What the Night Knows

11

JOHN SAT AT THE HEAD OF THE DINING-ROOM TABLE, NICOLETTE to his right, Minnie to his left and boosted on a pillow. Naomi sat beside her little sister, Zachary across from Naomi.

For the first time, the sight of his family gathered in one place didn’t at once warm John but instead inspired a cold tightness in his chest, a greasy sliding sensation in his stomach. The dining room seemed too bright, although the lighting was the same as ever at dinner, and every window invited hostile observation. The stainless-steel flatware flanking his plate had the sinister gleam of surgical instruments. His wineglass was indeed glass, a potential source of jagged shards.

For a moment, this curious uneasiness threatened to disorient him—until he understood the cause of it. Together, the family was five targets clustered, therefore vulnerable to quick annihilation. Although he had no incontestable proof that any enemy waged war against him, he was thinking like a man embattled.

His hyperbolic suspicion embarrassed him, and more important, he recognized that if not controlled, it would cloud his judgment. If he permitted his imagination to paint a gloss of evil on all things, he would provide camouflage for true evil. Besides, if you painted the devil on the walls often enough, you got the devil on the stairs, his footsteps approaching.

When John allowed his children to delight him, they soon lifted from him this pall of foreboding.

After grace, during the salad course, the primary subject discussed was the brilliant, the magnificent, the incomparable, the current that’s-who-I-want-to-be-when-I-grow-up, Louisa May Alcott, immortal author of Little Women, which Naomi had finished reading just that afternoon. She wanted to be Louisa May Alcott, and she wanted also to be Jo, the young writer in the story, but of course she wanted to be herself, embodying all the Alcott-Jo qualities while writing and living in her unique Naomi style.

Naomi seemed destined, as an adult, to appear on Broadway in the title role of a revival of Peter Pan. She contained both a tomboy who yearned for swashbuckling adventures and a perpetually breathless girl who saw romance and magic everywhere she looked. She wanted to know how to throw a perfect sinking curveball every bit as much as she wanted to know how to arrange roses to the best effect, and she believed both in Truth and in Tinker Bell. As likely to dance along a hallway as to run it, more likely to sing away a sadness than to sulk, she exhausted the possibilities of each new enthusiasm just as inevitably another one came along to captivate her.

As Walter whisked away the salad plates, Zachary said, “Little Women sounds like a giant bore. Why can’t you go nuts about vampire novels like every other dorky sixth-grade girl? Then we’d really have something worth talking about at the table.”

“I don’t find the living dead the least bit attractive,” Naomi said. “When I’m old enough to have a boyfriend, I don’t want one who drinks my blood. Imagine his bad breath and what a mess his teeth would be. All these girls swooning over hunky vampires, what they really want is to give away their freedom, to be controlled and told what to do and not have to think—and never die, of course. It’s sick is what it is. I don’t want to be a forever-young living corpse, I want to be Louisa May Alcott.”

Minnie said, “It’s stupid how she has three names.”

“We all have three names,” Naomi said. “You’re Minette Eugenia Calvino.”

“But nobody calls me all three, like you guys said a thousand times already ‘Louisa May Alcott, Louisa May Alcott.’ It’s stupid.”

“Celebrity-shooters always have three names,” Zach said. “Like Mark David Chapman and Lee Harvey Oswald. There’s a bunch of others, but I can’t think of them right now.”

“Good,” his mother said. “I’d be very disturbed to have a thirteen-year-old son obsessed with three-name celebrity-shooters.”

“Zach is totally obsessed with the United States Marines,” Naomi said. “He’s got like eighty-six books about them.”

“I only have thirty-one books about them,” Zach protested, “and I’m not obsessed with the marines. I just like military history is all. Lots of people are interested in military history.”

“Relax,” Naomi said. “I wasn’t implying your interest in the marines is a homosexual thing. After all, you’re also obsessed with Laura Leigh Highsmith worse than you are the marines.”

“Three names,” Minnie observed.

John said, “Who’s Laura Leigh Highsmith?”

Minnie said, “Is she related to Louisa May Alcott?”

“She’s just a girl in my human-head class.”

The children were primarily home-schooled. For educational purposes, Naomi went out of the house only to music lessons and to junior-orchestra practices. Zach attended group lessons twice a week as part of an art-institute program for gifted children. Currently he was enrolled in a pencil class to learn the fine points of drawing the human head.

Teasingly, Naomi said, “Hey, does Laura Leigh Highsmith draw portraits of you?”

“She’s just a challenging subject,” Zach said. “Hard to get right. Other than that, she’s nobody.”

“Are you gonna marry her?” Minnie asked.

“Of course not,” Zach said. “Why would I marry a nobody?”

“What’s wrong with your face?” Minnie asked.

Naomi said, “It’s sure not sunburn. He’s blushing.”

“I’m not blushing,” Zach declared.

“Then it’s a bad rash,” Minnie said. “Mom, he’s got a bad rash.”

“Permission to leave the table,” Zach said.

John said, “Denied. You’ve eaten only a salad.”

“I’ve lost my appetite.”

“It’s the rash,” Minnie said. “Maybe it’s conflacious.”

“Contagious,” Naomi corrected.

Minnie said, “Permission to leave the table.”

“Why do you want to leave the table?” John asked.

“I don’t want no rash.”

“He’s drawn at least ten thousand portraits of Laura Leigh Highsmith,” Naomi revealed.

Zachary had inherited his mother’s talent—and his father’s grimace. “What’re you doing, snooping in my drawing tablets?”

“It’s not like reading a diary, for heaven’s sake. I like to look at your drawings, you’re so good, and I can’t draw for beans. Though if I was a good artist, I’d draw all kinds of things, variety, not a gazillion portraits of Laura Leigh Highsmith.”

“You always exaggerate everything,” Zach said. “First it’s ten thousand, now a gazillion.”

“Well,” said Naomi, “it’s at least a hundred.”

“A hundred’s a whole lot less than a gazillion.”

Nicolette said, “You’ve drawn a hundred portraits of the same girl, and this is the first I’ve heard of her?”

“That’s a really, really bad rash,” Minnie said.

For the main course, everyone but Minnie enjoyed the carbonata with polenta and vegetables. Walter served the girl spaghetti and meatballs because she had the culinary stubbornness of the average eight-year-old.

The conversation turned to Italian history, possibly because Naomi noted, rightly or wrongly, that the Chinese invented spaghetti, not the Italians, and Minnie wanted to know who invented meatballs, and to forestall any further diminishment of their Italian heritage, John invented a colorful story that placed the origin of meatballs squarely in Rome. They talked about Michelangelo lying on his back to paint frescoes on ceilings (according to Minnie, here was another guy with three names—Michael Ann Jello) and about Leonardo da Vinci inventing airships that would have flown if only the technology had existed to build them. Because there was no Italian front for the marines in World War I and because during World War II they served primarily in the Pacific theater, Zachary changed the subject to France in general and specifically to the Battle of Belleau Wood, one of the finest hours in the history of the Corps, while Naomi hummed “The Marine Hymn” and Minnie made surprisingly quiet machine-gun sounds to enhance her brother’s anecdotes of war.

For dessert they had lemon cake with layers of ricotta and chocolate. Minnie did not ask for vanilla ice cream instead.

The five of them washed, dried, and put away the dishes without breakage. Unthinkingly, Naomi pirouetted with a stack of clean salad plates, but catastrophe did not ensue.

Had they eaten earlier, there would have been games or contests or a story read aloud. But private time had arrived. Kisses, good-nights, and wishes for sweet dreams were exchanged, and suddenly John found himself alone, walking the ground floor to check that all the exterior doors were locked.

Standing in the dark at a front window, he watched the lamplit street bubble as if boiling. He had forgotten the rain, but it still fell, without pyrotechnics now, straight down in the windless night. The trees were flourished silhouettes, the yard black. The graceful arc of the porch, styled as an elongated temple portico, was crowded with shadows, but none of them moved or revealed a gleaming eye.