What the Night Knows (8 page)

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.

12

ZACH SAT AT HIS DESK WITH HIS ART TABLET, REVIEWING RECENT drawings and wondering if he might be turning into a girl. Not the way the usual bonehead in a movie goes walking alone at night in a godforsaken forest where only the terminally stupid would go walking, and he gets bitten by some godawful thing and on the next full moon he morphs into the Wolfman, with no interest anymore in vegetables or cereal grains. If Zach was becoming a girl, it was a less dramatic transformation, slow and quiet, with no thrashing or snarling or howling at the moon.

His room was certainly not a girly room; it was a shrine to the Marine Corps. Crowding the walls were images of a present-day marine in dress blues with white gloves, an F/A-18 Hornet in flight, a super-cool V-22 Osprey vertical-lift aircraft, the famous Iwo Jima flag-raising photo.… Most striking of all was a print of Tom Lovell’s horrifying but thrilling painting of World War I marines attacking German troops in close combat in Belleau Wood: poisonous mist, gas masks, bloody bayonets, facial wounds.…

If the marines would have him, Zach intended to be one of them
eventually. Even if he was turning into a girl, they accepted girls in the marines now.

His dad’s parents had been art teachers, and his mom was a big deal in some quarters of the godawful art world. Zach’s talent had two origins, and he knew he ought to use it, but the question was
What should he use it for?
He didn’t want to teach art any more than he wanted to cut off his freaking ears and make a sandwich with them. You didn’t get to kick much butt teaching art. You didn’t get to blow up a lot of things for all the right reasons. And he would never care about what the freaking art-world snobs thought of him. His mom was the only non-idiot among her idiotic art-world friends. He wasn’t as nice as his mom, didn’t have her tolerance for snotty people, and he couldn’t always see the good side of them like she could. If he ever had his own godawful art-world friends, he would end up throwing them out ten-story windows and off overpasses, just to hear them splat.

Being an actual combat marine who, during lulls in the action, found moments to sketch scenes as they had been, as no photographer could ever catch those moments—
that
struck him as important work.

Other kids his age were big on sports stars and pop singers. These days, sports stars and pop singers were as real as steroids and lip-synching. Phonies. Fakes. Something had happened to the world. Everything was plastic. It wasn’t always that way.

Zach knew the names of marine combat artists the way other kids knew pop stars. Major Alex Raymond, who had become famous for his
Flash Gordon
comic strip. Pfc. Harry Jackson, who did great work at the Battle of Tarawa. Tom Lovell, John Thomason, Mike Leahy in Vietnam …

Zach’s determination to make a life in the Corps was almost two
years old. For a long time, he didn’t give a thought as to why this enthusiasm gripped him, but lately he began to understand.

When he grew up, he didn’t want to do boring monkey work just for the bucks. He needed to be part of something where people cared about one another, would die for one another, where they set high standards, where they respected tradition, honor, truth. These were qualities of his family, and the way they lived—to their own rhythm, pursuing their enthusiasms with little interest in the fads of the day, with respect for one another that still left room for poking fun—was something he would need for the rest of his life because he was addicted to it. His family had addicted him to living with purpose and fun. When he became an adult, he wanted his working life to be as much as possible like life in the Calvino family.

And he wanted to be a marine also because of his sisters.

Naomi was hyper but smart, flighty but so talented, frustrating but funny, and sometimes she talked at you until it was like being caught in a flock of fluttering birds, nice bluebirds and canaries, but an infinite number of them, twittering forever. Life with her was often like tumbling through a humongous rotating barrel in an amusement park,
but
when you came out the other end and got your balance, you realized it was better to be in the barrel sometimes than to be stuck forever on some boring dumb-ass merry-go-round moving at like a tenth of a mile an hour with freaking organ music.

And as for Minnie—well, Minnie was Minnie. A couple years back, when Minnie came down with a mysterious illness nobody could diagnose for what seemed like forever but was probably just a week or so, Zach hadn’t been able to sleep well or draw well, or think well. Although he wasn’t sick like she was, he threw up twice, just because Minnie was sick, like a sympathy puke, though he didn’t tell anyone.

Bad things were going to happen to Naomi and Minnie because bad things happened to everyone. Zach wasn’t able to protect them from viruses and runaway trucks. But out in the wider world were a lot of evil men and insane dictators, and being a marine was a way to help protect his homeland, his home, his sisters, and their way of life.

Semper Fi
.

He hoped he wasn’t turning into a girl, because he wanted to be their brother, not their sister. As he paged through recent drawings of Laura Leigh, he wondered about his gender because, although she was seriously pretty and though he had drawn her from observation and from memory more often than Michelangelo had drawn God, Jesus, saints, and angels
combined
, he felt no stirrings of desire for her.

Well, all right, now and then there were stirrings and a couple times the stirrings were so embarrassing that, to distract himself, he chewed on ice cubes until his teeth ached.

But maybe ninety-five percent of his obsession with Laura Leigh had nothing to do with sex. Mostly he felt about her the way he felt about his sisters, but even more so. She seemed so fragile, delicate, slender, so small and vulnerable that Zach worried about her, which struck him as weird because, although petite, she wasn’t a
dwarf
with brittle-bone disease, she was a normal size for a thirteen-year-old girl. He wanted to protect her, wanted her always to be happy, wanted everyone to see in her what he saw in her, not just beauty but also merit, virtue, kindness, and a precious something he couldn’t even name. His feelings for Laura Leigh were so tender and affectionate that they didn’t seem to be the kind of masculine things that a boy should be feeling. Sometimes the sight of her left him breathless, and sometimes when he was drawing her from memory, his throat grew so tight that he couldn’t swallow, and when at last he did swallow, though it was just spit, he sounded as if he were a pig taking
down an entire apple. Surely only girls—and boys turning into girls—were swept away by their emotions like this.