Searching for Caleb

  “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.”

  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.

  6

  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?”

  Though it seemed to all of them, now, that they should have thought of it long ago. Those visits Justine had p
aid him! Those trips! Everyone knew she hated traveling as much as any other Peck. Yet day after day this winter she had packed a lunch in Sulie’s kitchen and said she wouldn’t be home till night. “I’m going on a trip with Duncan. Out to the country somewhere.” “Yes, yes, go,” they told her. “Keep an eye on him for us.” She had cut classes, missed important family gatherings, stopped seeing Neely, grown distant from her cousins—“But it’s good she’s with Duncan,” they told each other. “She’s sure to be a good influence on him.” How she had deceived them!

  Only Sam Mayhew, slow of mind, seemed unable to make the mental leap the Pecks had just accomplished. He looked all around the table, from one person to the other, with his face set to laugh as soon as he saw the joke. “What? What’s that?” he said.

  The others waved him aside, too busy adjusting to the shock. But Duncan came over and stood squarely in front of him and spoke very quietly, as if to a child.

  “Uncle Sam, I’m marrying Justine.”

  “But—you can’t!”

  “I’m telling you I am. I’m telling you, not asking you. Nothing is going to make me change my mind.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Why, it must not even be legal!” said Caroline.

  “Yes, it is,” Duncan told her.

  “Oh yes,” his grandfather said.

  “But—” said Caroline.

  “Who’s the lawyer here, you or me? Boys’s right. It’s true. And yes, I know, there’s a lot to be said against it. But look at it this way. What nicer girl could he have picked? She’s sure to settle him down some. And this way there’s no adjustment for them to make, no in-law problems—”

  “You ought to be locked up,” Sam Mayhew said.

  “Sir!” said Grandfather Peck.

  “Haven’t you heard of inbreeding?”

  “Not at the table, Sam.”

  “Haven’t you heard of genes?”

  “Now, we come of good solid stock,” the grandfather said. “No worries there.” He picked up the carving knife. “Care for a slice of ham, Duncan boy?”

  “He’s a blood relative,” said Sam Mayhew. “And he’s only twenty years old, and he hasn’t got a responsible bone in his body. Well, I’m not going to allow it. Justine won’t marry Duncan or any other Peck.”

  “Then we’ll elope,” Duncan said.

  “Elope!” cried Justine’s mother. “Oh, anything but that!”

  “You are a fool, Caroline,” Sam Mayhew said. Then he stood and took Justine by the wrist and pulled her up and toward the door. But she was still calm and so was Duncan. Nothing seemed to disturb them. As Justine passed Duncan he gave her a slow, deep stare that caused the rest of the family to avert their eyes. “Come, Justine,” her father said. He led her through the living room and up to her bedroom. She went without a protest. He set her in her room and shut her door and locked it, and put the key up on the ledge again before he went back to the others.

  In her ruffled rocker, Justine sat and waited. The pointlessness of being locked in her room seemed more comical than annoying, and she was not worried about her family. Hadn’t Duncan predicted everything? “Your father’s the one who’ll be upset. The others will get over it. Anyway, it’s always been a bother adapting outside wives. Then your father will give in because he has to. There won’t be any problems.”

  “I know there won’t.”

  “There would be even less if you would just run away with me.”

  “I want to do this right, I said.”

  “Does it matter that much? Justine, why does it matter? They’re just a bunch of people, just some yellow-haired, ordinary people. Why do you have to ask for their approval?”

  “Because I love them,” Justine said.

  He didn’t have any answer for that. Love was not a word he used, even to her.

  She rocked and gazed at the wintry gray sky, while downstairs the battle went on and on. Great-Grandma soothed everyone, a dry thread weaving in and out. She thought this marriage was a wonderful idea; she had never heard of genes. When Sam Mayhew stormed, Grandfather snapped and cut him short. Uncles rumbled and aunts chirped and burbled. And over it all rode Duncan’s level voice, sensible and confident. Justine could tell when he began to win. He continued alone, the others fell behind. The worst of the battle was over. All that was left was for the losers to regain face.

  Justine felt suddenly stifled and bored. She went into her bathroom for her toothbrush, and took a pack of matches from her bureau drawer. She had not grown up with Duncan for nothing: heating the toothbrush handle very slowly, she pushed it little by little into the lock of her door and then turned it and walked out free. When she re-entered the dining room, they didn’t seem surprised to see her. Only Duncan, noticing the toothbrush in her hand, tipped back in his chair and looked amused, but he sobered up when Justine’s father rose and came around the table to face her.

  “Justine,” he said.

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “It has been pointed out to me that there’s nothing I can really do to stop you. All I can hope is that you’ll listen to reason. Justine, look. Don’t you see why you’re doing this? It’s merely proximity, the two of you had no one else, no one in this family has anyone else. You were thrown too much together, at an age when naturally … and you were afraid to turn to some outsider. Admit it. Isn’t that correct?”

  Justine thought it over. “Well,” she said finally, “it does sound correct, yes.”

  “Well, then.”

  “But then, both sides sound correct. I always agree with who I’m listening to.”

  He waited, expecting more. All she did was smile. “Aah!” he said suddenly, and turned away, throwing up his hands. “You even sound like him. You’re a puppet. I’ve learned something today: set a bad and a good person down together and the bad wins every time. I always wondered.”

  “Say that again?” said Aunt Lucy. “Is it Duncan you’re calling bad?”

  “Who else?”

  “Duncan’s not a bad boy.”

  Even Duncan looked surprised.

  “Justine’s the one who kept the rest of us away from him. Justine wouldn’t tell his own mother where he was staying! Blame your daughter!”

  “Why, Lucy!” Justine’s mother said.

  Duncan let his chair tip forward. This might turn out to be interesting. But no, they were distracted by a new development: Sam Mayhew buttoning his suit coat. He worked with his elbows out and his clock-shaped face set impassively toward some point above their heads. They knew at once that something important was going on.

  “I won’t be attending this wedding,” he said finally.

  “Oh, Sam!” his wife cried.

  “And I won’t be living here.”

  “What?”

  “I’m moving out to my parents’. I’m going to look for a house in Guilford.”

  He finished the buttons. He began pulling his shirt cuffs down, neat bands of white above his chubby red hands. “You may come too, of course, Caroline. And Justine if she decides against this marriage. But I warn you: if you come, we will only be visiting your family once a month.”

  “Once a month?”

  “The first Sunday of every month, for dinner. We’ll go home at three.”

  “But Sam—” his wife said.

  “Make your choice, Caroline.”

  He continued to gaze above her head. Caroline turned to her family. She was still baby-faced, although the years had worked like gravity pulling on her cheeks. Her weight had settled in upon itself. She looked like a cake that had collapsed. To each brother and sister, to her father and her grandmother, she turned a round lost stare while twisting the pearls on her fingers.

  “What’s your decision, Caroline?”

  “I can’t just leave them like that.”

  “All right.”

  “Sam?” she said.

  He walked over to Justine. Duncan rose instantly to his feet. “Justine,” Sam Mayhew said, “you have been a disapp
ointing daughter in every way, all your life.”

  Then Justine rocked back as if she had been hit, but Duncan already stood behind her braced to steady her.

  The wedding was to be held in a church. All the family insisted on that. Duncan had not been to church in several years and detested Reverend Didicott, a fat man who came from Aunt Lucy’s hometown and had a Southern accent that would surely double the length of the ceremony; but he said he would do whatever Justine wanted. And Justine, half willing anyway, went along with the others, submitting to a long satin dress, Sarah Cantleigh’s ivory veil, and a little old lady consultant with an emergency cigar box full of pins, white thread, spirits of ammonia, and a stick of chalk for stains. “Oh, Duncan!” Justine said, as she sped by him on the way to the photographer. “I’m sorry! I know how you must hate this!” But he was surprisingly tolerant. He had agreed to give up his room and move home for the month preceding the wedding; he went without a word to buy a black suit that turned him stern and unfamiliar. During lulls in the excitement, he seemed to be observing Justine very closely. Did he think she would change her mind? Reading Bride’s magazine, she felt his eyes upon her, weighing her, watching for something. “What is it?” she asked him, but he never would say.

  Her mother was everywhere: She bustled and darted, giving commands, trilling out fitting schedules in a voice so gay it seemed about to break off and fly. “Really, no one would guess her husband’s left her,” Justine told Duncan.

  “Don’t speak too soon.”

  “Why?”

  “Now she’s got the wedding to keep her busy. What about later?”

  Later Justine would be far away. One thing Duncan would not agree to was living in Roland Park. Nor even in Baltimore, not even long enough for Justine to finish school. And he would not go back to school himself. So they were renting a little house and a plot of land an hour’s drive out in the country, where they used to go on their trips. Duncan planned to start a goat farm. It was what he had always wanted, he said. It was? Justine had never heard him mention it before. But he couldn’t go on forever looking up facts for professors; and anyway, he kept losing those jobs, he gave in to a temptation to rewrite their material, making it more colorful, adding his own startling scraps of knowledge and a few untruths. And he and Justine each had a share of old Justin’s trust fund. Because of the proliferation of heirs it amounted to almost nothing, but they could manage till the dairy started paying off. “You’re strapping yourself in, boy,” his grandfather said. “You want an education. And renting’s no good, it’s a shoddy way to do things.”