Chris Bohjalian: Before You Know Kindness

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 Château 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.