Searching for Caleb (12 page)

   But that was before Easter Sunday. On Easter Sunday, at the dinner table, the aunts were discussing Mrs. Norman Worth's extensive collection of eggshell miniatures. The uncles were arguing the details of a hypothetical legal problem: If a farmer, while turning on the water to irrigate the fields, accidentally startled another farmer's mule, which, in turn, kicked down the fence enclosing a prize-winning Angus bull, who thereupon . . .

   "Neither of these subjects is fit table conversation," Duncan said.

   Everybody thought about that for a minute.

   "But what's wrong with them, dear?" his mother said finally.

   "They're not real."

   Great-Grandma, who had lived longest and was hardest to shock, poured more ice water into her tumbler. "To you they may not be," she said, "but I myself find eggshell miniatures fascinating and if I didn't have this tremor I would take them up myself."

   "You owe us an apology, Duncan boy," said Uncle Two.

   "You owe me an apology," said Duncan. "I've spent eighteen years here growing deader and deader, listening to you skate across the surface.

   Watching you dodge around what matters like painting blue sea around boats, with white spaces left for safety's sake-"

   "What?"

   "Can't you say something that means something?" Duncan asked.

   "About what?" said his mother.

   "I don't care. Anything. Anything but featherstitch and the statute of limitations. Don't you want to get to the bottom of things? Talk about whether there's a God or not."

   "But we already know," said his mother.

   What was so terrible about that? None of them could see it. But Duncan stood up, as wild-eyed as any Russian, and said, "I'm leaving. I'm going for good."

   He slammed out of the dining room. Justine jumped up to follow him, but then she stopped in the doorway, undecided. "He'll be back," Uncle Two said comfortably. "It's only growing pains. Ten years from now he'll talk the same as all the rest of us."

   "Go after him," the grandfather said.

   "What, Father?"

   "Well, don't just-somebody go. You go, Justine. Go after him, hurry."

   Justine went. She flew out the front of Great-Grandma's house and paused, thinking she had already lost him, but then she saw him just coming from Uncle Two's with a cardboard box. He crossed the lawn and heaved the box into the back seat of the Graham Paige. Then he climbed in himself.

   "Duncan! Wait!" Justine called.

   Surprisingly, he waited. She ran up out of breath, clutching her dinner napkin. "Where are you going?" she asked him.

   "I'm moving."

   "You are?"

   She looked at the back seat. It was like him to leave his clothes behind and take his box of tools and scrap metal.

   "But Duncan," she said, "what are we going to do without you?"

   "You'll manage."

   "What if we need you for something? Where will we find you?"

   By now other members of the family were straggling onto Great-Grandma's porch. She could tell by the look he flashed over her shoulder. "Bye, Justine," he said. "I've already got a place, beside that bookstore on St. Paul, but don't tell the others."

   "But Duncan-"

   "Bye, Justine."

   "Bye, Duncan."

   At first the family assumed he would be home in no time. It was only his age. Everybody eighteen expected deep things of people, but it never lasted. Yet the days stretched on and there was no word of him. They began to question Justine more closely. "He's all right, he's got a place to stay," was what she had said earlier, but now that wasn't enough. Had he told her where? Because this was not some childhood game any more, surely she was mature enough to realize that. Wasn't she?

   But she had promised Duncan.

   Aunt Lucy said Justine was cruel and selfish. Justine's mother said there was no call for that sort of talk, and then Aunt Lucy broke down and cried. "Now look here. Get a hold of yourself," the grandfather said, which made her turn on him. Why couldn't a person let loose a little, after all? Where was the sin? How come a forty-four-year-old woman didn't have a right to cry in her own house, and state her feelings as she pleased, without a bunch of Pecks crowding around telling her she was not sufficiently dignified, and elegant, and tasteful, and respectable?

   "Why, Lucy Hodges'." said Aunt Sarah.

   Aunt Lucy gave her a look of pure hatred, there was no other way you could put it.

   Justine was miserable. She would much rather tell and be done with it.

   But even if the grownup rules were different, Duncan was still playing by the old ones and he would be furious if she told. She hoped he would come home by himself-"turn himself in" was how she thought of it. Or that Uncle Two, strolling the Hopkins campus with false nonchalance during class break, would run across Duncan on his own. But Duncan didn't come and he wasn't seen on campus, and Uncle Two didn't want to ask at the Dean's office outright and involve other people in family matters. "You owe it to us to tell, Justine," he said. His face was tired and gaunt and there were shadows under his eyes. Aunt Lucy wasn't speaking. Even the cousins looked at Justine with a new edginess. How had she got herself into this? All she wanted was for the family to be happy together. That was the only reason she had run after Duncan in the first place.

   She felt like someone who takes a single short step on solid ice and then hears a crack. She was halfway onto a drifting floe, one foot pulling out to sea and the other still on shore.

   Then her grandfather said, "Have you been to see him?"

   "Oh, I don't think he'd like me to. Grandfather."

   "Why not? You're his cousin."

   "I know."

   "Yes, well," her grandfather said, and he pulled at his nose. "Well, never mind that. Go anyway. It's the only way we'll get any peace around here."

   "Go visit him?"

   "You didn't promise not to do that, did you? Go ahead. Don't worry, nobody will follow you."

   But Justine half hoped someone would follow. Then life could get back to normal.

   She knew the address because she had often gone with Duncan to the bookshop he mentioned-a cluttered place with creaky floorboards and great tilting stacks of used technical books. To the left of the shop was a paper sign, orange on black, saying ROOMS. When she opened the door she found narrow wooden steps, and at the top of the steps a dark hall with a toilet at the end. The doors reminded her of school, all thickly painted with scuff-proof brown and marked off with curly metal numbers. But she should have brought a flashlight to read the nameplates by. She moved down the hall very slowly, hunching her shoulders against a feeling of unknown things at the back of her neck, peering at the names scrawled on scraps of ruled paper or adhesive tape: Jones, Brown, Linthicum, T. Jones. No Peck. Only a door to her right with nothing at all, no name in the slot. And that, of course, would be Duncan.

   She knocked. When he opened the door she held onto her hat, like someone who has just pressed a fun-house button with no notion of what to expect.

   But all Duncan said was, "Justine."

   "Hello," she said.

   "Was there something you wanted?"

   "I'm supposed to see if you're all right."

   "Well, now you've seen."

   "Okay," she said, and turned to go.

   "But you might as well come in, I guess. Since you're here."

   His room was small and dingy, with stained wallpaper, a flapping torn shade, a speckled mirror, and a metal bed with a sagging mattress. Over in one corner was his cardboard box. He wore the clothes he had left home in, brown suit pants and a white shirt without a tie. He seemed thinner.

   "It doesn't look as if you're eating right," Justine said.

   "Is that what you came to tell me?"

   "No."

   She sat down very delicately on the edge of the bed. She lifted both hands to her hat, making sure it was perfectly level. For some reason, Duncan smiled.

   "Well!" she said finally.

   Duncan sat down next to her.

   "Your mother is really taking on, Duncan. She's crying where everyone can see her. Your father is-"

   "I don't want to hear about that."

   "Oh. Well-"

   "I know what they're doing. I always know, I can tell, I can see as if I'm sitting there. They're talking about someone in the outside world.

   They're digging the moat a little deeper. They're pointing out all the neighbors' flaws and their slipping dentures and mispronunciations, they're drawing in tighter to keep the enemy out. Why do you think my mother's crying? Because she misses me? Did she say that? Think a minute.

   Did she? Did any of them? No. They're worried I might be with the wrong kind of people. They're upset to think a Peck is out there in the world someplace. I've lowered the drawbridge."

   "Oh no, Duncan-" Justine said.

   "Everything they do is calculated to keep others at a safe distance.

   Everything. Look at your hat!"

   Justine's hands went up again, uncertainly.

   "No, no, it's fine. It's a fine hat," he told her. "But what are you wearing it for?"

   "Why, I always-"

   "Yes, but why? Did you ever take a good look around you? Only old ladies wear hats any more, outside of church. But every woman in our family, even little girls, they all wear hats even if they're just off to the side yard for a breath of air. 'A lady doesn't go without a hat, my dear.

   Only common people.' Common! What's so uncommon about us? We're not famous, we're not society, we haven't been rich since 1930 and we aren't known for brains or beauty. But our ladies wear hats, by God! And we all have perfect manners! We may not ever talk to outsiders about anything more interesting than the weather but at least we do it politely! And we've all been taught that we disapprove of sports cars, golf, women in slacks, chewing gum, the color chartreuse, emotional displays, ranch houses, bridge, mascara, household pets, religious discussions, plastic, politics, nail polish, transparent gems of any color, jewelry shaped like animals, checkered prints . . . we're all told from birth on that no Peck has had a cavity in all recorded history or lost a single tooth; that we're unfailingly punctual even when we're supposed to come late; that we write our bread-and-butter notes no more than an hour after every visit; that we always say 'Baltimore' instead of 'Balmer'; that even when we're wearing our ragged old gardening clothes you can peek down our collars and see 'Brooks Brothers' on the label, and our boots are English and meant for riding though none of us has ever sat on a horse . . ."

   He wound down like Great-Grandma's old Graphophone, and slumped forward suddenly with his long hands drooping between his knees.

   "But Uncle Two is so sad," said Justine. "He wanders around the Homewood campus all day hoping to-"

   "Justine. Will you please get out?"

   She rose immediately, clutching her little suede purse. But in the doorway Duncan said, "Anyhow, thanks for coming."

   "Oh, you're welcome."

   "I meant it, Justine. I'm sorry I ... really, if you wanted to come back sometime I wouldn't mind."

   "Well, all right," Justine said.

   Then of course when she got home everyone was furious with her, because she hadn't found out one concrete fact. What was he living on? Where was he eating? Was he going to school? Who were his companions?

   "I just know he's taken up with some-trash, he does have such peculiar taste in friends," Aunt Lucy said.

   And all of them wondered at Justine's sudden look of sorrow.

   What Duncan was living on was a pittance paid him by a Hopkins professor.

   He was double-checking dry facts in a library, and then writing them into the blanks the professor had left in a very long, tedious book on paleobotany. He was eating saltines and peanut butter, washed down with a quart bottle of milk in his room. He had no companions at all, not even Glorietta, with whom he had had a terrible fight several months ago over her habit of saying "between you and I." Eventually he was going to go very far away, perhaps to British Columbia, but at the moment it seemed he just couldn't get up the energy. And no, he was not attending school any more. He was not even reading Dostoevsky, whose writing suddenly appeared to have the squinny, eye-straining texture of plant cells. As a matter of fact, he thought he might be going crazy. He even liked the idea of going crazy. He waited for insanity as if it were some colorful character his parents had always warned him against, but every morning when he woke up his mind was the same efficient piece of machinery it had always been and he felt disappointed.

   Several times a week, his cousin Justine would come bringing irritating, endearing gifts-a ridiculous pair of slippers, his striped bedspread from home, once his old blue toothbrush with Ipana caked in the bristles.

   Whenever he opened the door to her he felt deeply happy to see her thin, sweet face and her streamered hat, but before she had been there five minutes he wanted to throw her out. She had such a gift for saying the wrong thing. "Can I tell the cousins where you are? They want to come too."

   "No. God."

   "Do you need any money?"

   "I can take care of myself, Justine."

   "Grandfather gave me some to bring to you."

   "Tell him I can take care of myself."

   "But I can't give it back to him, Duncan. He was so-he just pushed it into my hand all clumsy and secret. He pretended he wasn't doing anything."

   "Change the subject."

   "Like in the old days when he gave out horehound drops."

   "Justine, I wish you would go now."

   She always went. But she always came back, too, and when she stood in his doorway again a few days later he was all the more touched by her stupid, comical persistence. From earliest childhood she had been his favorite cousin-maybe because she was a little more removed, a Mayhew, a Philadelphia!!, not quite so easy to know. But he was surprised that she would brave his dark stairs and his rudeness. Here she had always seemed so docile! He made a special effort for her, smoothing the spread and offering saltines from his roach-proof tin and suggesting she take her hat off, which of course she would not do.