Searching for Caleb (25 page)

   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.

   Dear Mr. Peck:

   In response to your query of March 17, I am sorry to say that I do not recall my grandmother's ever mentioning a Caleb Peck or, for that matter, any other young man she used to dance with. I was not aware that she danced. However my cousin Annabel Perce (Mrs. John M.) of Duluth, Minnesota may know more. I myself was never at all close to my grandmother and am certainly not the one to ...

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

   Dear Mama, I have gone to be married in Arthur's church. We will be living with Arthur's mother. Don't worry about me, III finish school in Semple. I will keep in touch.

   Love, Meg

   "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.

   10

   B y 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 slaughterhouse."

   "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 riddling 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 Millar 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 shirtdresses 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: