“That took him five minutes?”
“Ssh.”
“But what was he up there working his mouth all that time for?”
“Ssh, Grandfather. Later.”
“You must have left something out,” he told her.
She would hand back his pen and pad, and sigh, and check the Seth Thomas clock on the mantel and run her eyes once more down the rows of straight-backed radiant adults and fidgety children lining the wooden benches. After twenty minutes the children were excused, rising like chirping, squeaking mice to follow the pied piper First-Day School teacher out of the room, breaking into a storm of whistles and shouts and stamping feet before the door was properly shut again. She should have gone with them, she always thought. The silence that followed was deep enough to drown in. She would plow desperately through her straw bag, rustling and jingling, coming up finally with her tin container of coffee beans. When she bit into them, she filled the meetinghouse with the smell of breakfast.
Once her grandfather wrote on the pad himself, several lines of hurried spiky handwriting that he passed to her. “Read this out when no one else is talking,” he whispered. She struggled to her feet, hanging onto her hat. Anything to break the silence. “My grandfather wants me to read this,” she said. “ ‘I used to think that heaven was—palatable? Palatial. I was told it had pearly gates and was paved with gold. But now I hope they are wrong about that. I would prefer to find that heaven was a small town with a bandstand in the park and a great many trees, and I would know everybody in it and none of them would ever die or move away or age or alter.’ ”
She sat down and gave him back the memo pad. She took the top off her coffee beans but then she put it on again, and kept the container cupped in her hands while she gazed steadily out the window into the sunlit trees.
One afternoon toward the end of May the doorbell rang and Justine, flying to answer it, found Alonzo Divich standing on the porch. Although it was hot he wore a very woolly sheepskin vest. He carried a cowboy hat, swinging by a soiled string. “Alonzo!” Justine said.
“I was afraid you might have moved,” he told her.
“Oh no. Come in.”
He followed her into the hall, shaking the floor with each step. Grandfather Peck was on the living room couch writing a letter to his daughters. “Don’t get up,” Alonzo called to him, although the grandfather was still firmly seated, giving him that stare of shocked disbelief he always wore for Alonzo. “How’s the heart, eh?” Alonzo asked. “How’s the heart?”
“Hearth?”
“Nothing’s wrong with his heart,” said Justine. “Come into the kitchen, Alonzo, if you want your cards read. You know I can’t do it right with Grandfather watching.”
While she cleared the remains of breakfast from the table, Alonzo wandered around the kitchen examining things and whistling. “Your calendar is two months ahead,” he told Justine.
“Is it?”
“Most people’s would be behind.”
“Yes, well.”
She went to the living room for her carry-all. When she returned Alonzo was standing at the open refrigerator, looking into a bowl of moldy strawberries. “How is my friend Duncan?” he asked her.
“He’s fine.”
“Maybe I’ll drop by and see him. Is Meg out of school yet?”
“She’s married.”
“Married.”
“She eloped with that minister.”
“I’m sorry, Justine.”
He shut the refrigerator and sat down at the table to watch her shuffle the cards. He looked tired and hot, and the grooves alongside his mustache were silvered with sweat. A disk with Arabic lettering gleamed in the opening of his shirt. Last time it had been a turquoise cross. She didn’t ask why; he wouldn’t have answered. “Alonzo,” was all she said, “you have no idea how it gladdens my heart to see you. Cut, please.” He cut the cards. She laid them out, one by one. Then she looked up. “Well?” she asked.
Alonzo said, “You realize, last time I took your advice.”
“You did?”
“When you told me not to sell the business.”
“Oh yes. Well, I should hope so,” said Justine.
“It was the first time you ever said to keep on with something I was already doing.”
She stopped swinging her foot.
“But I was tempted to disobey you anyway,” he told her. “I admit. I went to see my friend, the one in merchandising. He has these clients, you understand, department stores and such, they come to him for ideas on … but anyway. I said I might join up with him. ‘Oh, fine,’ he tells me. But then he starts suggesting I wear a different style of clothes. Well, that I can follow. I am practical, I know how the world works. But he doesn’t see, he’s still trying to convince me. ‘Face it, Alonzo,’ he says, ‘we all have to give in in little ways. Look at me. I’m a tall man,’ he says. And he is, a fine tall man. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘when important clients come, know what I do? I try to stay seated as much as possible, and if I stand I kind of squinch down. I don’t stoop,’ he says, ‘that’s too obvious. Just bend at the knees a little. Understand, it’s not something I think of so consciously. But you can see a client, important fellow like that, he wouldn’t feel right if I was to tower over him. You got to keep a watch for such things, Alonzo.’ ”
He shook his head, and pulled his great silver belt buckle around to where it wouldn’t cut into his stomach so.
“Justine,” he said, “do you know that I have never before done what you told me to do?”
“I’m not surprised,” she said.
“I mean it. You’re always right, but only because I go against instructions and things turn out badly just the way you said they would. Now I discover things turn out badly anyhow. Is that your secret? I’ve found it, ha? You give people advice they’ll be sure not to follow. Right?”
She laughed. “No, Alonzo,” she said. “And I’m glad you didn’t sell the carnival. Whatever’s gone wrong.”
“My mechanic’s been arrested.”
“Lem?”
“He robbed a bank in nineteen sixty-nine. They say.”
“Oh, I see.”
“Now, here’s what I want to know. Is he coming back, or not? I mean if he’s coming soon I’ll hold the machines together somehow and wait it out, but if he’s guilty, on the other hand—”
“Well, I don’t think I’m supposed to say if someone’s guilty or not.”
“Look here! What do I care about guilt? All they lost was two hundred dollars, let him keep it. Besides a little matter of a shooting. I want to know about my business. I want to know if I should just give up, because to tell the truth this fellow Lem was a man I relied on. He saw to everything. Now, merchandising is out but there is always something else, and the jodhpur lady still wants my carnival. Shall I sell, after all? Is the man gone forever?”
Justine frowned at a card.
“You see what I’ve fallen to,” Alonzo said. “I used to ask about beautiful women. Now it’s financial matters.”
“Well, Lem is not coming back,” said Justine.
“I knew it.”
“But you shouldn’t sell the carnival.”
“How can you keep saying such a stupid thing?”
“Don’t argue with me, argue with the cards. Have you ever seen anything like it? I’ve turned up every jack in the deck, you’ll have all the mechanics you want.”
“Oh, of course,” Alonzo said. “One after the other. The first one drinks, the second leaves with my ponies—”
“And look at the women! Look, Alonzo, you’re not paying attention. See? Here you are, the king of hearts. And here’s the queen of hearts, the queen of clubs, the queen of diamonds …”
Alonzo sat forward, peering at the cards, resting his hand upon his knees.
“Here is the good luck card, the card of friendship, the celebration card …”
“All right, all right!” Alonzo said.
She sat back and smi
led at him.
“Oh, Justine,” he told her sadly, “sometimes I think I would like to go live in a cabin in the woods, all alone. I’d take a lifetime supply of slivovitz, my accordion, plenty of food, perhaps some books. Do you know I’ve never read an entire book? Just the good parts. I think about hibernating like a bear, just eating and drinking and sleeping. No tax, insurance, electric bills, alimony, repairs or repainting or Rustoleum, no women to mess up my life, no one shooting bank guards, no children. Then here you come galloping along in your terrible hat and your two sharp hipbones like pebbles in your pockets and you tell me all these things I may expect, a life full of surprises. How can I refuse? I feel curious all over again, I like to know what will happen next.”
And he shook his head, stroking downward on his mustache, but he did not look so tired as when he had arrived. All his tiredness seemed to have passed to Justine, who sat slumped in her chair with her hands limp on the cards.
Duncan and Justine were on the front steps, watching the fireflies spark all around them. “Today I sold an antique garden engine,” Duncan said.
“What’s a garden engine?”
“It’s this big wheeled thing to spray water on your flowers. What a relief! I bought it with my own money in a moment of weakness. I kept it sitting in the back room; I had to open the double doors to get it in and then I was afraid it would go right through the floorboards. A man named Newton Norton bought it. He’s just started reconstructing this old-time farmhouse out in the country.”
“Well, that’s nice,” said Justine.
“He also bought some fuller’s shears, and all my carpentry tools.”
“That’s nice.”
He looked over at her.
“When I went into Meg’s room,” she said, “and found her note telling me she’d gone, I never read anything that hurt so. But then I looked up, and there I was reflected in the window that was just starting to go dark outside. There were these deep black shadows in my eyes and cheekbones. I thought, ‘My, don’t I look interesting? Like someone who has had something dramatic happen.’ I thought that!”
She laid her face against Duncan’s sleeve. Duncan put his arm around her and pulled her closer, but he didn’t say anything.
11
Lucy Peck had to ride in the suicide seat, beside her husband Two, who was driving. Laura May and Sarah got to sit in back. Lucy had to put up with the hot air rushing in Two’s open window and Mantovani playing much too loudly on the radio. She had to say what roads to take when she couldn’t even fold a map right, much less read it. “Now the next thing is you’re going to turn left, about a quarter-inch after Seven Stone Road. Or, I don’t know. What would a little bitty broken blue line seem to mean?” Her husband set his front teeth together very, very delicately, not a good sign at all. A bumble bee flew in past his nose, causing Lucy to cry out and fling her road map into the air. And meanwhile there sat Laura May and Sarah, protected by layered hats with brown veils, contemplating two separate views peacefully like children being taken for a drive.
It was the sixth of June and they were on their way to Caro Mill, Maryland, to celebrate their father’s ninety-third birthday. Unfortunately his birthday fell on a Wednesday this year, which meant that no one who worked could come along. And Bea was confined to her bed with lower back pain. It was up to them: Lucy and the maiden aunts, and Two, who was now retired. Between them they had loaded the car with presents and fruit, a Thermos of Sanka, Laura May’s needlework, Sarah’s knitting, insect repellent, sunscreen, Bufferin, Gelusil, a Triple-A tour guide, a can of Fix-a-Flat, a fire extinguisher, six emergency flares, and a white banner reading SEND HELP. They had had the Texaco man check the gas, oil, water, brake fluid, transmission fluid, tire pressure, and windshield cleaner. Then Two nosed the car out into traffic and they were on their way, with enough horns honking behind them to remind Lucy of an orchestra tuning up. Young people nowadays were so impatient. Luckily Two was not a man who could be fussed, and he went on driving at his same stately tempo. In his old age he had shrunk somewhat, and was made to seem even smaller by his habit of tipping his head back as he peered through the windshield. His eyes were narrow blue hyphens. His mouth was pulled downward by two ropes in his neck. When he decided to turn left from the right-hand lane he signaled imperiously out the window, still facing front, maintaining his cool Apache profile for Lucy to marvel at while behind them more horns honked. “Kindly check the odometer, Lucy,” was all he said. “I would be interested in knowing our mileage on this trip.”
“Yes, dear.”
Once they hit the open road they were dazzled by too much sunshine and too wide an expanse of fields. It was some time since they had been in the country. (One year ago today, to be exact.) Lucy longed for her wing chair in which she could sit encircled, almost, with the wings working like a mule’s blinders to confine her gaze to the latest historical romance. The upholstery was embroidered in satin-stitch, which she loved to stroke absently as she read. Then in the back yard her Sea Foam roses were just opening; there were going to be more this year than ever before and she was missing one entire day’s worth. And it was so much cooler and greener at home, so shadowy, so thickly treed that when you spoke outdoors your voice came echoing back, clear and close, as if reflected from a vaulted green ceiling not far above your head. Here the sun turned everything pale. Pinkish barns sped past and bleached gray roadbanks, and beige creeks spanned by wooden bridges like dried-up whitening bones. Lucy turned and sought out her sisters-in-law—a double pair of webbed eyes reluctantly drawn to hers. “Really, traveling makes me sad,” Lucy told them. But they didn’t answer (Lucy always said such personal things), so she faced front again.
At Plankhurst there was a very confusing crossroads and she sent Two thirteen miles out of the way before the mistake was realized. “Oh, I’m just so—I just can’t tell you how badly I feel about this,” she said. Two grunted. In the back seat her sisters-in-law gave her disappointed looks that made her want to cry. “I just seem to do everything wrong,” she said. Nobody denied it.
Two hours out of Baltimore they began to encounter signs for Caro Mill, although still it seemed they were in the depths of the country. The only buildings were farmhouses, widely scattered, and occasionally a little grocery store patched with soft drink ads. Then they swooped over a hill and there was the town all spread out before them, a clutter of untidy buildings. They had traveled this Main Street annually for years, although each time in a different location. They had passed this very Woolworth’s, diner, pizza parlor, fabric store displaying dingy bolts of cloth turning gray along the creases. Still, Lucy sat up straighter and began perking the lace at the neck of her dress. Two pressed his thin white hair flat against his head, and in back there were rustles and whispers. “Oh, I do hope Father likes the—” “Remind me to ask Father if he wouldn’t care to—” But Duncan was the one Lucy thought of, not her father-in-law at all. It was for Duncan she had bought this hat (only wouldn’t he think the wooden cherries were—old-ladyish, maybe?) and put on these coins of rouge and her eighteen-hour girdle and the Sunday pearls. (Only come to think of it, hadn’t he always laughed at the family’s fondness for pearls?) She twisted her rings. “Perhaps he won’t be home,” she said.
“Who?” Two asked, although of course he knew.
“It is a working day. Though Justine said he comes home for lunch. But perhaps he won’t. I mean, one time—”
One time when they visited he had gone fishing with a friend. A plumber or something. Another time he had wandered around the house all afternoon wearing earphones on a very long cord, following a baseball game. You could only grasp the depth of the insult when you remembered that Duncan did not like sports and would prefer to do almost anything but listen to a game. “One time—” she said, but Two’s voice cracked across hers like a whip.
“Leave it,” he said. “What’d you do with Justine’s letter?”
“Letter?”
“Her letter,
Lucy. Telling us how to get to their house.”
“Oh. Oh, why I—”
She remembered suddenly that she had left the letter at home on the dining room buffet, but she didn’t want to say so. “Why, someplace here,” she said, riffling through her pocketbook. Two let out a long puff of air. He slowed and beckoned from the window, startling a fat lady standing on the median line. “Pardon me,” he said. “We are looking for Watchmaker Street. For twenty-one Watchmaker Street.”
“Oh, Justine,” the lady said.
Everyone flinched. Justine’s name was always bandied about so. Like common property.
“Why, you just turn left at the next light,” she said, “go two blocks and turn left again. That’s Watchmaker Street.”
“Thank you.”
He rolled the window all the way up.
Now they were silent, concentrating on the view, wondering what sort of house they were headed for. Hoping, just this once, for something really fine. But no. Of course: there it was, a flimsy, no-account little place. Tacked to the screen was what appeared to be a magazine ad for traveler’s checks. YOU ARE FAR, FAR FROM HOME, it said, IN UNFAMILIAR TERRITORY … But then out flew Justine, barefoot, glowing, in a dress with a lopsided hem. “Uncle Two!” she cried. “Aunt Lucy! You got here!” She hugged them—some of them twice over. She called for her grandfather, who naturally couldn’t hear. She showed Laura May and Sarah up the rickety steps and into the house to find him, and then she ran out again to help Two and Lucy unload the trunk. “Duncan will be here in a minute,” she said. “He’s coming for lunch. Oh look! This is Aunt Bea’s gift, I know the wrapping. Will you look at that bow?” But then she dropped it. Fortunately it was not breakable. Lucy had often wondered: was accident-proneness catching? Justine had been such a careful little girl. “I wrote and asked Meg to come too but they’re having final exams,” Justine said. “It seems to me these birthday parties get smaller every year. She sent her love to all of you.”