Searching for Caleb

7

Duncan bought a dozen copper-colored hens and installed them in a shed he had built himself, complete with a box of oyster shells to assist in egg production and a zinc watering trough in which they all immediately drowned. But the goats flourished, and since only two customers had answered the newspaper ad there were quarts of surplus milk every day. Justine made butter and handcranked ice cream. Duncan boiled up kettles of Norwegian cheese. But no sooner had they finished one batch of milk than the goats gave more, and Justine dreamed at night of a white tide rising all around them. “Maybe we should cut down on the blackstrap molasses,” she told Duncan.

“Well, I don’t know if that would do much good. We seem to have started something we can’t stop, here.”

In the mornings Justine walked the gravel road with a basket of cheeses, peddling them to the neighbors, who bought them because they had grown to like her. Seeing her trudge up the driveway, in her country-looking hat and her plain cotton dress that was becoming a little faded, Mrs. Jordan would lumber out on her front steps and beam. “Why, it’s Justine Peck! How are you, honey?” Justine smiled trustingly, holding out her basket. It was hard for her to ask people to buy things, but she did enjoy the visits. At each house she stopped for a few minutes to sit in the kitchen and talk, and gradually the smells of kerosene and fatback stopped seeming strange to her and she began to feel comfortable with the stooped, prematurely aged women who offered her buttermilk and ginger cake to put some meat on her bones.

Sometimes, though, alone at home, she felt a gust of sorrow blow through her like a wind and she would stop whatever she was doing, hands stilled, face stunned and gaze into space for several minutes. Once when she was trimming the weeds that drained the fence’s current the smell of cut grass swung her back over years and years and she found herself sitting on a twilit lawn, nestled between her parents, listening to the murmur of her family all around her. She dropped the clippers and reached for the nearest object; she gripped the fence until her knuckles turned shiny. The throb of electricity caused a distant, dull ache. Duncan had to pry her fingers loose and say her name several times before she would look up.

They had not been back to Baltimore after that first visit, but she did write home weekly and one or another of the aunts would answer. Occasionally her grandfather composed a solemn, formal, nineteenth-century note saying that everyone was well and sent best regards. If only she could reach out and touch his knobby hand, as if by accident! But all she said in her own letters back was that Duncan was fine, the weather was fine, the goats were doing nicely.

If the sorrow went on too long she drove to Buskville, where she walked the streets for hours. She had been raised to believe that the best cure for grief was shopping, especially for things to wear. But there wasn’t that much money and anyway, she discovered she was incapable of purchasing clothes for herself. Putting on a dress that her mother had not picked out was a betrayal. She was reduced to buying little domestic articles in the dimestore: lemon reamers, parsley choppers. It seemed very important to have everything that would make her house perfect.

One day in August, having exhausted all the dimestore’s possibilities, she walked down a side street and discovered a hand-lettered cardboard sign reading MAGIC MARCIA. LOVE PROBLEMS. ADVICE. She swooped back through time and found herself on Madame Olita’s doorstep, Duncan watching her teasingly with one arm hooked around Glorietta de Merino. After a moment she switched her Woolworth’s bag to the other hand and rang Magic Marcia’s bell.

The woman who answered was thin and dark, with a crimson slash of lipstick. She was not much older than Justine, but there were two little boys with runny noses hanging onto her skirt. Gray straps slid out from her scoop-necked blouse. Justine was sorry she had come, but it was too late to back out.

Then when she was settled at the kitchen table, over the remains of breakfast, it seemed she was expected to ask some specific question. She hadn’t known that. “What is it?” the woman asked, flattening Justine’s hand like a letter. “Husband? Boyfriend?”

“No, I — just general things, I wanted to know.”

The woman sighed. She scratched her head and frowned at Justine’s palm. Apparently she saw nothing unusual. “Well,” she said finally, “you’re going to live a long time, that’s for sure.”

“Yes,” Justine said, bored. Really she had no particular interest in her future, which seemed certain to be happy and uneventful from here on out.

“Good marriage. Probably travel a little. Health is good. Probably have a lot of kids.”

“I will?” Justine asked. Duncan didn’t seem to want any children. But the woman said, “Oh yes.”

A question began to tug at the edges of Justine’s mind. She stared into space, not listening to the rest of her fortune. “Um, Magic Marcia,” she said finally. “Could you tell me something? If your palm predicts a certain future, is there any way you can change it?”

“Huh?”

“If your future is having children, could you deliberately not have children? If your future is to cause someone pain, for instance, isn’t there some way you could be very careful and not cause pain? Can’t you escape your fortune?”

“What is written is written,” said Magic Marcia, yawning.

“Oh,” Justine said.

On Friday she went to Blainestown, having checked the yellow pages beforehand. She climbed the stairs to SERENA, MISSTRESS OF THE OCCULT. This time, she knew exactly what she wanted to ask.

“Could I have avoided my future if my future was to do somebody harm?”

“Man does not avoid the future,” Serena said.

On Monday she went back to Blainestown, this time to MADAME AZUKI, ALL QUESTIONS ANSWERED.

“It’s in the stars. There is no escape,” said Madame Azuki.

“I see.”

On Wednesday she went to Baltimore. Duncan was inventing an automatic bean stringer and he only nodded when she told him she would be out for a while. She drove directly to a cluttered section on the east side of town. She found the dry cleaner’s, which was exactly the same even to its fly-specked, faded posters showing women in 1940’s suits. But Madame Olita’s sign on the window above had become a few flecks of paint, and there was a padlock on her door. Justine went into the cleaner’s. A large gray man was lining up laundry tags on the counter. “Can you tell me anything about Madame Olita?” she asked him.

“Ah, Madame Olita. She’s gone.”

“What, is she dead?”

“No, retired. She’s not feeling so well, you know? But was she a fortune teller! I don’t mind telling you, I used to go to her myself. Okay, so it’s mumbo-jumbo. You know why I went? Say you got a problem, some decision to make. You ask your minister. You ask your psychiatrist, psychologist, marriage counselor, lawyer — they all say, ‘Well of course I can’t decide for you and we want to look at all the angles here and I wouldn’t want to be responsible for—’ They hedge their bets, you see. But not Madame Olita. Not any good fortune teller. ‘Do X,’ they say. ‘Forget Y.’ ‘Stop seeing Z.’ It’s wonderful, they take full responsibility. What more could we ask?”

“Well, do you know where she is now? Could I just visit her?”

“Sure, she’s right down the block. But I don’t know how much she’s up to. Well, tell her I sent you, Joe sent you. Maybe she could use the company. Five eight three, apartment A.”

“Thank you very much,” Justine told him.

“Hope you get the answer you want.”

She let the door tinkle shut and walked on down the street, passing more cleaners and cut-rate pharmacies and pawnshops. At the end of the block was a large Victorian frame house surrounded by a veranda, and on the veranda sat Madame Olita in a Polynesian wicker chair. Although it was hot, she wore a crocheted shawl. She still had her stubby haircut, but she had lost an enormous amount of weight. Her clothes flopped and her neck was so scrawny that her face appeared to be lunging forward, vulturelike. She looked hollowed out. While Justine climbed the steps she watched without interest, perhaps assuming this was somebody else’s visitor. “Hello, Madame Olita,” Justine said.

“Hmmm?”

Madame Olita pulled herself together, wrapping the shawl more tightly around her shoulders.

“Joe sent me,” Justine said.

“Oh? Joe.”

“There’s a question I wanted to ask. Would you mind?”

“Well, I’m feeling poorly these days, you see. I don’t look into the future much.”

“No, it wasn’t about the future.”

Madame Olita sighed. “Sit down,” she said, pointing to the wicker chair beside her. She reached for Justine’s hand, as if she hadn’t understood.

“But I didn’t want—”

Madame Olita bent Justine’s palm back and frowned. “Oh, it’s you,” she said.

Justine felt pleased and shy, as if her unusual lines were her own accomplishment.

“Yes, I see,” said Madame Olita, nodding and tapping her teeth with one finger.

“You said my marriage was going to disrupt everything,” Justine reminded her.

“Did I.”

“You said I would break my parents’ hearts. How did you know that?”

“Oh, my dear,” said Madame Olita, leaning back suddenly and dropping her hand. “Really, I don’t remember. You were young and arrogant, and uncomfortable in my rooms, perhaps I just—”

“But it all came true!”

“Sometimes it does.”

“Was that just luck?”

“It may have been. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. Are you asking if I can truly see the future? I can. But more and more it seems to me that people are resisting change, digging in their heels against it. Which does make their futures easy to predict, but why bother? Fortune telling is only good when you forecast a happening. It falls flat when you say, ‘Never fear, your life will continue in its present course forever . . . ’ ”

She closed her eyes and then opened them and looked puzzled. “But I tend to go on and on,” she said. “You had some question you wanted to ask.”

Justine sat up straight and placed her hands together. “Madame Olita,” she said, “if my fortune was to break my parents’ hearts, is it true then that I had no way of avoiding it?”

“Oh, no.”

“No?”

“Goodness, no. You can change your future. I have seen lines alter in a hand overnight. I have seen cards fall suddenly into places where they refused to appear at any earlier reading.”

“I see,” said Justine, and then she sank back. It was the first answer that sounded right to her, but now she couldn’t think why she had wanted to hear it. She felt limp and drained.

“Otherwise,” said Madame Olita, “why take any action at all? No, you can always choose to some extent. You can change your future a great deal. Also your past.”

“My past?”

“Not what’s happened, no,” Madame Olita said gently, “but what hold it has on you.”

“Oh.”

“If you are so interested, I will teach you the art yourself if you like.”

“The — oh, well, I—”

“Cards would be your skill, I think.”

“Thank you anyway,” Justine said.

“Never mind. You’ll be back. I sit here every day of the week, taking the air. You can always find me. Shut the front gate going out, if you will.”

On Monday, Justine told Duncan that she was thinking of becoming a fortune teller. “Oh, really?” he said.

“Aren’t you going to laugh?”

“Not yet,” he said. “First I have to see how good you are.”

So she drove off to Baltimore again, to the white frame house where Madame Olita nodded dimly in her Polynesian chair.

“These are ordinary playing cards,” said Madame Olita, but to Justine they looked anything but. They were very old and the back of each was different: antique circus scenes of clowns, trapeze artists, dancing dogs, and bareback riders. “They once belonged to my mother. Who, though you wouldn’t believe it to look at me, was a genuine gypsy lady with seven ruffled petticoats and tiny brass cymbals that attached to her fingers for keeping time while she danced. She was raised in an abandoned candy store on Gay Street. Not exactly a painted wagon, but still . . . unfortunately she married my father, a high school civics teacher. She left her old life entirely, she cut off her long black hair, she had two daughters whom she sent to Radcliffe. However, I would rather have been raised a gypsy.”

She cut the cards. Justine sat across from her with her mouth open.

“It was my plan, after I graduated from Radcliffe, to join a caravan and marry a man with one gold earring. But it didn’t work out that way. I looked then more or less as I do today. I never married anyone, let alone a gypsy. So I had to get a job in my father’s high school, teaching algebra, but meanwhile I had learned fortune telling from my mother. Dancing I never mastered. I tried, though. My sister was quite good at it. But I bettered her at fortune telling. How I coveted these cards! My mother refused to give them to me. Cards like these are passed on only when the owner is dying, you see, and has no further use for them. Naturally I didn’t want my mother to die. But shall I tell you? When she failed to wake from surgery at the age of fifty-seven, the first thing I thought was, ‘Now I can have the cards.’ I went home and got them out of her wooden chest, then I walked over to the school and resigned my position. I set up shop in east Baltimore, above the cleaner’s. I have never laid eyes upon a caravan.”

She laid the cards out in concentric circles on a wicker table.

“My sister,” she said, “got the cymbals.”

Then she frowned and stabbed a card with her forefinger. “But pay attention! These cards are not read like books, you know. They have meanings assigned that you can memorize in half an hour, but ambiguous meanings. The death card, for instance. So called. But whose death? The client’s or someone’s close to him? And when? Is it real or metaphorical? No, you must think of these cards as tags.”

“Tags,” Justine said blankly.

“Tags with strings attached, like those surprise boxes at parties. The strings lead into your mind. These cards will pull out what you already know, but have failed to admit or recognize. Which is why palmistry works as well, or tea leaves or the Tarot or crystal ball. They all have validity, yes, but only when coupled with your own intuitions. You could take up astrology, even, but I already know: you haven’t the scholarly mind for it.”

“I prefer cards,” said Justine.

“Yes, yes, I know. But pay attention to everything. Watch your clients carefully. There will only be two kinds. Most are bored and merely hope to be told that something will happen. A very few lead eventful lives but cannot make decisions, which may be why they lead eventful lives; they will ask you to decide.”

“Which am I?” said Justine.

“Hmm? I don’t know. Maybe neither. You have never asked me to read your fortune, after all.”

“Oh. I guess not,” Justine said.

“You’re still looking backward, anyway,” Madame Olita told her.

“No, I’m not!”

“Suit yourself.”

After her lessons Justine drove straight home, but threads, strings, ropes pulled her in the direction of Roland Park and although she never gave in she had the feeling she was bleeding somewhere inside. “Well, you could go over for lunch,” Duncan said, but she thought from the way he spoke that he dreaded her agreeing to it. And she knew that her family would be distressed if they heard about Madame Olita. Then her new accomplishment, which was still as thin and fragile as a freshly hatched egg, would never seem right to her again; that was the way her mind worked. She didn’t go.

Did she believe in fortune telling herself? At Madame Olita’s she did. She was drawn in, impressed and fascinated by those no-nonsense hands dealing out the future. But then at home she felt compelled to test her faith with Duncan. She laid out her Bicycle playing cards self-consciously in front of him. “Today,” she told him, “I learned the formation used by Mademoiselle Le Normand, back in Napoleon’s time.”

“Le Normand,” he said, interested, cataloguing the name in his mind.

“We practiced on Madame Olita’s landlady, who is eighty-four years old. I predicted she was going to get married.”

He grinned.

“But!” said Justine. “She is! She told me afterward.”

“Good for you. Good for her.”

“Madame Olita says just a little longer and I can set up in business.”

“We’ll retire and live on your earnings,” he said.

She was relieved that he didn’t laugh. This was the only special skill she had ever possessed, the only thing she knew that he did not. Once he started memorizing her list of significations, but he got sidetracked while shuffling the cards and worked out a proof for Bernoulli’s Law of Averages instead.

There were days when Madame Olita was sharp-tempered and nothing would satisfy her. “Really, Justine, I despair of you!” she said. “Your mind! You have every qualification to be a good fortune teller but you will never be great, you’re mentally lazy. You coast along in intuition.”

“You said intuition was everything.”

“Never! I never said it was everything. You have to know a few facts as well, after all. These cards are like a doctor’s instruments. A good doctor has intuition too but he would never throw his instruments away on the strength of it.”

“But you said they were just tags, you said—”

“Enough!” And Madame Olita would fling up her hands and then slump in her chair. “You’ll spend your life doing readings for housewives and lovesick schoolgirls,” she said. “I don’t know why I bother.”

But other days she was as mild as milk. Then she would tell stories about her clients. “Will I ever forget that first year? All the Negroes came for clues on how to play the numbers. ‘Madame Olita I dreamed of handcuffs last night, which is number five nine eight in my Eye of Egypt Dream Book, but also razors, there was a cutting, eight seven three. So which do I play?’ ‘My dear,’ I told them, ‘you leave those numbers alone,’ and after a while they gave up on me and never came back. But how I tried! I wanted to have some influence, you see, on their lives. I would give them demonstrations of my psychic ability. I would have them choose a card and sight unseen I would tell them what it was.”

“I can’t do that,” Justine said sadly. Duncan had tested her once after reading an article on J. B. Rhine.

“No, I doubt very much that you would be psychic.”

“Then how come I can tell the future?”

“People who have led very still lives can often sense change before others can,” Madame Olita said.

“My life isn’t still,” said Justine.

Madame Olita only sighed.

At the last lesson, she gave Justine a test. “It’s time for you to read my fortune,” she said. Justine had been wanting to do that. She settled down happily at the wicker table, while Olita gazed off toward the street. It was one of her irritable days. “Cut the cards,” Justine told her, and she said, “Yes, yes, I know,” and cut them without looking. Justine chose a very complicated formation. She wanted to do this thoroughly, not missing a thing. She laid each card out with precision, and then sat back and drummed her fingers on her chair arm. After a moment she moved one card a half inch to the left and resettled herself. She frowned. She stopped drumming her fingers.

Madame Olita looked over at her with cool interest. Still Justine didn’t speak.

“Never mind,” said Madame Olita. “You passed.”

Then she became full of bustle, issuing last-minute instructions. “Did I tell you that strangers should pay ahead of time? If they don’t like their fortunes they tend to walk out, they’ll walk right out on you.”

Justine only gathered the cards in silence, one by one.

“Watch where you work, too. Some places have license fees, sometimes hundreds of dollars. It isn’t worth it. Are you listening?”

“What?”

“Don’t go to Calvert County. Don’t go to Cecil County, don’t go to Charles.”

“But we live on a farm, I’m not going anywhere.”

“Ha.”

Justine wrapped the cards and set them on the table. She came to stand in front of Madame Olita.

“Be a little mysterious, I didn’t tell you that,” said Madame Olita. “They’ll have more faith. Don’t let on where you come from or how you learned what you know. Make a point of ignoring personal questions when you’re giving a reading. Will you remember all this? What else should you know?”

Then she gave up. “Well, goodbye, Justine,” she said.

“Goodbye,” said Justine. “Could I come back for a visit?”

“Oh . . . no. No, I’ll be going into the hospital for a while, I think. But I wish you luck.”

“Thank you,” said Justine. She turned to go.

“Oh, and by the way.”

Justine turned back. Madame Olita, sagging in her chair, waved one hand toward the cards. “You might as well take those along with you,” she said.

When fall came Justine worked up the courage to offer her services at the high school homecoming fair. She donated her fees to the school. After that people began traveling all the way out to the farm, several a week, mostly women, asking if they should get married, or divorced, or sell their land or have a baby or move to California. Justine was astonished. “Duncan,” she said, “I don’t want to be responsible for people. For telling them who to marry and all.”

“But I sort of thought you believed in this,” Duncan said.

She wound a strand of hair around her finger.

“Well, never mind,” he told her. “Just don’t say anything that would cause somebody harm. But I don’t think people take bad advice. They’ve got intuition too, you know. In fact I’d be surprised if they take any advice at all.”

So she continued receiving people in her small, warm kitchen, laying Madame Olita’s cards across the surface of Great-Grandma’s rosewood table. She became a gatherer of secrets, a keeper of wishes and dreams and plans. Sometimes when people very young or very old came in, full of vague hopes, unable or unwilling to say what they would like to ask, she merely reassured them. But sometimes she was so explicit that her own daring amazed her. “Don’t sell any family possessions, particularly jewelry, particularly your mother’s,” she would say.

“How did you know?”

She hadn’t known she did know.

Then sometimes people came whose flat, frictionless lives offered Justine no foothold at all, and she slid into whatever general advice came to mind.

“Don’t rely too heavily on a man who bites his fingernails.”

In the next room, Duncan snorted.

Justine charged three dollars for each reading. They needed it; their milk customers barely paid for the newspaper ad. Juggling the budget to meet the rent, scraping up money from half a dozen sources, Justine had the feeling that she had been through all this years and years ago. Then she remembered: Monopoly. When Duncan had wiped her out and she was selling back hotels and mortgaging her railroads and turning in her get-out-of-jail-free card, all to pay the rent on Boardwalk. Their present problems did not seem much more serious than that. She knew that Duncan would manage.

For Christmas they went home to Baltimore. The family was very cautious and tactful, circling widely around all delicate subjects. It broke Justine’s heart to see what an effort they made. She worried about Duncan — would he say something new to hurt them? She went to bed each night exhausted. But Duncan was meticulously polite. He passed around the gifts that Justine had made by hand and he even invited the family to come and visit some Sunday. (“Oh, well, but it’s so much more comfortable for you to come here, don’t you think?” everybody said.) On the fourth day, when he became very quiet, Justine was quick to agree that they should head back early. She felt sad saying goodbye, particularly to her grandfather, but each time now it seemed a little easier than before.

In February, when money was especially tight, Duncan got a part-time job in town reporting for the Buskville Bugle. “But you can’t spell!” said Justine.

“Never mind, you can.”

For three weeks he ricocheted around the countryside, attending cornerstone layings, turtle derbies, zoning meetings, a Future Farmers contest in parliamentary procedure, a lecture on crop rotation. He enjoyed everything he went to, indiscriminately, and came home full of new scraps of information. “Did you know you can call up earthworms by vibrating a stick in the ground? If you harvest crimson clover too late it will turn into balls in your horses’ stomachs. I’ve learned a quilting pattern from the eighteenth century.” But then writing articles made him irritable. He never did like going at something systematically. He would hand Justine great sheaves of yellow paper all scrawled over and crossed out, with doodles in the margins. When she ran through them with a red pencil, correcting his spelling and slashing through his long digressions, he lost his temper. “Occurrence, o-c-u-r-e-n-c-e,” he said. “Why wreck it up adding extra c’s and r’s?”

“Because that’s how it’s spelled.”

“A waste of letters. This language has no logic to it.”

“I can’t help that.”

“Why’d you cross out my butterfly paragraph?”

“In an article on potato blight?”

“There happened to be a particularly fine great spangled fritillary sitting on the farm agent’s shoulder, totally out of season, ignored by everybody, all the way through the lecture. You can’t expect me to overlook a thing like that.”

And he would type the article complete and hand it in to the office, where any reference to butterflies was immediately deleted.

“They have minds like a snake’s intestinal tract,” Duncan said.

The fourth week, he attended an amateur musicians’ contest. His article that night began very well, describing the contest’s history, its sponsors, and the instruments represented. The next paragraph switched suddenly to first person and related his own impromptu entry with a borrowed harmonica, playing “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” for which he won fourth prize. In the third paragraph he reflected on the oddity of the “impromptu,” which could easily be mistaken, he said, for the name of some obscure Rumanian composer.

The newspaper editor said that, actually, they didn’t need a new reporter as much as they had thought they would.

By March, Duncan was becoming restless. Justine was not sure why. Everything was going well, six does had been dried off in preparation for their kidding in the spring. But Duncan rattled around the house like a bean in a box, staring out one window after another, starting inventions he didn’t finish, sending off to the Department of Agriculture for pamphlets on all sorts of impulsive projects: angora rabbits, fruit trees, popcorn. He painted half the kitchen yellow and then quit. He brought home a carload of rhododendron bushes with their roots balled up in burlap and he planted them all around the yard. “But Duncan,” Justine said, “do you think this is the proper time?” They were still wearing overcoats to bed; the ground was still cold and gray. “Why do I have to do everything properly?” he asked. “Don’t worry, I’ve got a green thumb. A green hand. I’m a whole green man.” And sure enough, the rhododendron took heart and started growing. But Duncan went off and forgot all about it; his strange mood hadn’t eased in the least. “To tell the truth, Justine,” he said, “this winter business is wearing thin. I imagined we’d be sitting by the stove oiling harness leather or something, but we don’t have any harness leather. Don’t you feel tired of it all?”

“No,” Justine said.

She watched, frowning, while he measured the kitchen for some shelves. She didn’t think he would ever finish them.

In April eight kids were born, all does. “Did you ever see such luck? We’ve got a whole damn herd,” Duncan said. Justine was glad because the bucks would have had to be killed. She spent hours playing with the kids, running across the field so that they would frolic behind her. They kicked up their heels and turned awkward half cartwheels. She set her face next to their muscular little muzzles; their yellow, slashed-looking eyes looked softly back at her. After the first few days they were switched to bottle feedings, and then to milk from a pan, while Justine crouched beside them and stroked their tufted spines. She fed them handfuls of grass to accustom them to solid food, and for most of the day she kept them in her yard. Meanwhile Duncan carried in endless buckets of warm milk, which he filtered and ran through the great silvery separator. There was suddenly a stream of customers with indigestion, allergies, or colicky babies, all desperate for goat milk, and the grocery store in Buskville had shown an interest in carrying Duncan’s cheeses. “There,” said Justine. “I knew it would work out!”

“Well, yes,” Duncan said.

In May, all the kids died in one night from eating rhododendron leaves.

Justine wandered around forlornly for days, mourning as if the kids had been human. But all Duncan would say was, “Isn’t it peculiar? You would think if rhododendron was poisonous they’d know it.”

“All those lovely little brown soft furry babies,” Justine said.

“But then, goats are fairly intelligent. Are intelligence and instinct inversely related?”

“At least we have the nannies still,” Justine said. “We don’t have to start completely over.”

“No.”

“And there’ll always be a new batch next year, and I won’t let them in the yard at all.”

Duncan picked up her hand. “Justine,” he said, “what would you think of getting out of the goat business?”

“What? Oh, Duncan, you can’t quit now. Not after one little setback!”

“No, that’s not the reason. I’ve been considering this for some time. I mean, there’s no challenge to it any more. Besides, it keeps you tied down, you always have to be around at milking time. It makes me feel stuck, I feel so — and I was thinking. You know what I enjoyed most this year? Building that hen house. Putting things together, fixing them up. Now Ma’s brother Ed has a sort of cabinetworks down in Virginia, making unfinished furniture and so on. If he could take me in—”

“Virginia? But that’s so far. And I never knew you wanted to make cabinets.”

“Well, I do.”

“We’re so nice and settled!”

“But I don’t like being settled.”

“And we would never get back to Baltimore. Duncan, I’ve already gone far enough, I don’t want to go farther. I couldn’t stand going farther.”

He waited a moment, looking down at her. Then he said, “All right.”

They didn’t talk about it again.

People came filing through Justine’s kitchen for advice on their spring problems: love affairs, unexplainable bouts of wistfulness, sudden waves of grief over people and places they had not even thought they liked. Justine laid her cards on the rosewood table.

“It will work out.”

“Just wait through this.”

“You will feel better a week from now.”

Duncan plodded through carrying buckets full of milk.

He had grown very silent, although if she spoke to him he always answered. He began drinking bourbon at night after supper. He drank from his great-grandfather’s crystal stemware. After the second glass his face became radiant and serene and childlike, and he would switch on a lamp in slow motion and start reading paperbacks. The technical books that he usually liked grew a film of dust while he worked his way through a stack of moldy, tattered Westerns the previous tenants had left in the barn. Whenever Justine looked over his shoulder stubbled men were drawling threats and cowboys were reaching for their guns.

“Duncan,” Justine said, “wouldn’t you like to sit out on the porch with me?”

“Oh, no thank you. Later, maybe.”

But later he went to bed, moving dreamily through the house, not asking if she were coming too. She sat alone at the kitchen table and shuffled her cards. Then she laid them in rows, idly, as if she were her own client. She yawned and looked to see what had shaped up.

She saw journeys, upheavals, surprises, new people, luck, crowds, hasty decisions, and unexpected arrivals.

Which meant, of course, that Madame Olita was right: it was not possible to tell your own fortune.

All the same, if she had had a client with these cards! She imagined how she would glance at him, interested for the first time, amazed at his quicksilver life after all the stale ones she had seen up till now. She imagined possessing such a future herself, having to consult the cards every day, so much was going on.

Then it seemed to her that she was not reading her fortune after all, but accepting little square papers that told her what was expected of her next. She had no choice but to stand up, and gather her cards, and wrap them in their piece of silk before she went to the bedroom to wake Duncan.

This time they moved in a rented truck, which was cheaper than Mayflower. They left behind Justine’s beloved goats, Duncan’s chewed-looking rhododendron bushes and his empty, echoing, beautifully built hen house. They took most of the Peck furniture as well as ten years’ supply of Bag Balm, which turned out to be excellent for chapped hands. And all the way to Virginia, his truck following behind the apple-green Graham Paige, Duncan studied the back of Justine’s head and wondered what was going on in her mind. He knew she hated this move. She had joined up with him, he thought, as easily as taking the hand of someone next to her on a sofa. How could she guess that immediately afterward she would be pulled not only off the sofa but also out of the house, out of the city, off to another state, even, clinging fast in bewilderment and asking herself what had happened? And now look: she was so bright and reckless, rattling down the highway, he was reminded of her mother’s terrible gaiety at the wedding reception. He knew that sooner or later she was going to break down.

Yet in Virginia, in their shallow hot apartment above Uncle Ed Hodges’s garage, Justine remained cheerful. She hummed as she settled their belongings in — only, perhaps, taking a little less care this time, leaving the damask curtains unhung and giving Aunt Marybelle, without a thought, the huge walnut breakfront when it wouldn’t fit through the apartment door. She located a church bazaar, where she told fortunes, and after that there was a steady trickle of clients. To Duncan they were indistinguishable from her Buskville clients — mostly women, faded housewives and very young girls — and their lives were indistinguishable too, and their futures, which even he could have predicted, but Justine was patient and kind with them and it was plain they all loved her. In the afternoons if she had no readings, she came to the cabinetworks and watched Duncan build things. At first she was shy among the blunt, sawdusty carpenters, but she warmed up after a while. She made friends with them and told fortunes for their wives and kept their children. Sometimes she even helped out with the work, sitting on a board for someone or sanding down a tabletop. And always she was so joyous. How long could this last?

She said she wanted a baby. Duncan didn’t. The idea of a family — a closed circle locking him in, some unlucky child whom he would lock in — made him feel desperate. Besides, he was not so sure that it was medically sound. Who knew what might be passed on? He pointed out their heredity: heart murmurs, premature births, their grandfather’s deafness.

“But!” Justine said. “Look at our teeth! They’re perfect, not a cavity in the lot. Nobody’s ever lost one.”

“Justine, if I hear one more word about those goddam teeth—”

But in the end he gave in. He agreed to a baby the way Justine, he imagined, had agreed to move to Virginia; he assumed it was necessary for her in some way that he would never understand. And all through her pregnancy he tried to take an interest. He listened to the details of every doctor’s appointment, he practiced her breathing exercises with her until he grew light-headed. Twice he drove her to Baltimore for overlong visits with the aunts, who fussed and clucked around her while Duncan skulked nearby with his collar turned up and his hands jammed deep in his pockets. It seemed to him that his part in all this was so incidental. But when he steeled himself to suggest that she might want to go to Baltimore for the birth as well, Justine turned a sudden level gaze on him and said, “No, thank you. I’ll have it here with you.” How did her mind work?

By her seventh month she had started poring over old photographs in the evenings, particularly photographs of her mother. She sat squinting through a magnifying glass, her hard little knot of a stomach straining the faded dress she had worn since she was seventeen. For she hadn’t bought any maternity clothes. Was she worried about the expense? In his experience, women shopped. He had expected a frilly layette to mount up in some bureau drawer, but the only things she had were what the aunts gave her. All the preparation she had made was to start building a cradle at the cabinetworks. And when he offered to get her a maternity dress himself her eyes spilled over with tears, something that almost never happened. “But I don’t want anything. Nothing is right. I couldn’t stand to buy anything in those stores,” she said. Duncan was mystified. He did the only thing he could think of: he went out and bought three yards of flowered material and a Simplicity dress pattern. He assumed there was not much difference between reading a pattern and a blueprint: he could figure it out in no time and run it up on Aunt Marybelle’s Singer. But when he got home Justine was in labor, and he had to take her straight to the hospital. It occurred to him during the trip that Justine was going to die. He thought he had known that all his life without admitting it: she would die at an early age because the world was so ironic The sight of her calm face beside him — she was so ignorant! — made him furious. “You are not going to leave me with that baby to raise,” he told her, and she turned and looked at him gently, from a distance. “No, of course not,” she said.

She was right, of course. The birth was easy. Justine didn’t die, she didn’t come close to dying. He had been angry for nothing, and on top of that he had an eighty-five-cent pattern now which would never be used, because he’d be damned if they would ever go through this again.

Justine wanted to name the baby Margaret Rose, which was fine with him. But he was a little surprised. He had expected to have to argue against Caroline, or Lucy or Laura or Sarah, none of which he could stand. How long had Justine’s fancy been taken by her runaway grandmother? Who was never mentioned, not ever, except by Sulie, who had loved Margaret Rose since first arriving to work for the Pecks at age thirteen. Certainly their grandfather never spoke of her. Duncan was curious as to what the old man would say now. Would he object? But no, when he came for a visit and they told him (Justine shouting it fearlessly into his good ear, which was turning bad like the other), he only nodded as if it meant nothing. Duncan should have guessed. Justine knew. In that family wrongdoers vanished without a trace, not even a hole to show where they had been.

They called the baby Meg for short. She was a blond, stocky, serious baby whose silvery eyebrows were quirked in a permanent frown. When she learned to walk, she trudged; if she laughed, it was only after a moment of study. Everything she did was laborious, even stringing wooden beads or feeding a doll or lugging around the large cardboard boxes that for several years she insisted on taking wherever she went. It touched Duncan to see her heaving her toys back into the toy chest every evening, unasked. As she grew older, as life became more hurried and scattered, she developed into a housewifely, competent little soul who always knew where things were, and what had been forgotten, and when they were supposed to be somewhere. By the age of six she had her own alarm clock, the only one in the house. For her seventh birthday she asked for a pop-up toaster. (She wanted to make toast like other people, she said, not in the oven.) She fixed her own breakfast, rinsed her own dishes, and hunted her own socks. Every afternoon when school was over she did her entire homework assignment without being told, her soft yellow head bent low, a pencil clutched tight in her fist. She asked to go both to Sunday school and church, neither of which her parents ever attended; she went alone, dressed in clothes from her grandmother, a bonnet and white gloves, clutching a quarter for the collection plate. Saturday afternoons she read her Bible assignment. “Meggie!” Justine would say, swooping down on her. “Come outside! Come play!” But Meg would have to finish and put everything away before she came. Then Justine took her out visiting other children, or hopscotching, or roller skating. If Justine stretched Meg’s skates to the largest size she could wear them herself, and she demonstrated all she remembered from the old days. In a strong wind she stood still and was blown backwards, with her skirts pressed wide and flat. She leaned on the air like a figurehead, laughing, but Meg watched dubiously with her thumb in her mouth.

“This is a cricket,” Duncan told Meg.

“Ooh.”

“Do you want to know how he chirps?”

“No.”

“Many people suppose that he does it with his legs but actually—”

Meg looked not at the cricket but at Duncan. Her eyes were transparent, and flat at the bottom.

He had not expected to feel like a father, but he did. Just the curve of her cheek could give him a wrench, or the blue veins inside her wrist or the stolid way she stood watching other children playing. But he was clearer-sighted than Justine, who thought Meg was perfect. He knew, for instance, that although Meg was of normal intelligence she had a mind that plodded and toiled, with narrow borders; that she was fiercely anxious for regularity, permanence, order. It seemed to him that he was the object of an enormous joke: he had feared all the genetic defects but the obvious one, total Peckness. She was more Peck than anybody, more even than stodgy Claude or the soft, placid twins. When she went to Baltimore for a visit she was the darling. There was not one facet of her that was foreign in any way. It was Duncan who was foreign. As she grew older she seemed to realize that, and more and more often the two of them found fault with each other, bickering pointlessly, defending their two worlds. Then Meg, silenced finally by his quicker tongue, would take on a closed, sad look, and he would be reminded of Justine as a child. He remembered how hopefully Justine would follow her cousins, her eyes anxious, her smile hesitant, her dress as carefully kept as when her mother had buttoned it in the morning. He softened, and gently tweaked a sprig of Meg’s hair until she gave in and smiled.

But where was the child Justine had been? There was nothing hesitant about her now. She had become fast-moving, kaleidoscopic. There was a sort of dash to everything she did that surprised and fascinated him. When she flew down a street people turned to look after her: an angular, frayed, pretty woman who looked as if she had no idea where she was going. She still wore the washed-out dresses from her girlhood, their hems adjusted belatedly half a dozen times, either raised to stand out like a spare tire around her knees or lowered and showing all previous levels like lines on ruled paper; and on her feet, Mary Janes with neat little straps; on her head that everlasting Breton, which Duncan had had to replace, twice, when the crown broke through from all the times she had clutched it to her head on her wild, careening journey through life. Her days consisted of a string of unexpected events. Passing a crazy man talking to himself, for instance (whom Duncan pretended not to hear), Justine stopped to answer whatever question he had asked the clouds and ended up involved for years in the man’s Houdini-like escapes from asylums. She was the only person Duncan knew who had actually had a baby left on her doorstep. (Later the mother changed her mind, but Justine had been prepared to keep him.) At any moment of the day he might catch sight of her driving seventeen third-graders in a fire engine down Main Street, or picketing a whites-only movie theater with the day’s groceries still in her arms, or zipping past his shop window towed by two gigantic St. Bernards when an hour ago she had owned no dogs at all. And she moved so easily from town to town! Oh, at first, of course, she was always a little reluctant. “But I like it here. We were just getting settled.” (She could get settled anywhere, he thought, in a cave or a coal mine even; she was like a cat.) “I don’t want to leave all our friends,” she would say. (Her friends, generally; Justine made friends by leaps and bounds while Duncan was more gradual. It seemed he had barely started getting close to people when it was time to leave a place.) “What do we have to go for, Duncan?” But it was plain what they had to go for — there he was, ever grimmer and bleaker, slogging through the days. “Oh, well,” she always said in the end. “We’ll move. We’ll just move, what’s wrong with that?” Then the two of them grew light-headed, as if spared from some disaster they had been dreading for weeks. Justine went off too far ahead of time to pack — her favorite occupation, which became easier every year as they left more and more things behind. She had very nearly stopped cooking, stopped cleaning; she had given away her wedding saucepans as if just being were enough to take all her time and attention. For dinner she served whatever came to mind, forgetting to eat herself and opening a window instead to beg a street Arab to let Meg have a ride on his horse. “Oh, Mama,” said Meg, who would not think of riding such an animal and wished that her mother would not embarrass her by hanging out windows. But Duncan drifted on this turbulence happily; during lulls he felt something was missing. When he came home and Justine was out the air seemed empty and dead. He plowed through the rooms calling her name. He went to neighbors. “Is Justine with you? She’s not at home, I don’t see her anywhere.” Until having tracked her down, he could heave a long sigh and sink onto the nearest flat surface. “I couldn’t find you. I didn’t know where you were. I didn’t know what had happened to you.” Then life zoomed into full speed again, the unexpected fluttered all around them like confetti, and Duncan felt peaceful.

Sometimes he remembered that she had not always been this way, though he couldn’t put his finger on just when she had changed. Then he wondered if she only pretended to be happy, for his sake. Or if she were deliberately cutting across her own grain, like an acrophobe who takes up sky diving. He became suddenly thoughtful, offering her perhaps a visit to Baltimore, although still, after all these years, the mere thought of his family filled him with a contrariness he seemed unable to control. Justine was still very fond of the family. When he pointed out for her the meaning beneath their words, the sharp edge beneath their sweet, trite phrases, Justine pointed out the meaning beneath that meaning, and he would have to admit some truth in what she said. She had the pathetic alertness of a child who has had to depend too much on adults; she picked up every inflection, every gesture and untied ribbon and wandering eye, and turned it over and over to study its significance. (Was that how she could read the future? She had foretold Great-Grandma’s death, she said, when she noticed her buying all her lotions in very tiny bottles.) So with Justine’s words fresh in his mind he would drive to Baltimore feeling charitable and enlightened, though that never lasted past the moment of entering staid chilly Roland Park with its damp trees and gloomy houses and its reluctant maids floating almost motionlessly up the hill from the bus stop, following their slow flat feet while their heads held back. And once they had arrived he kept watching her, trying to see if deep down she hated him for taking her away. But Justine was no different here from any other place. She gave everybody sudden kisses, knocked Aunt Bea’s spectacles askew, swooped through the house causing all the fairy lamps and figurines to tremble on the tables, and once at supper she accidentally ate the little glass spoon from her salt dish. All the aunts jumped up and wrung their hands, but Duncan smiled and his forehead smoothed and he rested back upon the white, tumbling waters of life with Justine.

Now the aunts and uncles were old, the grandfather wore a hearing aid, and the cousins (Sally divorced, the rest unmarried, all childless) were developing lines and sags in their curiously innocent faces like aging midgets. The lawns had grown meager and the fleet of Fords was outdated. The only servant was old Sulie, who shuffled around angry about something, as she had been for years, stirring the dust back and forth with a wilted gray rag. Great-Grandma’s house was inhabited by Esther and the twins, but Justine was the legal owner. Someday, everyone said, Justine and Duncan would want to come home bringing their sweet Meg, and when they did this house would be ready. Justine only smiled. Of course they would never live there. Yet always in the backs of their minds it waited as a last resort, if all else failed, if they ever were forced to admit defeat. It figured in back-up plans; it moved in on them, inch by inch, whenever money was tight and jobs were scarce, and over the years it had come to contain an imaginary life parallel to their own, advancing when theirs did. They knew what nursery school they would have sent Meg to if they had lived here, and then what grammar school; what pharmacy they would have patronized and where they would have gone for their groceries. Yet only one glance at that house, where it loomed beneath the oaks, was enough to make Duncan grow dark and hollow and he would suddenly lay a hand on Justine’s thigh as if she were a square of sunlight on a windowseat, and he just in from the cold.