Before You Know Kindness

Two

The morning after the deer found a veritable supermarket waiting for them on Nan Seton’s property, Willow was standing in a beam of phosphorescent sunlight in her grandmother’s kitchen, adjusting the candy lilies and the yellow loosestrife she had picked in one vase and the snowcap daisies in a second, thinner one. She was using the counter between the antique dishwasher and the sink, working carefully because she wanted the arrangements to be perfect. When she was done, she threw the stems she had trimmed into the garbage and filled both vases with water. Then, taking baby steps so she didn’t slop water onto the floor in the hallway, the stairs, or along the second floor corridor, she carried the flowers upstairs to the room in which her parents and Patrick would be staying when they arrived later that day—the room in which her parents always slept when they came here, since it had been her father’s bedroom in this house when he was a boy.
Initially she placed both arrangements on the embroidered scarf on the dresser, but that looked too crowded and so she sidled around the crib that Grandmother had brought down from the attic and placed the daisies on the nightstand. Then she fluffed the pillows on her parents’ bed one more time, made sure the welcome card she had created from colored paper and her grandmother’s ancient Magic Markers was perfectly centered against the headboard, and adjusted the bedspread so that it was as flat as a tabletop. Her mom and dad would be arriving sometime that afternoon, and she wanted their room to be cozy and welcoming. She couldn’t wait to see them.
When she turned around, she saw that her cousin was standing in the doorway in her string bikini.
“You should get in your suit,” Charlotte said. “You know Grandmother will freak if you’re not ready when she wants to leave for the club.”
“She’s still watering the vegetable garden, isn’t she?”
“Actually, she’s just standing there with the hose, staring at stuff. It’s like she’s had a stroke or something.”
“Charlotte!”
The older girl rolled her eyes and started running her fingers over the red petals of one of the lilies in the arrangement on the dresser.
“Be gentle with them,” Willow said to her, and then added quickly, “Please. I want them to look nice when Mom and Dad get here.”
“The only reason we even have flowers this year is because my dad planted them.”
“We all planted them.”
“It was my dad’s idea.”
“So? You can pick some for your parents’ room, too.”
“Yeah, right.”
“It would make them happy.”
“It would take more than a couple of tired-looking lilies to do that.”
“Don’t say the lilies are tired. They’re not,” she answered. Willow knew enough not to either reassure her cousin that her aunt and uncle had seemed happy enough when they’d all been here over Memorial Day Weekend or to ask her what she had meant and thereby give her yet another chance to vent. She really didn’t want to hear Charlotte’s complaints right now about either her parents’ marriage or how her father’s job was constantly screwing up her life: how she was the only kid in all of New York City who had never been to the Bronx Zoo or seen the Big Apple Circus or (and this, Willow knew, was what really vexed her cousin these days) been allowed to own a leather skirt or a pair of leather dress shoes.
“No, you’re right,” Charlotte agreed, “they do look pretty. Your mom and dad will like them. And the card, too. You’re sweet to do all this.” Then she gave her that wide-eyed smile that Willow thought made her older cousin look like a beautiful young model in a face crème commercial and took her hand. “Now come on,” she continued, pulling her from her parents’ bedroom and down the hall to the one the two of them shared, “you need to get dressed for the club.”


NAN SETON WAS SEVENTY, but she had more vigor than her forty-year-old son and her thirty-eight-year-old daughter. Sometimes, when John and Catherine would speak on the phone or visit with each other at one or the other’s home or at this imposing Victorian with its top-heavy tower in northern New Hampshire, the siblings would try to convince themselves that Mother only seemed to have a vast storehouse of energy inside her because she didn’t have young children the way they did. When she had been their age and they had been children themselves, she couldn’t possibly have been so . . . vigorous.
Oh, but Nan Seton was, and in their hearts John and Catherine knew this. They remembered from their childhoods that between the Junior League and the Mayflower Society and the mornings she spent as a volunteer at the public schools in Harlem and Chinatown and the South Bronx, or the time she spent riding her bicycle in Central Park or attending lectures at the Fifth Avenue museums near their apartment, the woman never stopped moving. And that was just during the school year.
In the summer she was even more active: Then there were those train-schedule-precise, rigidly programmed days in New Hampshire in which she would play golf in the morning, swim in the afternoon at the lake or in the Contour Club’s pool, take them on nature walks before dinner, and then insist—insist, as if it were homework—that they play badminton with her before the sun had set or they had cleared the dishes from the dining room table. Those days, John and Catherine lived very much the way their daughters did now for a month every summer, when the girls would attend what they called the Seton New England Boot Camp and spend the better part of their days hitting buckets of golf balls at the club, practicing the crawl or learning to dive at the pool, swatting tennis balls with the girl from Dartmouth who was serving this year as the club’s informal teaching pro, or learning the nuances of bidding in the club’s Young People’s Summer Bridge League. Charlotte and Willow, too, had their nature walks with Grandmother and—a new addition this year—a vegetable garden the size of a truck farm to weed and fertilize and thin.
Granted, Nan Seton always had the luxury of help when her own children were young: There was an endless stream of au pairs, a cleaning woman twice a week in Manhattan and another once a week here in the country. And, until he died, there had been Richard Seton. Richard didn’t do a whole lot around either the apartment or the house in New Hampshire, and by his own admission what went on in either world between, say, seven in the morning and seven at night was a complete mystery to him. But he was very, very good at running what had been his father’s advertising agency, and then he was even better at managing the enterprise when the agency went public in the late 1970s. He never wrote a single line of copy or bought even fifteen seconds of airtime, but he created an estimable litany of frivolous but impressively glossy innovations, such as the “Button Club,” a training program for young account executives that taught them such presentation morsels as the importance of buttoning their suit coats before speaking and of using their hands when they shared marketing and media plans with their junior clients. He made sure that his more senior clients received complimentary subscriptions to Advertising Age and the Wall Street Journal. And in an era well before e-mail and digital cameras and budgets that were lean to the point of malnourishment, he gave lavish holiday parties for the companies whose advertising dollars he spent. These parties, in his opinion, were about friendship—not pandering—because in his experience a person was far less likely to fire his friend than his ad agency. Granted there were always cases of Chateau Aile d’Argent and burgundies from La Vignée Bourgogne there, too, and Richard certainly was willing to look the other way in the late 1960s and 1970s when the younger account executives and copywriters were also offering their age-appropriate clients marijuana and controlled substances that Richard knew well were illegal.
But advertising for Richard was largely about relationships, and it was a testimony to the success of his formula that in the days after he died of a heart attack at his desk at fifty-one, Nan received dozens of sumptuous arrangements of flowers, all with accompanying cards expressing condolences and signed with appropriate gravity from “All of Us” at Warner-Lambert, Freeman-Duffy, Scott Paper, Coleman-McNeil, Lever Brothers, and Procter & Gamble.
He may not have been home all that often, but he enhanced an already sizable family estate and allowed Nan and John and Catherine to go about their lives without fear that the money might someday run short or Father might complicate their carefully managed end-of-the-day routines by showing up before dinner.
In all the years that Nan had been a widow, she had not, as far as either John or Catherine could tell, gone on a single date. The children presumed this was because there was no man her age who was willing to risk his health by trying to keep up with her. Of course, in the matriarchal worlds in which she moved—the Colony Club, the Contour Club, the garden clubs in New York and New Hampshire—a man would have been a needless encumbrance in any event.
Nan’s eyes sat back a tad too far in their sockets, and without the inspired ministrations of a stylist her hair would fall flat against her skull. Her skin was deeply lined from her years in the sun, but because of the moisturizers she slathered on it at night it looked as oily as an adolescent’s in the morning. But she had been a real beauty when she was young—that was clear even now—and her face was as adorably ellipsoidal as ever. She had grown into the term she had heard used to describe her own mother a quarter century earlier and become—and she accepted this most days with grace—a handsome woman.
She stood now at the edge of the vegetable garden, the end of the hose in her hands, while inside the house she presumed her granddaughters were climbing into their swimsuits and brushing their teeth. She had already packed the car with their towels and their tennis rackets and a couple of child-sized irons and drivers. Then she bent over with a lack of decorum that only would have been surprising had someone been present and stared closely at the decimated rows of peas and string beans and beets. For a moment she presumed this was the work of a rabbit or a raccoon, but then she saw the way that some of the corn plants had been toppled and overturned so that the roots extended into the air like wet dingy mop heads. This was the work of larger animals, she decided. Almost certainly deer.
She gazed down toward the trees at the edge of the sloping fields of lupine and then straightened up. Even from here she could see three of the large yellow signs that said POSTED in a bold, block sans serif type. The notices were nailed to the trees and informed possible trespassers that there was absolutely no hunting, fishing, or trapping allowed on this property and that violators indeed would be prosecuted. The prosecution was an idle threat, but the hardware store didn’t stock any versions of the sign that didn’t include it. She’d first had the warnings put up when Charlotte was four and Willow was a toddler, and the whole extended family decided to have an old-fashioned Thanksgiving in New Hampshire instead of Manhattan. It had been the last seventy-two hours of that year’s rifle season, however, and there had been so much sniper fire in the nearby woods and fields that the grown-ups had joked grimly about living in Beirut and Charlotte had gotten scared.
The idea crossed her mind now to take the signs down before she went home in September. If she did not discourage people from hunting on her property this November, perhaps the deer would stay away next summer. Maybe the herd would figure out that predators skulked near the Victorian at the top of the hill. Yes, if the family chose to spend Thanksgiving here again they might have to live with the snap and crack of rifle fire, and perhaps a deer might even be killed within sight of the house. But obviously Willow had seen dead deer in Vermont: Surely she’d noticed the newly killed animals when they were weighed on the big outdoor scales at general stores and town offices or when the disemboweled carcasses were hung out to dry on a house’s front porch. Her own father had taken up the sport last year to vent whatever midlife steam had begun to accrue in his bones, and he’d actually spent four or five days tromping through the snow and the cold in the woods. Apparently he’d seen a doe and then a doe and a fawn but no bucks that either he could or would have shot.
His hobby was a family secret of which only she and Sara and Willow were aware. John Seton owned some kind of Adirondack brand rifle, a scope (and she’d held the little spyglass in her hands before he had attached it to the rifle barrel) that made things hundreds of yards distant look like they were a mere arm’s length away, and camouflage clothing from some company with the frightening name of Predator that was crafted from a material with the equally disturbing moniker of Stealthtex. The fabric was wind and rain resistant, and when John was wearing it in the woods he was, supposedly, invisible if the conditions were right.
Well, not completely invisible. He also wore an orange cap with earflaps for safety, and the color was such an ill-advised shade—and so visible—that it looked at first as if he had wrapped his head in police tape when he modeled it for her.
She and her daughter-in-law both hoped this was a temporary fixation, triggered largely by Sara’s amnio. When Sara and John had learned their little baby was going to be a boy, John had started babbling about how in years to come he and his son might do some real north country male bonding and bag themselves a buck. She’d presumed he was kidding, and Sara—who was on the phone with them when he called with the news—said that she wished that he were. No such luck. By the time hunting season rolled around the second Saturday in November, he had taken his Hunter Education and Safety course and gotten his hunting license for the sixteen-day rifle season.
Nan knew that her vegetarian daughter and son-in-law in Manhattan—oh, God, especially her son-in-law—could never be privy to the reality that John Seton owned a gun and hoped to use it someday to kill a deer. They would be appalled. Spencer would be particularly furious, and there was nothing more unendurable than Spencer McCullough’s self-righteous indignation. At her sixty-fifth birthday party at the Colony Club, she had overheard David Linton, a retired bank economist and the husband of one of her bridge pals, Marisa Linton, admonishing Spencer very good-naturedly about some of FERAL’s stunts, the realities of supply and demand in a free market, and how nowhere in the world was good meat more affordable than in the United States. And so when it was his turn to stand and raise his champagne flute, Spencer had toasted her warmly but then gone on to rebuke everyone who was eating the Colony Club’s beef Wellington—one of the two entrees she had chosen for the party, the other being a pasta primavera specifically for Catherine and Spencer and Charlotte—while insisting that FERAL did nothing ever but point out the obvious, and no one in the room would be eating that beef if they’d seen a cow emerge onto a slaughterhouse kill floor or been forced to witness a steel bolt being blasted into its forehead to stun it before it was butchered. She vaguely recalled him saying something next about the animal’s tongue sticking out from between its teeth in shock and incredulity, but he was (once again) becoming such a spoilsport that by then she was trying hard to tune him out.
Which brought her back to posting. John and Sara wouldn’t care if she chose to stop posting her land. If there was going to be any resistance to the idea, it was going to come from her daughter and her son-in-law. They were both not merely vegetarians, they were animal rights activists—Spencer professionally, Catherine as a reasonably enthusiastic amateur. Spencer, in fact, was something even worse than a vegetarian: He was a vegan, a word that sounded vaguely anatomic in Nan’s mind and therefore caused her a slight, unpleasant shudder whenever she heard it. Spencer’s peculiarity meant that she couldn’t even serve something as comfortably plebian as macaroni and cheese when he was visiting, because one of its two signature ingredients was made with milk and milk came from cows. It was ridiculous, in her opinion, completely ridiculous. Thank God Catherine still allowed milk and yogurt and cheese to be part of her and Charlotte’s diet.
Nevertheless, Spencer was the communications director for FERAL, a lobbying group that championed animal causes, and when he wasn’t jetting to Washington to argue against things that seemed harmless to normal people—state dairy compacts and pet stores that sold tropical birds—he was meeting with magazine editors and appearing on TV shows defending positions that more times than not completely befuddled her. Why in heaven’s name was it better for college students to drink beer than milk? Who really cared if wing tips or a wallet were made of leather: What were people supposed to do, wear plastic dress shoes? Keep their credit cards packed together in their pockets or purses with elastic bands?
And while Nan thought chimpanzees were cute and she understood that they were considerably smarter than, say, squirrels, she found her eyes glazing when Spencer would go on and on about the need to extend legal rights to chimps and gorillas and dolphins.
She knew that the A and the L in FERAL stood for animal liberation, and that FER stood for Federation. The group’s official name was the Federation for Animal Liberation. This meant, in her opinion, that the acronym should more properly be FEDAL, since the first three letters of federation were FED. Or, perhaps, they could use the first five letters of federation and call themselves FEDERAL. She thought that had a nice historical ring to it. But FERAL? It made them sound like they were a bunch of wild animals, and what could possibly be the point of that? Still, she did like the way their letterhead and their magazine and even some of their T-shirts had a portion of some poem by Ovid—though she did wish they’d chosen one that wasn’t quite so judgmental about “feasting on meat.”
Spencer was not a particularly handsome man, even if, as Nan recalled, he had been a rather good-looking college boy. But he carried himself with the confidence of someone who was striking and tall and who knew it. You could see it (as she certainly had) when he was speaking before groups of people in libraries, local YMCAs, and even the larger, more urban Rotary and Kiwanis clubs. Moreover, he was so indefatigably self-assured about his positions on . . . well, on everything . . . and so facile with statistics and stories and seemingly relevant anecdotes that it was futile to argue with him. Nevertheless, Nan was often left wondering: Did anyone really care that Pythagoras was a vegetarian? Who, other than Spencer, even knew who the Manicheans were? The only reason the family even had this ridiculous vegetable garden was because it was easier to put the effort into the earth than into trying to talk Spencer out of it: Nan and her granddaughters were now weeding and watering more for his sake than for their own. Here in the country they accommodated his diet—his family’s diet—even if it put desperate strains on Nan’s admittedly limited creativity in the kitchen, they endured his monologues at dinner, and (yes) they gardened.
But then, of course, there was that other Spencer—the gentle and loving and almost farcically good-natured man whose sincere consideration of animals made him such an impassioned and (in small doses) charismatic champion of their rights. How he had loved Catherine when he was courting her here in the country at nineteen and twenty! It was so obvious and genuine and touchingly over the top. Breakfast in bed. Bouquets of lupine and wildflowers. Enduring hours of defeat at her hands on the Contour Club tennis courts. Nan had heard stories from Spencer’s parents of the lengths to which he had gone to rescue raccoons as a child, to shelter birds with broken wings, to nurse ailing dogs and cats and (once) a neighbor’s ugly ferret. Nan needed only to recall Julys past and how Spencer would read to Charlotte and Willow for hours before the children would go to bed to be reminded of her son-in-law’s strengths. He would use voices so rambunctious and theatric that Nan would be left wondering why he hadn’t wound up an actor. Moreover, as busy as he was—he seemed to be traveling all the time—when Willow and her family would visit New York, it was invariably Spencer who would take the girls to a Broadway musical or a children’s ballet. He didn’t always make time for the small things, Nan knew, such as teaching his daughter the names of the trees that grew in Central Park or showing her how to press a fallen leaf between wax paper in the fall, but then her husband, Richard, had rarely done those sorts of things with his children, either.
The difference—and this was what alarmed Nan periodically—was his utter unwillingness to listen to others, and the way he would dismiss those who disagreed with him when it came to matters of food and meat and animal rights. All too often he seemed more interested in animals than in humans. Than in his own family. Moreover, sometimes he seemed interested in animals in the abstract—as issues and causes—rather than as individual creatures with whom he might feel a special bond. It was as if he’d lost somewhere that little boy who would rescue a raccoon because it was furry and soft and he saw in its eyes the simple spark of life.
The irony in Nan’s mind was that there had been a time when Spencer had not simply eaten like a regular person, he’d actually been a rather good cook. A chef, even! He was nineteen and he was dating her daughter, and the two of them spent the summer (the first of many) with her in New Hampshire between their freshman and sophomore years of college. It was only a year after Richard had died, and Nan was very glad to have a man around the country house so there would be someone to empty the kitchen garbage and change the lightbulbs in the ceiling fixtures—real man’s work, in her opinion. Her daughter, Catherine, was a waitress at Gerta’s Edelweiss Garden that summer, a restaurant with postcard-perfect vistas of the ski slopes at Cannon and the new condominiums at Mittersill, while Spencer worked in the kitchen at the Steer by the Shore, a steak-and-seafood restaurant, which in lieu of a view had both a dining room big enough to accommodate bus tours and the area’s first dessert bar—a novelty back then. Spencer started there over Memorial Day Weekend as a dishwasher but, through a combination of pluck and luck and the sudden arrest of the restaurant’s second chef for cocaine possession, had ascended with meteoric efficiency. By the Fourth of July it was young Spencer McCullough who was slicing the chicken breasts and cooking the lobsters and making that delicious stuffing with the secret ingredient that tasted an awful lot like Ritz crackers and that Spencer protected like a spy. That summer she would not have been surprised if someday when he finished college Spencer had enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America or Johnson & Wales with the hope of becoming a serious chef or restaurateur.
Of course he hadn’t. By late August, when he and her daughter were done with their jobs for the summer and the boy—and in so many ways then he really was still a boy—went home to see his family in Westchester before returning to college, it was clear that he would continue on the more predictable white-collar path taken by all of her children’s friends.
And, in truth, why should she have expected him eventually to go on to cooking school? It wasn’t as if Catherine ever again wanted to have anything to do with either a restaurant’s kitchen or its dining room.
Spencer still enjoyed cooking—that was clear—and he certainly enjoyed cooking here in New Hampshire. The problem was that he now cooked like a—and there was only one word for it—weirdo. She shuddered when she thought of the odd beans and curds and funguses that he considered legitimate sources of nutrition.
Behind her she heard the screen door clap shut and for a split second it had sounded to her like a gunshot, and she thought suddenly of the deer and her idea to remove the signs that forbid hunting on her property. She turned around and saw her two granddaughters racing toward her, Willow in a blue terry-cloth cover-up and her cousin in only that minuscule string thing that both Catherine and Charlotte insisted was a bathing suit. She sighed and then prepared herself for her daily battle with the older girl: The child might have only the merest hummocks for breasts, but she still could not arrive at the Contour Club dressed like a lap dancer. It was just that simple.