Searching for Caleb

9

For the Polk Valley church’s April bazaar Justine wore her very best dress — an A-line shift that Duncan had bought her five years ago at a nearly-new sale. She pulled her hair into a sprout on top of her head, covered it over with her hat, and dabbed at her mouth with a pink Tangee lipstick from high school. On her feet she wore her black Mary Janes, on her arm a gypsy bracelet borrowed from the Blue Bottle. Generally speaking, she thought she looked very presentable.

Because the car was in the body shop, Justine had to ask for a lift in Dorcas’s baby-blue Cadillac. And Ann-Campbell had to come along, jouncing in the back seat, periodically nosing her sharp little freckled face between the two women to eavesdrop. Justine liked Ann-Campbell. She was certain she was going to lead a very interesting life.

On the way to Polk Valley Dorcas talked about her ex-husband, Joe Pete, whom she had married and divorced three times now. Every time she married him she had a large church wedding all over again, with Ann-Campbell as flower girl in a floor-length organdy dress to cover the scabs, scars, scrapes, bruises, and Band-Aids on her bony knees. Lately relatives had stopped attending, and the gifts had thinned out. “But,” said Dorcas, “he’s still my first husband, isn’t he? I’ve never been married to anybody else, and neither has he. Why can’t I have a wedding like I choose?”

Justine didn’t want to think about weddings. They reminded her of Meg. She was worried sick about Meg, who had become very quiet the last few weeks, and whenever she talked it over with Duncan he acted so cross and stubborn that he was no help at all. He said Meg could marry anyone she chose, a Congo chieftain if she cared to, but not a man whose only quality was harmlessness. “Maybe she loves him,” Justine said, but doubtfully. She tried to believe it. Whenever she saw Arthur she worked at being interested in him. She observed that he was kindhearted, steady, polite . . . and then her mind would trail off to some other subject and she forgot he was there. She watched Meg, who appeared as placid as ever. But then Meg didn’t show emotions, that was all. Of course she loved him or she wouldn’t say she wanted to marry him.

Oh, the things she had prepared herself for, when Meg was born! Merely the fact of having a new person in the world implied a stream of unforeseen events endlessly branching and dividing. As Meg grew into her teens Justine was braced for long-haired suitors, LSD, shoplifting, pregnancy, revolutionists, firearms in the closet — anything, for her daughter’s sake she could deal with anything! She just hadn’t expected Arthur Milsom, exactly.

“Thursday night Joe Pete calls up. ‘Will you be at home a while?’ Where would I go to? On no alimony at all and six months behind in child support. And Joe Pete’s a rich man, Britt Texaco. ‘Joe Pete,’ I told him, I said, ‘all in the world that’s left for me to do tonight is read my November seventy-two Modern Movies,’ and he says, ‘Fine, for I’m bringing back your daughter and you owe me forty-eight ninety-five for my new emerald rug which she dribble-bleached with a gallon of Clorox. I won’t charge for the Clorox,’ he says. ‘Well and good,’ I tell him, ‘you can take that up with the FBI when they haul you in for kidnap.’ I’m no fool.”

“When he brought me back he stayed all night,” said Ann-Campbell.

“It’s his English Leather aftershave,” said Dorcas.

Justine laughed.

The church parking lot was packed with cars, flashing the afternoon sunlight off their chrome, and ladies were swarming in the front yard and spilling down the hill as far as the cemetery. “I want to get a hot dog,” Ann-Campbell said, “and you owe me a balloon from that time at the shopping center, and I need a caramel apple. If they have cotton candy, can I have some? If they’re selling lemon sticks—”

“Ann-Campbell, you promised me you would act nice now if I let you stay out of school today.”

“In school we do this math,” Ann-Campbell told Justine.

“Oh yes,” said Justine, who had disliked math.

“If five mothers are fighting over ten blond wigs, how many does each of them get? They want me to say two, but how can I be sure? Maybe one wig’s ugly and nobody takes it. Maybe one mother’s stronger than the rest and she gets five. Or one’s got a head that’s too big for the—”

“Ann-Campbell Britt, you are sending a shooting sharp pain right down between my shoulder blades,” her mother told her.

If Justine had had to choose what child would most likely be Duncan’s in all the world, she would have said Ann-Campbell. Never Meg.

The bazaar was in the church basement, down a flight of linoleum steps. It took Justine’s eyes a minute to get used to the dimness. Then she saw rows of booths covered with crêpe paper, and more ladies bustling around in pantsuits and varnished hairdos. Justine hated pantsuits. Whenever she saw one she had an urge to tell the owner some scandalous fortune, loudly enough to be heard everywhere: “The father of your next-to-last baby has run off with a cigar-smoking redhead.” But she kept her bright smile and waited, clutching her bag, until the woman in charge noticed she was there. Mrs. Edge’s pantsuit was pale aqua, Justine’s least favorite color. Oh, but she would have to get over this mood she was in. She widened her smile another inch. “I’m Justine Peck,” she said. “I promised to come tell fortunes.”

“Mrs. Peck? Why, I thought you would be darker. We’ve heard such amazing things about you, dear. Now somewhere, let me see now . . . ”

Mrs. Edge led the way toward a card table. It was covered with a white cloth to which stars and crescent moons had been pinned. Justine followed and behind her came Dorcas, wobbling on her spike heels and humming. There was no telling where Ann-Campbell had got to.

“Now dear, this is your cashbox. I’ve laid a few dollar bills in for change. Is there anything else you’ll be wanting? I do hope you won’t be chilly. Perhaps you should have brought a wrap.”

“Oh no, I’ll be fine,” said Justine, who was always burning up.

“Why! Here’s Mrs. Linthicum, our pastor’s wife. Mrs. Peck here is just a wizard telling fortunes, Mrs. L.”

“Oh, then you can start on me,” Mrs. Linthicum said. She was wearing a dress, and a little brown mushroom of a hat. She was a tall wispy woman with freckles seeping through her pink face powder. When she sat down in the folding chair she arranged herself so graciously, smoothing her skirt beneath her and then patting her bosom as if to make certain it was there, that Justine felt an unexplainable rush of sorrow. She reached over without planning to and touched Mrs. Linthicum’s freckled hand. “Oh, is it the left palm you read?” asked Mrs. Linthicum.

“No, no, I don’t read palms,” said Justine, withdrawing her hand.

But she could easily have read that one, with its lengthwise groove and the worn wedding ring no wider than a thread.

She took out her cards and unwrapped them. “Why, how fascinating,” said Mrs. Linthicum.

“Is there anything in particular you want to know?” Justine asked.

“Oh, nothing I can think of.”

Dorcas leaned closer, giving off waves of Tabu, while Justine laid the cards down very, very gently. Madame Olita used to snap them down, but that was before they had started falling apart. When these went, where would she get more? She gazed into space, considering.

“I’m not afraid to hear, if it’s bad,” said Mrs. Linthicum.

Justine pulled her eyes back to the cards. “Oh, it’s not bad, not at all,” she said. “You’re going to do just fine.”

“I am?”

“You’ll continue to have money worries, but not serious ones. You shouldn’t be so concerned about your children. They will turn out all right. No trips in sight. No illness. You have true friends and a loving husband.”

“Well, of course,” said Mrs. Linthicum.

“All in all it’s a very good life,” Justine said. She cleared her throat and steadied her voice. “Anybody would be happy to have a formation like this one.”

“Why, thank you very much,” said Mrs. Linthicum. Then when the silence had stretched on a while she gave a little laugh and rose to pay her fee, pressing Justine’s palm briefly with her cool, wilted fingers. When she left, Justine gazed after her for so long that Dorcas waggled a hand in front of her face and said, “You in there?”

Then others came, woman after woman, giggling a little in front of their friends. “No tall dark strangers? No ocean trips?” Several young girls filed through, a little boy in a baseball suit, a man in platform heels, an old lady. Justine tried to pin her mind to what she was doing. This was how she attracted future clients, after all. “You will have a minor car accident,” she told one girl, relieved to see something concrete.

“Even if I drive slower?”

“No, maybe not.”

“Then what’s the point of all this?”

“I don’t know.”

“To warn you to start driving slower, Miss!” Dorcas cried. “Honestly, Justine! Where are you today?”

Oh, beautiful Dorcas, with her watery silk dress showing dimpled knees and her jangling bracelets and creamy throat! Her fortune altered from week to week. Which gave Justine a greater likelihood of error, but at least she enjoyed doing it.

During a lull they captured Ann-Campbell, who was winning too many prizes anyway tossing nickels into ashtrays, and Justine read her cards. Ann-Campbell leaned over her with a cone of cotton candy, smelling of burnt sugar and money. “You’ll have to travel your whole life to use up all the travel cards I’m seeing,” Justine told her.

“I know that.”

Then Dorcas, who had learned palmistry in high school, examined Ann-Campbell’s little square hand — a mass of warts and deep, soiled lines. “I find travel too,” she said, “but I don’t know, Ann-Campbell gets carsick. Let me see yours, Justine.”

Justine turned her palm up. Secretly she had become as addicted to the future as Alonzo Divich, now that life moved so quickly.

“Oh, talk about travel!” said Dorcas.

“What do you see?”

“Lots of trips. Oh, well, there’s much too much to read here. You have an indecisive nature, there are lots of . . . but I’m not too sure what this means. And then a frequent change in surroundings and tendency to—”

“But is it a good palm?”

“I’m telling you, Justine! Of course it is, it’s just full of things.”

“No, I mean—”

Dorcas raised her head.

“Oh well, it doesn’t matter,” Justine told her finally.

She never did say what she had meant. She sat silent, frowning at the cracked square of silk in her lap, while beside her Ann-Campbell started firmly, grimly patting her arm with the hand that wasn’t holding the cotton candy.

Duncan looked up from polishing a Cinderella pastry cutter and found Justine staring at him through the plate glass window, directly beneath his hand-lettered sign, ANTIC TOOLS WANTED. She was wearing her fanciest church bazaar outfit and there was a chain of safety pins dangling from the tip of her left breast. When he waved she waved back, but she kept on standing there. He rose and came close to the glass, popping his mouth like a goldfish. She smiled. “Come in!” he shouted.

So she came, leaving the door swinging open behind her. “I was just passing,” she told him.

“You want to hear about my movie?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to buy a camera and walk around filming to one side of things, wherever the action isn’t. Say there’s a touchdown at a football game, I’ll narrow in on one straggling player at the other end of the field. If I see a purse-snatcher I’ll find someone reading a newspaper just to the right of the victim.”

“What’s the point?” Justine asked.

“Point? It’ll be the first realistic movie ever made. In true life you’re never focused on where the action is. Or not so often. Not so finely.” He stopped and looked at her. “Point?” he said. “You don’t usually ask me that.”

“Duncan, I wish I knew what we should be doing about Meg.”

“Oh. School called. She cut all her afternoon classes, they said. Is she sick?”

“Why, I don’t know. I haven’t been home.”

“Every day this week she’s had a headache.”

“See there? No wonder I worry,” Justine said. “I ought to go look in on her.” But instead she sat down on a knobby piano stool he had been trying to get rid of for months. “I am forty and one-third years old,” she said.

Duncan blew on the pastry cutter and started polishing it again.

“Doesn’t it seem to you that things are going by very fast?”

“I have always thought everything moved too slowly,” he said. “But I know I’m in the minority.”

“How did we get here?”

But when Duncan looked up, she had her eyes fixed on the opposite wall as if she didn’t want an answer.

He set down his work and rose to walk around the shop, passing his rows of polished tools and utensils. They did his heart good. He ignored what Silas had brought in from his tours of the auction sales — the china and scrolled furniture, which he allowed to pile up in dim corners. He paused beside a nineteenth-century pressure scale and laid his hand upon it gradually, delighting in its intricate, precise design. Behind him he heard the familiar plop, plop of Justine’s cards. What would she be asking, all alone? But when he turned he saw that she was laying the cards absent-mindedly, the way another person might doodle or chew a pencil. Her eyes were on something far away; she smoothed each card blindly as she set it on the sewing chest beside her.

While he watched, she frowned and collected her thoughts. She looked down at what she had laid out. “Why, Duncan,” she said.

“What is it?”

“Why—”

“What is it, Justine?”

“Never mind, don’t worry. Don’t worry.”

“Who says I’m worried?”

But she was already out the door, running down the street with her hat streamers fluttering. It was the first time Duncan had ever known her to leave her cards behind.

Daniel Peck was on the front porch, rearranging a sheaf of correspondence, when Justine came dashing up the walk between the rows of sprouting vegetables. She looked wild-eyed and flustered, but then she often did. “Grandfather,” she called, “have you seen Meg?”

He tried to think.

“Meg.”

“Well, now I wonder where she could be,” he said.

“What time is it?”

He fumbled in his pocket and hauled out lengths of gold chain hand over hand, raising his eyebrows when his fingers met up with a watch. “Ah! Five twelve,” he said.

She spun past him, into the house, clattering the screen door behind her. He felt the noise rather than heard it. He felt his bones jar. Then there was peace, and he returned to a letter dated April 10, 1973. He squinted in the twilight at a ragged blue script.

He sighed. Long white fingers entered his vision, fluttering another letter on top of the first.

“Eh? What’s this?” he asked Justine.

She merely lifted an arm and dropped it, as if she couldn’t speak.

“Why,” he said, “I didn’t know it was proper for ministers to elope.”

Justine went down the porch steps, back through the vegetables toward the street, drifting along slower than he had seen her in years.

“Justine? Wasn’t that fellow a minister?”

She didn’t answer. In the end he simply filed the letter away among his other correspondence and went on with what he had been doing before.