Searching for Caleb

8

An inferior class of people tended to travel by bus. Daniel Peck glared at them: three sailors, a colored boy in a crocheted cap, and a sallow, weasely woman with four children whom she kept slapping and pinching. One of the children stuck out his tongue. “Look at there. Did you see that?” Daniel asked his granddaughter.

She glanced up from her magazine.

“Child made a face at me.”

She smiled.

“Well, there’s nothing funny about it, Justine.”

Whatever she said, he didn’t quite catch. It bothered him to go motoring with his hearing aid on.

They were returning from Parthenon, Delaware, where finally after a great deal of tedious correspondence, he had located the youngest son of the past headmaster of Salter Academy. A Mr. Dillard. Mr. Dillard had already informed him by letter that he had never kept in touch with any of his father’s students (who were older than he and not likely to be among the living anyway, he said tactlessly), but Daniel Peck knew that memory was not such a well-ordered affair. Sometimes little things could jog it, he knew, sometimes so small a thing as the smell of clover or the sight of a boy wobbling on a bicycle. So he had come in person, bringing his photograph of Caleb and prepared to offer any detail he could think of, a whole wealth of detail flattened and dried in his mind. “He was a tardy boy, always tardy. Perhaps your father mentioned having a student with a tardiness problem. And let’s see, he was extremely sociable. Surely if there had ever been a class reunion of any sort he would have attended. Or just come visiting, don’t you know. Perhaps come visiting your father years later, he would do that sort of thing. Can you remember such a visitor? Tall boy, blond, this picture doesn’t quite show. He had a habit of tilting his head when listening to people. If you were a child he passed on his way to your father’s study, for instance, he would most surely have spoken to you. Though he was not a smiling person. Did you see him? Do you know?”

But Mr. Dillard did not know. A stooped, red-faced man who wouldn’t speak up. There were cartoon fishes all over his bathroom wallpaper. His wife was nice, though. Lovely lady. She offered them homemade butter mints, the first he had tasted in years, and gave Justine the recipe on an index card.

He set his face toward Justine, waiting till she would feel it and raise her head again. “Yes, Grandfather,” she said.

“What’d you do with that recipe?”

She looked blank.

“Recipe card Mrs. Dillard gave you.”

“Oh!”

“Don’t tell me you lost it.”

“Oh no. No, I—”

He didn’t know the rest of what she said but he could see her plainly enough, rummaging through her crushed straw bag and then her dress pockets, one of which was torn halfway off. Gone, then. He would never have those fine butter mints again.

He removed a large leather wallet from the inner breast pocket of his suit coat. He took out a cream-colored envelope and a sheet of stationery. The envelope was already stamped and addressed. He was very well organized. His stepmother had taught him years ago: compose your card of thanks on the carriage ride home. Never allow an hour to elapse before writing a bread-and-butter note. “Then why,” Duncan had asked as a child, “don’t we write the whole letter ahead of time?” But no, that wouldn’t do at all. You had to mention something personal that had occurred during the visit, don’t you see. As Daniel did now, after frowning a moment at his pen.

When he got back to Caro Mill or wherever he would type a copy of this note for his files. He liked to keep a record of all correspondence, particularly that regarding Caleb. His old Underwood typewriter, with its metal keys and high black forehead, was forever set up on the bureau by his bed; his file cabinet was packed solid with letters of inquiry, thank you letters, follow-up letters, for how many years back? How many years?

Well, his stepmother died in 1958. That was a hard time. She was the last person on this earth who called him Daniel. He had not realized that until she died. She had journeyed through all his life with him, minus the first few months: seventy-seven years. The only person who remembered his kid soldier doll, and his father’s way of widening his eyes when displeased, and the rough warm Belgian blocks that used to pave the streets downtown. She left her house to Justine, and he knew why. (She was uneasy in her mind about that girl, the sweetest of his granddaughters and the most defenseless, dragged from pillar to post by harum-scarum Duncan, whom marriage had not toned down in the least.) But for months after her death Daniel would not enter her house or look at it, and although he allowed Esther and the twins to move in he told them to stay out of her bedroom. He would sort her things later, he said; he was just a little busy right now. He walked around feeling wounded, struck as if for the first time by the fact that the world kept progressing and people aged and died and nothing in life was reversible. Where had it all gone to? Whatever happened to that little brown German step-grandfather he used to have? Or Sarah Cantleigh’s family, who cried whenever they saw him, were they all dead by now? Where was that silent, musical brother of his with the tilted head?

But he was a sensible man, and in time he recovered. Then he sent for Sulie with her ring of keys. They went to sort Laura’s belongings. “Oh, my soul,” Sulie kept saying. “My soul.” She had been mad at Laura for decades, but she looked stricken as she gazed around the dark, stale room. Her eyes were triangular and the cords stood out in her neck. She had a wrinkled face like a yellow paper kite. “So this is what it all come to,” she said.

“Now if you don’t stop that,” Daniel told her, “you can just go on back to the kitchen, hear?”

He left the clothes for the women to deal with; that was none of his business. What concerned him were her desk drawers, jewelry boxes, and knick-knack shelves, which held little mementos that should be parceled out among the family. He opened drawers guiltily, shamed by the puffs of lavender scent that rose from everything as if she were still in the room somewhere. “Well, I just don’t know,” he said to each new object they found, and then when he had laid it aside Sulie would pick it up and say, “Miss Sarah always admire this,” or “Miss Bea always saying how she wish she had one like it.”

“Take it to her then. Fine. Fine,” said Daniel.

He kept nothing for himself. Those neat drawers, with everything arranged so precisely and all for nothing, took away his interest in life. And maybe Sulie’s, too. At any rate, when he offered her the oval brooch that contained a plait of Laura’s mother’s hair and had only one little thing wrong with the clasp, Sulie’s mouth turned downward. “I don’t want it,” she said.

“Suit yourself,” he told her. Not everyone would put up with Suite’s rudeness the way he did.

In a desk drawer behind a stack of stationery he found an ancient brittle advertisement for Baum’s Fine Cutlery. Beneath it, an envelope that looked as if it had been handled a great deal. Inside was a photograph of Caleb playing the cello in a stable loft.

Now, where did that come from?

He had never seen it before, but from the poor focus and the haphazard composition he guessed that it was the work of Margaret Rose that summer she got her Brownie. For a few months she had wandered everywhere, photographing the most unlikely things: Sulie stringing beans, Sarah on her rocking horse, Lafleur Boudrault playing cigar-box guitar and Mark with a mouthful of honeysuckle blossoms. (Daniel had known she was gone for good when he found all her photos of the children missing. But enough of that.) He peered at Caleb’s blurred, sharp-featured face. So far as he knew this was the only picture of Caleb in existence. Not counting the one in the album: age two, wearing a ruffled dress and holding an open book he could not possibly have read. And of course all traces of Margaret Rose had been systematically destroyed long ago. Yet in a sense this was a picture of her too, a permanent record of her hasty way of doing things; and her presence could be inferred from the head-on, quizzical look Caleb directed to the camera holder — an expression he reserved for Margaret Rose. Daniel passed a hand over his eyes. “I believe that will be all for today, Sulie,” he said.

“What, you quitting?”

“For now.”

“Leaving this mess any which old way?”

“Later I’ll tend to it.”

When he left she was poking the piles of belongings with angry, crabbed hands, muttering beneath her breath. He didn’t care to hear what she was saying.

Then for several evenings in a row he sat alone in his thought he was up to. Caleb was best forgotten. He was surely dead by now. What did it matter what note he had played on a summer’s day in 1910?

When Justine visited home that August, she came to where he sat in his slat chair beneath an oak tree. She kissed his cheek and drew back and looked at him. He could tell she had heard something. They had all been discussing him behind his back. He snorted. “You know, of course, that I am non compos mentis,” he told her.

She went on studying him, as if she took what he had said seriously. A literal-minded girl, Justine. Always had been.

“Could I see Caleb?” she asked finally.

“Pardon?”

He thought he had heard wrong.

“Your picture of Caleb.”

“The others are asking not to see it.”

“But I don’t even know what he looks like,” she said.

He frowned at her. Well, no, of course she wouldn’t. Probably didn’t know much of anything about him. Laura never let his name cross her lips; he seldom had himself; and to the others Caleb was nearly forgotten, a distant grownup uncle whom they had never found very interesting.

“Well,” Daniel said.

He drew out the photograph, protected now by glass.

“My brother,” he said.

“I see,” said Justine.

“Generally he did not go about in his shirtsleeves, however.”

Justine bent over the photograph. Her lowered eyelids reminded him of wings. “He looks like you,” she said.

“But his eyes were brown.”

“His face is the same.”

“Yes, I know,” said Daniel, and he sighed. He took back the picture. “The others, you see, they don’t count him any more. To them he’s a deserter.”

Justine said something he couldn’t catch.

“Eh? To me,” he said, “he is still a member here. He bedroom studying the photograph, testing the new feeling of sorrow that drove straight through his ribcage. And when that was absorbed (not lessened, just adjusted to) he became, he admitted, a little crazy. He began wondering if this photo didn’t have some secret message to it. It was impossible for such an object just to be, wasn’t it? He studied the angle of Caleb’s hat, the set of his cello, the shreds left on the stable wall by some old poster. What was the significance? Meanwhile his bachelor son and his two spinster daughters whispered downstairs, wondering what he could be doing. When Laura May knocked on his door, he jumped and shoved the photo into his pocket. All she found was her father in his easy chair with his arms folded unnaturally across his front.

Then he went to Lucy, who played a little piano still. He pulled her aside one day when she was counting Mason jars in the pantry. “Lucy,” he said, “you know music.”

“Oh, Father Peck, I—”

“Look here. What note is this man playing?”

He showed her the photo. Surprise set little sharp pleats across her forehead. “Why, who—” she said.

“What note is he playing?”

“Oh, well, I don’t — actually, it doesn’t look to me as if he’s playing any note.”

“What? Speak up.”

“Not any note.”

“Why, how is that possible? No note at all? I never heard of such a thing.”

“It looks to me as if he’s just resting his bow on the strings, Father Peck.”

“But that would be ridiculous.”

“Oh, no, it’s really quite—”

“I never heard of such a thing,” he said, and then he slammed out of the pantry.

Already he knew he had made a mistake. For Lucy, of course, had to go and tell Two, and Two out of all the family was the most certain to recognize a description of Caleb. Then everybody knew, and everybody asked him what he goes back to nearly as long ago as I can recollect. I just like to think of him, is all. What’s wrong with that?”

“Not a thing,” Justine said.

“I would give all the remaining years of my life if I could set eyes on him again.”

She said something else. He took a swipe at the air, protesting the curtain of muffled sound that separated them.

“If I could just walk to church with him once more,” he told her, “only this time, paying closer attention, don’t you see. If I could pass by the Salter Academy and look in the window and see him wave, or hear him play that foolish messy music of his on the piano in the parlor — if they could just give me back one little scrap of time, that’s all I ask!”

“Oh, well,” said Justine. “Come around to the front, Grandfather, see how Meg’s grown.” And then she took him by the hand, so that he had to rise and follow. In a way, he was a little disappointed in Justine. He had thought she might understand his viewpoint, but if she did she didn’t let on.

In November of that year, on a cold, waterlogged day, he received an envelope postmarked Honora, Maryland, where Justine was living at the time. There was no letter, only a clipping from the Honora Herald, a whole page devoted to education. He was puzzled. Education did not much interest him. But wait: at the bottom was a very old-fashioned photograph of rows and rows of young boys. The caption said: The Good Old DaysAbove, the author’s own school, Salter Academy in Baltimore, around the turn of the century. Note gaslights along the walls. Author is in seated row, second from left.

Daniel took off for Honora within the hour, driving his V-8 Ford. He arrived at Justine’s house waving the clipping. Justine was in the kitchen reading some lady’s future — an occupation he and all the family preferred to ignore. “Never mind that,” he told her. “I want to see Ashley Higham.”

“Who’s Ashley Higham?”

“The man who wrote this piece, of course.”

“Oh, then you do know him!” Justine said.

“No I don’t know him, don’t know him from Adam, but it says right here he went to Salter Academy, doesn’t it? Says this is him seated, second from left, and not an arm’s length away from him is my own brother Caleb isn’t it?”

“Is that right?” said Justine. She set down her cards and got up to have a look. So did the lady, not that it was any of her business.

“Now all I’ve got to do is find Ashley Higham,” Daniel said.

“Oh, well, Grandfather. I don’t really know where—”

“I know,” said the lady.

So it was the lady who led the way to Ashley Higham. And Mr. Higham did, in fact, remember Caleb well, but had not seen him since graduation day in 1903. However, he had a remarkable mind and could reel off the name of every boy, his shaky white index finger slowly traversing the rows of faces. Daniel recorded each name on a sheet of paper. Later he would copy them into a pocket-sized ring notebook that he carried with him everywhere, gradually stuffing it fatter and fatter. For one thing led to another, one man remembered another who had been a friend of Caleb’s and that man remembered Caleb’s elocution teacher, who turned out to be deceased but his grandson in Pennsylvania had saved all his correspondence and from that Daniel found the name of the geography teacher, and so on. His files began filling up. His Ford clocked more miles in a year than it had in all its past life. And bit by bit, as the rest of the family grew more disapproving (first arguing reasonably, then trying to distract him with television and scrapbooks and homemade pie, finally stealing his car keys whenever his back was turned) he began staying for longer periods of time with Justine. Only visiting, of course. It would never do for Caleb to come home unexpectedly and find him vanished without a trace. His house still waited for him in Baltimore, his daughters still kept his room made up. But Justine was the only one who would hop into the car with him at a moment’s notice, and go anywhere, and talk to anyone and interpret all the mumbled answers. And when he was discouraged, Justine was the one who bolstered his confidence again.

For he did get discouraged, at first. At first he was in such a hurry. He thought he was right around the corner from success, that was why. Then when he traveled clear across the state to find Caleb’s oldest, dearest friend and learned that he had last seen Caleb in 1909, he grew morose and bitter. “I always assumed,” he told Justine, “that people keep in touch, that if they lost touch they go back and pick it up again, don’t you know. Of course I am more a family man myself, family’s been my social life. But I would suppose that if you just watched a man’s best friend long enough, you would be certain to see the man himself eventually. Well, not Caleb. In fifty years he has not once gone back to pay a call, and his friend has never done a thing about it. What do you make of that?”

Justine said, “Never mind, Grandfather. It will work out.” (Was she speaking professionally?) And the next morning she was perfectly willing to set off again, cheerful as ever, never losing patience. So there was no need to hurry after all. He began to relax. He began to enjoy the search itself, the endless rattling rides, the motionless blue sky outside the window of his train. (For they had quickly switched to railroad, as his deafness had caused several near accidents and Justine’s driving terrified him.) In the old days, merely a business trip to New York had made him feel like a ball of yarn rolling down the road, unwinding his tail of homesickness behind him in a straight line back to Roland Park. But now he learned to concentrate solely on the act of traveling. He liked to imagine that Caleb himself had ridden this very train. He bobbled along on the Southern Railroad Line or the B & O, on dusty plush seats, occasionally stretching his legs on some small-town platform where, perhaps, Caleb had stood before him. And he returned home as confident as when he left, for there was always time to search further, next week or next month or whenever he felt up to it.

If Duncan minded this permanent visit, he never said so. In the beginning Daniel had asked him outright. (Well, as outright as he could get.) “Nowadays, people seem to prefer a minimum of adults in one household, have you noticed?” he had said. But Duncan only smiled. “Some do, some don’t,” he said. Another of those unexplained remarks of his. He did it on purpose. Daniel mulled for several days, and then he went to Justine. “Duncan of course has never kept close family ties,” he told her, and waited, trustingly, for her to understand. She did.

“That’s true,” she said, “but he hasn’t said anything so far.”

And Daniel was careful to see that he never gave Duncan reason to. He held back from advice (which Lord knows the boy could have used) and praise and criticism. He accepted every change of address without question, although none of them were the least bit necessary. Didn’t it occur to Duncan that other people had low periods too, and just sat them out instead of packing up bag and baggage? You endure, you manage to survive, he had never heard of someone so consistently refusing to. But never mind, he didn’t say a word. He went uncomplainingly to each new town, he accepted Justine’s half-hearted cooking and cleaning, which were, he assumed, the natural result of failing to give a woman any permanence in her life. Why should she bother, in those shabby, limp houses that looked flung down, that seemed to be cowering in expectation of the next disaster? And meanwhile Laura’s fine place was sitting empty. (He didn’t count Esther and the twins living there, for really they belonged at home with their parents.) But leave it be, leave it be. The only change he made in their lives was to deed his Ford to them once he quit driving. It made him nervous to ride about in the Graham Paige, for which Duncan had to haunt antique shows every time a part wore out. “But I don’t like Fords,” Duncan said. “I have a deep-seated hatred of Fords,” and for half a year they had been a two-car family, Justine darting about in the Ford and Duncan in the Graham Paige, whistling cheerfully and looking down from time to time to watch the highway skating along beneath the hole in the floorboards. The engine, he said, was in fine shape, and no doubt it was, for Duncan was an excellent mechanic. But you have to have something to put an engine in, not this collection of green metal lace and sprung springs; and on moving day that year, without a word, Duncan had left it sitting in front of the house and driven off in the U-Haul. His grandfather pretended not to notice. He was a tactful man.

He lived in his own tiny, circular world within their larger one. While they moved up and down the eastern seaboard, made their unaccountable decisions, took up their strange acquaintances and then lost them and forgot them, Daniel Peck buttoned his collarless shirt and fastened his pearl-gray suspenders and surveyed his white, impassive face in the bedroom mirror. He wound his gold watch. He tidied his bed. He transformed even his journeys, the most uncertain part of his life, into models of order and routine and predictability. For Justine was always with him, he always had the window seat, she read her National Geographic, they carried on their spasmodic, elliptical conversations over the noise of the road. Now they had to ride the buses more and more often, since that was all most towns had these days. They would take long circuitous routes in order to join up someplace, somehow, with a railroad, and even then it was usually Amtrak, a garish untrainlike train where nothing went right, where certainly Caleb had never set foot in his life. But still Daniel traveled calm and expressionless, his hands on his knees, a ten-dollar bill pinned inside his undershirt, and his granddaughter’s hat brim comfortingly steadfast in the righthand corner of his vision.

They were drawing close to what’s-its-name, Caro Mill. He noticed people rising to put their coats on, and lifting suitcases down from the rack. He noticed within himself a sudden feeling of emptiness. So they were back again, were they? He sighed. Justine looked up again from her magazine.

“We didn’t get much done,” he told her.

“Why, no.”

To her it didn’t matter. She thought he felt the same, he had ridden content beside her for so many years now. But lately he had had a sense of impatience, as in the old days when he first began his search. Did that mean he was drawing close to Caleb? Once he almost asked her outright for a reading from her cards — ridiculous business. Of course he had stopped himself in time. Now he stared bleakly out the window at a jumble of service stations and doughnut shops. “So this is where we’re headed,” he said.

“What?”

“It’s not much of a place to come back to.”

“Oh—” said Justine, and then something else he couldn’t catch, but he knew it would be cheerful. Justine did not seem to be easily disappointed. Which was fortunate. Whereas he himself was leaden with disappointment, sinking fast. He felt there was something hopeless about the deep orange sunset glowing beyond an auto junkyard. “Grandfather?” Justine asked, in her most carrying tone. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, certainly.”

The bus wheezed past a dismal hotel with tattered windowshades. It stopped in front of the Caro Mill Diner. Place couldn’t have a regular terminal, no. Out they had to climb, in the middle of the street. The driver did not so much as give Justine a hand down the steps, or either of the other ladies; Daniel had to do it. He touched his temple for each one in turn as he let go of her arm. “Why, thank you,” one lady told him. The other didn’t say a word, or else he missed it.

In front of the diner sat the Ford, three feet from a hydrant, battered and dusty and bearing a long new dent in the rear bumper. He studied the damage. In the old days people left notes about such things, giving their names and telephone numbers. Not any more. When he finally climbed into the car he said, “Conscience has vanished.”

“Excuse me?”

Justine looked at him, one hand outstretched toward her own door which was flapping open and snarling traffic. “What’s vanished?”

“Conscience, I said. They dent your bumper and don’t even leave a note.”

“Perhaps I,” said Justine, and something else.

“No, if you had done it I would have noticed. Besides, you’ve had this week’s accident.” His little joke. He laughed, covering his mouth with his fist to turn it into a cough.

Then, wham! He was jarred and knocked into the windshield. Aches and pains started up all over, instantly. It seemed that someone had reached down a gigantic hand and flung him like a doll. “Grandfather?” Justine asked. There was a long red welt on the inside of her arm, and a few dots of blood. Just past her, a car had stopped and a man was climbing out. And where the door had been swinging open there was nothing now at all, just clear blank air and then the man’s angry face. The man was shouting but all his words were a blur. It didn’t matter; Daniel was just relieved to see the cause of his shake-up. Of course, a door torn off! Yet he continued to feel disoriented. When the man had driven away, and Justine stepped out to drag the door to the trunk and heave it in, he was still so dazed that he didn’t offer to help. He watched numbly as she slid behind the wheel again. “At least we’re well ventilated,” she told him. A strange thing to say, or perhaps he had misunderstood. He wished he were home. He raced through the hallways of his mind calling out for Laura, his father, Caleb, Margaret Rose. But really he should never have married Margaret Rose. A shared background was the important thing. If he had not been such a fool for her chuckling laugh and the tender, subtle curve at the small of her back he would have made a more sensible choice, a person he had known all his life. Who was that little girl who used to come visiting with her parents? Melissa, Melinda? But he had wanted someone new and surprising. A terrible mistake. How he hated Margaret Rose! The thought of her made him grind his teeth. He would like to know where she was now so that he could do something dreadful to her, humiliate her in front of all her fancy, tinkling friends. But no, she was dead. He was so disappointed to remember. As usual she had done something first, run ahead of him laughing and looking back at him over her shoulder, and for once he could not refuse to follow.

“Once you’re alive, there’s no way out but dying,” he told Justine.

She looked over at him.

“You’ve set a thing in motion, you see.”

“It’s like being pregnant,” said Justine. Of course she couldn’t really have said that. His ears were bad. His mind was bad. He was going to have to get a hold of himself. He straightened his back and looked out the window, a respectable elderly gentleman admiring the view as they rattled homeward.

Meg Peck and the Reverend Arthur Milsom were sitting in the living room waiting for Meg’s parents. Or Arthur was sitting; Meg kept moving around. First she chose the armchair because she wanted to look proper and adult. Then she thought it was more natural to sit next to Arthur on the couch. They were about to ask permission to get married; what would they be doing across the room from each other?

Arthur had on his clerical collar, which wasn’t absolutely required but it looked very nice. He was a young, pale, tense man, small but wiry. When he was nervous he cracked his knuckles and his brown eyes grew so dark and sober that he seemed to be glaring. “Don’t be nervous,” Meg told him sitting back down on the couch. She reached over and took his damp hand.

This visit had been planned for weeks. The first Monday after she turned eighteen, he said, he would come talk to her parents. (Monday was a slow day at the church.) They had worked it out by letter. It was Arthur’s feeling that Duncan was the important one, but as Meg pointed out they needed Justine there to smooth things over. For certainly Duncan would be at his sharpest. He didn’t like Arthur. (How could anyone not like Arthur?) What they hadn’t counted on was Justine’s vanishing, taking Grandfather on one of his trips. Now there was no telling when she would be back, and meanwhile Duncan was coming home from work at any minute. They would have to handle him alone after all.

Meg always thought of her parents as Duncan and Justine, although she didn’t call them that. It might have been due to the way they acted. They were not very parent-like. She loved them both, but she had developed a permanent inner cringe from wondering how they would embarrass her next. They were so—extreme. So irresponsible! They led such angular, slap-dash lives, always going off on some tangent, calling over their shoulders for her to come too. And for as long as Meg could remember she had been stumbling after, picking up the trail of cast-off belongings and abandoned projects. All she really wanted was to live like other people. She tried to keep the house neat, like her friends’ houses, and to put flowers in the vases and to hide, somehow, whatever tangle of tubes and electrical wires Duncan was working on at the moment. But then it seemed so hopeless when she knew how soon they would be moving on. “We’re nomads,” Justine told her, “think of it that way”—as if making it sound romantic would help. But there was nothing romantic about this tedious round of utility deposits, rental contracts, high school transcripts and interrupted magazine subscriptions. “He’s ruining our lives!” she told Justine. Justine looked astonished. “But Meggie darling, we can’t be the ones to say—” Then Meg’s anger would extend to her mother, too, who was so gullible and so quick to give in, and she closed herself up in her room (if they were in a house where she had a room) and said no more.

She kept herself occupied with sewing, or pasting pictures in her scrapbook full of model homes — French windows and carpeted kitchens and white velvet couches. She straightened up her closet with all her shoes set side by side and pointing in the same direction. She ironed her own dresses, as she had since she was nine. (Justine thought there was no point to ironing, as long as things were clean.) At the age of ten she had baked her first cake, which everyone admired but no one ate because they were too busy rushing off somewhere; they seemed to live on potato chips from vending machines. Nothing ever worked on a schedule. She was encouraged to bring her friends home at any hour of the day or night. “This family is not a closed unit,” Duncan told her — apparently his only rule, if you could call it that. But how could she bring friends when her parents were so certain to make fools of themselves? “Oh, I just love your folks,” girls were always saying, little dreaming what agony it would be to have them for their own. For Justine might be found barefoot and waving her dirty playing cards, or sitting at the kitchen table with three or four unsuitable friends, or racing about looking for her broken straw carry-all in order to go to the diner whose food she preferred to her own. She had a high-handed, boisterous way of acting sometimes and she was likely to refer to Duncan publicly as “Meg’s second cousin,” her idea of a joke. And Duncan! Spouting irrelevant, useless facts, thinking out loud in startling ways, leaving her friends stunned and stupid-looking. His idea of a joke was to hang idiotic newspaper and ladies’ magazine pages all over the house, bearing what he thought were appropriate messages. On Justine’s birthday he pasted up a bank ad saying WE’RE INCREASING OUR INTEREST, and after Meg spent too much money on a dress (only because she wanted to look like the other girls for a change, not all homemade and tacked together) she found a page Scotch-taped to her closet door:

Then she had snatched up the page and stalked in to where Duncan sat inventing a new keyboard arrangement for the typewriter. “Act your age!” she told him. But when he looked up his face was so surprised and unguarded, and she saw that he really was aging, there were dry lines around his eyes and two tiny crescents left by his wide, dippy smile. So she laid the paper down gently, after all, and went away defeated.

Now she sighed, remembering, and Arthur squeezed her fingers. “In an hour this will all be over,” he told her.

“It will never be over.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We’re going to be demolished,” she said. “I feel it.”

But now she had insulted him. He straightened up, which made him look smaller. He said, “Don’t you think I can have a reasonable discussion with my own girl’s parents?”

“Yes but—”

“You forget, I’m a minister. I’ve convinced families who swore they’d cut off their daughters without a penny. I’ve convinced fathers who claimed that—”

“But it wasn’t you their daughters were marrying.”

“Now don’t worry. If worst comes to worst we’ll just go away quietly and have the ceremony in my own church.”

But neither of them wanted that. They wanted everything perfect. Arthur wanted her to be happy, and Meg would only be happy with a white dress that dipped to a point at the waist, Sarah Cantleigh’s veil, and a bouquet of baby’s breath. She wanted to walk down the aisle of the family’s church in Baltimore where her mother had been married; she would like to be guarded by rows and rows of aunts and uncles and second cousins, grave Peck eyes approving her choice. Bridal showers, long-grained rice, Great-Grandma’s sixpence in her shoe. Arthur waiting beside the minister, turning his pale, shiny face to watch her procession. Whenever he looked at her, she felt queenly. All right, so he was not a handsome man, but would a handsome man treat her as adoringly as Arthur Milsom did? When they went to lectures she looked at the lecturer and Arthur looked at her. She felt the thin moon of his face turned upon her. He assisted her in and out of cars, through doorways, up the shallowest steps, his hands just barely brushing her. (The aunts would love his manners.) He devoted his entire attention to her, so much so that sometimes, he said, he worried about his jealous God. Nobody had ever, in all her life, felt that way about her before.

A car drove up in front of the house, chugging and grinding familiarly. “There’s Mama now!” Meg said. “Look, she beat him home after all.” She rose and went out to the porch. Justine was still seated behind the wheel, straight-backed and prim, unguarded by even the vestige of a door. The car looked like a cross-section of something. But, “Certainly makes it easier to get in and out!” she called to Meg, and she waved gaily and stepped onto the sidewalk. “Coming, Grandfather?”

“Mama, I want to talk to you,” Meg said.

But then up spoke Dorcas Britt, the lady next door, calling over the hedge in a large, rich voice that seemed to mock Meg’s. “Justine, honey! I got to talk to you.”

“A man came along doing eighty and flung Grandfather into the windshield,” Justine said.

“Mama.”

The house was swept suddenly with a variety of colors and shapes — the white, tottering grandfather, Justine flicking back her yellow hair, Dorcas all chartreuse and magenta on red patent-leather spike-heeled sandals. Arthur stood up with his fingers laced in front of him, as he did when greeting church members after the sermon. He wore a determined smile. Meg felt a twist; was she doomed to be embarrassed by everyone, all her life, even Arthur? “Mama, Grandfather, you remember Arthur,” she said. “Mrs. Britt, this is Arthur, my — Arthur Milsom.”

“My baby has been kidnapped,” Dorcas told him.

Her baby was nine years old and she was kidnapped regularly, always by her father, who did not have visiting rights, but Arthur didn’t know that and he grew white around the lips. “Oh, my heavens!” he cried.

“Arthur. It’s all right,” Meg told him.

“All right?” said Dorcas. “To you, maybe.”

“Grandfather was zonked in the forehead,” Justine said.

Which caused Arthur to spin next in the grandfather’s direction, full of a new supply of horror and sympathy. He hadn’t learned yet. Such an expenditure of emotion would drain you in no time, living here. “Arthur,” Meg said.

“The man was going eighty, at least,” said Justine. “How else could he have ripped a door clean off like that?”

“It was already hanging by one hinge, Mama.”

“ ‘You were going eighty,’ I told him, but guess what he said? It’s against the law to open a car door on the street side. Did you know that? How are we supposed to get into our cars?”

“Perhaps from the sidewalk side,” Arthur said carefully.

Justine paused, in the middle of removing her hat, and looked over at him. “Oh. Arthur,” she said. “Why, how are you?”

“I’m just fine, thank you, Mrs. Peck. How are you?”

“And Meg! Meggie, did you find my note? I forgot to tell you I was going off today. Did you have anything to eat when you came home from school?”

She didn’t wait for an answer. She kissed Meg on the cheek — a breath of Luden’s cough drops. Whenever she kissed people she gave them quick little pats on the shoulder. Meg drew away, trying to regather her dignity. “Mama, when you get a moment,” she said.

“But I have a moment. All the time in the world. What can I do for you?”

“Don’t you have to start supper?”

She meant, Can’t you come out in the kitchen and talk without Dorcas? But Justine said, “Oh, I thought we would just have pick-ups tonight.” The only one who understood Meg was Dorcas, who drew herself in while remaining, somehow, as billowy and bosomy as a featherbed. A fat blonde with tiny hands and feet. “You are not a mother,” she said. “You have never had your baby kidnapped. This is not something I can just go home and forget until a more convenient time.”

“Perhaps if you called the police,” said Arthur.

“Police! Ha!”

“Mama, I want to talk to you a second.”

“All right.”

“I mean, privately.”

“Honey, can’t you talk here? Dorcas is a friend, we don’t have to be private from her.”

“I should say not,” said Dorcas.

“Well, I’ll wait till Daddy comes home,” Meg said.

“Oh, Duncan! Where is he? Shouldn’t he be here by now?”

And off she flew to the window, with Dorcas tripping behind her on her ridiculous shoes. “Look here, Justine, you got to help. Won’t you lay the cards? I got to know where Ann-Campbell is.”

“Oh, well, I’m sure she’s all right.”

Ann-Campbell would be all right anywhere. Meg pitied her kidnapper. But Justine gave in, soft-hearted as usual. “But maybe just a quick reading,” she said. And off they went to the kitchen for the cards. Grandfather Peck stood teetering from heel to toe, peering after them. “Are they going to make supper?” he asked Meg.

“They’re doing a reading, Grandfather.”

“A what?”

“Reading.”

“What would they be reading now? It’s suppertime.”

He sat down suddenly in the armchair. There was a long knot growing on his forehead. “Grandfather, you’re turning purple,” Meg said.

“Ah?”

“Perhaps he needs medical attention,” Arthur whispered.

But the grandfather, who could sometimes hear astonishing things, slapped his knee and said, “Nonsense!”

Then there was a blue-and-yellow flash in the door — Duncan, wearing the jeans Mr. Amsel had asked him not to. He sprinted across the hall and into the coat closet. “Daddy?” Meg said.

“Meg, where is that magazine I was reading last night?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you have to put everything away all the time?”

“I didn’t put it anywhere.”

“Never mind, I found it.”

Off he went again. The door slammed. Arthur began stroking his chin thoughtfully.

“Was that Duncan?” the grandfather asked.

“Yes, Grandfather.”

“You’re a pastor,” he told Arthur.

“Assistant pastor, yes sir.”

“Here’s an idea for a sermon.”

“Grandfather.”

“All our misery comes from the length of our childhood. Ever thought of that?”

“No, sir, I don’t believe I have.”

“Look at it this way. Everything arises from boredom, right? Irritation, loneliness, violence, stupidity — all from boredom. Now. Why are we bored? Because the human childhood is so durned lengthy, that’s why. Because it takes us so durned long to get grown. Years. Years and years just hanging around waiting. Why, after that just anything would be an anticlimax.”

“Sugar,” Duncan called, crossing the front hall again.

“How’s that?”

“Eat more sugar.”

“What’d he say?”

Duncan stuck his head in the living room door. “Sugar hastens puberty,” he said. “All the Eskimos are growing up faster now they’ve switched to carbohydrates.”

Grandfather Peck scratched his head.

“Daddy,” said Meg, “we want to talk to you.”

“Ah so, Meggie.” But then he saw Arthur. “Why, looky there, a man of the cloth.”

“Daddy, when Mama gets through—”

“Where is your mother?”

“She’s reading the cards for Dorcas.”

Arthur stood up. Next to Duncan he looked very small and stalwart. “Actually, Mr. Peck,” he said, “I feel it would be quite enough just to talk to you.”

“Oh, more than enough,” said Duncan.

“When I became a man,” the grandfather said, “I caught myself thinking, many times, so this is what it’s like to be grown up! Plodding back and forth, between work and home. Even being a judge was not what I had hoped. Really you don’t make judgments at all; you simply relate what happens today to what has happened yesterday, all the precedents and statutes and amendments. And when you’ve waded through that, what next? You get old. And you’re old for years and years and years. Your hearing goes and your knees go. Some people’s teeth go. I myself have kept all my teeth but I wouldn’t say it has done much good. After all, whatever I eat I ate a thousand times before. In addition I have become more and more conscious of where the food comes from. Pork tastes like pigs, beef like cows, lamb like sheep’s wool, and so forth. Milk chocolate, which I used to consider a treat, nauseates me now. I taste the smell of cow barns.”

“I wonder,” said Duncan. “If we ran some experiments with goat’s milk chocolate—”

“The Chinese venerate age. If I were in China people would come to me and say, ‘You’re old and wise. What’s the meaning of it all?’ ”

“What is the meaning of it all?” Duncan asked.

“I don’t know,” his grandfather told him.

“Mr. Peck,” said Arthur, “I would like to marry your daughter.”

The grandfather said, “My daughter?”

But Duncan understood. He gave Arthur a long, clear, untroubled look, as if nothing such a man could say would bother him. Then he said, “She’s seventeen.”

“Eighteen,” said Meg.

“Eighteen? Oh yes.”

“And Arthur’s twenty-six.”

“Well, that’s ridiculous,” said Duncan. “When you’re seventy he’ll be seventy-eight.”

“So?”

“And you’re still in school.”

“We’re planning a June wedding,” said Arthur. “She’ll be graduated by then.”

“And Daddy, you know I’m not the college type.”

“Who is? Who cares about college? Did I ever say I wanted you to go to college? But I didn’t say I wanted you to get married right off the bat, either, and go live in Simper, Virginia, sitting in the front pew every Sunday nodding all the flowers off your hat. It’s a trap. Do you want to be trapped? I thought you would go off and do something, Meggie, travel somewhere. Leave old Caramel behind if you like, we’re not trying to keep you for ourselves. Hitch-hike to California. Take a freight train. Take a bus. Learn to surf. Marry somebody unpredictable. Join the Foreign Legion.”

“But I can’t be that way.”

“Try! Anything but this. Just settling for it doesn’t matter who, any pale fish in a suit—”

“Mr. Peck,” said Arthur, “I understand, of course, that in the heat of the moment—”

“How will you have babies, Reverend Mildew, osmosis?”

“Mama!” Meg called.

“Don’t trouble your mother, Meg, I’ll see him out myself.”

“Unfortunately I am not that easy to discourage,” Arthur said.

“That is unfortunate.” But Duncan was guiding him toward the door anyway, and Arthur was allowing it. “Now,” said Duncan, “if by any strange chance Meg still feels the same when she is of a decent age, Reverend, I admit there is nothing I can do about it. Meanwhile, goodbye.”

“But I am of age!” Meg said.

The front screen slammed.

Meg looked at her great-grandfather, who smiled a weary smile showing every one of his perfect teeth. She crossed to the kitchen door and opened it.

“Meg,” said Dorcas, “your mother’s a marvel. My cards say Ann-Campbell is with Joe Pete and I’m to enjoy the rest while she’s gone.”

“Mama, listen.”

Justine looked up. She was seated at the kitchen table, holding both hands rigid. Between each finger were long sprays of raw spaghetti. “Look, Meg!” she said. “I’m learning the I Ching!”

“Is that all you have to do?”

“Well, we should use yarrow stalks but we don’t know what they are.”

“I just want to tell you this,” Meg said. “I blame you as much as him.”

“What, Meggie dear?”

“The two of you are as closed as a unit can get, I don’t care what he says.”

“Closed? What?” said Justine, looking bewildered. She rose, holding out two spaghetti whiskbrooms. “Wait, Meggie darling, I don’t—”

But Meg was gone. She ran across the hall and out of the house. There was no sign of Arthur or Duncan in the yard. Only the Ford, melting into the twilight, with a magazine page flapping in the space where the door should have been: