Searching for Caleb

   Duncan Peck has a fascination for randomness and is always taking his family on the move. His wife, Justine, is a fortune teller who can't remember the past. Her grandfather, Daniel, longs to find the brother who walked out of his life in 1912, with nothing more than a fiddle in his hand. All three are taking journeys that lead back to the family's deepest roots...to a place where rebellion and acceptance have the haunting power to merge into one....

   The fortune teller and her grandfather went to New York City on an Amtrak train, racketing along with their identical, peaky white faces set due north. The grandfather had left his hearing aid at home on the bureau. He wore a black suit, pearl-gray suspenders, and a very old-fashioned, expensive-looking pinstriped collar-less shirt. No matter what happened he kept his deep-socketed eyes fixed upon the seat in front of him, he continued sliding a thumb over the news clipping he held in Ms hand.

   Either the train had turned his deafness absolute or else he had something very serious on his mind, it was hard to tell which. In any case, he would not answer the few things the fortune teller said to him.

   Past his downy white head, outside the scummy window, factories and warehouses streamed along. Occasionally a leftover forest would coast into view and then out again-twisted bare trees, trunks ripped by lightning, Ws covered with vines, tangled raspy bushes and beer cans, whisky bottles, rusted carburetors, sewing machines, and armchairs. Then some town or other would take over. Men wearing several layers of jackets struggled with crates and barrels on loading docks, their breaths trailing out of their mouths in white tatters. It was January, and cold enough to make the brick buildings appear to darken and condense.

   The fortune teller, who was not a gypsy or even Spanish but a lanky, weedy blond woman in a Breton hat and a faded shift, took a National Geographic from a straw bag on the floor and started reading it from back to front. She flicked the pages after barely a glance, rapidly swinging one crossed foot. Halfway through the magazine she bent to rummage through the bag again. She felt her grandfather slide his eyes over to see what she was keeping there. Tarot cards? A crystal ball? Some other tool of her mysterious, disreputable profession? But all she showed was a spill of multicolored kerchief and then a box of Luden's cough drops, which she took out and offered him. He refused. She put one in her mouth, giving him a sudden smile that completely upturned every one of her pale, straight features. Her grandfather absorbed it but forgot to smile back.

   He returned to his view of the seat ahead, a button-on antimacassar with an old lady's netted hat just beyond.

   In his hand, stroked by his puckered thumb, the newspaper clipping first rustled and then wilted and drooped, but the fortune teller knew it by heart anyway.

   TABOR

   Suddenly on December 18, 1972, Paul Jeffrey, Sr., of New York City, formerly of Baltimore. Beloved husband of Deborah Palmer Tabor. Father of Paul J. Tabor, Jr., of Chicago and Theresa T. Hanes of Springline, Massachusetts. Also survived by five grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

   Services will be held Thursday at the . . .

   "My throat is dry, Justine," her grandfather said.

   "I'll get you a soda."

   "What?"

   "A soda."

   He drew back, offended. No telling what he thought she had said. Justine patted his hand and told him, "Never mind, Grandfather. I'll just be gone a minute."

   She left, sidling between shopping bags and weekend cases along the narrow aisle, holding tight to her saucer-like hat. Three cars up, she paid for two root beers and a sack of Cheez Doodles. She returned walking carefully, opening doors with her elbows and frowning at the plastic cups, which were filled to the brim. Just inside her own car, the Cheez Doodles fell and a man in a business suit had to pick them up for her.

   "Oh! Thank you!" she said, and smiled at him, her cheeks grown suddenly pink. At first glance she could be taken for a young girl, but then people saw the fine lines beginning to show in her skin, and the faded blue of her eyes and the veined, parched, forty-year-old hands with the scratched wedding band looking three sizes too large below one knobby knuckle. She had a ramshackle way of walking and a sharp, merry voice.

   "Roof beer, Grandfather!" she sang out. If he didn't hear her, all the rest of the car did.

   She put a cup in his hand, and he took a sip. "Ah yes," he said. He liked herby things, root beer and horehound drops and sassafras tea. But when she tore open the cellophane bag and presented him with a Cheez Doodle-a fat orange worm that left crystals on his fingertips-he frowned at it from beneath a tangle of white eyebrows. He had once been a judge. He still gave the impression of judging everything that came his way. "What is this," he said, but that was a verdict, not a question.

   "It's a Cheez Doodle, Grandfather, try it and see."

   "What's that you say?"

   She held out the bag, showing him the lettering on the side. First he replaced the Cheez Doodle and then he wiped his ringers on a handkerchief he took from his pocket. Then he went back to drinking root beer and studying the clipping, which he had laid flat on one narrow, triangular knee. "Theresa," he said. "I never cared for that name."

   Justine nodded, chewing.

   "I don't like difficult names. I don't like foreignness."

   "Perhaps they're Catholic," Justine said.

   "How's that?"

   "Perhaps they're Catholic."

   "I didn't quite hear."

   "Catholic!"

   Faces spun around.

   "Don't be ridiculous," her grandfather said. "Paul Tabor went to the same church I did, he was in my brother's Sunday school class. The two of them graduated from the Salter Academy together. Then this-dissatisfaction set in. This, this newness. I can't tell you how many times I've seen it come to pass. A young man goes to a distant city instead of staying close to home, he gets a job, switches friends, widens his circle of acquaintances. Marries a girl from a family no one knows, lives in a house of unusual architecture, names his children foreign names that never were in his family in any preceding generation. He takes to traveling, buys winter homes and summer homes and vacation cottages in godforsaken states like Florida where none of us has ever been. Meanwhile his parents die and all his people just seem to vanish, there's no one you can ask any more, 'Now, what is Paul up to these days?' Then he dies himself, most likely in a very large city where there's nobody to notice, only his wife and his barber and his tailor and maybe not even the last two, and what's it for? What's it all about? Now in Paul's case I just couldn't say for certain, of course. He was my brother's friend, not mine. However I will hazard a guess: he had no stamina. He couldn't endure, he wouldn't stay around to fight it out or live it down or sit it through, whatever was required. He hadn't the patience. He wanted something new, something different, he couldn't quite name it. He thought things would be better somewhere else. Anywhere else.

   And what did it get him? Watch, next time I'm in Baltimore I'll tell the family, 'Paul Tabor died.' 'Paul who?' they'll say. 'Paul Tabor, it was in the Baltimore Sun. Don't you read it any more? Don't you know?' Well, of course they do read it and would catch any familiar name in a flash but not Paul Tabor's. Forgotten, all forgotten. He discarded us, now he's dead and forgotten. Hear what I say, Justine. Do you hear?"

   Justine smiled at him. "I hear," she said.

   She had moved away from Baltimore herself. She and her husband and daughter now lived in Semple, Virginia; in another place last year and another the year before that. (Her husband was a restless man.) Next week they were moving to Caro Mill, Maryland. Was it Caro Mill? Caro Mills?

   Sometimes all these places would run together in her mind. She would mentally locate friends in towns those friends had never set foot in, she would await a visit from a client whom she had left two years ago without a forwarding address. She would ransack the telephone book for a doctor or a dentist or a plumber who was actually three hundred miles away and three or four or fourteen years in the past. Her grandfather didn't guess that, probably. Or care. He had scarcely bothered to learn the towns' names in the first place. Although he lived with Justine and made all those moves with her he called it visiting; he considered himself a citizen still of Baltimore, his birthplace. All other towns were ephemeral, no-account; he shuffled through them absent-mindedly like a man passing a string of shanties on the way to his own sturdy house. When he arrived in Baltimore (for Thanksgiving or Christmas or the Fourth of July) he would heave a sigh and lower the sharp narrow shoulders that he held, at all other times, so tightly hunched. The brackets around his mouth would relax somewhat. He would set his old leather suitcase down with finality, as if it held all his earthly goods and not just a shirt and a change of underwear and a scruffy toothbrush. "There's no place in the world like Baltimore, Maryland," he would say.

   He said it now.

   This morning they had passed through the Baltimore railroad station, even stopping a moment to let other, luckier passengers alight. The thought of having come so near must have made him melancholy. He looked down at his clipping now and shook his head, maybe even regretting this trip, which had been entirely his own idea. But when Justine said, "Are you tired, Grandfather?"-thinning her voice to that special, carrying tone he would be certain to hear-he only looked at her blankly. It seemed that his mind was on Paul Tabor again.

   "They don't say a word about where they buried him," he said.

   "Oh well, I imagine-"

   "If you died in New York City, where would you be buried?"

   "I'm sure they have-"

   "No doubt they ship you someplace else," he said. He turned his face to the window. Without his hearing aid he gave an impression of rudeness. He interrupted people and changed the subject willfully and spoke in a particularly loud, flat voice, although normally he was so well-mannered that he caused others to feel awkward. "I never made the acquaintance of Paul's wife," he said, while Justine was still considering cemeteries. "I don't recollect even hearing when he got married. But then he was younger than I of course and moved in different circles. Or perhaps he married late in life. Now if I had known the wife I would have gone up for the funeral, then asked my questions afterwards. But as it is, I hesitated to barge in upon a family affair and immediately put my case. It would look so-it would seem so self-serving. Do you think I did right to wait?"

   He had asked her this before. He didn't listen for the answer.

   "By now she will be calmer," he said. "Not so likely to break down at any mention of his name."

   He folded the clipping suddenly, as if he had decided something. He creased it with one broad yellow thumbnail.

   "Justine," he said.

   "Hmm?"

   "Am I going to be successful?"

   She stopped swirling the ice in her cup and looked at him. "Oh," she said. "Why-I'm certain you are. Certainly, Grandfather. Maybe not this time, maybe not right away, but-"

   "Truly. Tell me."

   "Certainly you will."

   He was looking too closely into her face. Possibly he hadn't heard her.

   She set her voice to the proper tone and said, "I'm sure that-"

   "Justine, how much do you know?"

   "What?"

   "This telling fortunes. This bunk. This-piffle," said her grandfather, and he brushed something violently off his sleeve. "I hate the very thought of it."

   "You've told me all that, Grandfather."

   "It's not respectable. Your aunts go into a state whenever we speak of it. You know what people call you? 'The fortune teller.' Like 'the cleaner,' 'the greengrocer.' 'How's that granddaughter of yours, Judge Peck, the fortune teller. How's she doing?' Ah, it turns my stomach."

   Justine picked up her magazine and opened to a page, any page.

   "But, Justine," her grandfather said, "I ask you this. Is there anything to it at all?"

   Her eyes snagged on a line of print.

   "Do you really have some inkling of the future?"

   She shut the magazine. He locked her in a fierce, steady frown; his intensity made everything around him seem pale.

   "I want to know if I will find my brother," he said.

   Yet immediately afterward he turned away, watching the train's descent into the blackness beneath Manhattan. And Justine repacked her straw bag and brushed cheese crumbs off her lap and put her coat on, her expression calm and cheerful. Neither one of them appeared to be waiting for anything more to be said.

   Because they were trying to save money, they took the subway from Penn Station. Justine loved subways. She enjoyed standing on them, gripping a warm, oily metal pole, feet planted slightly apart and knees dipping with the roll of the train as they careened through the darkness. But her grandfather distrusted them, and once they were off the shuttle and onto the IRT, he made her sit down. He continually rotated his face, scanning the car for enemies. Silent young people returned his stare. "I don't know, Justine, I don't know what's happening. I don't like this city at all any more," her grandfather said. But Justine was enjoying herself too much to answer. She watched each station as they drew into it, the murky light and bathroom-tile walls and those mysterious, grimy men who sat on benches, one or two at every stop, watching trains come and go without ever boarding one. Then when they were moving again she drank in the sensation of speed. Getting somewhere. She loved going fast in any kind of vehicle. She particularly liked the rickety sound of these tracks, on which something unexpected might happen at any moment. She hoped the wheels would howl in that eerie way they had while heading through the deepest stretch of darkness. Once the lights went out and when they came on again her face was surprised and joyous, open-mouthed; everybody noticed. Her grandfather touched her wrist.