Searching for Caleb

5

Justine’s childhood was dark and velvety and it smelled of dust. There were bearded men under all the furniture, particularly her bed. When her door was shut at night blue worms squiggled through the blackness, but when it was open the knob stuck out exactly like a shotgun barrel sidling through to aim at her head, and she would have to lie motionless for hours pretending to be a wrinkle in the blankets.

In the mornings her father was away, either at the office or out of town, and her mother was in bed with a sick headache, and Justine sat in the living room with the curtains shut so that even to herself she was only a pale glimmer. She was waiting for the maid. First there was the scrabbling of the key in the apartment door and then light, air, motion, the rustle of Claudia’s shopping bag and her thin cross mosquito voice. “Now what you doing sitting there? What you up to? What you doing sitting in that chair?” She would yank the curtains open and there was the city of Philadelphia, a wide expanse of blackened brick apartment houses and dying trees in cages and distant factory smokestacks. Then she would dress Justine in a little smocked dress and braid the two skinny braids that she called plaits. “Don’t you go getting that dress dirty. Don’t you go messing yourself up, I’ll tell Miss Caroline on you.” By that time maybe her mother’s headache would be lifting, at least enough so that her parched voice could trail out from the bedroom. “Justine? Aren’t you even going to say good morning?” Although not an hour ago she had buried her face in the pillow and waved Justine away with one shaky, pearl-studded hand.

Justine’s mother wore fluffy nightgowns with eyelet ruffles at the neck. Her hair was the color of Justine’s but tightly curled. She was the youngest of Daniel Peck’s six children, the baby. Even total strangers could guess that, somehow, from her small, pursed mouth and her habit of ducking her chin when talking to people. Unfortunately she tended to put on weight when unhappy, and she had become a plump, powdery, pouchy woman with her rings permanently embedded in her fingers. Her unhappiness was due to being exiled in Philadelphia. She had never guessed, when agreeing to marry Sam Mayhew, that the Depression would close down the Baltimore branch of his company just six months after the wedding. If she had had any inkling, she said — but she didn’t finish the sentence. She just reached for another chocolate, or a petit-four, or one of the pink-frosted cupcakes she grew more and more to resemble.

But Justine loved her mother’s soft skin and her puffy bosom and the dimples on the backs of her hands. She liked to huddle beneath the drooping velvet canopy of the bed, which was her mother’s real home, surrounded by a circle of chocolate boxes, empty teacups, ladies’ magazines, and cream-colored letters from Baltimore. Of course there were days when her mother was up and about, but Justine pictured her only in the dim rosy glow of the bedside lamp. She dwelt on the suspense of entering that room: was she welcome this time, or wasn’t she? Some days her mother said, “Oh Justine, can’t you let me be?” or wept into her pillow and wouldn’t speak at all; but other days she called, “Is that my Justine? Is that my fairy angel? Don’t you have one tiny kiss for your poor mama?” And she would sit up and scoop Justine into a spongy, perfumed embrace, depriving her of breathing room for a moment, not that it mattered. Then she flung back the ruffled pink sleeves of her bedjacket and taught Justine the games she had played when she was a child — cat’s cradle and Miss Fancy’s Come to Town and the doodle story, where you drew a map that turned out to be a goose. Or she would have Justine fetch scissors and she would cut, from the Baltimore newspaper, folded stars and paper dolls with pigtails and standing angels made from a circle cleverly slashed here and there as only she knew how. She would tell true stories, better than anything in books: How Uncle Two Scared the Hobo Away, How Grandfather Peck Fooled the Burglar, How the Mayhews’ Ugly Dog Buttons Ate My Wedding Dress. She told how Justine was born in Baltimore thanks to split-second timing and not in Philadelphia as everyone had feared. “Well, luckily I had my way,” she said. “You know how your daddy is. He didn’t understand at all. When you started coming two months early I said, ‘Sam, put me on that train,’ but he wouldn’t do it. I said, ‘Sam, what will Father say, he’s made all the arrangements at Johns Hopkins!’ ‘I just hope he didn’t lay down a deposit,’ your daddy said. So I picked up my suitcase that I had all ready and waiting and I said, ‘Listen here, Sam Mayhew . . . ’ ”

At six in the evening Claudia would leave, slamming the door behind her, and Justine’s mother would look at the clock and her fingers would fly to her mouth. “How in the world did the time pass?” she would ask, and she would slide to the edge of the bed and feel for her pink satin slippers. “We can’t let your daddy catch us lazing about like this.” She would put on a navy blue dress with shoulder pads, and cover her rosebud mouth with dark lipstick, turning instantly from pink-and-gold to a heavy, crisply defined stranger like the ones hurrying down the sidewalk five stories below. “Of course my headache hasn’t improved one bit,” she would say. “I’d go back to bed but your daddy would never understand. He doesn’t believe in headaches. He certainly doesn’t believe in going to bed for them. It just is not his custom, I suppose.”

To hear her talk, you would think Sam Mayhew was as different and exotic as an Asian prince, but he was only a small pudgy man with a Baltimore accent.

Then there were days in a row when Justine was not allowed in her mother’s room at all, when she would puzzle and puzzle over what magic password had given her entry before. No one could go in but Claudia, carrying the latest string-tied box from the Parisian Pastry Co. Justine was marooned on a scratchy brocade chair in the living room and the bearded men beneath it were only waiting for her to lower one foot so that they could snatch her by the ankle and drag her down. Even Sam Mayhew’s homecoming could not rouse his wife from bed. “Oh, go away, Sam, let me be, can’t you see a crack is running down in front of my ears?” Sam and Justine ate supper alone, on the gold-rimmed plates that Claudia had laid out in the dining room. “Well, now, Justine, what have you been doing with yourself?” Sam would ask. “Did Claudia take you to the playground? Did you have a nice time on the swings?”

But he would quickly flounder and drown in her blank, astonished stare.

Day after day Justine on her brocade island looked at her mother’s old Books of Knowledge—tattered maroon volumes with brittle pages, the only things she could reach without setting a foot to the floor. She lost herself in a picture of a train heading through outer space. It had been explained to her that this picture demonstrated the impossibility of man’s ever reaching the moon. See how long it would take to cover the distance, even by rail? But to Justine it appeared all too easy, and she felt herself lightening and dwindling and growing dizzy whenever she saw that tiny lone train curving through the endless blackness.

Finally a time would come when she could raise her eyes from a page and find the air parting expectantly to make way for some change; she could always tell when change was coming. And not long afterward the telephone would ring, and Claudia would carry it from the foyer to the bedroom and rouse Justine’s mother to shout long distance to Baltimore. “Hello? Oh, Father! Why are you — did Sam tell you to call me? What? Oh, not too well, I’m afraid. I said, not too well. Everything just seems to be going wrong, I can’t quite . . . ”

Justine would listen carefully, trying to discover exactly what had caused her world to collapse. She heard that her mother’s nerves were acting up, her headaches were ferocious and no doctor could do a thing, the chandelier had fallen smack out of the ceiling, the landlord was impossible, Claudia showed no respect, there had been a very depressing story in the paper Sunday, Justine was turning sulky, Sam was out of town too much, and really it was entirely the fault of the City of Philadelphia. If he had any feeling, if he cared even a little, she knew it was asking a lot but she wished he would come and straighten things out.

He always came. She was his youngest daughter after all and very far from home, the only one of his children to leave the safety of Roland Park. Which was not to say that he approved of her. Oh, no. As soon as he stepped in the door, late that very night, he was curling his mouth downwards at the welter of pastry boxes and her crumb-littered, used-looking bed, and he was telling her outright that she had grown too fat.

“Yes, Father,” Caroline said meekly, and she sat a little straighter and sucked in her stomach.

The next morning, when Justine got up unusually late after an unusually calm, dreamless sleep, she would find the apartment bright with sun and all the curtains open. Claudia was wearing a crisp white scarf and briskly attacking the dust in the cushions. Her mother sat in the dining room fully dressed, eating fresh grapefruit. And in the foyer her grandfather stood at the telephone announcing that he, Judge Peck, would personally drag the landlord through the entire United States judiciary system if that chandelier were not replaced by twelve noon sharp. Then he hung up and cupped Justine’s head with his right hand, which was his way of greeting her. He was a bony man in a three-piece pinstriped suit, with fading hair like aged gardenia petals and a gold wafer of a watch that he let her wind. He had brought her a sack of horehound drops. He always did. Justine was certain that no matter what, even if he had rushed here through fires and floods and train wrecks, he would not forget to stop at Lexington Market first for a sack of horehound drops and he would not fail to cup her head in that considering way of his when he had arrived.

Generally during those visits Sam Mayhew would vanish, or if he did come home he wore a gentle, foolish smile and tried to keep out of the way. At any rate, the grandfather was never there for very long. He was a busy man. He came up over the weekend usually, just long enough to get his daughter to her feet again, and he left Sunday evening. Only once did he come on a working day. That was for Justine. She was supposed to be starting kindergarten, the first time she would ever be away from home alone. She refused to go. She wouldn’t even get dressed. She became very white and sharp-faced and her mother gave in, sensing that there was no use arguing with her. The next morning when Justine awoke her grandfather Peck was standing by her bed carrying her plaid dress, her ruffled underpants with “Tuesday” embroidered on them and her lace-edged socks. He dressed her very slowly and carefully. Justine would have refused even her grandfather but his hands were so thick and clumsy, untying the bow of her nightgown, and when he stopped to pick up her shoes she could see the pink scalp through his thin pale hair. He even did her braids, though not very well. He even sat across from her and waited with perfect patience while she dawdled over breakfast. Then he helped her with her coat and they left, passing her mother, who wrung her hands in the doorway. They went down streets that were bitterly familiar, where she had shopped with her mother in the dear, safe days before school was ever thought of. At a square brick building her grandfather stopped. He pointed out where Claudia would meet her in the afternoon. He cupped her head briefly and then, after some fumbling and rustling, pushed a sack of horehound drops at her and gave her a little nudge in the direction of the brick building. When she had climbed the steps she looked back and found him still waiting there, squinting against the sunlight. Forever after that, the dark, homely, virtuous taste of horehound drops reminded her of the love and sorrow that ached in the back of her throat on that first day in the outside world.

In summer the leather suitcases would come up in the elevator to be packed, and Justine and her parents would board the evening train to Baltimore. Their arrival was never clear to Justine. She was half asleep, carried off the train and laid in the arms of some white-suited uncle. But when she awoke the next day there she was in Roland Park, all rustling with trees and twittering with birds, in her great-grandmother’s white brick house, and if she went to the window she knew that all the houses within her view belonged to Pecks and so did the fleet of shiny black V-8 Fords lining one side of the street, and all the little blond heads dotting the lawn were Peck cousins waiting for her to come out and play.

Her mother would be talking in the dining room, but such a different mother — twinkling and dimpling and telling terrible giggling stories about Philadelphia. Aunts would be grouped around her, drinking their fifth and sixth cups of coffee. Aunt Sarah and Aunt Laura May were spinsters and still lived next door in the grandfather’s house along with the bachelor Uncle Dan. Uncle Two’s wife Lucy and Uncle Mark’s wife Bea were Pecks by marriage only, and lived in the other two houses. They were not as important as the true Peck aunts, but then they were the mothers of the cousins. And of course, presiding over everyone was the great-grandma, a tidy, brownish woman. The white rims showing beneath her irises gave her a look of reproach, but as soon as she saw Justine she smiled and the rims disappeared. She offered Justine an enormous Baltimore breakfast — two kinds of meat, three kinds of pastry, and a platter of scrambled eggs — but Justine wasn’t hungry. “Naturally,” her mother said, laughing her summer laugh, “she’s anxious to see her cousins,” and she tied Justine’s sash and gave her a pat and sent her off.

Justine had six cousins. All of them looked like her and talked like her, all of them knew the story of how Grandfather Peck had fooled the burglar. It was very different from Philadelphia, where her mother, coming to the school play, referred to “that dark little boy” and asked, “Who was the child who spoke with such a nasal twang?” With her cousins, there was no need to worry. Baltimore was the only place on earth where Justine would not be going over to the enemy if she agreed to play Prisoner’s Base.

Yet even here, wasn’t she an outsider of sorts? Her last name was Mayhew. She lived in Philadelphia. She did not always understand her cousins’ jokes. And though they drew her into every game, she had the feeling that they were trying to slow down for her in some way. She envied them their quick, bubbling laughter and their golden tans. Occasionally, for one split second, she allowed herself to imagine her parents painlessly dead and some uncle or other adopting her, changing her name to Peck and taking her to live forever in Roland Park with its deep curly shadows and its pools of sunlight.

At such times Aunt Bea, coming out to the front porch to shade her eyes and check the children, would smile and sigh over poor little plain Justine, whose pointed face was wisped with anxiety so that it looked like crazed china or something cobwebbed or netted. And who ran so artificially, so hopefully, at the edge of the other children’s games, kicking her heels up too high behind her.

In the evening they all went home. The four houses gave the illusion of belonging to four separate families. But after supper they came out again and sat on Great-Grandma’s lawn, the men in their shirtsleeves and the women in fresh print dresses. The children grew over-excited rolling down the slope together. They quarreled and were threatened with an early bedtime, and finally they had to come sit with the grownups until they had calmed down. Sweaty and panting, choking back giggles, itchy from the grass blades that stuck to their skin, they dropped to the ground beside their parents and looked up at the stars while low measured voices murmured all around them. The oldest cousin, Uncle Mark’s daughter Esther, held her little brother Richard on her lap and tickled him secretly with a dandelion clock. Nearby, Esther’s twin sisters, Alice and Sally, were curled together like puppies with Justine in the middle because she was new and special. And Uncle Two’s boys, Claude and Duncan, wrestled without a sound and without a perceptible movement so they wouldn’t be caught and sent to bed. Not that the grownups really cared. They were piecing together some memory now, each contributing his own little patch and then sitting back to see how it would turn out. Long after the children had grown calm and loose and dropped off to sleep, one by one, the grownups were still weaving family history in the darkness.

In the winter of 1942, when Justine was nine, her father left for the war. The apartment was dismantled, a moving van came, and Justine and her mother took the train to Baltimore. Her mother cried all the way down. When they arrived she spilled out of the train and into her sisters’ arms, still weeping, with her curls plastered to her face and her nose as pink as a rabbit’s. Her sisters looked flustered and kept searching their purses for fresh hankies. The situation was new to them; no Peck had ever gone to war. It was believed that old Justin had mysteriously avoided the Civil War altogether, while every member of the family after him had possessed a heart murmur of such obviousness that they had been excused from even the mildest sports, the women cautioned against childbirth and the men saved from combat and long marches and the violence of travel by the unique, hollow stutter in their chests. Which did not prevent them from standing in a semicircle, bright-eyed and healthy and embarrassed, around their baby sister in the railroad station. It was their father who finally took charge. “Come, come,” he said, and he herded them out of the station and into the line of Fords at the curb. Justine and her mother rode in his car, at the head of the procession. Justine’s mother kept sniffing. Nothing irritated Grandfather Peck more than the sound of someone sniffing. “Look here, Caroline. We people don’t cry. Get a hold of yourself,” he said.

“I can’t help it, Father. I just can’t help it. I keep thinking of ways I could have been nicer to him. I mean I was never exactly — and I’m just certain he’s going to be killed.”

“He won’t be killed,” said Justine.

But nobody was listening.

They settled in Great-Grandma’s house, since it had the most room. Justine was entered in the girls’ school that Esther and the twins attended. Bit by bit she forgot almost completely the dark, bearded world of Philadelphia, and her mother grew carefree and girlish. Her mother seldom mentioned Sam Mayhew any more but she wrote him dutifully once a week, saying everyone was fine and sent him best regards. Only Justine, looking up sometimes from The Five Little Peppers or a game of backgammon, had a sudden picture of Sam Mayhew’s sad, kind face and wondered if she had not missed out on something, choosing to be her mother’s child alone.

Yet there were her cousins, always embarked on some new project. Esther wrote plays and her twin sisters shared a single role, speaking in unison. Justine played the princess in Aunt Laura May’s blood-red lipstick. Little Richard would take any part you gave him, he was so happy to be included. And Uncle Two’s son Claude was fat and studious; he was fine for rainy days, when he told horror stories in a hair-raising whisper in the gloom of the pantry stairwell.

But Duncan Peck was an evil, evil boy, and all his cousins worshipped him.

Duncan was prankish and reckless and wild. He had a habit of disappearing. (Long after she was grown, Justine could still close her eyes and hear his mother calling him — a soft-voiced lady from southern Virginia but my, couldn’t she sing out when she had to! “Dun-KUNN? Dun-KUNN?” floated across the twilit lawn, with no more response than a mysterious rustle far away or a gleam of yellow behind the trees, rapidly departing.) While the rest of the cousins seemed content to have only one another for friends, Duncan was always dragging in strangers and the wrong kind of strangers at that, ten-year-old boys with tobacco breath and BB guns and very poor grammar. His cousins took piano lessons and hammered out “Country Gardens” faithfully for one half hour a day, but all Duncan would play was a dented Hohner harmonica—“Chattanooga Choo Choo” complete with whistles and a chucka-chucka and a country-sounding twang that delighted the children and made the grownups flinch. His great-grandma complained that he was impudent and dishonest. It was perfectly obvious that he was lying to any adult who asked him a question, and his lies were extreme, an insult to the intelligence. Also he was accident-prone. To his cousins that was the best part of all. How did he find so many accidents to get into? And such gory ones! He never just broke a bone, no, he had to have the bone sticking out, and all his cousins crowding around making sick noises and asking if they could touch it. He was always having a finger dangle by one thread, a concussion that allowed him to talk strangely and draw absolutely perfect freehand circles for one entire day, a purple eye or an artery opened or a tooth knocked horizontal and turning black. And on top of all that, he was never at a loss for something to do. You would never see him lolling about the house asking his mother for ideas; he had his own ideas, none of which she approved of. His mind was a flash of light. He knew how to make the electric fan drive Richard’s little tin car, he could build traps for animals of all kinds including humans, he had invented a dive-proof kite and a written code that looked like nothing but slants and uprights. Tangled designs for every kind of machine littered his bedroom floor, and he had all those cousins just doting on him and anxious to do the manual labor required. If he had been a cruel boy, or a bully, they never would have felt that way, but he wasn’t. At least not to them. It was the grownups he was cruel to.

Justine once saw him hanging from a tree limb, upside down, when the family was out on a picnic. He was safe but Aunt Lucy fretted away. “Dun-KUNN? I want you down from there!” she called. All Duncan did was unwrap one leg from the limb. Now he hung precariously, at an impossible angle, with his arms folded. Aunt Lucy rose and began running in ridiculous circles just beneath him, holding out her hands. Duncan grabbed the limb again — was he going to give in? What a disappointment! — but no, he was only readjusting himself so that now he could hang by his feet. All that supported him were his insteps, and it was not the kind of limb you could do that from. He folded his arms again and looked at his mother with a cool, taunting, upside-down stare that gave Justine a sudden chill. Yet wasn’t Aunt Lucy laughable — flitting here and there crying, “Oh! Oh!” in a rusty scream. All the cousins had to giggle. Their grandfather set down his deviled egg and rose. “Duncan Peck!” he shouted. “Come down here this instant!”

Duncan came down on the top of his head and had to go to the emergency room.

Aunt Lucy, knitting soldiers’ socks with her sisters-in-law, wondered and wondered what had made her son turn out this way. She considered all his flaws of character, his disgraceful report cards and the teachers’ complaints. (He couldn’t spell worth beans, they said, and had never learned that neatness counted. As for his papers, while there was no denying that they were ah, imaginative, at least what parts were readable, his hasty scrawl and his lack of organization and his wild swooping digressions left serious doubts as to his mental stability.) Now, where did all that come from? She reflected on her pregnancy: during her afternoon naps, she and the unborn Duncan had had, why, battles! for a comfortable position. Whenever she lay on her back, so the baby rested on the knobs of her spine, he would kick and protest until she gave in and shifted to her side. Of course she had only Claude to compare him with, but she had wondered even at the time: wouldn’t the average baby merely have moved to a more comfortable position and let her rest?

The sisters sighed and shook their heads. The cousins, who had been eavesdropping in a row beneath the window, were very interested in pregnancy, but Duncan had a plan to weld all their bicycles together in a gigantic tandem and they couldn’t stay to hear more.

When Sam Mayhew returned, his manufacturing company had reopened its Baltimore offices. There was no need to move back to Philadelphia. There was no need even to buy a place of their own, as his wife pointed out. Why bother, when Great-Grandma had three full stories in which she rattled around with no one but old Sulie the maid for company? So they stayed on in the white brick house in Roland Park, and Sam Mayhew rode downtown every day in a V-8 Ford behind his brothers-in-law. The Ford was a homecoming gift from the grandfather, who always had owned Fords and always would. To tell the truth, Sam Mayhew would have preferred a DeSoto. And he would have liked to buy a house in Guilford, which was where his parents lived. Somehow he never got to see his parents any more. But he was not a stubborn man and in the end he agreed to everything, only fading more and more into the background and working longer and longer hours. Once he took a three-day business trip and when he came home, only Sulie noticed he had been away. And that was because she had to count out the place settings for dinner every night.

His daughter, Justine, who had been undersized and pathetic when he left, was now a tall narrow beige girl. She had changed into one of those damned Pecks, clannish and secretive with a veiled look in her eyes, some sort of private amusement showing when she watched an outsider. And Sam was an outsider. Not that she was rude to him. All the Peck girls had excellent manners. But he knew that he had lost her, all right.

“What do those damned kids do all day? Don’t they have any outside friends?” he asked his wife.

“Oh, they’re all right. We were that way,” she said serenely.

And she smiled out across the lawn at her brittle spinster sisters and her stuffy brothers who were all dressed alike, all lawyers as their father had wished them to be, and at the two wives who might have been chosen merely for their ability to be assimilated. Who were chosen for that. He looked down suddenly at his own colorless suit, so baggy that it seemed to be uninhabited. Then he sighed and walked away. Nobody noticed him leaving.

None of the girl cousins dated much in high school. At the mixers that were held with the boys’ school up the road they were thought to be standoffish. Especially Justine, whose tense, pinched face stopped most of the boys from asking her to dance. Sometimes Sally, the prettier of the twins, might circle the floor with someone, but she tipped her pelvis away stiffly and seemed relieved when the music was over. As for the boy cousins, only Duncan had a steady girlfriend.

Duncan’s girlfriend was a dimestore clerk named Glorietta de Merino. In an age when nice girls wore short skirts, Glorietta’s swirled just above her ankles. She had a tumbling waterfall of black hair and a beautiful vivid face. There appeared to be sugar crystals on her eyelashes. Her waist was tiny and her breasts precisely cone-shaped, like the radio speakers Duncan was constructing in his basement. Anyone who talked to her appeared to be talking into the speakers — Grandfather Peck included, as Justine noticed when Glorietta came for Sunday dinner. Duncan was the only one who enjoyed that dinner. Even Glorietta must have suspected that things were not going exactly right. For afterwards, she never was seen in any Peck house again. Instead she took up residence in Duncan’s car, a forty-dollar 1933 Graham Paige that smelled suspiciously of beer. Whenever the Graham Paige was parked outside, a green blemish in the row of Fords, you could glimpse a flash of Glorietta’s red dress through the window. When Duncan taught Justine to drive, Glorietta rode in the back like a lap robe or a Thermos bottle, part of the car. She hummed and popped her chewing gum, ignoring the shrieking gears and the quarrels and near accidents. Later, when Justine had learned the rudiments of driving, Duncan sat in the back as well. Justine could look in the rear view mirror and see his arm cocked carelessly around Glorietta’s neck, his face peaceful as he watched the passing scenery. She did not think she could ever be so relaxed with someone outside the family.

Once for a school bazaar Justine was asked to run the fortune-telling booth, which she knew nothing about. A very peculiar old biology teacher sent her to a seeress named Olita. “She is my fortune teller,” she said, as if everyone should have one, “and she’ll teach you enough to get by.” Duncan and Glorietta drove Justine to a cleaner’s in east Baltimore and parked to wait for her. Olita had a room upstairs, behind a plate glass window reading MADAME OLITA, YOUR DESTINY DISCOVERED. Justine began to think that wasn’t such a good idea. She turned back toward the car, planning to tell Duncan she had changed her mind, but she found that Duncan was looking squarely at her, half smiling, with a spark in his eyes. It reminded her of the time he had hung from the tree limb. She went on up the stairs.

Madame Olita was a large, sloping woman with a stubby gray haircut, wearing a grandmotherly dress and a cardigan. Her room, which was bare except for two stools and a table, smelled of steam from the cleaner’s. Since the biology teacher had called ahead, she already knew what Justine wanted. She had written out a list of things to tell people. “Palms will be simplest,” she said. “Palms take much less time than cards, and for a bazaar that’s all that counts. Just sound sure of yourself. Take their hands, like so.” She reached for Justine’s hand and turned it upward, smartly. “Start with the — you could be telling fortunes yourself, if you wanted,” she said.

“But I will be,” said Justine.

“I mean seriously telling fortunes. You have the knack.”

“Oh,” said Justine. “Well, I don’t think I—”

“Do you ever have flashes when you know something is going to happen?”

“No! Really,” said Justine. She pulled her hand away.

“All right, all right. Here’s the list, then, of the major lines of the palm. Life, mind, heart, fate . . . ”

But later when she had heaved herself up to see Justine to the door, she said, “This is really not a parlor game, you realize.”

“No, I’m sure it isn’t,” Justine said politely.

“You know it isn’t.”

Justine couldn’t think what was expected of her. She went on buttoning her coat. Madame Olita leaned forward and jabbed the back of Justine’s left hand with one stubby finger. “You have a curved ring of Solomon, a solid line of intuition, and a mystic cross,” she said.

“I do?”

“Even one of those denotes a superior fortune teller.”

Justine straightened her hat.

“I have a mystic cross too,” said Madame Olita, “but I’ve never found one on anybody else. They are very rare. May I see your right palm, please?”

Justine held it out, unwillingly. Madame Olita’s hands felt like warm sandpaper.

“Well?” Justine said finally.

“You are very young,” Madame Olita told her.

Justine opened the door to go.

“But you’re going to enter into a marriage that will disrupt everything and break your parents’ hearts,” said Madame Olita, and when Justine spun around Madame Olita gave her a small, yellow smile and lifted a hand in farewell.

Out in the car, Duncan and Glorietta were kissing in broad daylight. “Stop that,” Justine said irritably, and Duncan broke away and looked up at her, surprised.

Justine wondered if some aura of Duncan’s had rubbed off on her, so that Madame Olita had told the wrong person’s fortune.

In the church hall after the sermon one Sunday a boy named Neely Carpenter asked Justine what time it was. “It’s approximately twelve thirteen and a half,” she told him.

“Approximately twelve thirteen and a half?”

“My watch says that, you see, but my watch is a little off,” said Justine. “It’s logical, really.” She started laughing. Neely Carpenter who had always thought of her as a spinster-faced girl, looked surprised for a moment and then asked if she would like a ride home from church.

After that he gave her a ride every Sunday, and he took her to the movies every Saturday night. Justine’s mother said she thought that was very sweet. It was the fall of Justine’s senior year, after all; she was seventeen. It was about time she had a steady boyfriend. And Neely was a doctor’s son recently moved to Roland Park, a serious-looking boy with very straight black hair and excellent manners. “Why don’t you invite this Neely boy for Sunday dinner?” Justine’s mother asked her.

Sunday dinner was always held at Great-Grandma’s house, with four leaves extending the table so that everyone could sit around it. Neely looked a little stunned when he saw how many Pecks there were, but he found a seat between Aunt Sarah and Uncle Dan and did his best to keep his place in the conversation. “Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am,” he kept saying. Justine thought he was doing fine. She was proud of her family, too — her aunts in their new rust-colored fall outfits, her handsome cousins, her stately grandfather with his hair turned silvery white and his face puzzled-looking from the effort he had started having to make in order to hear. So she was surprised when later, after Neely had gone home, Duncan said, “You’ll never see him again.”

They were out on Great-Grandma’s lawn, where Justine had gone to see Neely off and where Duncan, up to some project or other, was unrolling a gigantic reel of baling wire across the grass. When he raised his head to speak to her Justine was struck by his expression, which was almost the same as his grandfather’s. “Why do you say that?” she asked him.

“Nobody takes Sunday dinner with the Pecks and comes back for more.”

“Well! Just because Glorietta! And besides, you’re wrong. He’s already asked me to Sue Pope’s birthday dance.”

“Then he’s a fool,” said Duncan. “No, I don’t mean because of you, Justine. I mean, who would willingly mix with that crowd in the dining room?”

“I would,” said Justine. “I thought they were very nice to him.”

“Ah, yes! ‘Ask if your little friend there would like another potato, Justine.’ Little friend! And, ‘Tell me, is it true that you go to public school? How are the public schools?’ And, ‘I understand your father is a doctor, um, Reilly. How nice! It’s a very rewarding profession, I hear, though a little — mechanical, don’t you think? We are all lawyers, I suppose you know—’ ”

“What’s wrong with that? They were only showing an interest,” Justine said.

“Ho! And then when he asked Great-Grandma if he could help to clear the dishes. Then he got it twice! ‘Oh, my, no, we have a servant, dear.’ And, ‘Besides,’ Aunt Caroline says, ‘it’s the very best china.’ ”

“Well?” said Justine. “We do have a servant. And it was the best china.”

Duncan stopped unreeling the baling wire. He straightened up and wiped his face on his sleeve. “You really don’t see it, do you,” he said.

But Justine wouldn’t answer. She folded her arms against an autumn wind and looked instead at the four brick houses behind them, where everybody was getting comfortable now with newspapers and needlework and cups of spiced tea. “You know what those houses remind me of?” Duncan said, following her gaze. “Hamsters. Or baby mice, or gerbils. Any of those little animals that cluster in one corner piled on top of each other even when they have a great big cage they are free to spread out in.”

“Oh, Duncan,” Justine said.

She knew he only talked that way because he was going through a difficult time. Next year he would enter college and he wanted to go to Hopkins instead of the University and study science instead of law. But Grandfather Peck and the uncles kept arguing with him, nagging, pushing him. Of course he could study science, it was a free country, they said, but all the same there was something so materialistic about science, whereas law . . . “Peck, Peck, Peck & Peck,” said Duncan, referring to the family firm, which was actually called Peck & Sons. “What a perfect name for them.” And he would shut himself away in his room, or go riding aimlessly with Glorietta so close beside him that if the Graham Paige were a matchbox (which it almost appeared to be) they would have tipped over long ago.

So Justine didn’t worry when he spoke so bitterly. And sure enough, Neely kept on asking her out. He never came to Sunday dinner again but that was because he really had to eat with his own family, he said. He did take her to movies and dances and birthday parties. He drove her home the long way around and parked some distance from the Pecks’ in order to kiss her good night. He asked if she would like to move to the back seat where they would be more comfortable. “Oh well, oh no—” said Justine, uncertain of the proper answer. She really didn’t know what she was supposed to do in this situation. None of her girl cousins could help her, either. All they knew about sex was what Duncan had told them when he was eight; that and the vague, horticultural-sounding information their mothers had given out. So Justine would flutter and debate with herself, but she always ended up saying, “Well actually I’m very comfortable where I am but thank you just the—” Neely, who might have been uncertain too, would look almost relieved. Going home he hummed along with “Good Night, Irene” on the radio. He was starting to talk about their getting married someday, after he was through with medical school. Justine thought he was the best-looking boy in Roland Park and she liked his eyes, which were gray and translucent like quartz, and his quiet, level way of speaking. It was possible that she might even love him, but she didn’t know what her mother would say.

By the fall of 1951, Justine had started attending a girls’ junior college nearby. She thought she would do English or preschool education or something. It didn’t much matter. Although she had always been a fair student she didn’t have any real curiosity and she couldn’t think of any career she wanted to aim for. So she and Esther drifted off to college every day in the Ford their grandfather had bought them for commuting, their bright kerchiefs flickering and their hair whipping in the wind. Almost every evening Neely would come over (he was at Hopkins now) to study in the dining room with her. And there were still the Sunday dinners, the cousins alternating with grownups around the table to discourage mischief, and Claude’s round face shining with the relief of being home from the University even if just for a day.

But Duncan!

Something came over Duncan that year. No one could quite put a finger on it. He had what he wanted, didn’t he? He was studying science at Hopkins, wasn’t he? Yet it seemed sometimes that he was more dissatisfied than ever, almost as if he regretted winning. He complained about living at home, which he had to do because Hopkins was so expensive. He said the expense was an excuse; this was just the family’s way of punishing him. Punishing! To live at home with your own close family? He was morose and difficult to talk to. He did not appear to have any friends at all, at least none that he would introduce, and Glorietta was no longer to be seen. Well, of course he had always been somewhat of a problem. Surely this was just another of his stages, the aunts told his mother.

But then he started reading Dostoevsky.

Naturally they had all read Dostoevsky — or at least the uncles had, in college. Or Crime and Punishment, at any rate. At least in the abridged edition. But this was different. Duncan didn’t just read Dostoevsky; he sank in, he buried himself in Dostoevsky, he stopped attending classes entirely and stayed in his room devouring obscure novels and diaries none of the rest of the family had heard of. On a soft spring evening, in the midst of a peaceful discussion on the merits of buying a home freezer, Uncle Two’s branch of the family might be startled by the crash of enormous footsteps down the stairs and Duncan’s wild, wiry figure exploding into the living room to wave a book at them. “Listen! Listen!” and he would read out some passage too loudly and too quickly for them to follow. A jumble of extravagant Russian prose, where emotions were stated outright in a surprising way and a great many extreme adjectives were used and feverish fancies kept darting and flashing. Paragraphs were layered and dense and complicated like chunks of mica. “Did you hear?” he shouted. His parents nodded and smiled, their embarrassed expressions giving them the look of sleepers dazzled by bright light. “Well then!” he would say, and off he spun, up the stairs. His parents stared at each other. His father went to talk to the grandfather, who understood it no better. “But I thought he was scientific!” he said. “What is he reading for?” And then, “Ah well, never mind. At least it’s the classics, they surely can’t hurt him.”

But that was before Easter Sunday. On Easter Sunday, at the dinner table, the aunts were discussing Mrs. Norman Worth’s extensive collection of eggshell miniatures. The uncles were arguing the details of a hypothetical legal problem: If a farmer, while turning on the water to irrigate the fields, accidentally startled another farmer’s mule, which, in turn, kicked down the fence enclosing a prize-winning Angus bull, who thereupon . . .

“Neither of these subjects is fit table conversation,” Duncan said.

Everybody thought about that for a minute.

“But what’s wrong with them, dear?” his mother said finally.

“They’re not real.”

Great-Grandma, who had lived longest and was hardest to shock, poured more ice water into her tumbler. “To you they may not be,” she said, “but I myself find eggshell miniatures fascinating and if I didn’t have this tremor I would take them up myself.”

“You owe us an apology, Duncan boy,” said Uncle Two.

“You owe me an apology,” said Duncan. “I’ve spent eighteen years here growing deader and deader, listening to you skate across the surface. Watching you dodge around what matters like painting blue sea around boats, with white spaces left for safety’s sake—”

“What?”

“Can’t you say something that means something?” Duncan asked.

“About what?” said his mother.

“I don’t care. Anything. Anything but featherstitch and the statute of limitations. Don’t you want to get to the bottom of things? Talk about whether there’s a God or not.”

“But we already know,” said his mother.

What was so terrible about that? None of them could see it. But Duncan stood up, as wild-eyed as any Russian, and said, “I’m leaving. I’m going for good.”

He slammed out of the dining room. Justine jumped up to follow him, but then she stopped in the doorway, undecided. “He’ll be back,” Uncle Two said comfortably. “It’s only growing pains. Ten years from now he’ll talk the same as all the rest of us.”

“Go after him,” the grandfather said.

“What, Father?”

“Well, don’t just—somebody go. You go, Justine. Go after him, hurry.”

Justine went. She flew out the front of Great-Grandma’s house and paused, thinking she had already lost him, but then she saw him just coming from Uncle Two’s with a cardboard box. He crossed the lawn and heaved the box into the back seat of the Graham Paige. Then he climbed in himself. “Duncan! Wait!” Justine called.

Surprisingly, he waited. She ran up out of breath, clutching her dinner napkin. “Where are you going?” she asked him.

“I’m moving.”

“You are?”

She looked at the back seat. It was like him to leave his clothes behind and take his box of tools and scrap metal.

“But Duncan,” she said, “what are we going to do without you?”

“You’ll manage.”

“What if we need you for something? Where will we find you?”

By now other members of the family were straggling onto Great-Grandma’s porch. She could tell by the look he flashed over her shoulder. “Bye, Justine,” he said. “I’ve already got a place, beside that bookstore on St. Paul, but don’t tell the others.”

“But Duncan—”

“Bye, Justine.”

“Bye, Duncan.”

At first the family assumed he would be home in no time. It was only his age. Everybody eighteen expected deep things of people, but it never lasted. Yet the days stretched on and there was no word of him. They began to question Justine more closely. “He’s all right, he’s got a place to stay,” was what she had said earlier, but now that wasn’t enough. Had he told her where? Because this was not some childhood game any more, surely she was mature enough to realize that. Wasn’t she?

But she had promised Duncan.

Aunt Lucy said Justine was cruel and selfish. Justine’s mother said there was no call for that sort of talk, and then Aunt Lucy broke down and cried. “Now look here. Get a hold of yourself,” the grandfather said, which made her turn on him. Why couldn’t a person let loose a little, after all? Where was the sin? How come a forty-four-year-old woman didn’t have a right to cry in her own house, and state her feelings as she pleased, without a bunch of Pecks crowding around telling her she was not sufficiently dignified, and elegant, and tasteful, and respectable?

“Why, Lucy Hodges!” said Aunt Sarah.

Aunt Lucy gave her a look of pure hatred, there was no other way you could put it.

Justine was miserable. She would much rather tell and be done with it. But even if the grownup rules were different, Duncan was still playing by the old ones and he would be furious if she told. She hoped he would come home by himself—“turn himself in” was how she thought of it. Or that Uncle Two, strolling the Hopkins campus with false nonchalance during class break, would run across Duncan on his own. But Duncan didn’t come and he wasn’t seen on campus, and Uncle Two didn’t want to ask at the Dean’s office outright and involve other people in family matters. “You owe it to us to tell, Justine,” he said. His face was tired and gaunt and there were shadows under his eyes. Aunt Lucy wasn’t speaking. Even the cousins looked at Justine with a new edginess. How had she got herself into this? All she wanted was for the family to be happy together. That was the only reason she had run after Duncan in the first place.

She felt like someone who takes a single short step on solid ice and then hears a crack. She was halfway onto a drifting floe, one foot pulling out to sea and the other still on shore.

Then her grandfather said, “Have you been to see him?”

“Oh, I don’t think he’d like me to, Grandfather.”

“Why not? You’re his cousin.”

“I know.”

“Yes, well,” her grandfather said, and he pulled at his nose. “Well, never mind that. Go anyway. It’s the only way we’ll get any peace around here.”

“Go visit him?”

“You didn’t promise not to do that, did you? Go ahead. Don’t worry, nobody will follow you.”

But Justine half hoped someone would follow. Then life could get back to normal.

She knew the address because she had often gone with Duncan to the bookshop he mentioned — a cluttered place with creaky floorboards and great tilting stacks of used technical books. To the left of the shop was a paper sign, orange on black, saying ROOMS. When she opened the door she found narrow wooden steps, and at the top of the steps a dark hall with a toilet at the end. The doors reminded her of school, all thickly painted with scuffproof brown and marked off with curly metal numbers. But she should have brought a flashlight to read the nameplates by. She moved down the hall very slowly, hunching her shoulders against a feeling of unknown things at the back of her neck, peering at the names scrawled on scraps of ruled paper or adhesive tape: Jones, Brown, Linthicum, T. Jones. No Peck. Only a door to her right with nothing at all, no name in the slot. And that, of course, would be Duncan.

She knocked. When he opened the door she held onto her hat, like someone who has just pressed a fun-house button with no notion of what to expect. But all Duncan said was, “Justine.”

“Hello,” she said.

“Was there something you wanted?”

“I’m supposed to see if you’re all right.”

“Well, now you’ve seen.”

“Okay,” she said, and turned to go.

“But you might as well come in, I guess. Since you’re here.”

His room was small and dingy, with stained wallpaper, a flapping torn shade, a speckled mirror, and a metal bed with a sagging mattress. Over in one corner was his cardboard box. He wore the clothes he had left home in, brown suit pants and a white shirt without a tie. He seemed thinner. “It doesn’t look as if you’re eating right,” Justine said.

“Is that what you came to tell me?”

“No.”

She sat down very delicately on the edge of the bed. She lifted both hands to her hat, making sure it was perfectly level. For some reason, Duncan smiled.

“Well!” she said finally.

Duncan sat down next to her.

“Your mother is really taking on, Duncan. She’s crying where everyone can see her. Your father is—”

“I don’t want to hear about that.”

“Oh. Well—”

“I know what they’re doing. I always know, I can tell, I can see as if I’m sitting there. They’re talking about someone in the outside world. They’re digging the moat a little deeper. They’re pointing out all the neighbors’ flaws and their slipping dentures and mispronunciations, they’re drawing in tighter to keep the enemy out. Why do you think my mother’s crying? Because she misses me? Did she say that? Think a minute. Did she? Did any of them? No. They’re worried I might be with the wrong kind of people. They’re upset to think a Peck is out there in the world someplace. I’ve lowered the drawbridge.”

“Oh no, Duncan—” Justine said.

“Everything they do is calculated to keep others at a safe distance. Everything. Look at your hat!”

Justine’s hands went up again, uncertainly.

“No, no, it’s fine. It’s a fine hat,” he told her. “But what are you wearing it for?”

“Why, I always—”

“Yes, but why? Did you ever take a good look around you? Only old ladies wear hats any more, outside of church. But every woman in our family, even little girls, they all wear hats even if they’re just off to the side yard for a breath of air. ‘A lady doesn’t go without a hat, my dear. Only common people.’ Common! What’s so uncommon about us? We’re not famous, we’re not society, we haven’t been rich since 1930 and we aren’t known for brains or beauty. But our ladies wear hats, by God! And we all have perfect manners! We may not ever talk to outsiders about anything more interesting than the weather but at least we do it politely! And we’ve all been taught that we disapprove of sports cars, golf, women in slacks, chewing gum, the color chartreuse, emotional displays, ranch houses, bridge, mascara, household pets, religious discussions, plastic, politics, nail polish, transparent gems of any color, jewelry shaped like animals, checkered prints . . . we’re all told from birth on that no Peck has had a cavity in all recorded history or lost a single tooth; that we’re unfailingly punctual even when we’re supposed to come late; that we write our bread-and-butter notes no more than an hour after every visit; that we always say ‘Baltimore’ instead of ‘Balmer’; that even when we’re wearing our ragged old gardening clothes you can peek down our collars and see ‘Brooks Brothers’ on the label, and our boots are English and meant for riding though none of us has ever sat on a horse . . . ”

He wound down like Great-Grandma’s old Graphophone, and slumped forward suddenly with his long hands drooping between his knees.

“But Uncle Two is so sad,” said Justine. “He wanders around the Homewood campus all day hoping to—”

“Justine. Will you please get out?”

She rose immediately, clutching her little suede purse. But in the doorway Duncan said, “Anyhow, thanks for coming.”

“Oh, you’re welcome.”

“I meant it, Justine. I’m sorry I . . . really, if you wanted to come back sometime I wouldn’t mind.”

“Well, all right,” Justine said.

Then of course when she got home everyone was furious with her, because she hadn’t found out one concrete fact. What was he living on? Where was he eating? Was he going to school? Who were his companions?

“I just know he’s taken up with some — trash, he does have such peculiar taste in friends,” Aunt Lucy said.

And all of them wondered at Justine’s sudden look of sorrow.

What Duncan was living on was a pittance paid him by a Hopkins professor. He was double-checking dry facts in a library, and then writing them into the blanks the professor had left in a very long, tedious book on paleobotany. He was eating saltines and peanut butter, washed down with a quart bottle of milk in his room. He had no companions at all, not even Glorietta, with whom he had had a terrible fight several months ago over her habit of saying “between you and I.” Eventually he was going to go very far away, perhaps to British Columbia, but at the moment it seemed he just couldn’t get up the energy. And no, he was not attending school any more. He was not even reading Dostoevsky, whose writing suddenly appeared to have the squirmy, eye-straining texture of plant cells. As a matter of fact, he thought he might be going crazy. He even liked the idea of going crazy. He waited for insanity as if it were some colorful character his parents had always warned him against, but every morning when he woke up his mind was the same efficient piece of machinery it had always been and he felt disappointed.

Several times a week, his cousin Justine would come bringing irritating, endearing gifts — a ridiculous pair of slippers, his striped bedspread from home, once his old blue toothbrush with Ipana caked in the bristles. Whenever he opened the door to her he felt deeply happy to see her thin, sweet face and her streamered hat, but before she had been there five minutes he wanted to throw her out. She had such a gift for saying the wrong thing. “Can I tell the cousins where you are? They want to come, too.”

“No. God.”

“Do you need any money?”

“I can take care of myself, Justine.”

“Grandfather gave me some to bring to you.”

“Tell him I can take care of myself.”

“But I can’t give it back to him, Duncan. He was so — he just pushed it into my hand all clumsy and secret. He pretended he wasn’t doing anything.”

“Change the subject.”

“Like in the old days when he gave out horehound drops.”

“Justine, I wish you would go now.”

She always went. But she always came back, too, and when she stood in his doorway again a few days later he was all the more touched by her stupid, comical persistence. From earliest childhood she had been his favorite cousin — maybe because she was a little more removed, a Mayhew, a Philadelphian, not quite so easy to know. But he was surprised that she would brave his dark stairs and his rudeness. Here she had always seemed so docile! He made a special effort for her, smoothing the spread and offering saltines from his roach-proof tin and suggesting she take her hat off, which of course she would not do. “Justine, I’m glad you came back,” he said.

“Why, thank you.”

“You may get on my nerves sometimes but at least you show things, you say things outright, you don’t feel it’s a sin. You were the only one to ask me not to go, the Sunday I left.”

“But Grandfather told me to do that,” Justine said.

Right away she had managed to get on his nerves again.

She always had an answer. She drove him up a wall. He reached the point where he would turn on her the moment she entered, letting loose a flood of arguments that he had been storing up. “You know what they’re like?” (There was no need to say whom he meant.) “You know who they remind me of? People choosing a number on a radio dial. The way they ignore anything that isn’t Peck, like flicking past stations that don’t concern them, just a split second of jazz or ballgames or revivalist ministers and they wince and move on, and settle finally on the one acceptable station that plays Mantovani. Nothing uncomfortable, nothing extreme, nothing they can’t tolerate . . . ”

“They tolerate you at the Sunday dinner,” Justine said. “Really you were as rude as can be and they tried to see your side of it and act reasonable. Who are you to say they can’t talk about eggshells?”

Duncan said, “Nothing outside the family matters. Nobody counts if they’re not Pecks. Not even neighbors, not even Sulie. Why, Sulie’s been with us since our parents were children, but does anybody know her last name?”

“Boudrault.”

“Hmm?”

“She married old Lafleur Boudrault, the gardener.”

“Oh, details,” said Duncan.

“He died in nineteen forty.”

“Little church-lady Emily Post details and nothing underneath. And you’re just like them, Justine, you always will be. Who asked you to come here and clutter up my life?”

But when she was gone, her smell of warm grass hung in the air and the memory of her imperturbable Peck face. At night her chilly little voice ran on and on, arguing, reasoning, imposing logic, even in his dreams. He would wake and punch his flattened pillow and toss beneath the spread that carried her smell too, even from its brief stay in her arms. He wished she were there to argue with; then he wished she were there to apologize to; then he wished she were there to lay her long cool body next to his on the sagging mattress and hold him close all through the deep, steamy Baltimore night.

Justine was not herself; everybody noticed it. Even summer vacation didn’t seem to relax her any. She was strange and distant with her family. She began watching her aunts and uncles in a measuring way that made them uncomfortable. “What’s the matter with her?” her father said once, but his in-laws only smiled blankly; they did not believe in asking too many questions.

It seemed that they accepted Duncan’s absence now. Sometimes when Justine came back from visiting him they would forget to ask how he was. Or they would say, “See Duncan, did you?” and go on about their business. Even Aunt Lucy appeared resigned. But one day in August, a particularly hot Saturday morning, Aunt Lucy appeared on Great-Grandma’s front steps with a small electric fan. Justine was drying her hair outdoors and reading Mademoiselle. “Justine, dear,” said Aunt Lucy.

Justine looked up, with her mind still on her magazine. Her aunt wore the expression of a lady heading calm and smiling toward disaster.

“Justine, this is for Duncan,” Aunt Lucy said.

“What? Oh, a fan. He could use it.”

“Oh, I knew it! I’m so glad I — well, whenever you go to see him, then. Are you going today?”

“Today I’m going on a picnic with Neely. Tomorrow I might, though.”

“Don’t you think you might stop by this morning? Wouldn’t you be able to work it in?”

Aunt Lucy’s smile hesitated.

“Of course I could,” Justine said, and she took the fan from her aunt’s shaky hands.

It was not until she had parked in front of the bookshop that she noticed the little envelope dangling from the fan’s grid.

Duncan’s room was blasting with heat and he was so hot he seemed to have been oiled. He wore a grayish undershirt. His trousers were creased and limp. “Oh, it’s you,” was all he said, and then he sat back down on his bed and wiped his face with his balled-up shirt.

“Duncan, I brought you a fan from your mother.”

“You’ve been telling her about my room.”

“No, I haven’t. She just guessed you would need this.”

“What’s that in the envelope?”

“I don’t know.”

He broke the string that tied it and pulled out a folded note. First he read it silently and then he groaned and read it aloud.Dear Duncan,I am taking the liberty of sending you the fan from my bedroom, now that it is so warm.Everyone is well although I myself have had a recurrence of those headaches. Just a little tension, the doctor says, so I keep my chin up!Your father has been working very . . .

“What about the fan from my room?” Duncan said. “There is one, you know.”

“She gave you her own to show she cares, she didn’t know how else to put it,” said Justine.

“None of them do. Oh, you can tell who she married into. She’s just like all the rest of them now. Too little said and too much communicated, so that if you fight back they can say, ‘But why? What did I do?’ and you won’t have any answer. It all takes place in their secret language, they would never say a thing straight out.”

“But that’s tact. They don’t want to embarrass you.”

“They don’t want to embarrass themselves,” Duncan told her.

She said nothing.

“Isn’t that right?”

“Probably it is,” she said. “But so is the other. There isn’t any right and wrong. I keep looking at them, trying to decide. Well, everything you say is true but then so is everything I say. And what does it matter, after all? They’re your family.”

“You know who you sound like? Aunt Sarah, Justine. You’re going to grow up an old maid. Or you’ll marry a stick like Neely and have him change his name to Peck. I can see it coming. I can see it in that flat straight face of yours, just watch.”

But he had gone too far. Even he must have known that. When Justine turned away from him, fumbling for something in her purse, he said, “Anyway!” He jumped up and started pacing the floor. “Well, anyway, tell me all the news,” he said.

“Oh . . . ”

“Come on!”

“There’s nothing much.”

“Nothing? Nothing in all those four enormous houses?”

“Well, Aunt Bea has had to get glasses,” Justine said.

“Ah.”

“She’s very shy about them, she wears them on a string tucked inside her blouse. She takes them off between sentences in a newspaper even.”

“So Aunt Bea has glasses.”

“And Mama’s bought a TV.”

“A TV. I might have known it would come to that.”

“Oh, it’s not so bad, Duncan. It’s very convenient, don’t you think, having a moving talking picture in your home that way? I wonder how they do it.”

“Actually it’s quite simple,” said Duncan. “The principle’s been around for decades. Have you got a pencil? I’ll show you.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t understand,” Justine said.

“Of course you would.”

“But I’m not scientific. I don’t see how you know those things.”

“Those things are nothing,” he said, “it’s the others I don’t get. The ones you take for granted. Like mirrors, for instance,” and he stopped his pacing to wave at the mirror on the opposite wall. “I lay awake the other night going crazy over that. I spent hours trying to figure out the laws of reflected images. I couldn’t measure the angles of refraction. Do you understand it? Look.”

She stood up and looked. She saw herself in the speckled glass, nothing surprising.

“How come it shows my image and not yours?” he asked her. “How come yours and not mine? How come eyes can meet in a mirror when you’re not looking at each other in real life? Do you understand the principle?”

In the glass their eyes met, equally blue and distant, as if the mirror were reflecting images already mirrored.

Duncan turned around and set his hands on her shoulders and kissed her on the mouth. He smelled of salt and sunlight. His grip on her was weightless, as if he were holding something back. When she drew away, he let his hands drop to his sides. When she ran out of the room he didn’t try to stop her.

Justine wouldn’t visit Duncan any more. Her grandfather kept coming around, pressing twenty-dollar bills into her hand, but she didn’t know what to tell him and so she took the money in silence. She stuffed it haphazardly into her jewelry box, feeling like a thief even though she never spent it. She quarreled with her mother over a print dress, saying it was old-ladyish, although before she had worn whatever her mother picked out. When school started she studied indifferently and had trouble getting to class on time. Esther had graduated and was teaching nursery school, but now the twins were commuting with Justine and they objected to her late starts. “Is that what you call the point of life?” Justine asked them. “Getting to a class on the dot of nine o’clock?”

The twins looked at each other. Certainly they had never meant to imply that it was the point of life, exactly.

On a Saturday night in October, Justine was watching television with Neely in her great-grandma’s study. Neely was stroking her neck up and down in a particularly rasping way, but she had been so short-tempered with him lately that she didn’t want to protest. Instead she concentrated on the television: a mahogany box with a snowy blue postage stamp in its center, showing a girl who had become engaged due to cleansing her face with cold cream twice a night. She flashed a diamond ring at her girlfriends. “Your diamond’s going to be twice as big,” said Neely. “My father’s already promised me the money.”

“I don’t like diamonds,” said Justine.

“Why not?”

“I don’t like stones that are transparent.”

On the television, a man held up a watch that would keep running steadily through everything, even a cycle in a washing machine.

“How about me?” Neely asked.

“What?”

“Do you like me?”

His finger kept annoying her neck. Justine winced and drew away.

A man in downtown Baltimore was interviewing people coming out of a movie theater. He wanted to see if they had heard of his product, an antibacterial toothpaste. “Goodness, no,” said a lady.

“Well, think a minute. Say you have a cold and get over it. You wouldn’t want to catch it right back again from your toothbrush, would you?”

“Goodness, no.”

He stopped a man in a raincoat.

“Sir? Have you ever thought how risky it is, using the toothbrush you used when you were sick?”

“Why, no, now I never considered that. But you got a point there.”

He stopped Duncan.

“Say!” said Neely. “Isn’t that your cousin?”

Duncan was wearing some dark shade of jacket that Justine had never seen before. His face was clamped against the cold. There was no one in the world with such a pure, unwavering face. He stooped a little to hear the question, concentrating courteously with his eyes focused on something in the distance. When the man was finished Duncan straightened and thought a moment.

“Actually,” he said, “once your body’s built up enough resistance to overcome those bacteria in the first place it’s very doubtful if—”

The man discontinued the conversation and ran after a fat lady.

Justine went to the front hall for her coat. “Justine?” Neely called. She ignored him. Probably he thought she was out of hearing, maybe gone to the kitchen for soft drinks. At any rate, he didn’t call again.

All she told herself was that she owed Duncan a visit. He was her cousin, wasn’t he? And she really should give him their grandfather’s money. (Which was still crammed in her jewelry box at home.) She had herself convinced. But Duncan must have known exactly how her mind worked, because when he opened the door he stood looking at her for a minute, and then he drew her in and kissed her, and then he said, “Look, I can see the layers sliding across your eyes like shutters until you can properly explain this away.” Then he laid her on his bed, with its hollow center that rolled her toward him so that she could feel his warm bones through the thin white fabric of his shirt. He took off her clothes and his. Still she didn’t make a single objection, she said none of the things that she had said to Neely. She felt happy and certain, as if everything they did was already familiar. She seemed to be glinting with some secret laughter at this newer, more joyous mischief that they were just inventing, or at Duncan’s Puckish face turned suddenly gentle, or at her own self in his mirror eyes, a naked girl wearing a Breton hat.