Anne Tyler - Searching for Caleb

Nor did Laura, who continued as spry and capable as ever. Nor Daniel, of course-a man of even temper. Although sometimes, late at night, he would take the Ford and drive aimlessly over the moonlit roads, often ending up in the old section of the city where he had no business any more, and knew no one, and heard nothing but the faint, musical whistling of the streetcar wires in the dark sky overhead.

Justine's childhood was dark and velvety and it smelled of dust. There were bearded men under all the furniture, particularly her bed. When her door was shut at night blue worms squiggled through the blackness, but when it was open the knob stuck out exactly like a shotgun barrel sidling through to aim at her head, and she would have to lie motionless for hours pretending to be a wrinkle in the blankets.

In the mornings her father was away, either at the office or out of town, and her mother was in bed with a sick headache, and Justine sat in the living room with the curtains shut so that even to herself she was only a pale glimmer. She was waiting for the maid. First there was the scrabbling of the key in the apartment door and then light, air, motion, the rustle of Claudia's shopping bag and her thin cross mosquito voice.

"Now what you doing sitting there? What you up to? What you doing sitting in that chair?" She would yank the curtains open and there was the city of Philadelphia, a wide expanse of blackened brick apartment houses and dying trees in cages and distant factory smokestacks. Then she would dress Justine in a little smocked dress and braid the two skinny braids that she called plaits. "Don't you go getting that dress dirty. Don't you go messing yourself up, I'll tell Miss Caroline on you." By that time maybe her mother's headache would be lifting, at least enough so that her parched voice could trail out from the bedroom. "Justine? Aren't you even going to say good morning?" Although not an hour ago she had buried her face in the pillow and waved Justine away with one shaky, pearl-studded hand.

Justine's mother wore fluffy nightgowns with eyelet ruffles at the neck.

Her hair was the color of Justine's but tightly curled. She was the youngest of Daniel Peck's six children, the baby. Even total strangers could guess that, somehow, from her small, pursed mouth and her habit of ducking her chin when talking to people. Unfortunately she tended to put on weight when unhappy, and she had become a plump, powdery, pouchy woman with her rings permanently embedded in her ringers. Her unhappiness was due to being exiled in Philadelphia. She had never guessed, when agreeing to marry Sam Mayhew, that the Depression would close down the Baltimore branch of his company just six months after the wedding. If she had had any inkling, she said-but she didn't finish the sentence. She just reached for another chocolate, or a petit-four, or one of the pink-frosted cupcakes she grew more and more to resemble.

But Justine loved her mother's soft skin and her puffy bosom and the dimples on the backs of her hands. She like to huddle beneath the drooping velvet canopy of the bed, which was her mother's real home, surrounded by a circle of chocolate boxes, empty teacups, ladies' magazines, and cream-colored letters from Baltimore. Of course there were days when her mother was up and about, but Justine pictured her only in the dim rosy glow of the bedside lamp. She dwelt on the suspense of entering that room: was she welcome this time, or wasn't she? Some days her mother said, "Oh Justine, can't you let me be?" or wept into her pillow and wouldn't speak at all; but other days she called, "Is that my Justine? Is that my fairy angel? Don't you have one tiny kiss for your poor mama?" And she would sit up and scoop Justine into a spongy, perfumed embrace, depriving her of breathing room for a moment, not that it mattered. Then she flung back the ruffled pink sleeves of her bedjacket and taught Justine the games she had played when she was a child-cat's cradle and Miss Fancy's Come to Town and the doodle story, where you drew a map that turned out to be a goose. Or she would have Justine fetch scissors and she would cut, from the Baltimore newspapers, folded stars and paper dolls with pigtails and standing angels made from a circle cleverly slashed here and there as only she knew how. She would tell true stories, better than anything in books: How Uncle Two Scared the Hobo Away, How Grandfather Peck Fooled the Burglar, How the Mayhews' Ugly Dog Buttons Ate My Wedding Dress. She told how Justine was born in Baltimore thanks to split-second timing and not in Philadelphia as everyone had feared. "Well, luckily I had my way," she said. "You know how your daddy is. He didn't understand at all. When you started coming two months early I said, 'Sam, put me on that train,' but he wouldn't do it. I said, 'Sam, what will Father say, he's made all the arrangements at Johns Hopkins!' 'I just hope he didn't lay down a deposit/ your daddy said. So I picked up my suitcase that I had all ready and waiting and I said, 'Listen here, Sam Mayhew . . .' "

At six in the evening Claudia would leave, slamming the door behind her, and Justine's mother would look at the clock and her fingers would fly to her mouth. "How in the world did the time pass?" she would ask, and she would slide to the edge of the bed and feel for her pink satin slippers.

"We can't let your daddy catch us lazing about like this." She would put on a navy blue dress with shoulder pads, and cover her rosebud mouth with dark lipstick, turning instantly from pink-and-gold to a heavy, crisply defined stranger like the ones hurrying down the sidewalk five stories below. "Of course my headache hasn't improved one bit," she would say.

"I'd go back to bed but your daddy would never understand. He doesn't believe in headaches. He certainly doesn't believe in going to bed for them. It just is not his custom, I suppose."

To hear her talk, you would think Sam Mayhew was as different and exotic as an Asian prince, but he was only a small pudgy man with a Baltimore accent.

Then there were days in a row when Justine was not allowed in her mother's room at all, when she would puzzle and puzzle over what magic password had given her entry before. No one could go in but Claudia, carrying the latest string-tied box from the Parisian Pastry Co. Justine was marooned on a scratchy brocade chair in the living room and the bearded men beneath it were only waiting for her to lower one foot so that they could snatch her by the ankle and drag her down. Even Sam Mayhew's homecoming could not rouse his wife from bed. "Oh, go away, Sam, let me be, can't you see a crack is running down in front of my ears?"

Sam and Justine ate supper alone, on the gold-rimmed plates that Claudia had laid out in the dining room. "Well, now, Justine, what have you been doing with yourself?" Sam would ask.

"Did Claudia take you to the playground? Did you have a nice time on the swings?"

But he would quickly flounder and drown in her blank, astonished stare.

Day after day Justine on her brocade island looked at her mother's old Books of Knowledge-tattered maroon volumes with brittle pages, the only things she could reach without setting a foot to the floor. She lost herself in a picture of a train heading through outer space. It had been explained to her that this picture demonstrated the impossibility of man's ever reaching the moon. See how long it would take to cover the distance, even by rail? But to Justine it appeared all too easy, and she felt herself lightening and dwindling and growing dizzy whenever she saw that tiny lone train curving through the endless blackness.

Finally a time would come when she could raise her eyes from a page and find the air parting expectantly to make way for some change; she could always tell when change was coming. And not long afterward the telephone would ring, and Claudia would carry it from the foyer to the bedroom and rouse Justine's mother to shout long distance to Baltimore. "Hello? Oh, Father! Why are you-did Sam tell you to call me? What? Oh, not too well, I'm afraid. I said, not too well. Everything just seems to be going wrong, I can't quite . . ."