Searching for Caleb

6

Duncan came home in March of 1953. He walked into his great-grandma’s dining room one Sunday at dinnertime. “Duncan!” his mother said, half rising. Then, “What on earth is that you’re wearing?”

He was wearing a peajacket he had bought from Navy surplus. His hair needed cutting. He had been gone nearly a year and in that time his face had changed in some indefinable way that made him an outsider. The grownups stared and his cousins gave him self-conscious, sidelong glances. All but Justine, who raised her face like a beacon and smiled across the room at him. He smiled back.

“Well, my boy,” his grandfather said. “So you’re home.”

“No,” said Duncan, looking at Justine.

But they didn’t believe him. “Pull up a chair,” his mother said. “Take mine. Get yourself a plate. Have you had one decent meal since you left us?”

“I’m going to get married,” Duncan said.

“Married?”

The ghost of Glorietta flashed scarlet through their minds. All the grownups shifted uneasily.

“I’m marrying Justine.”

First they thought it was a joke. A tasteless one, but just like him. Then they saw how grave and still the two of them were. “My God,” said Justine’s mother. She clutched suddenly at a handful of ruffles on her chest. “My God, who would have thought of such a thing?”

Though it seemed to all of them, now, that they should have thought of it long ago. Those visits Justine had paid him! Those trips! Everyone knew she hated traveling as much as any other Peck. Yet day after day this winter she had packed a lunch in Sulie’s kitchen and said she wouldn’t be home till night. “I’m going on a trip with Duncan. Out to the country somewhere.” “Yes, yes, go,” they told her. “Keep an eye on him for us.” She had cut classes, missed important family gatherings, stopped seeing Neely, grown distant from her cousins—“But it’s good she’s with Duncan,” they told each other. “She’s sure to be a good influence on him.” How she had deceived them!

Only Sam Mayhew, slow of mind, seemed unable to make the mental leap the Pecks had just accomplished. He looked all around the table, from one person to the other, with his face set to laugh as soon as he saw the joke. “What? What’s that?” he said.

The others waved him aside, too busy adjusting to the shock. But Duncan came over and stood squarely in front of him and spoke very quietly, as if to a child.

“Uncle Sam, I’m marrying Justine.”

“But — you can’t!”

“I’m telling you I am. I’m telling you, not asking you. Nothing is going to make me change my mind.”

“You can’t.”

“Why, it must not even be legal!” said Caroline.

“Yes, it is,” Duncan told her.

“Oh yes,” his grandfather said.

“But—” said Caroline.

“Who’s the lawyer here, you or me? Boys’s right. It’s true. And yes, I know, there’s a lot to be said against it. But look at it this way. What nicer girl could he have picked? She’s sure to settle him down some. And this way there’s no adjustment for them to make, no in-law problems—”

“You ought to be locked up,” Sam Mayhew said.

“Sir!” said Grandfather Peck.

“Haven’t you heard of inbreeding?”

“Not at the table, Sam.”

“Haven’t you heard of genes?”

“Now, we come of good solid stock,” the grandfather said. “No worries there.” He picked up the carving knife. “Care for a slice of ham, Duncan boy?”

“He’s a blood relative,” said Sam Mayhew. “And he’s only twenty years old, and he hasn’t got a responsible bone in his body. Well, I’m not going to allow it. Justine won’t marry Duncan or any other Peck.”

“Then we’ll elope,” Duncan said.

“Elope!” cried Justine’s mother. “Oh, anything but that!”

“You are a fool, Caroline,” Sam Mayhew said. Then he stood and took Justine by the wrist and pulled her up and toward the door. But she was still calm and so was Duncan. Nothing seemed to disturb them. As Justine passed Duncan he gave her a slow, deep stare that caused the rest of the family to avert their eyes. “Come, Justine,” her father said. He led her through the living room and up to her bedroom. She went without a protest. He set her in her room and shut her door and locked it, and put the key up on the ledge again before he went back to the others.

In her ruffled rocker, Justine sat and waited. The pointlessness of being locked in her room seemed more comical than annoying, and she was not worried about her family. Hadn’t Duncan predicted everything? “Your father’s the one who’ll be upset. The others will get over it. Anyway, it’s always been a bother adapting outside wives. Then your father will give in because he has to. There won’t be any problems.”

“I know there won’t.”

“There would be even less if you would just run away with me.”

“I want to do this right, I said.”

“Does it matter that much? Justine, why does it matter? They’re just a bunch of people, just some yellow-haired, ordinary people. Why do you have to ask for their approval?”

“Because I love them,” Justine said.

He didn’t have any answer for that. Love was not a word he used, even to her.

She rocked and gazed at the wintry gray sky, while downstairs the battle went on and on. Great-Grandma soothed everyone, a dry thread weaving in and out. She thought this marriage was a wonderful idea; she had never heard of genes. When Sam Mayhew stormed, Grandfather snapped and cut him short. Uncles rumbled and aunts chirped and burbled. And over it all rode Duncan’s level voice, sensible and confident. Justine could tell when he began to win. He continued alone, the others fell behind. The worst of the battle was over. All that was left was for the losers to regain face.

Justine felt suddenly stifled and bored. She went into her bathroom for her toothbrush, and took a pack of matches from her bureau drawer. She had not grown up with Duncan for nothing: heating the toothbrush handle very slowly, she pushed it little by little into the lock of her door and then turned it and walked out free. When she re-entered the dining room, they didn’t seem surprised to see her. Only Duncan, noticing the toothbrush in her hand, tipped back in his chair and looked amused, but he sobered up when Justine’s father rose and came around the table to face her.

“Justine,” he said.

“Yes, Daddy.”

“It has been pointed out to me that there’s nothing I can really do to stop you. All I can hope is that you’ll listen to reason. Justine, look. Don’t you see why you’re doing this? It’s merely proximity, the two of you had no one else, no one in this family has anyone else. You were thrown too much together, at an age when naturally . . . and you were afraid to turn to some outsider. Admit it. Isn’t that correct?”

Justine thought it over. “Well,” she said finally, “it does sound correct, yes.”

“Well, then.”

“But then, both sides sound correct. I always agree with who I’m listening to.”

He waited, expecting more. All she did was smile. “Aah!” he said suddenly, and turned away, throwing up his hands. “You even sound like him. You’re a puppet. I’ve learned something today: set a bad and a good person down together and the bad wins every time. I always wondered.”

“Say that again?” said Aunt Lucy. “Is it Duncan you’re calling bad?”

“Who else?”

“Duncan’s not a bad boy.”

Even Duncan looked surprised.

“Justine’s the one who kept the rest of us away from him. Justine wouldn’t tell his own mother where he was staying! Blame your daughter!”

“Why, Lucy!” Justine’s mother said.

Duncan let his chair tip forward. This might turn out to be interesting. But no, they were distracted by a new development: Sam Mayhew buttoning his suit coat. He worked with his elbows out and his clock-shaped face set impassively toward some point above their heads. They knew at once that something important was going on.

“I won’t be attending this wedding,” he said finally.

“Oh, Sam!” his wife cried.

“And I won’t be living here.”

“What?”

“I’m moving out to my parents’. I’m going to look for a house in Guilford.”

He finished the buttons. He began pulling his shirt cuffs down, neat bands of white above his chubby red hands. “You may come too, of course, Caroline. And Justine if she decides against this marriage. But I warn you: if you come, we will only be visiting your family once a month.”

“Once a month?”

“The first Sunday of every month, for dinner. We’ll go home at three.”

“But Sam—” his wife said.

“Make your choice, Caroline.”

He continued to gaze above her head. Caroline turned to her family. She was still baby-faced, although the years had worked like gravity pulling on her cheeks. Her weight had settled in upon itself. She looked like a cake that had collapsed. To each brother and sister, to her father and her grandmother, she turned a round lost stare while twisting the pearls on her fingers.

“What’s your decision, Caroline?”

“I can’t just leave them like that.”

“All right.”

“Sam?” she said.

He walked over to Justine. Duncan rose instantly to his feet. “Justine,” Sam Mayhew said, “you have been a disappointing daughter in every way, all your life.”

Then Justine rocked back as if she had been hit, but Duncan already stood behind her braced to steady her.

The wedding was to be held in a church. All the family insisted on that. Duncan had not been to church in several years and detested Reverend Didicott, a fat man who came from Aunt Lucy’s hometown and had a Southern accent that would surely double the length of the ceremony; but he said he would do whatever Justine wanted. And Justine, half willing anyway, went along with the others, submitting to a long satin dress, Sarah Cantleigh’s ivory veil, and a little old lady consultant with an emergency cigar box full of pins, white thread, spirits of ammonia, and a stick of chalk for stains. “Oh, Duncan!” Justine said, as she sped by him on the way to the photographer. “I’m sorry! I know how you must hate this!” But he was surprisingly tolerant. He had agreed to give up his room and move home for the month preceding the wedding; he went without a word to buy a black suit that turned him stern and unfamiliar. During lulls in the excitement, he seemed to be observing Justine very closely. Did he think she would change her mind? Reading Bride’s magazine, she felt his eyes upon her, weighing her, watching for something. “What is it?” she asked him, but he never would say.

Her mother was everywhere: She bustled and darted, giving commands, trilling out fitting schedules in a voice so gay it seemed about to break off and fly. “Really, no one would guess her husband’s left her,” Justine told Duncan.

“Don’t speak too soon.”

“Why?”

“Now she’s got the wedding to keep her busy. What about later?”

Later Justine would be far away. One thing Duncan would not agree to was living in Roland Park. Nor even in Baltimore, not even long enough for Justine to finish school. And he would not go back to school himself. So they were renting a little house and a plot of land an hour’s drive out in the country, where they used to go on their trips. Duncan planned to start a goat farm. It was what he had always wanted, he said. It was? Justine had never heard him mention it before. But he couldn’t go on forever looking up facts for professors; and anyway, he kept losing those jobs, he gave in to a temptation to rewrite their material, making it more colorful, adding his own startling scraps of knowledge and a few untruths. And he and Justine each had a share of old Justin’s trust fund. Because of the proliferation of heirs it amounted to almost nothing, but they could manage till the dairy started paying off. “You’re strapping yourself in, boy,” his grandfather said. “You want an education. And renting’s no good, it’s a shoddy way to do things.”

“Sure, Grandfather.”

But Duncan went on reading the Dairy Goat Journal, rummaging through his shocks of hair as he always did when he was absorbed in something. And a week before the wedding he helped supervise the loading of a Mayflower van containing ancient, massive furniture from the relatives and rolled-up rugs, crates of crystal stemware, gifts of silver and china, linens monogrammed by Aunt Laura May and heavy damask curtains, all meant for their three-room cabin. Justine wasn’t entirely sure that everything was suitable, but how else would you furnish a place? She didn’t know. Duncan made no comment, only watched without surprise as she directed the movers toward a claw-footed bureau, a tasseled floor lamp, a bedstead with pineapple knobs.

“Prepare your mother, now,” he told her. “I mean it. Get her ready for doing without you, because it’s going to be a shock for her once it happens.”

“I will.”

“Prepare yourself, Justine.”

“Prepare for what?”

“Do you really understand that you’ll be leaving here?”

“Of course I do,” she said.

Well, naturally she would rather not be leaving. It made her sad just to think about it. But nothing mattered as much as the lurch in her stomach when she saw him. When they sat apart in Great-Grandma’s study, some inner selves seemed to rise up and meet while their bodies remained seated. In halls and pantries and stairwells, they kissed until they were sick and dizzy. She missed Duncan’s room downtown: his jingling bed, the warm pulse in the hollow of his throat, the leathery arch of his right foot curving exactly to the shape of her calf when they fell asleep.

“Still,” Duncan said, “I wish I could be sure you know what you’re getting into.”

At the rehearsal, Esther took the part of the bride for good luck. It was terrible to see her up there so close to Duncan. Her emerald-green sheath showed off her figure, which was better than Justine’s. “Tell me,” Justine said to Duncan later. “Did you ever think of marrying Esther?”

“No.”

“But why me?” she asked.

“Why me, for that matter?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Why are you marrying me, Justine?”

“Oh, well, Claude is too fat and Richard’s too young.”

She didn’t understand the strange look he gave her.

On Justine’s wedding morning, a pale cool day in April, her mother woke her by pulling open the curtains in her bedroom. “Justine,” she said, “listen. Are you awake?”

“Yes.”

“I want you to listen a minute.”

She was wearing a slithery pink silk dressing gown and already her doll-like face was made up perfectly, her curls precisely flattened. She carried a torn scrap of paper. She sat on Justine’s bed and held the paper out to her, smiling a coaxing smile like someone offering medicine. “Your daddy’s telephone number,” she said.

“My what?”

“Hear what I say, now. I want you to go out in the hall to the phone. I want you to dial this number. It’s your grandmother Mayhew’s. Ask to speak to your daddy. Say, ‘Daddy, today is my wedding day.’ ”

“Oh, Mama.”

“Listen! Say, ‘Daddy, this is supposed to be the happiest day of my life. Won’t you make it perfect and come give me away?’ ”

“But I can’t talk like that,” Justine said.

“Of course you can. And he has that fine suit that’s still in the cleaner’s bag, I know he took it with him. Why, it wouldn’t be any trouble at all! Justine? I beg you, Justine.”

“Mama—”

“Please, I’ve been counting on it. I know it will work. See, I’ve written the number so neatly? Take it. Take it.”

She pressed it into her hands. Justine climbed out of bed, still unwilling.

“Go on, Justine.”

In the hall, the telephone sat on a piecrust table. The window above it was party open, so that Justine in her flimsy cotton nightgown shivered while she dialed.

“Hello,” Sam Mayhew said.

She had been expecting her grandmother, a static-voiced old lady she hardly knew. She wasn’t prepared for her father yet.

“Hello,” he said.

“Daddy?”

There was a pause. Then he said, “Hello, Justine.”

“Daddy, I — today is my wedding day.”

“Yes, I saw it in the paper.”

She was silent. She was taking in his soft, questioning voice, which reminded her of his baffled attempts at conversation long ago in Philadelphia. For the first time she realized that he had actually left. Everything had broken and altered and would not ever be the same.

“Honey,” he said. “You can always change your mind.”

“No, Daddy, I don’t want to change my mind.”

“I’m about to buy a house in Guilford. Wouldn’t you like that? There’s a room for you with blue wallpaper. I know you like blue. You could go away to college, someplace good. Why, you used to be a high-B student! Those Pecks think girls go to college to mark time but — it’s not too late. You know that. You can still call it off.”

“Daddy, will you come give me away at the wedding?”

“No. I can’t lend myself to such a thing.”

“I’d really like you to.”

“I’m sorry.”

Her mother tugged at Justine’s nightgown. “Tell about the happiest day of your life!” she hissed.

“Wait—”

“Who’s that?” her father asked.

“It’s Mama.”

“What’s she doing there?”

“She says to tell you—”

“Did your mother put you up to this?”

“No, I — she just—”

“Oh,” her father said. “I thought it was you that was asking. I wish it had been.”

“I am asking.”

“Justine, I’m not going to come to your wedding. Don’t bring it up again. But listen, because these are the last sensible words you’ll hear all day, or maybe all the rest of your life: you’ve got to get out of there.”

“Out, Daddy . . . ”

“You think you are getting out, don’t you. You’re going to farm chickens or something.”

“Goats.”

“But you’re not really leaving at all, and anyway you’ll be back within a year.”

“But we’re going to—”

“I know why you’re marrying Duncan. You think I don’t. But have you ever asked yourself why Duncan is marrying you? Why is he marrying his first cousin?”

“Because we—”

“It’s one of two reasons. Either he wants a Peck along to torment, or to lean on. Either he’s going to give you hell or else he’s knotted tighter to his family than he thinks he is. But whichever, Justine. Whichever. It’s not a business you’d care to get involved in.”

“I can’t talk any more,” Justine said.

“What? Hold on there, now—”

But she hung up. Her teeth were chattering. “What happened?” her mother asked. “What happened, isn’t he coming?”

“No.”

“Oh! I see. Well.”

“I feel sick.”

“That’s wedding jitters, it’s perfectly natural,” her mother said. “Oh, I never should have asked you to call in the first place. It was only for his sake.”

Then she led Justine back to her room, and covered her with the quilt handstitched by Great-Grandma, and sat with her a while. The quilt gave off a deep, solid warmth. There was a smell of coffee and cinnamon toast floating up from the kitchen, and a soft hymn of Sulie’s with a wandering tune. Justine’s jaw muscles loosened and she felt herself easing and thawing.

“We’re going to do without him just fine,” her mother said. “I only wanted to make him think he was a part of things.”

Later the minister, Reverend Didicott, told the assistant minister that the Peck — Mayhew wedding was the darnedest business he had ever seen. First of all the way they sat the guests, who were not numerous to begin with: friends clumped in back, and the bride’s and groom’s joint family up front. There was something dreamlike in the fact that almost everyone in the front section had the same fair, rather expressionless face — over and over again, exactly the same face, distinguished only a little by age or sex. Then the groom, who seemed unsuitably light of heart, followed him around before the ceremony insisting that Christianity was a dying religion. (“It’s the only case I know of where mental sins count too; it’ll never sell,” he said. “Take it from me, get out while the getting’s good.” Right then Reverend Didicott should have refused to marry them, but he couldn’t do that to Lucy Hodges Peck, whose family he had known down South.) The bride was given away by her grandfather, an unsmiling man with a mighty snappy way of speaking to people, although so far as was known the bride’s father was in excellent health. The groom refused to kiss the bride in public. But the bride’s mother was the strangest. Perfectly sedate all through the ceremony, if a little trembly of mouth, gay and flirtatious at the reception afterwards, she chose to fall apart at the going away. Just as the groom was enclosing the bride in his car (which was another whole story, a disgraceful greenish object with a stunted rear end), the mother let out with a scream. “No!” she screamed. “No! How can you just leave me all alone? It’s your fault your father’s gone! How can you drive off like this without a heart?” The bride started to get out but the groom laid a hand on her arm and stopped her, and then they took off in their automobile, which appeared to be led by its nose. The mother threw herself in the grandfather’s arms and wept out loud. “We people don’t cry, Caroline,” he said. The most ancient Mrs. Peck of all put on a genteel smile and started humming, and Reverend Didicott looked inside the envelope the groom had given him and found fifty dollars in Confederate money.

Duncan told everyone they would be away on a honeymoon, but they weren’t; he just liked to lie. Instead they went straight to the farm. For two weeks they were left to themselves. Duncan worked uninterrupted, settling in eight Toggenburg does and a purebred buck who smelled like a circus, transporting bales of hay and sacks of Purina goat chow, a block of pink salt and a vat of blackstrap molasses he claimed would increase milk production when added to the goats’ drinking water. The weather had turned suddenly warm and he went about in his undershirt, whistling “The Wabash Cannonball,” while in their little house Justine threw open all the windows and tied the damask curtains back so they wouldn’t hinder the breeze. She had made the place a replica of Great-Grandma’s house, if you ignored the green paper walls and the yellowed ceilings. Rugs covered the flowered linoleum, and the four-poster bed hid the fungus growing beneath one window. She fought the foreign smells of kerosene and fatback by hanging Great-Grandma’s china pomander ball in the hall. She worked for hours every day constructing meals from Fannie Farmer’s cookbook, the one her aunts all used. In the evenings, the two of them sat side by side on the front porch in cane-seated rockers that used to be their grandfather’s. They looked out across their scrubby, scraggly land, past the slant-roofed shed where the does stood swaybacked. Like an old country couple they rocked and watched the gravel road, where they might see an occasional pick-up truck bound for the Jordans’ farm on the hill or a string of children carrying switches and weedy flowers, dawdling home. Justine thought she would like to stay this way forever: isolated, motionless, barely breathing, cut loose from everyone else. They were like people under glass. They rocked in unison side by side, almost touching but not quite, as if thin wires were stretched between them.

Then the letters started coming. “I keep busy, I go for a lot of walks,” her mother said. “Not far, of course. Just up and down your great-grandma’s side yard, up and down again.” Aunt Lucy said, “We think of you often. Especially Caroline does, you can tell although you know she wouldn’t mention it for anything.” “Last Sunday,” Great-Grandma said, “we laid two places for you supposing you might be back from your honeymoon and would think to come for dinner, as it would do Caroline a world of good, but it seems you couldn’t make it.”

Justine felt stabbed in the chest. “Dear Mama,” she wrote, “I miss you very much. I want to come home for a visit. Duncan says we will just as soon as we can, although of course goats are not something you can just walk off and leave. They have to be milked twice a day and watered, and Duncan has to stay pretty close by anyway because he has to put an ad in the paper and soon customers will be coming . . . ”

“Dear Ma,” Duncan said on a postcard. “High! We’re doing fine. Say hello to everybody. Sincerely, Duncan.”

The family’s ink was black, their envelopes cream. Nearly every morning a cream-colored accordion lay waiting in the mailbox at the end of the driveway. Once Duncan got there before Justine and he scooped the letters out of the box and flung them over his head. “Hoo!” he said, and tipped back his face like a child in a snowstorm while the envelopes tumbled all around him. Justine came running, and bent at the edge of the gravel to gather them up. “Oh, Duncan, I wish you wouldn’t do things like this,” she told him. “How will I know I’ve got them all?”

“What does it matter? Each one is just like the next.”

It was true. Still she read them closely, often stirring or starting to speak, while Duncan watched her face. Each envelope let out a little gust of Ivory soap, the smell of home. She could imagine the leafy shadows endlessly rearranging themselves outside her bedroom window, and her grandfather’s slow, fond smile when he met her at the start of a day. She missed her grandfather very much.

“If you like,” Duncan said, “I’ll take you this Sunday for dinner. Is that what you want?”

“Yes, it is,” she told him.

But somehow they didn’t go. Duncan became involved in cleaning the barn, or wiring the new electric fence. Or they simply overslept, waking too slowly with their legs tangled together and their blue eyes opening simultaneously to stare at each other across the pillow, and then the unmilked goats were bleating and there were always so many chores to do. “Maybe next Sunday,” Justine would write. When the new sheaf of envelopes arrived she felt chastened and sorry even before she had opened them. But when she took the letters to Duncan out in the barn he only laughed. Like a teacher with a pointer, he would poke a stalk of timothy at stray sentences here and there — reproaches, transparent braveries, phrases with double and triple and quadruple meanings. “ ‘Of course we’re sorry you didn’t make it but we understand perfectly, as I had already told your aunts that perhaps we shouldn’t expect you.’ Ha!” he said.

Justine’s face, then, would slowly ease, but she reclaimed the letters and stacked them carefully before she went back to the house.

Then one day a truck rattled up their driveway and a man climbed out, carrying a telephone on the palm of his hand. “Phone,” he said, as if Justine should lift the receiver to answer it. But he swung on by her and up the porch steps, with a beltful of tools clanking around his hips. Duncan met him in the doorway. “We didn’t order that,” he said.

“Somebody did.”

“Not us.”

The man pulled a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and shook it open. “Peck and Sons,” he said.

“That’s someone else.”

“Your name Duncan Peck?”

“Yes.”

“This phone is for you, then. Don’t complain. Bill goes to Peck and Sons. Wished I got presents like that.”

“If we had wanted a telephone we would have ordered it on our own,” Duncan said.

But Justine said, “Oh, Duncan, it’s a gift! We can’t hurt their feelings.”

Duncan studied her a minute. Then he said, “All right.”

Now the phone rang once, twice, three times a day even, and Justine would come running in from the fields or the barn to answer it. “Justine,” her mother said, “I am upstairs. I’m standing in the hall here looking into your room and your shelf of dolls along the wall, the Spanish lady with her real lace mantilla that your grandfather gave you in Philadelphia when you were only four, remember? She has the sweetest, saddest face.”

“Mama, I’m helping Duncan dehorn a goat.”

“Do you remember when Grandfather gave you the Spanish lady? You insisted on taking her to bed with you, though she wasn’t a cuddly kind of doll. Your daddy and I came into your room every night after you were asleep and put her up on the bureau again. Oh, you looked so innocent and peaceful! We would stand there a while just watching you. Your daddy didn’t have to travel so often then and it seemed we had so much more time together.”

“Oh, Mama,” Justine would say, “I wish I could be there with you. Don’t take on so, please don’t cry.”

Aunt Sarah called, with Aunt Laura May on the upstairs extension. “She’s started staying in bed, Justine, she never gets out of her bathrobe. She has these awful headaches. I called your daddy but I believe that man is possessed. He said he wouldn’t come, she should come stay in his house and of course that is just not possible, he only has a weekly cleaning lady. Of course she would need more than that, it’s all we can do to see to her wants even with Sulie helping out. We’re running our feet off.”

“We bring all her meals on a tray,” Aunt Laura May said.

“We’ve moved the television up to her bedroom.”

“The radio for daytime. Stella Dallas.”

Justine said, “We’ll come on Sunday.”

“Do my ears deceive me?”

“We’ll be there around noon,” said Justine. “But we can’t stay the night, you know, the goats are—”

“The goats, yes.”

“Goodbye till then.”

She went back out to the field. “Duncan,” she said, “I think we’d better go for dinner this Sunday.”

“You do, do you.”

“It’s been six weeks, you know. And they say that Mama is—”

“You don’t have to keep harping on it, we’ll go.”

But in bed that night, when he had just stretched out alongside her and taken her head in his hands, the phone rang again and he said, “Bulls-eye.”

“I’ll get it,” she said.

“Oh, your mother and her X-ray vision. She’s worked on this, she’s got it timed. She couldn’t call when you were just reading Woman’s Day, no—”

“Let me up, I’ll answer,” said Justine.

“No, don’t. We’ll ignore it.” But then he said, “How can we ignore a thing like that? Nine rings. Ten.”

“I’ll only be a minute.”

“Eleven,” Duncan said. He had laid one arm across her to hold her down but he kept his head raised and his eyes on the black shine of the telephone. “We’ll go out and sleep in the field,” he told her.

“The field, Duncan!”

“Where else? If we answer, she wins. If we lie here and listen she wins. Hear that? Four-letter rings. Come on, Justine.”

“Well, just let me get a blanket.”

“Here’s a blanket.”

“I’ll need a bathrobe.”

“What for?”

“Do you want your pillow?”

“No I don’t want my pillow.”

“And insect repellent.”

“Oh, for—”

Then he was off the bed and out of the room. “Duncan?” she said. “Duncan, have you changed your mind?” But before she could follow him he was back, waving the huge iron clippers he used for trimming the goats’ hooves. Justine heard a single click. The phone gave a whimper and died.

“Oh, Duncan,” Justine said, but she was laughing when she lay back down.

All the next morning the telephone sat silent on the bureau with its comical stub of a tail sticking out. In the afternoon, when they were leaving to do some shopping in town, Duncan locked the front door so that no repairman could come while they were gone. “You know the family is going to let them hear about this,” he said. “They’ll be sending undercover men with their little bags of tools.” And sure enough, when they got back there was a card hanging from the doorknob. “What a pity, our telephone representative has been and gone,” he said. Still, Justine only laughed.

But in the evening, when they were sitting on the porch, something stopped her rocking. She straightened suddenly and frowned. “Duncan,” she said.

“Hmm?”

“I have this funny feeling.”

Duncan had been reading a book on how to start a chicken farm, sliding a flashlight down the page because it was already dark. He raised the flashlight now and shone it into her face.

“Something terrible is going on at home,” she told him.

“Something terrible’s always going on at home.”

“I mean it. This is serious. I really mean it.”

“What, have you turned psychic?”

“No, but I can tell if there’s going to be a change of some kind.”

He rocked and waited.

“We have to go there,” she said.

The flashlight clicked off.

“I’m sorry, Duncan. I’ll go alone if you’d rather. But I just feel I—”

“All right, all right.”

While she packed an overnight case, he drove up the hill to ask Junior Jordan to tend the goats. They could have done that weeks ago! But then, Justine knew that as well as Duncan. She waited on the porch, clutching her case, shivering a little although the night was warm. When she saw his close-set headlights bobbing toward her she ran down the steps and opened the car door. “It’s all set,” Duncan told her. “Climb in.”

The car seemed to be drawn down the road by two long yellow cones. Justine was reminded of other trips, before they were married, rushing home to beat a curfew. All through that silent drive she had the feeling that she was some younger, smaller self, anxiously chewing the ribbons of her hat while she wondered if she would be scolded for staying out so late.

In Guilford, at eight o’clock that morning, Sam Mayhew’s cleaning lady had found him dead in his kitchen. He was wearing a bathrobe and there was a roll of Tums on the floor beside him. Apparently he had suffered a heart attack. By ten o’clock old Mr. Mayhew had called the Pecks, but at five o’clock that evening Caroline still knew nothing about it. Nobody wanted to tell her. Instead they huddled in small groups downstairs in Great-Grandma’s house, whispering bulletins back and forth. “She’s in bed eating the chocolates Marcus brought her.” “She’s watching a program on flower arranging.” “She’s trying to get Justine on the telephone again.” “Oh, if only we could just never tell her and this would all blow over!”

Then the grandfather arrived from work. He was forcibly retired now but he liked to prowl around his sons’ offices, checking up. “What’s this?” he said, seeing clusters of women everywhere. When they told him he shook his head sharply, as if getting rid of a fly. “What? But how old was he? Not even out of his forties! And had a heart attack? What kind of stock did the man come from, for God’s sake?”

Then he went to break the news to Caroline. The others stood around downstairs, pretending to talk but trailing off in the middle of sentences. One by one the uncles came to find out where everybody was, and they had to be told too. Richard arrived with a girlfriend who was asked politely to leave, as there had been an unfortunate occurrence. Aunt Lucy, who had double-dated with Sam and Caroline when they were young, became a little upset and kept hanging onto her husband’s arm until Laura May suggested that she fetch her afghan squares to get her mind off things. Then down came the grandfather, sober and dignified, checking his flip-top watch. “Well?” they asked. “How’d she take it?”

“Took it fine.”

“What’d she say?”

“Didn’t say anything.”

“Shall we go up now?”

“Do what you like,” he said, and then he went off to his own house, taking Esther with him to fix his supper.

The others tiptoed up the stairs. Caroline was sitting in her bed against stacks of pillows. When they came in she leaned over to lower the volume slightly on the television set. “Caroline, we’re so sorry,” they said, and Caroline said, “Why, thank you. It’s so nice of you to take an interest.”

“If there’s anything we could be doing now—”

“I can’t think of a thing! But I do appreciate your asking.”

“Would you like to go over to the funeral home? Of course it’s not as if you had still been together or anything, I’m not quite sure what is customary in this case but if you feel you—”

“Why, later, perhaps. Not just now.”

“It’s probably not customary anyway.”

“No.”

“Well, if you want us, then—”

“Oh, certainly! I’ll let you know first thing.”

They tiptoed down again. Although they should be going to their homes for supper, they seemed inclined to churn about in Great-Grandma’s living room instead. They weren’t quite sure just how they should behave. The last death in the family had been in 1912, too long ago for most of them to remember. “Yet after all,” Aunt Sarah said finally, “it’s not as if Sam Mayhew were really—”

“No. No.”

“And after all, he did actually—”

“Oh, he acted like a man possessed.”

“Always trying to turn her against us.”

“Making no effort to understand her.”

“And Caroline’s so sensitive. It’s the way she is.”

“Refusing to give his own daughter away.”

“But still,” said Aunt Lucy, who sometimes grew over-emotional, “Caroline loved him! I know she did, she must have, you could tell she was just torn. And now he’s dead. Oh, what will she do now?”

“Lucy,” her husband said. “About time to feed me my supper, don’t you think?”

“Well, all right.”

“We’ll try to call Justine from our house, Grandma. If the phone’s not fixed, I’ll drive out there in the morning.”

“Oh, think of Justine. How will she ever forgive herself?”

Upstairs, cowboys sang lonesome songs around a camp-fire and the wind rolled tumbleweed across the desert with a howling sound.

At nine o’clock that evening, Caroline rose up in her pink silk gown and put on her feathered slippers. Before leaving the room she turned off the television set. She descended the stairs, stately and flowing; she crossed the front hall and went out the door. She drifted across the lawn and then onto the road, where she proceeded down the center with her arms out and her steps mincing and careful like a tightrope walker. To the first car that came, she appeared as monstrous and unexpected as a wad of pink bubble gum. The driver gasped and swerved at the last moment. The second driver was harder to surprise. “Do your drinking at home, lady!” he shouted out the window, and then he slid smoothly past.

She had to wait for six cars, all told, before she found one that would run her down.

Duncan brought Justine a cup of beef broth and a silver spoon and a linen napkin. He found her sitting in the living room of Great-Grandma’s house, all alone, staring into space. ‘Oh. Thank you,” she said. She set the cup on the coffee table.

“I made it myself.”

“Thank you.”

“Ma said coffee, but coffee has no food value.”

She smoothed her dress.

“Broth has protein,” Duncan told her. “You can go without protein for months and feel just fine, never notice, but underneath it’s doing you harm that can never be repaired. Protein is made up of amino acids, the building blocks of the—”

“Duncan, I can’t believe you’re saying all this.”

“I can’t either,” he told her.

He waited for her to try the broth. She didn’t. He squatted beside her. “Justine—” he said.

But no, too late, the aunts had tracked them down again. “Justine? You mustn’t sit like this, dear heart—”

They reminded him of ships. They traveled in fleets. Their wide summer skirts billowed and collapsed as they settled all around him, edging him out. But he didn’t give in so easily. “We were just talking,” he told them.

“She should be in bed.”

“What for?”

“She doesn’t look at all well.”

She didn’t. Even her hair seemed changed, hanging lank and lifeless around her face. In just four days she had developed a new deep hollow between her collarbones. She was already losing her country tan. If he could just carry her home, to the sunlit fields and their little house with its ridiculous damask curtains! But the aunts rustled and resettled, inching closer. “She ought to be left with us a while, Duncan. She just feels so sorry, you see. She’s acting just like her poor dear mother did. You can’t take her back to sit all alone in the middle of nowhere.”

“Alone?”

“She needs looking after.”

“I look after her,” Duncan told them.

“Yes, but — and she could have her old room again, or maybe yours if hers would bring memories. You could go back to your cows or whatever and we would take good — Justine, do you like Duncan’s room?”

“Duncan’s? Yes.”

“There, see?”

“Or she could come to us,” Aunt Bea said. “At our house, you see, we have so much excitement, Esther and Richard rushing around and the twins so talkative, she’d just come out of herself in no time.”

“Maybe she doesn’t want to come out of herself,” Duncan said.

“Oh, it helps to have a little company! All those young people making merry. Justine?”

Justine sat like a stone. The old secret, tucked-in smile she used to flash Duncan seemed gone forever. When he rose she didn’t even look his way, and it seemed unlikely that she noticed when he left the room.

Now as she cruised through the darkening house she was aware of how everything here was attached to everything else. There was no such thing as a simple, meaningless teacup, even. It was always given by someone dear, commemorating some happy occasion, chipped during some moment of shock, the roses worn transparent by Sulie’s scrubbing, a blond stain inside from tea that Sam Mayhew had once drunk, a crack where Caroline, trembling with a headache, had set it down too hard upon the saucer.

She went out the front door that was dented by Justin Peck’s invalid’s bed in the fall of 1905. She passed her grandfather’s front porch, where Maggie Rose stood in the twilight waiting for a Model T. She climbed Uncle Two’s front steps, surrounded by ghostly whispers and murmurs of love and scoldings and reproaches and laughter. Upstairs she found Duncan in his room among Erector Set machines he had built when he was twelve, a full-color poster of Princess Pet in the Land of the Ice Cream Star, the Monopoly board in which all seven cousins had played a thirty-eight-hour world series in the spring of 1944. But Duncan — oh, forever in the present! — was whistling “The Wabash Cannonball” and fiddling with a rectangle of lead-colored metal.

She didn’t know how he could whistle.

When she came in the room he stopped. “Do you want to lie down?” he asked her. He began clearing his bed of everything on it, a jungle of wires and soldering irons, tubes of flux, glue, and paint. She sat on the edge of the mattress, but she didn’t want to stretch out. It was barely eight o’clock. If she slept now she would lie awake for hours later on, as she had last night and the night before.

“Anything you wanted to say?” Duncan asked.

“No.”

“Well.” He went back to whatever he was doing, but he didn’t whistle any more. “This is a wire-bending jig,” he told her.

She didn’t comment.

“These pegs can be moved, see? Then you bend the wire around them any way you want. There are all kinds of curves and angles. I could make you a bracelet. Want a bracelet? Or a necklace, if you like.”

She laid her fingers across her eyes, cooling them.

“I’ve got it,” he said. “A nose ring. Want a nose ring?”

When she opened her eyes she found a curve of wire nearly touching her nose, giving off a gray smell, sharp at one end. She batted it away. “What are you trying to do to me?” she said.

He looked surprised.

“Are you trying to get me angry on purpose?” she asked him.

“Well, not on purpose, no—”

“Why are you acting this way?”

“Justine, I’m not acting any way.”

“How can you play around with little pieces of wire when both my parents are dead, and you’re the one that took me far off and cut the telephone cord and laughed at Mama’s letters and wouldn’t bring me to visit?”

“Justine.”

“Daddy warned me,” she said. “He told me straight out you were marrying me to torment me.”

“Oh, did he?”

“Either that, he said, or to lean on me, but I don’t picture that ever happening.”

“Well, he certainly thought of everything, didn’t he,” Duncan said.

He went back to bending his wire. He adjusted a peg on the jig and turned a right angle.

“I’m sorry,” Justine said finally.

“That’s all right.”

“I just feel so—”

“It’s all right.”

“Duncan, couldn’t we just stay here a while?”

He looked up at her.

“We could live in Great-Grandma’s house,” she said. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“No, it wouldn’t.”

“Please?”

“I should have known,” he told her. “I didn’t really believe you would come away with me in the first place.”

“But I feel I’m getting pulled. I hate to just go away and leave them. And I can’t stay here without you, but you wouldn’t say a word against it when they brought it up.”

“I don’t want to pull you, Justine.”

“But then they’re the only ones doing it, and they’ll win.”

“Is that the only way you go anywhere? Being pulled?”

She was silent.

“All right,” said Duncan. “I’d like you to come with me. It’s important. It’s more important than they are.”

But she went on watching his face.

“Well, how am I supposed to do this?” he asked her. “I was too well trained, I don’t feel comfortable saying things straight out. They got to me a little too, you know.”

“Oh, Duncan,” Justine said. “You’ve said everything straight out since you were four years old and told Aunt Bea she had hair like broccoli.”

“No,” said Duncan. “I a Peck. I not talk so good but I give swell presents.”

Then he handed her his wire, a stick figure wearing Justine’s flat hat and triangular dress, looking so straightbacked and light-hearted that even a tribesman in darkest Africa could tell that someone cared for her.

The family lined up to see them off, their faces papery in the morning sun. “I can’t believe that you would be going like this,” Aunt Lucy said. Justine kissed her. She kissed Aunt Sarah, who said, “Do you think your parents would have understood? Rushing off as if all that mattered was a pack of billy goats?” Justine kissed her way down the entire row, not skipping even Richard, who ducked and blushed, and when she came to her grandfather she hung onto him hard for a moment as if this, not the wedding, were her real leavetaking. “Oh, um, now, Justine,” her grandfather said.

“Goodbye, Grandfather.”

Duncan opened the car door and she climbed in. The seat covers had a fish-oil smell from the sunlight, and when she leaned out the window to wave the metal was pleasantly hot on her arm. In the trees above them, mockingbirds were singing. Even when the car roared up they didn’t hush. “Scientists,” said Duncan, “have been investigating the stimuli that cause birds to vocalize in the morning. So far they have determined only one. They sing because they’re happy.”