Searching for Caleb

19

Every now and then Justine would catch a glimpse of Caleb — as he passed a doorway, or skimmed in and out of view in front windows while walking the porch — and she would mistake him for Grandfather Peck and her heart would leap. She had never managed to believe that some people truly will not be seen again. Look, there was that jutting head, the glint of silver hair, the long nose pinched white at the tip! But then she would notice his eyes. The shock of brown eyes in her grandfather’s face. Or she would call and he would answer instantly, wincing if she spoke to him too loudly, which she was always doing, out of habit. Or his clothes gave him away — her grandfather’s, yes, but on Caleb they looked scruffy and poorly cut. She sank back, wherever she was, and Duncan looked at her curiously but said nothing.

Duncan was playing Battue now, moving yellow plastic disks among a triangle of pegs. For him it appeared to be another game of solitaire, not a puzzle; he had solved the puzzle years ago. The disks clicked steadily like the beads of an abacus or a rosary, their rhythm dictated by the churning of private thoughts. What were Duncan’s private thoughts? He wouldn’t say. He kept the bourbon bottle beside him, always nearly empty, it seemed, its cheap wavery glass perfectly clear down to the inch or so of yellow in the bottom. Occasionally he smoked a doll-sized metal pipe containing foul-smelling leaves and seeds and stems. Then he would grow dreamy and whimsical, although the leaves were so old now (having been stored nearly forever in an oregano bottle in the kitchen) that Justine suspected they had lost all their potency. He suggested unusual projects — for instance, planting the little round seeds on some village green. “Once a year we could have a new ritual, the Burning of the Green. All the villagers could sit around breathing the smoke and getting happy on a specified day.” Justine looked sideways at Caleb to see if he were shocked. He didn’t seem to be. He was not above accepting a slug or two of bourbon himself (those rigid, grandfatherly lips poised at the rim of a bottle!) and perhaps would have tried the pipe as well, if smoke did not make him cough. Nevertheless, Justine continually felt the need to tell him, “You mustn’t think Duncan’s always like this.”

“He’s not?” said Caleb.

“No, really he’s just — it will pass.”

Then she wondered why she bothered explaining, for Caleb only looked disappointed. He had some sort of expectation of them that Justine couldn’t understand. On the trip, for instance, his moods had kept shifting until she hadn’t known what to think of him. First he was elated, almost all the way to New Orleans. It was her favorite view of Caleb so far: his face alight, looking much like Duncan’s, just as she had always known it would. He was tense with excitement and his hands moved rapidly as he spoke. (Yet Justine had been taught that a Peck does not gesticulate.) He told her his whole life, everything that had happened to him since leaving Baltimore—buckets of life, torrents of names and places, snatches of song broken off and sentences left unfinished. She had the feeling that he had been saving it up for sixty years, until he could locate a family member. But then when he had finished and she questioned him on the fine points—“Whatever happened to the friend you went to New Orleans with?” “What sort of man was White-Eye Ramford?” “Did you ever think of coming home?”—he became morose and short of words. “I don’t know. I don’t know,” he muttered. Thinking to cheer him up, she said “When we get to New Orleans we’ll buy you some shoes. You can’t get on a plane in paper slippers.” But if anything, that only deepened his gloom. He looked out the window, his thumb and middle finger steadily stroking the corners of his mouth in a way that made her uncomfortable. But of course: he was mourning his brother. She should have thought. No doubt he had only been making an effort for her sake, earlier, and it had worn him out. So she let him sit in silence, and when they reached New Orleans she didn’t mention his shoes again. He did, though. He became suddenly brisk. “Say now!” he said. “Weren’t we going to change out of these paper scuffs? We can’t go back to the family looking unkempt.”

“Well, if you want to,” Justine said carefully.

“Unfortunately I am out of funds at the moment but—”

“Oh, I’ll take care of that.”

In that respect, at least, he showed his background. He did not make any sort of unseemly fuss over financial matters.

They had to stay overnight in a very poor hotel, for which Justine was apologetic, but Caleb didn’t seem to mind. He retired early after eating a large quantity of salad; fresh fruits and vegetables were some sort of obsession with him. When he waved good night in the corridor he looked just fine, but the next morning on the plane he was up and down, up and down. Talkative, then moody. Mostly moody. He asked her unlikely questions. “How many ships do you have?”

“Ships? What?”

“Do you own or lease them now?”

“Ships! Oh,” said Justine. “We’re not importers any more.”

“You’re not?”

“The family sold it all.”

“Why! When did they do that?”

“Right after you left,” said Justine.

Then he sank into himself again, and hardly spoke until they had landed and caught the two connecting buses to Caro Mill. When she led him up Watchmaker Street she felt she was laboring with him, he looked so dismal. But at her front walk he stopped short. “Here?” he said. “Is this where you live?”

For the first time she noticed how unsteady the house appeared, how the screens bagged and the steps buckled. She wondered what that rusty motor was doing on the porch. “Yes, it is,” she said.

She felt him staring at her. She focused on the tips of her shoes.

“This is your house?”

“Yes.”

“And what is this yellow stuff in the yard?”

“Why, cornstalks.”

“I mean—eating corn?”

“Well, Duncan wanted to grow some, you see, and he said the back didn’t get enough sun. He said we could grind up the garbage for fertilizer and spread it on the—”

She felt herself growing desperate, trying to convince him that really their life was perfectly logical. But she shouldn’t have bothered. For when finally she raised her eyes (just a glance at his face to see how she was doing) she found the corners of his mouth perked upwards like Duncan’s, his expression bright and merry again. He was back to being cheerful. And he remained cheerful ever after, growing more light-hearted day by day. He fit right in. She couldn’t understand him.

Sometimes Duncan let the Battue disks fall silent a moment while he read the newspapers. Help Wanted, of course. “Look, Justine, someone in Virginia wants a zoo keeper.”

“You’ve never been a zoo keeper, Duncan.”

“Right.”

“I mean you don’t know the first thing about it.”

“Right.”

“You have a job. Duncan, you have a job, and you should have been there three hours ago.”

Then he would rise, steady on his feet but a little slow, his face luminous and calm and angelic as only bourbon could make it, and he would very, very carefully button himself into his jacket. “If you really want to know,” he said (but speaking in Caleb’s general direction), “I don’t believe in people sacrificing themselves for the sake of other people.”

“But neither do I, Duncan,” she said.

He didn’t have any answer for that.

So he would give a little salute to Caleb, and turn up his collar as if facing winter winds before he set off for the antique shop. Where there would be no customers anyway, now that opening hours were so uncertain. Where antiques lay in a jumble, dusty and neglected, and half the lightbulbs were out and the window was patched with adhesive tape. Look at this very newspaper column, spindled now on a Battue peg: WANTED antique shop mgr. must be reliable apply Silas Amsel Box 46 Caro Mill. But Justine was firm and cool and deliberate. Like her grandfather, she stiffened her pointy chin and set her head at a commanding angle. “It’s time we learned to stay in one place,” she told Duncan every night when he came home.

“Whatever you say, Justine.”

There was something underneath, some considerateness in his voice that made her turn on him. “Don’t you think so?” she asked him.

“Whatever you say.”

“Not what I say. Don’t you think so yourself? We’ve been moving around forever.”

“That’s very true,” he said.

“Why do you keep agreeing with me? Do you feel you have to humor me in some way?”

“No, no.”

But he did. She knew he did. It was because of her fetching Caleb. Wasn’t it? Duncan seemed to think she had gone crazy, or senile — or who knows? — running off like that to get Caleb. (She had assumed he would understand. She had called the antique shop from Box Hill: I’ll be away overnight, I think, Duncan, I don’t think I can find a plane out of New Orleans till tomorrow.” “New Orleans? Is that where you are? I thought you had left me,” he said. “I went home for lunch and you weren’t there.” She said, “I wouldn’t leave you”—forgetting altogether that up till that afternoon she had been seriously considering it. She was so excited about meeting Caleb. And it was so good to hear Duncan’s voice on the telephone. It had completely slipped her mind how angry she was with him.) When she came back from New Orleans, Duncan gave Caleb a long look and then shook his hand. But the look he gave Justine was longer — a gentle, sad, pitying look, which she was going to remember till the end of her days. What could he be pitying her for? He didn’t even know that she had done all this illegally, so to speak. Yet during supper that night he had been so soft-voiced and solicitous, as if she were sick. When really there was nothing more natural than having your great-uncle come to stay with you.

Not that Duncan minded having Caleb. He got along with him very well. Better than Justine herself did, in fact. They had long discussions on jazz and blues and Creole food. Duncan would ask about Lafleur Boudrault, and Whisky Alley, and musical funerals and old-time cathouses, about which (Justine was surprised to hear) Caleb seemed to know everything. Caleb played Duncan’s harmonica, drawing forth from it such beautiful, disreputable sounds that Justine stood motionless and open-mouthed. This was her great-uncle?

But he didn’t like to be called Great-Uncle, or even Uncle. Perhaps he had been without relatives too long for such titles to sit easy on him. “Just ‘Caleb’ will do,” he said. And there had been so many difficulties in the way of his paying the rest of the family a visit. He was too tired from the trip; he was just getting used to Caro Mill; his arthritis was acting up. Thanksgiving would be better, he said. They could arrive unannounced and take the family by surprise. “Thanksgiving!” said Justine. It was barely November. Was it fair to keep everyone in the dark for so long? She was all for going this Sunday, perhaps, for Sunday dinner at Uncle Two’s. But Caleb refused, offering a dozen shiftless excuses. (“I’m scared I wouldn’t know anybody’s name,” he said.) Justine sighed. She had to admit there were times when Caleb disappointed her.

No, more than that. Tell the truth. There were times when she almost disliked him.

He had gone so far afield, it seemed. He had journeyed such a distance from his family. Now it appeared that the return trip was not that easy, maybe even impossible. He had a hundred habits and qualities that the Pecks would not have tolerated, skills they neither possessed nor wanted, bits of knowledge they would not know existed. Often he said things that horrified her. “Maybe,” he said, “we could just never let the family know, have you thought of that?”

“Why, Caleb!”

“I mean — Justine, I’m happy here with you and Duncan. Why go anywhere else? It would be like meeting strangers.”

“That’s ridiculous! It’s ridiculous.”

“I don’t have anything in common with them, Justine.”

“How can you say such a thing?”

“Do you think a one of them would recognize me?”

No. Not a one of them. Deep down, she knew it, and he and she would stare at each other in absolute agreement even while she continued to protest.

Sometimes she shut herself in her room and pulled out Caleb’s old photo, which she had taken from her grandfather’s pocket after he died. She studied it as if it could be read, not merely looked at. The gleam of Caleb’s Panama, the set of his shoulders, the perfect crispness of his tie. Nowadays he did not even wear a tie. His old jauntiness had become, somehow, boldness; his speech had a sharp, unpleasant tang. There was something spineless and lackadaisical in the way he walked. And she could not help noticing that still, wearing Daniel’s clothes and Duncan’s aftershave, he had the musty cabbage smell of a public institution.

Well, after all, he had been away so long.

Yes, but he had gone by degrees, traveling only where led, merely proving himself adaptable, endlessly adaptable.

As Justine herself had.

Then a trembling would rise from the soles of her feet, turn her stomach queasy, pass through the hollow of her chest to beat in her throat like a second heart. She stuffed the snapshot beneath a stack of magazines and hurried out to join the others.

In the afternoons, with Duncan asleep on the floor beside his disks, Justine brought Caleb up to date on the family. Even though he seemed not to care, she sat at the table earnestly filling him with history. She was amazed at how little time it took to tell — all those events unfolding over months and years, summed up now in minutes. “Richard did get married but it was annulled, the girl’s father had it annulled because she was under age, and since then he’s lived downtown in a—”

“Now, which was Richard?”

“Why, Uncle Mark’s son,” she said.

When she told how her mother died she spoke without inflection, as if hoping he wouldn’t catch it, but of course he did. He made no comment. When she talked about fortune telling he only looked interested. What did he really think? She imagined that he was about to define her; that at last, after clearing his throat, he would sum her up, announce where she had been heading all her life. She tensed expectantly whenever she caught him looking around the house, or glancing at her clothes, or staring at some toothless woman in socks and Wedgies who came to have her cards read. Surely he was judging their life, whose skimpiness she had just begun to realize. Any moment now he would give his verdict. But he never did. She kept trying to explain herself, even so. “You see we have always just — Duncan has kept wanting us to move around,” she told him.

“Is that right,” said Caleb.

“He likes to travel.”

“But he hasn’t traveled far.”

“What?” She searched her memory for other family news, meanwhile absently cracking a coffee bean with her teeth. “Now Aunt Lucy, she always says—”

“Lucy? I didn’t remember Daniel had a Lucy.”

“Lucy is Two’s wife, Caleb. I told you that.”

“Ah yes.” He nodded. “It must be hard trying to keep all this straight.”

“I don’t have to try. They’re family. Now, what was I telling you about Aunt Lucy?”

“You said — who did you say she was?”

So that she grew exasperated. “Don’t you have any memory?” she asked him. “Don’t you feel any connection at all?”

“Memory, yes. Connection, no.”

She believed him. At night, tossing in her bed, she told Duncan, “We might as well have picked a stranger off the streets.”

“What makes you think so?”

“He’s not connected, he says. He admits it. That scroungy old man — if he had written a letter when he should have I bet Grandfather would be alive today. He doesn’t have a trace of the family left in him and he tells me so as if he’s proud of it. He doesn’t have a trace.”

“He does, though.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, use your head, Justine. Who do you know who acts more like a Peck? Consider that he has remained alone his whole life long, never let in anybody who wasn’t a blood relative. Never got close to White-Eye, never married that waitress, never was a father to Roy. Can’t you read between the lines? Look at what Luray said: it’s not as if he were a real relation. You say the Pecks haven’t left a trace?”

“You don’t know the first thing about it,” Justine said. “Of course he didn’t get close to White-Eye. He was careful and respectful. He had tact.” And she would flounce over on her side away from him, preparing for another night of insomnia.

Then the next afternoon, facing Caleb, who wore his brother’s pinstriped shirt, she was full of new hope and energy. “I think you’re going to like my cousin Claude,” she told him.

“Oh yes?”

“He collects engravings. He’s the only one besides you who’s interested in the arts.”

But, “I believe I’ll make coffee out of some of those beans, Justine,” he said. Then she would notice how metallic his eyes were, and how there was something raw and uncared-for about his skin, which was stretched too tightly across the bridge of his nose.

He had taken over the kitchen by now, as if he guessed how she felt about cooking. (The first supper she served him was hot dogs scorched in a skillet.) He prepared every meal so seriously and so tenderly that it tasted like a gift. “Eat it all,” he told them at suppertime. “If you don’t finish it, how can I make more? I want to get started on something new.” He would hum as he worked, clattering pots, cursing the scarcity of equipment. “But that’s all right, I can make do with anything. Put me in the pokiest diner and I will cook you up a seven-course meal. Why did I ever retire? I let Luray talk me into it. Here I’ve been thinking I had no means of support, but I do! I’m going to get a job and contribute to the household, I have it all worked out.”

But even Duncan looked doubtful when he heard that. “Well, look,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to discourage you, but age might stand in your way, don’t you think?”

“Never mind my age,” said Caleb. “Oh, for the quality places, yes. But there is always some little café by the tracks or the water where they don’t give a hang, and that’s where I’ll ask.”

“Well, at least why don’t you wait a little. If we move or anything, you don’t want to go through a whole new job application.”

“But we’re not moving,” said Justine.

“Oh, no hurry,” Caleb said. “I play it by ear. I wait to see what falls out and who is going in what direction. I always have.” He smiled. “It’s funny,” he said, “I’d forgotten the taste of garlic. Can you beat that? It’s peculiar how you associate some foods with people. Or times you used to have, or places . . . Bess always liked garlic-buttered popcorn. The two of us must have eaten bushels of it. Now you could bring me some and I don’t know, it would taste so unfamiliar somehow. I suppose everybody’s like that. Best friend I ever had liked Blue Peter sardines on saltine crackers, but maybe if I were to track him down today I’d find he doesn’t even remember them any more.”

Duncan listened so hard he forgot to eat. Justine slid a salt shaker back and forth. Why did Caleb have to talk about food all the time? No one else in the family did. All they asked was that their meals be nourishing, and not too unusual in taste. They tended to like white things, foods baked in cream sauce. They would have been horrified by the peppery shrimp casserole that Caleb had served tonight. “Listen!” Justine said suddenly. “How can we be sure you’re Caleb Peck?”

Both men stared.

“How do we know you’re not some impostor?”

“Justine,” said Duncan.

She ignored him. She was watching Caleb. “But who else would bother?” Caleb asked her.

“You’re not like them in any way.”

Caleb shrugged. (A foreign gesture.) “For that matter,” he said, “how do I know you’re a Peck?”

“We’re not even sure that Eli’s honest,” Justine said. “Maybe he just picked up some stranger and coached him. Maybe the two of you framed this whole story together. After all, there must be money involved. Caleb’s share of the will must have been drawing interest for sixty years.”

“Caleb didn’t have any share of the will,” Duncan told her. “Justine, I wish you would—”

But Caleb only nodded, sober and proud somehow, as if he were receiving compliments.

In the night there was a pounding on the door, and shouting and the beam of headlights across the bedroom ceiling. Justine, wide awake as usual, crawled over Duncan and threw a bathrobe around her shoulders. “Just a minute,” she called. Duncan stirred and then sat up. From Caleb’s room came the rustle of bedclothes. Justine ran through the hallway, breathless and shivering. Someone had died. Something was wrong with Meg. She had never realized how many possibilities there were for disaster, or how calm and joyous her life had been until this moment.

But it was only Tucker Dawcett, whose wife had her fortune told weekly to see if he were faithful and never believed it when the answer was yes. Tucker was just a sweet skinny man with buck teeth. He jogged in a sweatsuit every morning and worked as a, let’s see—

Policeman.

Her teeth started chattering again.

Tucker coughed, and then showed her his identification in a plastic envelope. (Why on earth?) For all she knew it was his YMCA card. “Oh. Tucker,” she said.

“Could I speak with you a moment, Justine?”

From the hall doorway, Duncan said, “Do you know what time it is?”

“Police business,” said Tucker.

Duncan came up behind Justine without a sound.

“Now I have to ask you folks this question,” Tucker said. “Are you all related to a Mr. Caleb Peck?”

“You get us up at one a.m. to ask us that?” Duncan said.

“Now I know, I know how trying this must be,” Tucker told him. Through the screen his face looked grainy; out of tiredness or embarrassment he kept his eyes down. “Fact is I was sacked out at home myself. Doug Tilghman called from the station asking me to run this little errand. I wanted to wait till morning but he said we would look pretty silly if Louisiana called back in a couple hours and we hadn’t done a thing.”

“Louisiana?” said Duncan.

“See they got this lady down there claiming a Mr. Caleb Peck has been kidnapped.”

Duncan looked at Justine.

“Seems like he was in a home of some sort. This lady, Mrs. Luray Pickett, went to visit him last Sunday and found he’d disappeared. Home hadn’t noticed. Seems somebody at the office remembered a Justine Peck come from Caro Mill to visit him, and he was never seen again.”

“So?” said Duncan.

“Well, I believe that would be kidnapping, or stealing at least. See, the man was institutionalized. He didn’t have no right to be leaving of his own free will. Or would it be aiding and abetting? Well, look. I don’t care about it. Let an old fellow go where he wants, I always say. But Doug Tilghman said I had to just ask, because some lady somewhere is fit to be tied. Mrs. Luray Pickett. I said, ‘Look, Doug, can’t this wait till morning? I mean what will the Pecks think of us for this?’ I said, and he said, ‘Tell them I’m just as sorry as I can be but these policemen in Louisiana have this lady name of Mrs. Luray Pickett who is kicking up a storm, calling them and visiting, asking why they’re not doing more. She says she put the man in a Home herself and saw to his every need, never let a month go by without . . . and here he had been removed and not so much as a by-your-leave. She says if anybody thought she wasn’t taking proper care they could just come to her in person, there was no need to steal the man, and she will thank the police to get him replaced or she’ll know the reason why. And also—’ Well, and it’s true there’s not many Justine Pecks. I mean the name is odd. And especially from Caro Mill. Of course you do have that old man staying with you now . . . ”

“Tucker,” said Duncan, “don’t you know that all our family is from Baltimore?”

“That’s true, they are.”

“And have you ever heard either one of us mention a relative in Louisiana?”

“Well, not directly,” said Tucker.

“So,” said Duncan.

“Well, I knew there was nothing to it,” Tucker told him. “Sorry to have woken you folks up.” And for the first time he raised his eyes to meet theirs. “I’ll tell the wife I saw you,” he said. “Night, now.”

“Night,” said Duncan.

He turned on the porch light and shut the door. Justine waited, but he didn’t say a word. Maybe he was angry. She should have told him from the beginning. Only at the beginning he had been so odd, and after that it was never the proper moment. Now what? Would he make her send Caleb back again? Then it occurred to her that all this time Caleb must have been listening, bolt upright in bed, terrified they would give him away. “That poor old man!” she said, and slid past Duncan to open Caleb’s door.

He was gone.

His bed was unmade, and his pajamas lay at the foot. His rubberized raincoat no longer hung from the closet door. Duncan’s harmonica was missing from the bureau. And the window was wide open, empty and black, the paper shade lisping in the wind. “Duncan!” Justine called. “Hurry, we have to find him!”

She already had one leg over the windowsill before he stopped her. He took hold of her arm and said, “Let him get a little head start again first, Justine.”