Anne Tyler - Searching for Caleb

And search parties would have to be sent down all the streets running toward the harbor. Only everybody soon learned: if you wanted to find Caleb, hold still a minute and listen. Whenever you heard distant music somewhere in the town, maybe so faint you thought you imagined it, so thin you blamed the whistling of the streetcar wires, then you could track the sound down and find Caleb straddling his little velocipede, speechless with joy, his appleseed eyes dancing. The maid would touch his sleeve, or Daniel would take his hand, or Laura would grab him by the earlobe, muttering, "This is where I find you! Out with a bunch of ... well, I don't know what your father is going to say. I don't know what he's going to think of you for this."

Only she never told his father. Perhaps she thought that she would be held to blame. Sometimes, from the way she acted, you would think she was afraid of Justin.

On Sundays the Pecks went to church, of course, and on Wednesday evenings Laura had her Ladies' Circle. On holidays there were the formal visitors: Justin's business associates and their wives, along with their starched, ruffled children. But you couldn't say that the Pecks had friends, exactly. They kept to themselves. They were suspicious of outsiders.

After guests left, the family often remarked on the gentlemen's inferior brand of cigars, the children's poor manners, the wives' regrettable overuse of Pompeiian Bloom rouge. Daniel listened, memorizing their words. Caleb hung out the window to hear an Irish tenor sing "Just a Lock of Hair for Mother."

Daniel was a tall, cool, reflective boy, and from the beginning he planned to study law. Therefore Caleb would take over the importing business. In preparation for this Caleb attended the Salter Academy, walking there daily with his friend Paul and a few of the neighborhood boys. He worked very conscientiously, although sometimes his mother suspected that his heart wasn't in it. Coming home from school he could be waylaid by any passing stranger, he fell willingly into conversation with all sorts of riffraff. He had no discrimination. And he still followed organ grinders. With his pocket money he bought tawdry musical instruments, everything from pennywhistles to a cheap violin sold him by a sailor; he could make music out of anything. He played these instruments not only in his room but outdoors as well, if he wasn't caught and stopped. More than once he was mistakenly showered with coins from someone's window. When Laura heard about it she would grow dark in the face and order him to remember his name. She shut him in the parlor, where he continued to spill out his reckless, made-up tunes on the massive piano draped in fringed silk. Unfortunately the Creole gardner, Lafleur Boudrault, had taught him ragtime. A disreputable, colored kind of music. Justin, home in his study doing the accounts, would raise his head to listen for a minute and frown, but then he shrugged it off.

In 1903, Caleb graduated from the Salter Academy. The day after his graduation Justin took him down to his office to show him around. By now, of course, the importing business was very different from what it had been in the '70's. The old full-rigged steamers, which looked like brigantines with smokestacks, had given way to modern ships, and their spectacular journeys to Brazil and Peru and the West Indies had been discontinued in favor of the more profitable coastwise hauls, carrying manufactured goods south and raw materials north. The Merchants' Exchange had been torn down; Caleb would be spending his days in an office above a warehouse, behind a roll-top desk, dealing with ledgers and receipts and bills of lading. Still, it was a fine opportunity for a young man with ambition, Caleb. Caleb?

Caleb turned from the single, sooty window, through which he had been gazing even though it was impossible to see the harbor from there. He said that he would prefer to be a musician.

At first Justin couldn't take it in. He was politely interested.

Musician? Whatever for?

Then the situation hit him in the face and he gasped and caved in. He felt for the chair behind him and sat down, preparing bitter, harmful words that would convey all his horror and disgust and contempt. But music was so-no young man would ever seriously- music was for women! For parlors! He felt nauseated by the sight of this boy's intense brown eyes.

He could hardly wait to chew him up and spit him out and stamp on what was left.

Instead, all that came from his mouth were strange vowel sounds over which he had no control.

He had to be carried away in his office chair by two men from the warehouse. They laid him in his buggy and folded both arms across his chest, as if he were already dead, and then Caleb drove him home. When Laura came to the door she found Caleb on the topmost step with his father curled in his arms like a baby. But Justin's eyes were two hard, glittering pebbles, and she could feel his rage. "What happened?" she asked, and Caleb told her, straight out, while struggling upstairs with his burden to Justin's high carved bed. Laura's face grew as dark as coffee but she said not a word. She had the kitchen maid fetch the doctor from down the street, and she listened stonily to the doctor's diagnosis: apoplexy, brought on by a shock of some sort. He did not hold out much hope for recovery. If Justin lived, he said, one side would likely be paralyzed, although it was too soon to say for certain.

Then Laura went downstairs to the parlor where Caleb stood waiting. "You have killed your half of your, father," she said.

On Monday, Caleb started work behind the roll-top desk.

Daniel, meanwhile, had finished his courses at the University in record time and was now preparing himself further by working at the offices of Norris & Wiggen, a fine old respectable law firm. He lived at home and often relieved Laura at his father's sickbed, reading aloud to him from the newspaper or from Laura's enormous Bible. Justin would lie very still with one fist clenched, his flinty blue eyes glaring at the wall. He had not recovered the use of his left side. It was apparent suddenly that he was a very old man, with liver spots across his dry forehead and claws for hands. Half of his face seemed to be melting and running downward. He spoke only with difficulty, and when people misunderstood he would fly into a rage. Because he could not bear to have his weakness observed by the outside world (which would take advantage immediately, he was certain of it), he had determined to stay in his bedroom until he was fully recovered. For he assumed that he was suffering only a brief, treatable illness, his convalescence hampered by a worse-than-useless doctor and a half-wit wife. Therefore he undertook his own cure. He had all the panes in his windows replaced with amethyst glass, which was believed to promote healing. He drank his water from a quassia cup and ordered Laura to send away for various nostrums advertised in the newspaper- celery tonic, pectoral syrup, a revitalizing electric battery worn on a chain around the neck. His only meat was squirrel, easiest on the digestive tract. Yet still he remained flat on his back, whitening and shriveling like a beached fish.

On Friday nights Caleb came and summarized the week's business in a gentle, even voice, directing his statements to the foot of the bed.

Justin looked at the wall, pretending not to hear. As a matter of fact it seemed that Caleb was handling everything quite adequately, but it was too late now. The time for that was past, there was no undoing what had been done. Justin went on looking at the wall until Caleb left.

Laura brought out an old busybody she had-a mirror arrangement placed to reflect passers-by on the street below. She thought he might like to keep in touch with things. But when Justin turned his face to the busybody he saw Caleb just descending the front steps, turned faded and remote and long-ago by the blue glass of the windowpanes. He told Laura to take her nonsense elsewhere.