Searching for Caleb

10

By May the whole front yard was a tangle of cucumber vines and little green stalks of corn. Neighbors began knocking on the door. “Justine, of course, it’s your lawn to plant as you please although frankly it seems . . . but never mind, what is that smell? What we want to know is, that smell!”

“Oh, just things from the blender.”

“The—? When you turn down this street it’s the first thing you notice. It smells like a zoo. A city dump. A slaughter-house.”

“I’ll mention it to Duncan,” Justine said. But her face was lit up and her eyes all curly, she was so happy to see somebody. She would reach out to touch visitors on the wrist or shoulder, drawing them in. “Since you’re here, why don’t you stay?”

“Oh, well . . . ”

“We can sit out back. You won’t smell a thing.”

“Oh, well, maybe for a minute.”

“I’ll make you lemonade, or coffee. Anything. What would you like?”

The fact was, Justine hated to be alone. She had felt so restless and unhappy lately, wandering from room to room, trying to start up conversations with her grandfather when he was too busy with his own thoughts to answer. “Grandfather, isn’t there any place you’d like to go?”

“How’s that?”

“Do you want to go somewhere, I said.”

“No, no.”

She sank back and twisted a piece of her hair. It was impossible to drive off on her own; a car was so private. Like a sealed black box. She would end up speeding just to get her isolation over with, or she would run a stop sign because even horns and curses were better than silence. So instead of driving she walked to Duncan’s shop, missing no opportunity to speak to passers-by. “Hello, Mr. Hill, did you get the money I said you would? Where’s Mrs. Hill? Wait, Red Emma, I’ll walk along with you,” and she would run to catch up and travel three blocks out of her way, pausing at each house while Red Emma delivered the mail. She parted from people with difficulty, dragging it out, loitering on the sidewalk fiddling with a button and finding new things to say to them. She dreaded walking even half a block with only her own thoughts for company. And when finally she arrived at the Blue Bottle she would be full of pent-up words that exploded from her before she was fully in the door. “Duncan, Red Emma told me . . . Bertha Miller asked . . . oh, Duncan, I just had a thought, can we borrow a wayward girl from the police station?”

“A what’s that?”

“Surely they must have some, wouldn’t you think? We could leave our name and the next time the police arrest somebody they could bring her to us. I mean the house seems so—”

“Well now, wait a minute.”

But she would be off to something new, picking up merchandise and putting it down. “Oh look, a locket like Aunt Bea’s almost. And Aunt Sarah’s dinner ring but the stone’s a different color. Isn’t it funny they call these antiques? They’re only what our aunts wear every day of their lives. What’s this thing, Duncan?”

“A Victorian slide pendant,” Duncan said glumly. “If you ask me, it’s junk. All this stuff is junk. Yesterday Silas brought in a whole carton full, he’d been to some flea market. ‘Here, take this,’ he said, ‘and get rid of that mess on the table, it doesn’t look nice.’ Do you know what he called mess? A genuine chromatrope I bought from old Mrs. Milhauser, and a Boston bathing pan with a pump that still works . . . where is it now? I wanted to show you. He dumped it in some corner or other. He doesn’t like tools and things with moving parts, he says they clutter the shop. We spend all our time shifting each other’s merchandise into hiding places and out again, in and out. Look at that chair! He likes it. He wants me to ask a hundred and fifty dollars for it.”

Justine looked at a chair with a curved spine that was all pointed leaves and flowers and little sharp berries. On one of its finials Duncan had impaled a liniment ad. “I’ve a good mind to quit this job,” he said, but she didn’t bother answering that. He would never quit in the middle of a fight.

She wanted him to come with her somewhere. “Maybe we could take a trip,” she told him.

“All right.”

“Just spur of the moment.”

“All right.”

“We might even stop and see Meg.”

But then his face grew cold and stubborn. “Not a chance. Not until we’re asked, Justine.”

“But she said. She said in her letters.”

“ ‘We’ll have you over sometime soon,’ is what she said. Pay attention.”

He knew Meg’s letters by heart, the same as Justine. It was all an act, his unconcern. (“Duncan,” she had told him, “Meg has gone to marry Alfred, I mean Arthur,” and he had grown motionless for one split second before continuing to close up shop.) “As long as we don’t come for a meal,” she said now, “why do we have to wait to be invited?”

“We’re not going till we are, I tell you.”

“Oh, that’s ridiculous. She’s our daughter.”

“So what?”

“Remember when she was colicky, all those evenings you walked up and down with Meggie on your shoulder? You sang ‘Blues in the Night.’ Her head was straight up and wobbling, her forehead would get all wrinkled from trying not to miss a word.”

“Merely singing ‘Blues in the Night’ to someone does not obligate me to pay them an uninvited visit seventeen years later.”

“Eighteen,” said Justine.

“Eighteen.”

“You used to take her to the circus when she was too little to hold down a spring-up seat. For three straight hours you leaned on it for her so she wouldn’t pop right up again.”

“There was an intermission.”

“Even so.”

“Merely leaning on a spring-up seat for someone—”

“And she’s not just someone. She’s not just any old person that you would treat so formally the minute she hurt your feelings.”

“Who’s hurt?” Duncan said.

“Look at Grandfather. Do you know what I found him doing the other day? He was at the kitchen table all hunched over with his head in his hands. I thought something was wrong. Then he sat up and I saw he’d been studying this world map in the Hammond atlas. Not Maryland, not the United States, the world, Duncan. That’s how far he let Caleb run before he would go after him. Are we going to do that too?”

“We’re never going to forget that man, are we,” Duncan said. “The one that got away.” He set down a crimping iron. “However, we’re wandering off the subject here. Meg has not vanished. We know exactly where she is. She writes us a letter once a week. All I’m saying is don’t repeat history, give her a little breathing space. Let her ask us first.”

“Oh, there’s always some excuse.”

“I’m just telling you what I think.”

“Do you wish I hadn’t come after you, when you left home?”

“No.”

“Well, I wish it sometimes, Duncan Peck.”

“No doubt you do,” said Duncan.

“And if you ever walk off again, you realize I won’t follow. I’ll have them declare you legally dead, I’ll remarry right away.”

“Of course,” he said serenely.

There was no way to win a fight with that man.

She stormed out of the shop and then stood on the sidewalk, wondering what to do with herself. Everything seemed irritating. The sunlight was too sharp for her eyes. The traffic was too noisy, a swarm of gigantic glaring station wagons. She hated the way the women drivers were poised at the Main Street traffic light, all lifting their arms simultaneously to orchestrate their hairdos. She turned in the other direction, toward home, which was not where she wanted to be but she couldn’t think of any place else.

In the kitchen, her grandfather was washing the dishes. Periodically he had these spells of trying to make the house look cared for. He wore around his waist a striped linen dishtowel with an enormous charred hole in its center. He bent over the sink, unaware of Justine’s presence, doggedly scrubbing a saucepan with a piece of dried gourd that Duncan had grown two years ago after reading about its scouring properties. The gourd looked like a chunk of hardened beige seaweed. From time to time he stopped scrubbing and examined it, frowning, as if he found it difficult to believe. Then he rinsed the saucepan and plodded over to the table with it, head bowed, shoulders hunched. “Hello, Grandfather,” Justine said. “Grandfather?”

He started and looked up. “Eh?”

“You don’t have to wash the dishes.”

“I’d like to know what we’d eat off tonight if I didn’t.”

“We could always go to the diner,” Justine said.

“Ha.”

He dried the saucepan on a corner of his apron. Then he set it on a stack of meticulously cleaned, polished plates and trudged back to the sink. He was so stooped that, from behind, his head seemed to disappear. All Justine saw was his rounded shoulders, the elastic X of his suspenders in the hollow of his spine, and his trousers draped and formless as if he had no seat. Nowadays, everywhere Justine looked she found something to make her sad.

She would have liked to write Meg another letter, but she had sent one just this morning. So she went instead to Meg’s bedroom, to open her closet and stare at the row of shirt-dresses that seemed to be leading a gentle muted life of their own. Someday soon, Meg said in her letters, she would stop by for the rest of her things or her parents could bring them when they came to visit. But Justine felt comforted by what was left behind and she would be sorry to see the room stripped. She took a deep breath of Meg’s clean smell: Ivory soap and fresh-ironed fabric. She stroked the collar of the nearest dress, with its precise top-stitching, and then she lifted the cover of the sewing machine to admire Meg’s mastery of such a complex, wheeled invention. She would have opened bureau drawers, but Meg was particular about her privacy.

When Meg was a baby, Justine had realized for the first time that it was possible to die. She had felt suddenly fragile under the responsibility of staying alive to raise her daughter. (In those days, she expected to do it perfectly; she thought no one else could manage.) She developed a fear of fire that was so unfounded she couldn’t even tell Duncan because of course he would laugh at her. Over and over again she imagined the salty smell of smoke in the air, or a flickering red glow reflected on the wall. If Duncan were home he could get them out of anything, but what if it happened in the daytime while he was at work? By herself she was so young and skinny and incompetent. Then gradually, she developed an escape plan. They were living in Uncle Ed Hodges’s garage apartment at the time. If fire broke out she could snatch up the baby, climb out on the kitchen window ledge, and make a long, desperate leap to the roof of Uncle Ed’s back porch. Once she had pictured all this she relaxed, and eventually she forgot her fear completely. It was not till years later, returning to Uncle Ed’s for a visit, that she saw that such a leap would have been insane. It was not only too far, it was also upward. She would have had to soar through the air like some surrealistic figure in a painting by Chagall, feet set neatly together and arms primly clasping the baby. But in those days, she might have managed anything. She was so necessary. Even when Meg had left infancy, given up first Justine’s breast and then her lap and finally gone to play in other rooms altogether, Justine had to be there. She had to be the feeder, the fixer, the sounding board for an endless stream of announcements. “Mama my dress is dirty, Sammy hit me, the violets are out. Mama there’s a spider in my chocolate milk, a moth in my bath, a ladybug on the windowscreen. My stomach aches. My mosquito bites itch. Janie has a hamster, Edwin’s in the asparagus, I broke the handle off my teapot, Melissa has a music box you can watch right through the glass.” Justine nodded, barely listening; the only answer required was, “Yes, dear.” Then Meg was satisfied, as if things came into existence only when she was certain her mother knew about them. And now what? Justine had raised her daughter without dying after all; she was freed from her fears. But at night she woke up shaky and sad, and she pressed her face against Duncan’s chest and said, “I’m not necessary any more.”

“To me you are,” he said.

He didn’t see what she meant. He hadn’t had that feeling of being essential to Meg in the first place; he couldn’t know how it felt to lose it.

She wandered to other rooms, to hers and Duncan’s with its unmade bed and scattered clothing, to the hall where she tripped over a stack of lumber. Everything looked dusty and stale. She hung out the living room window to be revived by Ann-Campbell, who was taunting a playmate among the cucumber vines:

She returned to the kitchen, feeling more cheerful. “Grandfather, let’s take a trip,” she said.

“A what?”

“A trip.”

“But we don’t have any leads right now, Justine.”

“Why wait for leads? Oh, why won’t anyone do anything? Are we just going to sit here? Am I going to get rooted to the living room couch?”

Her grandfather watched her, with his eyes wide and blank and his hands endlessly drying an Exxon coffee mug on the corner of his apron.

Justine took her grandfather to an afternoon concert in Palmfield, although she did not like classical music and her grandfather couldn’t hear it. The two of them sat rigid in their seats, directing unblinking blue stares toward the outline of a set of car keys in the violin’s soloist’s trouser pocket. Then they went home by bus with Justine as dissatisfied as ever, bored and melancholy. Each time strangers rose to leave she mourned them. Who knew in what way they might have affected her life?

She took Duncan, her grandfather, and Ann-Campbell Britt to the funeral of a chihuahua belonging to an old lady client. “What is this? Where are we going?” her grandfather kept asking. “Don’t worry, just come,” said Justine. “Why do you care? Just grab up your hearing aid and come, Grandfather. If you want things to happen you have to run a few blind errands, you know.” So he came, grumbling, and they sat on folding chairs in a cow pasture that had recently been turned into a pets’ memorial garden. “The casket cost one hundred and forty-five dollars,” Justine whispered to Duncan. “It’s all metal. But they could have settled for wood: thirty-two ninety-eight. Mrs. Bazley told me. She selected the hymns herself. The minister is fully ordained.”

“Oh, excellent,” said Duncan. “I wonder if he needs an assistant,” and after the service he went up and offered Arthur Milsom’s address to the minister. But Grandfather Peck wandered among the wreaths and urns looking baffled. Why had he been brought here? Justine could no longer tell him. She rode home beside Duncan without a word, swinging one foot and rapidly chewing coffee beans that she had taken to keeping in a tin container at the bottom of her bag.

On Sundays she drove her grandfather to Plankhurst for Quaker meetings, which used to be something she tried to get out of because she didn’t like sitting still so long. Now she would go anywhere. Grandfather Peck was not, of course, a Quaker and had no intention of becoming one, but he resented regular church services because he claimed the minister wouldn’t speak up. It made him feel left out, he said. Even the Quakers would sometimes take it into their heads to rise and mumble, perversely keeping their faces turned away so that he couldn’t read their lips. Then he whispered, “What? What?”—a harsh sound sawing through the air. He made Justine write everything down for him on a 3 × 5 memo pad he kept in his breast pocket. Justine would click the retractable point of his ballpoint pen in and out, in and out, waiting for a five-minute speech to be over, and then she wrote, “He says that God must have made even Nixon,” or “Peace is not possible as long as neighbors can still argue over a lawn mower.”

“That took him five minutes?”

“Ssh.”

“But what was he up there working his mouth all that time for?”

“Ssh, Grandfather. Later.”

“You must have left something out,” he told her.

She would hand back his pen and pad, and sigh, and check the Seth Thomas clock on the mantel and run her eyes once more down the rows of straight-backed radiant adults and fidgety children lining the wooden benches. After twenty minutes the children were excused, rising like chirping, squeaking mice to follow the pied piper First-Day School teacher out of the room, breaking into a storm of whistles and shouts and stamping feet before the door was properly shut again. She should have gone with them, she always thought. The silence that followed was deep enough to drown in. She would plow desperately through her straw bag, rustling and jingling, coming up finally with her tin container of coffee beans. When she bit into them, she filled the meetinghouse with the smell of breakfast.

Once her grandfather wrote on the pad himself, several lines of hurried spiky handwriting that he passed to her. “Read this out when no one else is talking,” he whispered. She struggled to her feet, hanging onto her hat. Anything to break the silence. “My grandfather wants me to read this,” she said. “ ‘I used to think that heaven was — palatable? Palatial. I was told it had pearly gates and was paved with gold. But now I hope they are wrong about that. I would prefer to find that heaven was a small town with a bandstand in the park and a great many trees, and I would know everybody in it and none of them would ever die or move away or age or alter.’ ”

She sat down and gave him back the memo pad. She took the top off her coffee beans but then she put it on again, and kept the container cupped in her hands while she gazed steadily out the window into the sunlit trees.

One afternoon toward the end of May the doorbell rang and Justine, flying to answer it, found Alonzo Divich standing on the porch. Although it was hot he wore a very woolly sheepskin vest. He carried a cowboy hat, swinging by a soiled string. “Alonzo!” Justine said.

“I was afraid you might have moved,” he told her.

“Oh no. Come in.”

He followed her into the hall, shaking the floor with each step. Grandfather Peck was on the living room couch writing a letter to his daughters. “Don’t get up,” Alonzo called to him, although the grandfather was still firmly seated, giving him that stare of shocked disbelief he always wore for Alonzo. “How’s the heart, eh?” Alonzo asked. “How’s the heart?”

“Hearth?”

“Nothing’s wrong with his heart,” said Justine. “Come into the kitchen, Alonzo, if you want your cards read. You know I can’t do it right with Grandfather watching.”

While she cleared the remains of breakfast from the table, Alonzo wandered around the kitchen examining things and whistling. “Your calendar is two months ahead,” he told Justine.

“Is it?”

“Most people’s would be behind.”

“Yes, well.”

She went to the living room for her carry-all. When she returned Alonzo was standing at the open refrigerator, looking into a bowl of moldy strawberries. “How is my friend Duncan?” he asked her.

“He’s fine.”

“Maybe I’ll drop by and see him. Is Meg out of school yet?”

“She’s married.”

“Married.”

“She eloped with that minister.”

“I’m sorry, Justine.”

He shut the refrigerator and sat down at the table to watch her shuffle the cards. He looked tired and hot, and the grooves alongside his mustache were silvered with sweat. A disk with Arabic lettering gleamed in the opening of his shirt. Last time it had been a turquoise cross. She didn’t ask why; he wouldn’t have answered. “Alonzo,” was all she said, “you have no idea how it gladdens my heart to see you. Cut, please.” He cut the cards. She laid them out, one by one. Then she looked up. “Well?” she asked.

Alonzo said, “You realize, last time I took your advice.”

“You did?”

“When you told me not to sell the business.”

“Oh yes. Well, I should hope so,” said Justine.

“It was the first time you ever said to keep on with something I was already doing.”

She stopped swinging her foot.

“But I was tempted to disobey you anyway,” he told her. “I admit. I went to see my friend, the one in merchandising. He has these clients, you understand, department stores and such, they come to him for ideas on . . . but anyway. I said I might join up with him. ‘Oh, fine,’ he tells me. But then he starts suggesting I wear a different style of clothes. Well, that I can follow. I am practical, I know how the world works. But he doesn’t see, he’s still trying to convince me. ‘Face it, Alonzo,’ he says, ‘we all have to give in in little ways. Look at me. I’m a tall man,’ he says. And he is, a fine tall man. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘when important clients come, know what I do? I try to stay seated as much as possible, and if I stand I kind of squinch down. I don’t stoop,’ he says, ‘that’s too obvious. Just bend at the knees a little. Understand, it’s not something I think of so consciously. But you can see a client, important fellow like that, he wouldn’t feel right if I was to tower over him. You got to keep a watch for such things, Alonzo.’ ”

He shook his head, and pulled his great silver belt buckle around to where it wouldn’t cut into his stomach so.

“Justine,” he said, “do you know that I have never before done what you told me to do?”

“I’m not surprised,” she said.

“I mean it. You’re always right, but only because I go against instructions and things turn out badly just the way you said they would. Now I discover things turn out badly anyhow. Is that your secret? I’ve found it, ha? You give people advice they’ll be sure not to follow. Right?”

She laughed. “No, Alonzo,” she said. “And I’m glad you didn’t sell the carnival. Whatever’s gone wrong.”

“My mechanic’s been arrested.”

“Lem?”

“He robbed a bank in nineteen sixty-nine. They say.”

“Oh, I see.”

“Now, here’s what I want to know. Is he coming back, or not? I mean if he’s coming soon I’ll hold the machines together somehow and wait it out, but if he’s guilty, on the other hand—”

“Well, I don’t think I’m supposed to say if someone’s guilty or not.”

“Look here! What do I care about guilt? All they lost was two hundred dollars, let him keep it. Besides a little matter of a shooting. I want to know about my business. I want to know if I should just give up, because to tell the truth this fellow Lem was a man I relied on. He saw to everything. Now, merchandising is out but there is always something else, and the jodhpur lady still wants my carnival. Shall I sell, after all? Is the man gone forever?”

Justine frowned at a card.

“You see what I’ve fallen to,” Alonzo said. “I used to ask about beautiful women. Now it’s financial matters.”

“Well, Lem is not coming back,” said Justine.

“I knew it.”

“But you shouldn’t sell the carnival.”

“How can you keep saying such a stupid thing?”

“Don’t argue with me, argue with the cards. Have you ever seen anything like it? I’ve turned up every jack in the deck, you’ll have all the mechanics you want.”

“Oh, of course,” Alonzo said. “One after the other. The first one drinks, the second leaves with my ponies—”

“And look at the women! Look, Alonzo, you’re not paying attention. See? Here you are, the king of hearts. And here’s the queen of hearts, the queen of clubs, the queen of diamonds . . . ”

Alonzo sat forward, peering at the cards, resting his hand upon his knees.

“Here is the good luck card, the card of friendship, the celebration card . . . ”

“All right, all right!” Alonzo said.

She sat back and smiled at him.

“Oh, Justine,” he told her sadly, “sometimes I think I would like to go live in a cabin in the woods, all alone. I’d take a lifetime supply of slivovitz, my accordion, plenty of food, perhaps some books. Do you know I’ve never read an entire book? Just the good parts. I think about hibernating like a bear, just eating and drinking and sleeping. No tax, insurance, electric bills, alimony, repairs or repainting or Rustoleum, no women to mess up my life, no one shooting bank guards, no children. Then here you come galloping along in your terrible hat and your two sharp hipbones like pebbles in your pockets and you tell me all these things I may expect, a life full of surprises. How can I refuse? I feel curious all over again, I like to know what will happen next.”

And he shook his head, stroking downward on his mustache, but he did not look so tired as when he had arrived. All his tiredness seemed to have passed to Justine, who sat slumped in her chair with her hands limp on the cards.

Duncan and Justine were on the front steps, watching the fireflies spark all around them. “Today I sold an antique garden engine,” Duncan said.

“What’s a garden engine?”

“It’s this big wheeled thing to spray water on your flowers. What a relief! I bought it with my own money in a moment of weakness. I kept it sitting in the back room; I had to open the double doors to get it in and then I was afraid it would go right through the floorboards. A man named Newton Norton bought it. He’s just started reconstructing this old-time farmhouse out in the country.”

“Well, that’s nice,” said Justine.

“He also bought some fuller’s shears, and all my carpentry tools.”

“That’s nice.”

He looked over at her.

“When I went into Meg’s room,” she said, “and found her note telling me she’d gone, I never read anything that hurt so. But then I looked up, and there I was reflected in the window that was just starting to go dark outside. There were these deep black shadows in my eyes and cheekbones. I thought, ‘My, don’t I look interesting? Like someone who has had something dramatic happen.’ I thought that!”

She laid her face against Duncan’s sleeve. Duncan put his arm around her and pulled her closer, but he didn’t say anything.