Searching for Caleb (13 page)

   "Justine, I'm glad you came back," he said.

   "Why, thank you."

   "You may get on my nerves sometimes but at least you show things, you say things outright, you don't feel it's a sin. You were the only one to ask me not to go, the Sunday I left."

   "But Grandfather told me to do that," Justine said.

   Right away she had managed to get on his nerves again.

   She always had an answer. She drove him up a wall. He reached the point where he would turn on her the moment she entered, letting loose a flood of arguments that he had been storing up. "You know what they're like?"

   (There was no need to say whom he meant.) "You know who they remind me of? People choosing a number on a radio dial. The way they ignore anything that isn't Peck, like flicking past stations that don't concern them, just a split second of jazz or ballgames or revivalist ministers and they wince and move on, and settle finally on the one acceptable station that plays Mantovani. Nothing uncomfortable, nothing extreme, nothing they can't tolerate . . ."

   "They tolerated you at that Sunday dinner," Justine said. "Really you were as rude as can be and they tried to see your side of it and act reasonable. Who are you to say they can't talk about eggshells?"

   Duncan said, "Nothing outside the family matters. Nobody counts if they're not Pecks. Not even neighbors, not even Sulie. Why, Sulie's been with us since our parents were children, but does anybody know her last name?"

   "Boudrault."

   "Hmm?"

   "She married old Lafleur Boudrault, the gardener."

   "Oh, details," said Duncan.

   "He died in nineteen forty."

   "Little church-lady Emily Post details and nothing underneath. And you're just like them, Justine, you always will be. Who asked you to come here and clutter up my life?"

   But when she was gone, her smell of warm grass hung in the air and the memory of her imperturbable Peck face. At night her chilly little voice ran on and on, arguing, reasoning, imposing logic, even in his dreams. He would wake and punch his flattened pillow and toss beneath the spread that carried her smell too, even from its brief stay in her arms. He wished she were there to argue with; then he wished she were there to apologize to; then he wished she were there to lay her long cool body next to his on the sagging mattress and hold him close all through the deep, steamy Baltimore night.

   Justine was not herself; everybody noticed it. Even summer vacation didn't seem to relax her any. She was strange and distant with her family. She began watching her aunts and uncles in a measuring way that made them uncomfortable. "What's the matter with her?" her father said once, but his in-laws only smiled blankly; they did not believe in asking too many questions.

   It seemed that they accepted Duncan's absence now. Sometimes when Justine came back from visiting him they would forget to ask how he was. Or they would say, "See Duncan, did you?" and go on about their business. Even Aunt Lucy appeared resigned. But one day in August, a particularly hot Saturday morning, Aunt Lucy appeared on Great-Grandma's front steps with a small electric fan. Justine was drying her hair outdoors and reading Mademoiselle. "Justine, dear," said Aunt Lucy.

   Justine looked up, with her mind still on her magazine. Her aunt wore the expression of a lady heading calm and smiling toward disaster.

   "Justine, this is for Duncan," Aunt Lucy said.

   "What? Oh, a fan. He could use it."

   "Oh, I knew it! I'm so glad I-well, whenever you go to see him, then. Are you going today?"

   "Today I'm going on a picnic with Neely. Tomorrow I might, though."

   "Don't you think you might stop by this morning? Wouldn't you be able to work it in?"

   Aunt Lucy's smile hesitated.

   "Of course I could," Justine said, and she took the fan from her aunt's shaky hands.

   It was not until she had parked in front of the bookshop that she noticed the little envelope dangling from the fan's grid.

   Duncan's room was blasting with heat and he was so hot he seemed to have been oiled. He wore a grayish undershirt. His trousers were creased and limp. "Oh, it's you," was all he said, and then he sat back down on his bed and wiped his face with his balled-up shirt.

   "Duncan, I brought you a fan from your mother."

   "You've been telling her about my room."

   "No, I haven't. She just guessed you would need this."

   "What's that in the envelope?"

   "I don't know."

   He broke the string that tied it and pulled out a folded note. First he read it silently and then he groaned and read it aloud.

   Dear Duncan, I am taking the liberty of sending you the fan from my bedroom, now that it is so warm.

   Everyone is well although I myself have had a recurrence of those headaches. Just a little tension, the doctor says, so I keep my chin up!

   Your father has been working very . . .

   "What about the fan from my room?" Duncan said. "There is one, you know."

   "She gave you her own to show she cares, she didn't know how else to put it," said Justine.

   "None of them do. Oh, you can tell who she married into. She's just like all the rest of them now. Too little said and too much communicated, so that if you fight back they can say, 'But why? What did I do?' and you won't have any answer. It all takes place in their secret language, they would never say a thing straight out."

   "But that's tact. They don't want to embarrass you."

   "They don't want to embarrass themselves," Duncan told her.

   She said nothing.

   "Isn't that right?"

   "Probably it is," she said. "But so is the other. There isn't any right and wrong. I keep looking at them, trying to decide. Well, everything you say is true but then so is everything I say. And what does it matter, after all? They're your family."

   "You know who you sound like? Aunt Sarah, Justine. You're going to grow up an old maid. Or you'll marry a stick like Neely and have him change his name to Peck. I can see it coming. I can see it in that flat straight face of yours, just watch."

   But he had gone too far. Even he must have known that. When Justine turned away from him, fumbling for something in her purse, he said, "Anyway!" He jumped up and started pacing the floor. "Well, anyway, tell me all the news," he said.

   "Oh . . ."

   "Come on!"

   "There's nothing much."

   "Nothing? Nothing in all those four enormous houses?"

   "Well, Aunt Bea has had to get glasses," Justine said.

   "Ah."

   "She's very shy about them, she wears them on a string tucked inside her blouse. She takes them off between sentences in a newspaper even."

   "So Aunt Bea has glasses."

   "And Mama's bought a TV."

   "A TV. I might have known it would come to that."

   "Oh, it's not so bad, Duncan. It's very convenient, don't you think, having a moving talking picture in your home that way? I wonder how they do it."

   "Actually it's quite simple," said Duncan. "The principle's been around for decades. Have you got a pencil? I'll show you."

   "Oh, I wouldn't understand," Justine said.

   "Of course you would."

   "But I'm not scientific. I don't see how you know those things."

   "Those things are nothing," he said, "it's the others I don't get. The ones you take for granted. Like mirrors, for instance," and he stopped his pacing to wave at the mirror on the opposite wall. "I lay awake the other night going crazy over that. I spent hours trying to figure out the laws of reflected images. I couldn't measure the angles of refraction. Do you understand it? Look."

   She stood up and looked. She saw herself in the speckled glass, nothing surprising.

   "How come it shows my image and not yours?" he asked her. "How come yours and not mine? How come eyes can meet in a mirror when you're not looking at each other in real life? Do you understand the principle?"

   In the glass their eyes met, equally blue and distant, as if the mirror were reflecting images already mirrored.

   Duncan turned around and set his hands on her shoulders and kissed her on the mouth. He smelled of salt and sunlight. His grip on her was weightless, as if he were holding something back. When she drew away, he let his hands drop to his sides. When she ran out of the room he didn't try to stop her.

   Justine wouldn't visit Duncan any more. Her grandfather kept coming around, pressing twenty-dollar bills into her hand, but she didn't know what to tell him and so she took the money in silence. She stuffed it haphazardly into her jewelry box, feeling like a thief even though she never spent it. She quarreled with her mother over a print dress, saying it was old-ladyish, although before she had worn whatever her mother picked out. When school started she studied indifferently and had trouble getting to class on time. Esther had graduated and was teaching nursery school, but now the twins were commuting with Justine and they objected to her late starts. "Is that what you call the point of life?" Justine asked them. "Getting to a class on the dot of nine o'clock?"

   The twins looked at each other. Certainly they had never meant to imply that it was the point of life, exactly.

   On a Saturday night in October, Justine was watching television with Neely in her great-grandma's study. Neely was stroking her neck up and down in a particularly rasping way, but she had been so short-tempered with him lately that she didn't want to protest. Instead she concentrated on the television: a mahogany box with a snowy blue postage stamp in its center, showing a girl who had become engaged due to cleansing her face with cold cream twice a night. She flashed a diamond ring at her girlfriends. "Your diamond's going to be twice as big," said Neely. "My father's already promised me the money."

   "I don't like diamonds," said Justine.

   "Why not?"

   "I don't like stones that are transparent."

   "You don't like anything any more, Justine."

   On the television, a man held up a watch that would keep running steadily through everything, even a cycle in a washing machine.

   "How about me?" Neely asked.

   "What?"

   "Do you like me?"

   His finger kept annoying her neck. Justine winced and drew away.

   A man in downtown Baltimore was interviewing people coming out of a movie theater. He wanted to see if they had heard of his product, an antibacterial toothpaste. "Goodness, no," said a lady.

   "Well, think a minute. Say you have a cold and get over it. You wouldn't want to catch it right back again from your toothbrush, would you?"

   "Goodness, no."

   He stopped a man in a raincoat.

   "Sir? Have you ever thought how risky it is, using the toothbrush you used when you were sick?"

   "Why, no, now I never considered that. But you got a point there."

   He stopped Duncan.

   "Say!" said Neely. "Isn't that your cousin?"

   Duncan was wearing some dark shade of jacket that Justine had never seen before. His face was clamped against the cold. There was no one in the world with such a pure, unwavering face. He stooped a little to hear the question, concentrating courteously with his eyes focused on something in the distance. When the man was finished Duncan straightened and thought a moment.

   "Actually," he said, "once your body's built up enough resistance to overcome those bacteria in the first place it's very doubtful if-"

   The man discontinued the conversation and ran after a ^fat lady.

   Justine went to the front hall for her coat. "Justine?" Neely called. She ignored him. Probably he thought she was out of hearing, maybe gone to the kitchen for soft drinks. At any rate, he didn't call again.

   All she told herself was that she owed Duncan a visit. He was her cousin, wasn't he? And she really should give him their grandfather's money.

   (Which was still crammed in her jewelry box at home.) She had herself convinced. But Duncan must have known exactly how her mind worked, because when he opened the door he stood looking at her for a minute, and then he drew her in and kissed her, and then he said, "Look, I can see the layers sliding across your eyes like shutters until you can properly explain this away." Then he laid her on his bed, with its hollow center that rolled her toward him so that she could feel his warm bones through the thin white fabric of his shirt. He took off her clothes and his. Still she didn't make a single objection, she said none of the things that she had said to Neely. She felt happy and certain, as if everything they did was already familiar. She seemed to be glinting with some secret laughter at this newer, more joyous mischief that they were just inventing, or at Duncan's Puckish face turned suddenly gentle, or at her own self in his mirror eyes, a naked girl wearing a Breton hat.

   Duncan came home in March of 1953. He walked into his great-grandma's dining room one Sunday at dinnertime. "Duncan!" his mother said, half rising. Then, "What on earth is that you're wearing?"

   He was wearing a peajacket he had bought from Navy surplus. His hair needed cutting. He had been gone nearly a year and in that time his face had changed in some indefinable way that made him an outsider. The grownups stared and his cousins gave him self-conscious, sidelong glances. All but Justine, who raised her face like a beacon and smiled across the room at him. He smiled back.

   "Well, my boy," his grandfather said. "So you're home."

   "No," said Duncan, looking at Justine.

   But they didn't believe him. "Pull up a chair," his mother said. "Take mine. Get yourself a plate. Have you had one decent meal since you left us?"

   "I'm going to get married," Duncan said.

   "Married?"

   The ghost of Glorietta flashed scarlet through their minds. All the grownups shifted uneasily.

   "I'm marrying Justine."

   First they thought it was a joke. A tasteless one, but just like him.

   Then they saw how grave and still the two of them were. "My God," said Justine's mother. She clutched suddenly at a handful of ruffles on her chest. "My God, who would have thought of such a thing?"