Searching for Caleb

  “So it got there August thirtieth,” Justine said.

  Red Emma nodded. Tiny droplets clung to her curls like the dew on a cobweb, and her face was shiny and her mail pouch was growing speckled.

  “Then how long back again?” Justine asked. “Four more?”

  “I would say so.”

  “Plus a day in between for the answer to be written.”

  “Well, if it would take a whole day.”

  “September fourth,” said Justine. “A week ago. I don’t think Grandfather can stand to wait much longer.”

  “Really he ought to develop some other interest,” Red Emma told her. “Join the Golden Age Club.”

  “Oh, I don’t think he’d like it.”

  “But he would be so popular! With his fine head of hair and all his teeth.”

  “Maybe so,” said Justine, “but I don’t picture it.”

  She waved goodbye and went back to the house with her mail—a sample packet of salad dressing mix and a postcard from Meg. “Here,” she said to Duncan. He was playing solitaire on the living room floor. When she tossed him the postcard he picked it up and squinted at the picture, which showed thousands of people stretched out nearly naked on a strip of sand. He turned the card over. “ ‘Dear Mama and Daddy and Grandfather,’ ” he read. “ ‘Here we are with the Young Marrieds Fellowship having just a wonderful time and wish you were …’ ” He passed the card to his grandfather, who was sitting on the couch doing nothing at all.

  “What’s this?” said his grandfather.

  “Card from Meg.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  He set the card very carefully on the couch beside him and went back to staring into space.

  “Grandfather, would you like to play cribbage?” Justine asked him.

  “Cribbage? No.”

  “It’s just as well, you always forget the rules,” Duncan told her.

  “Would you like a game of chess, Grandfather?”

  He looked at her blankly.

  “Or a trip in the car. You don’t want to just sit.”

  “Why not?” he asked her.

  Duncan laughed.

  “It isn’t funny,” Justine told him. “Oh, when is this rain going to stop?” She swept tangles of plant vines aside in order to peer through the window. “I wish we had somewhere to go. I wish we could just get in the car and drive, or catch a train somewhere.”

  “You know,” her grandfather said, “my feelings won’t be hurt at all if he doesn’t ever answer.”

  Justine turned to look at him.

  “Anyhow, what was I thinking of? It would be so tiring, having to bring him up to date on all that’s happened. Too much has gone on. I might not know him. He might not know me. I might look old to him. Now I recall we were often short-tempered. Why, we couldn’t sit and talk five minutes without one or the other of us losing patience! And he never showed much interest in the children. And I wouldn’t know what to say about his music and all. Then look at that place he’s living in. Who knows what goes on there? Probably they have this schedule of activities, and special shelves to put your pajamas on and rules and medication and refreshment hours and seating arrangements that I would just have no inkling of. We have nothing in common. Know what I dreamed last night? No, maybe two nights ago. I dreamed that I saw Caleb driving down the street. Looking fine, just as fine as always. But his car! Peculiar little foreign station wagon, with a pinchy face and windows too big for it like one of those durned chihuahua dogs you see around. ‘Caleb!’ I called to him, ‘what are you doing driving that thing?’ and all he did was turn and wave. You would think that he belonged in it.”

  “Grandfather, it will work out,” Justine told him. “All week I’ve had this feeling of change coming. He’s going to write any day now. We’ll send him a plane ticket and settle him in Meg’s old room.”

  “Then what?”

  “What?”

  “Then what, I said. Then what will we do? ‘Oh, it will work out, it will work out.’ You’re always so blasted cheerful, Justine. But where is your common sense?”

  “Why, Grandfather—”

  “Sometimes it gets too much for me,” he told Duncan. “You expect me to have the patience of a saint.”

  “Not at all,” Duncan said.

  “You think I shouldn’t say how I feel. Underneath, you think that.”

  “Do what you like, I don’t care.”

  “In my childhood I was trained to hold things in, you see. But I thought I was holding them until a certain time. I assumed that someday, somewhere, I would again be given the opportunity to spend all that saved-up feeling. When will that be?”

  Nobody answered. Justine stayed braced against the windowframe, Duncan lowered a three of spades and stared at him. Finally their grandfather rose and went off to his room, leaning on each piece of furniture as he passed it.

  At noon Justine had to eat lunch alone. Duncan had left for the shop and her grandfather, when she knocked on his door, said that he was busy. From the sudden squawk of metal on metal she guessed that he was rearranging his file cabinet. “But maybe you could just come out and have some coffee,” she called.

  “Eh?”

  “You could keep me company.”

  “How’s that?”

  She gave up and went back to the kitchen. She opened a bottle of pickled onions and set it on the table, went to the drawer for a fork, and then suddenly straightened and frowned. This premonition of hers was pressing now against her temples and the small of her back. She returned to her grandfather’s room and knocked again. “I was wondering,” she called. “Would you like a cup of tea, instead?”

  “Justine.”

  “I asked if—”

  “Justine, I don’t feel so well.”

  She opened the door instantly. Her grandfather sat on his bed holding a sheaf of papers. His face was white and slick and the papers were trembling. “What is it?” she asked.

  He passed a hand across his eyes. “I was standing over there, you see,” he said, “just rearranging my files a bit. I was just standing there when I felt so—”

  He trailed off and looked at the shaking papers.

  “Lie down,” Justine told him. When he didn’t seem to hear she touched his shoulder, pushing him gently backward until he gave in. She bent to scoop his feet up and set them on the bed. Now he lay half on his side, half on his back, breathing a little too quickly. “Are you sick to your stomach?” she asked him.

  He nodded.

  “Oh, then. Probably just … are you dizzy?”

  He nodded.

  “Well … but your chest doesn’t hurt.”

  He nodded again.

  “Does it? Say something.”

  “Yes.”

  “I see,” Justine said.

  She thought a moment. Then she went to the open window and leaned out. Next door, Ann-Campbell stood in a wading pool wearing bikini underpants, tilting her face into the rain and singing,

  We are fine mermaids of high pedigree,

  We eat baby sharks and we pee in the sea …

  “Ann-Campbell!” Justine called. “Go get your mother. Hurry. I want her to call the ambulance in Plankhurst.”

  Ann-Campbell broke off her song.

  “Hurry, Ann-Campbell! Tell her to call Duncan too. My grandfather’s having a heart attack.”

  Ann-Campbell darted off, all flashing angles and freckles and patches of peeled skin. Justine turned back to her grandfather. “A what?” he said, bewildered. “Having a what?”

  “Well, maybe not.”

  He pressed a hand to his chest.

  “Is there anything I can get you?” she asked him. “Do you want a drink of water? Or—I don’t know, maybe you aren’t supposed to. Just lie still, Grandfather.”

  He did not look capable of doing anything else. He seemed to be flattened, sinking into his mattress. Nevertheless, his neck was tightly strung as if he were determined to keep his head just slightly off the pillow; it was n
ot dignified to be seen in a horizontal position. Perhaps he even wished she would leave him in privacy, but she couldn’t. She paced around and around the tiny room, willing into him all her strength and her burning, aimless energy. She kept being drawn to the window, which opened onto the side yard and would not have shown her the ambulance even if it could come so soon. “Oh, I wish Caro Mill had a hospital of its own!” she cried.

  “I would never agree to a hospital,” her grandfather said. He closed his eyes.

  Then the screen door slammed and Justine could breathe again. “Duncan?” she called. “Is that you?”

  But it was only Dorcas, clattering across the floor on her spike-heeled sandals. She stuck her bubbly head in the door and rounded her eyes at Grandfather Peck, who pretended to be asleep. “Justine honey, I called right away,” she said. “They’re sending an ambulance. Now I’m going to stand on the corner and wave it down.”

  “And Duncan? Did you call Duncan?” Justine asked.

  Dorcas was already leaving, but her voice floated back. “He’s coming too, he’ll be here in a minute.”

  Justine went back to the bed and sat down on the edge of it. She laid a hand on her grandfather’s cold, damp forehead. His eyes flew open and he gave her a look she had not seen him wear before: he seemed to be asking something from her. “What is it?” she said.

  “Justine, I—there seems to be a considerable amount of pain starting up.”

  “Oh, where is Duncan?”

  “I believe that I’m having a heart attack.”

  She picked up both his hands, which passed on their shakiness to her. His eyes withdrew and he thought something over in the gray of the ceiling. “Well,” he said finally, “I had certainly hoped for more than this out of life.”

  “Don’t talk!” she told him. She jumped up and ran to the window again. “Oh, where is—”

  Then something made her turn, some sound much smaller than a click, and she saw that her grandfather had let his head rest at last and his hands were still and his face was calm and dead.

  While she waited for Duncan she went into the living room, but it made her sad to abandon her grandfather and she returned to the bedroom. Even now, after all, there was that pinstriped collarless shirt and the silvery slant of hair, those perfect teeth glinting between the thin Peck lips, the waxy gray cord of his hearing aid and the deep-socketed eyes, closed but still leaking their blueness into the white of the lids. There was more to him than soul; there was this body, which would have looked different worn by any other man. She memorized the single stark line running alongside each corner of his mouth, drawn by pride and firmness of purpose. She willed his gnarled hands to press into hers, one more time, a bitter oval of horehound, but she did not reach out to touch him. He was too much present still, and would not have approved. Instead she slightly altered the position of his pillow, causing his head to lie straighter; and when the movement set up a rustling of papers she pulled from beneath his shoulder the sheaf of letters he had held, his carbon copies on onionskin. Their new creases and the blurred gray softness of the type made them seem to have come from someone already long dead and forgotten. “Dear Caleb,” she read, from the top page. “I take pen in hand to express my hope that …” Her eyes slid down, line by line. When she reached the end of the letter she lowered it and stared at her grandfather’s closed, set face.

  “Justine!” Duncan called.

  She spun around.

  “Justine? Dorcas says—”

  He stopped in the doorway, and then walked in and picked up his grandfather’s wrist. “Well,” he said after a moment, and when he set the wrist back down he was so gentle that there was no sound at all. Then he came to stand in front of Justine. “I’m sorry,” he told her.

  She held the letter out to him, and he took it from her to read it. First he sighed, then he smiled; then he stopped reading and looked over at her.

  “Oh, Duncan,” Justine said, “how could he write such a thing?”

  But when he reached for her, she dodged his hands and went to the opposite side of the room.

  16

  Down the curved, gleaming staircase (which in her girlhood she used to descend holding onto her chest, to prevent exercising off what little she had), across the porch where her great-grandmother had often sat listing the three permissible excuses for typing a note of condolence (paralytic stroke, severed tendons, and amputation) Justine moved dimly beside her husband, wearing the suit she had worn to her mother’s funeral and clutching one frayed white glove. (She had not been able to find the other.) She entered her uncle Mark’s car; she rode through Roland Park, alighted in front of the church, and climbed the steps leaning backward slightly as if she feared what she would find inside. But inside there was only a density of carpet and shadowy pastel light from the windows, and up front an anonymous coffin. Then a cemetery as flat and well mown as a golf course, rows upon rows of glazed granite headstones including PECK Justin Montague, PECK Laura Baum, MAYHEW Caroline Peck and finally an admirably well cut rectangular ditch beside which the coffin lay like something forgotten, abandoned at the brink, while more words were said. Afterwards the family went home to receive their callers, who had been streaming in for the past two days and continued even now that it was over—elderly gentlemen, ladies in hats and gloves and veils and crocheted shawls in spite of the heat. “My,” they said to Justine, “are you that little girl of Caroline’s? But you used to be so—well, you certainly have—now, this is your husband, isn’t it? Him I recognize.”

  Him they recognized. From her new distance Justine turned and looked at him, at his boyish pointy chin and his gawky way of standing, twining one leg about the other and rocking slightly with his hands in his back pockets so that his elbows jutted out to spear passers-by. The upturned corners of his mouth made him appear to be smiling mysteriously, teasingly, and perhaps he was. “Why, Duncan!” said Justine, dropping her glove. “You haven’t changed a bit!”

  An old lady mumbled, embarrassed at her mistake. Plainly these two were not married and perhaps not even related, in spite of the resemblance. Then Duncan stooped for the glove and handed it formally to Justine, and Justine turned and went off alone.

  Not only had Duncan remained the same but so had her aunts and uncles, solidified in their flowery dresses and summer suits, and her cluster of cousins passing trays of tea cakes as they had when they were children. Only Justine stood swaybacked, chewing the empty finger of her glove, in a distant corner of the room.

  “You were that little girl who used to be so sweet,” a spindle-shanked lady told her. “And still are, I’m sure. You used to bring me little handfuls of flowers. You would never stay and talk because you were too shy.”

  Justine removed the glove from her mouth and gave her a sweet, shy smile, but the lady was not deceived and moved on immediately.

  When the guests were gone Duncan escaped to bed, but the rest of the family had a light supper in the kitchen, working around Sulie, who was dusting the pipes under the sink. They laid out memories of Grandfather Peck, one by one. Aunt Lucy cried a little. Aunt Sarah became irritable and informed Justine that there was no call to wear a hat in her own family’s house. “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Justine, removing it. Then she didn’t know what to do with it. She balanced it on her lap, leaving her sandwich untouched. She was feeling very tired. Really she would have liked to go off to sleep. But she stayed on, and by the time the aunts and uncles had risen to go she had her second wind and remained in the kitchen with the cousins, who discussed memories of their own. They remembered their grandfather’s expression at that picnic for which Duncan had made him a Noxzema and olive sandwich, and first they sputtered into their iced tea and then laughed outright. Justine looked around at each blond, lit-up face, remembering times when she had been a member here. When she and the girls were eleven and twelve and thirteen, what on earth had they all found so funny that it made them laugh until they squeaked?

  Esther was now the
supervisor of a nursery school. Alice was a librarian, while Sally, the prettier twin, had returned from her month-long marriage a little less outgoing than she used to be and now taught piano in the privacy of Great-Grandma’s house, on a modern blond upright that looked peculiar in the wine-colored parlor. Richard had a high-rise apartment downtown, and Claude lived over the garage behind Uncle Two’s and spent all his money on steel engravings that nobody liked. New little lines were pricked in all their faces and their hair was dryer and duller, their hands growing freckles; but still they were the same. Only Justine was different, and when she tried to talk to them she had the sense of swimming hard against a strong current. Frustration made her clumsy, and she spilled a glass of ice cubes into Claude’s lap but everyone said it didn’t matter a bit.

  Upstairs, in her old pink-and-white bedroom, she undressed in the dark so as not to wake Duncan and lay down beside him. It was going to be one of those nights when she couldn’t sleep. She felt a familiar alertness in her legs, as if she were tightrope-walking on a rubber band. Voices swam in and out of her hearing: Duncan at twelve, explaining shotgun poker; Richard asking if he could come too; Aunt Bea naming all the wedding gifts she had received in the summer of 1930; and her grandfather calling, “Wait for me, Justine! There’s no need to rush so.” But she had rushed anyway. She had been so quick and brash, so loud, so impatient, which must explain that constant look of puzzlement he had worn in his later years; for where was the old slow, tender Justine?

  “Wait for me,” she heard Meg say, and she clearly saw Meg’s five-year-old face, apple-round, rosy with heat, in the shadows of a spiral staircase in a lighthouse on the New Jersey coastline. They had stopped there on the way back from an unsuccessful job interview. (Justine had always wanted to live in a lighthouse.) Justine had climbed up and up, tumbling over her feet in her haste to see what was at the top, while Meg trudged panting behind. There were two hundred and seventy-eight steps, a sign outside had said. But when Justine reached the top, she found the catwalk enclosed in clear plastic, which clouded the view. The only room was a small dark alcove in which a uniformed park guard sat tipping his chair, reading a paperback Mickey Spillane. So she didn’t want to live there after all. She descended more slowly, still breathless from her upward run, and on the next to the last flight she found Meg sobbing on a windowsill while Duncan tried to comfort her. “Oh, honey!” Justine cried. “I forgot all about you!” But had that taught her anything? She had only speeded up with every year, gathering momentum. Racing toward some undefined future and letting the past roll up behind her, swooping Meg along under one arm but neglecting to listen to her or to ask if she wanted this trip at all. So Meg grew up alone, self-reared, and left home alone for a sad stunted life she had not really wanted; and Grandfather Peck became ever more lost and bewildered stumbling through a series of paper shanties. And Justine awoke one day to wonder how it had happened: what she had mislaid was Justine herself.