dumplings. He was heavier than in college (but weren't all men?), and sometimes she thought the dark hair that once had fallen across his forehead had migrated to his back, his shoulders, and the insides of his ears. She knew he was fierce at work-spirited with politicians, feisty with the press-and though all too often he brought that fierceness home with him, he never brought it to the tennis court.

A thought came to her: She did things with Spencer that didn't interest her-such as that vegetable garden-for the sad reason that it was easier to do things she disliked than to bicker. This couldn't be healthy, and it struck her as yet another indication that her marriage might be over. It was possible, wasn't it? Maybe that's what happened to some marriages: They just ran out of energy and forward momentum, and both halves of the equation no longer saw the future as any more promising than the present. This notion made her even more queasy, and she tried to tell herself that she was wrong, that she didn't really want out, that this was all just a bad patch. All marriages had them. Still, she wondered if Spencer's motivation for playing tennis was similar to her involvement in his vegetable garden: He did it despite little enthusiasm because playing was easier than arguing.

No, that couldn't be right. Tennis for Spencer was an element of the world of Sugar Hill, an important component of the spell the place held for him. She knew he a.s.sociated it with their first summers there together, his introduction to New Hamps.h.i.+re.

Maybe, she decided, focusing now with real effort on the week and a half before her instead of on the bigger problems posed by her marriage, if her brother and sister-in-law were willing to drive back to the club after dinner, she and Spencer could squeeze in an hour of doubles tonight-or, perhaps, they could even get in a game before dinner if she could catch John and Sara before they left the pool for the day. Maybe on vacation Spencer would find it within himself to care about something other than the plight of a bullhook-p.r.i.c.ked circus elephant and actually play to win for a change.

She guessed she'd have a better chance of rounding up a match if she asked her brother (with any luck he'd even have a fresh can of b.a.l.l.s, a real novelty for the Seton family when they were together in New Hamps.h.i.+re) than if she bounced the idea off Sara, who she presumed was still bleary-eyed by her five-month-old. And so she retrieved the cell phone once more and left a message for her brother with a woman who happened to pick up the phone at the clubhouse. If he got the message before she and Spencer reached Sugar Hill, then they could drive directly to the Contour Club instead of straight home.

Her mother would be proud: Going directly from the plane to the tennis court. Now, that that was vigorous. was vigorous.

Inside the shoulder bag in which she kept her cell phone and her computer were four unopened Slim Jims. Spencer, of course, knew nothing about her secret stash of beef jerky-about, in truth, any of her secret stashes of meat. She hid them along with her Altoids and those potent Listerine PocketPak strips of paper-thin mint that melted instantly on your tongue and she presumed were designed more to encourage better oral s.e.x than oral hygiene. She considered whether she should tell Spencer she had to run to the ladies' room so she could scarf down one of the Slim Jims, but her secret desire for meat wasn't as powerful as a smoker's need for nicotine. She was not uncomfortable and she could wait.

She told herself that she needed to approach the coming ten days with a good att.i.tude. Or, at least, not a bad one. She would play tennis, a little golf, she would swim. And there were worse ways to spend fifteen or twenty minutes in the morning than weeding a vegetable garden or deadheading rows of annuals. Had it been all that unpleasant to plant the gardens in the first place? Not really.

Moreover, soon she would get to see her daughter-though, these days, Charlotte was as likely to be a source of anxiety as she was emotional quietude or maternal pride. She adored the girl, but she didn't look forward to the way she and Charlotte could fight over nothing. Charlotte knew precisely how to push her b.u.t.tons: which slang annoyed her the most, which music she found the most offensive. She was like her father in that anything could lead to a confrontation, any interaction could become a power struggle: which bathing suit to wear, when to go to sleep, whether it was appropriate to read Cosmopolitan Cosmopolitan in the orthodontist's office waiting room-whether an orthodontist should even have in the orthodontist's office waiting room-whether an orthodontist should even have Cosmopolitan Cosmopolitan in his office waiting room. The child knew exactly where to leave her drool-swaddled retainer to cause her mother the most discomfort (the mouse pad beside the living room computer one day, atop whatever magazine Catherine was reading the next), and exactly which cosmetics were absolutely off-limits and therefore she simply had to use (the lids of which she would be sure to leave askew on her mother's vanity). in his office waiting room. The child knew exactly where to leave her drool-swaddled retainer to cause her mother the most discomfort (the mouse pad beside the living room computer one day, atop whatever magazine Catherine was reading the next), and exactly which cosmetics were absolutely off-limits and therefore she simply had to use (the lids of which she would be sure to leave askew on her mother's vanity).

Before she had left for her grandmother's home for the summer, she'd even begun to challenge the antimeat, antileather, antizoo dictates of their household. She wanted a leather skirt. Leather shoes. Catherine suspected that she'd been to McDonald's. Hormones were starting to course through the girl like river rapids, and Catherine hoped they wouldn't transform a difficult child into an ungovernable adolescent.

When Spencer had finished with the forms for the rent-a-car, they each grabbed their suitcases and carry-ons, their tennis rackets and golf clubs, and labored their way through the tiny concourse and out into the small parking lot. The sun was still high and the air was warm. She thought it irrational that with a week of tennis and gardening and after-dinner family badminton challenges before her she was still so filled with anxiety.

But, of course, she also understood why that disquiet was there.

Six

Spencer stood in front of the vegetable garden, dinner behind him and the sun at the very tip of the highest of the scalloped foothills to the west, and considered going inside to boot up one of the laptop computers that sat inside the house in their nylon ballistic carriers. Perhaps the Internet held a solution to this problem with the deer. Sure, there had been no way to stop them in Connecticut, but that was both because there were so many and they were so comfortable in the Long Ridge suburbs. One time when he was inching along in traffic just south of exit 34 on the Merritt Parkway-exit 34, barely thirty miles from his office near the Empire State Building-he counted nineteen in a single, mile-long stretch nibbling the delicate April buds that grew on the trees just beyond the asphalt. The animals would pause, raising their heads so he could see clearly their great black marble eyes and their eyelashes-as long and lovely as human bangs-and then they would resume eating.

The only predator he knew of in Fairfield County was his neighbor Rick Salieri and his Ford Expedition: Salieri had managed to slam into deer on three separate occasions.

Spencer was sure there couldn't possibly be as many deer here in this part of New Hamps.h.i.+re, and they couldn't possibly be as sa.s.sy or fat. Not with all the hunting that must occur in the fall. Not with winters here so much colder and longer than in southern Connecticut. The snow pack so deep. This herd had to be a reasonable-a manageable manageable-size. Plus, here Spencer knew he had that lupine to work with. Clearly deer hated lupine, and as big as the garden was, it was still a small island in the midst of a sea of the stuff. It grew like gra.s.s, except that it was waist high and the roots were like vines. If only he could find the right Web site for gardeners or wildlife management...

Perhaps he could somehow build an impenetrable tangle of lupine, a barrier that would keep the animals at bay.

He was imagining exactly such a wall-a hedgerow made of lupine, the enclosure creating a secret garden of almost Victorian sensibility-when he realized his brother-in-law, John, was standing beside him, holding two bottles of beer by their long, thin necks. He'd already pulled the tops off them both, and he handed one to Spencer.

"You're depressed," John said to him with mock gravity and earnestness. "I understand."

Spencer took a swallow. "I'm not finished."

"You plan to sleep out here?"

He smiled. "I won't go that far. But I am shocked. How could everything have been thriving only yesterday?"

On the other side of the house they could hear the squeals from their girls as they played badminton in the yard against Grandmother and Catherine. Catherine wasn't as proficient at whacking birdies as she was tennis b.a.l.l.s, but she was a Seton and thus had a genetic ability to swing things-rackets and golf clubs and, in the summer she'd lived at home immediately after college and thus wound up a part of the Brick Church's co-ed softball team, a baseball bat-with hereditary competence. Sara was nursing Patrick on the porch.

"Well, I presume it was only yesterday when the deer discovered what kind of good eating we'd put in the ground for them," John answered.

"They'll be back tonight, you know."

"And they'll bring their friends. Yes, I do know."

"I remember one year in Connecticut-the first year we tried to have a garden-they devoured the whole plot in two nights."

"It will take them more than two to finish off this one. Unless there's a whole herd that's interested."

"I know they're just acting like deer...but I really didn't think this would happen."

"Personally, I figured we'd lose the garden to rabbits. Or racc.o.o.ns."

"It's like a car accident."

"Oh, it's not that bad. You sound like one of your news releases."

Above them a bat darted past in the twilight, then another. The bats lived in the room Nan used for storage above the garage, and when Spencer was leading the charge to get the seeds in the ground he took comfort in their presence: A tiny pipistrelle bat, he knew, ate as many as three thousand mosquitoes on a warm summer night; a colony of brown bats-say 150 animals strong-would consume eighteen million rootworms in a year. He squatted now and ran his fingers over the ravaged tendrils of one of the rows of what would have been snow peas. His mother-in-law's golden retriever had wandered outside, and when the dog saw him the animal ambled over and put a front paw on his knees. He scratched the back of the dog's ears and stroked his neck. Then he wrapped an arm around the canine's strong chest and allowed the creature to lick the side of his face.

It was already too dark to see the yellow and black POSTED signs at the bottom of the field, but John looked in that direction and thought about them. He had a vision of himself and a ten- or eleven-year-old boy, Patrick in a decade and change, marching one crisp November morning off into these woods in search of a buck: the offspring, perhaps, of one of the animals that had had dinner last night in this very garden. The signs, by then, would have been gone a long time, pried from their trees with the hooked end of a hammer.

John's father had never hunted, but his grandfather had. His great-grandfather, too, a man he had never met but the architect-literally-of this house on the hill behind them and the elegant carriage barn that once had stood beside it. John knew that barn only from black-and-white photographs and a painting that hung in the hallway on the second floor of the house, because his grandfather had replaced it with the less sophisticated, more functional two-car garage long before he'd been born.

He watched Spencer stand and wondered exactly what kind of tirade would be triggered in his brother-in-law if he mentioned that he had gone hunting last November and planned to go again in another three and a half months. If Spencer knew that he found himself browsing Web sites for hunters and purchasing magazines about tracking. If Spencer somehow discovered that most days in a locked cabinet in the guest bedroom in their house in Vermont was a rifle and two little bottles of buck urine that-sometimes John couldn't believe this himself-he had doused on his legs last year every time he went into the woods in search of deer.

Lord, how large would be the explosion if Spencer knew that the only reason there wasn't a rifle in that cabinet right now was because it was currently in its gun bag in the trunk of his car, stashed there because he was taking it to a gunsmith on Monday morning? He thought of those fifteen-thousand-pound Daisy Cutter bombs the United States had dropped a few years back in Afghanistan. Spencer, he decided, would be Daisy Cutter mad. His brother-in-law was thirty-eight and change, and every single day of his adult life he had worked for the likes of the Animal League, the Wildlife Partners.h.i.+p, and, for the last six or seven years, FERAL-each group more extreme than the one that preceded it.

Actually, the part that would truly have disgusted Spencer wasn't the notion that his brother-in-law, the lawyer, was capable now of firing a bullet into a deer: That would infuriate him, all right, but it wouldn't sicken him. The part that would send ol' Spencer over the edge was the reality that when he was in the woods he carried with him a knife with a ma.s.sive handle and a four-inch blade to field-dress the deer once it was dead. Cut away its p.e.n.i.s and its genitals, cut through the breastbone and yank up its windpipe. Extract the heart, the entrails, and the liver.

In truth, John wasn't completely sure he could field-dress a deer without vomiting. He hadn't gotten a deer yet so he hadn't had to eviscerate one. But he had studied the manuals, and in his knapsack was a set of instructions with the sort of photographs that only a pathologist, a medical student, or a hunter could love.

He considered whether things might be different if Spencer had a son, too, but he doubted it. Spencer was meant to have a daughter: a child he could take to Oliver, Oliver, The Phantom of the Opera, The Phantom of the Opera, and-two times that John was aware of, so Charlotte could see how different actors handled the lead role- and-two times that John was aware of, so Charlotte could see how different actors handled the lead role-Annie Get Your Gun. John knew he could try to explain to his brother-in-law his vision of days alone in the woods with his son-the two of them occasionally whispering as they walked through the brush, sharing the sorts of intimacies he never shared with his own father-but he knew that none of it would register. You don't sing show tunes with a boy in the woods. Besides, all Spencer would hear was the fact that John wanted to take his son into the forest to kill something. The sense of independence-the feel of the tall trees that const.i.tuted the canopy and the small ones around which was built the understory-would never make sense to him. Nor would he ever acknowledge that hunting was a sport that demanded genuine skill. The hard reality was that Spencer would be appalled by what he would see as a betrayal...and then deeply disappointed. John knew he could try to explain to his brother-in-law his vision of days alone in the woods with his son-the two of them occasionally whispering as they walked through the brush, sharing the sorts of intimacies he never shared with his own father-but he knew that none of it would register. You don't sing show tunes with a boy in the woods. Besides, all Spencer would hear was the fact that John wanted to take his son into the forest to kill something. The sense of independence-the feel of the tall trees that const.i.tuted the canopy and the small ones around which was built the understory-would never make sense to him. Nor would he ever acknowledge that hunting was a sport that demanded genuine skill. The hard reality was that Spencer would be appalled by what he would see as a betrayal...and then deeply disappointed.

Almost as if he knew that someday in the future he would be holding a gun at the edge of this very field and would thereby have earned Spencer's wrath, he thought he should top off the well of goodwill that existed between the two men-at some point he might need the water in that well to be lapping at the brim-and so he finished off his beer and wandered to the far side of the garden.

"What do you say?" he called back to Spencer. "Should we try to scare the p.i.s.s out of a couple of uppity deer with some good old-fas.h.i.+oned human pee?"