Anne Tyler - Searching for Caleb

Justine would listen carefully, trying to discover exactly what had caused her world to collapse. She heard that her mother's nerves were acting up, her headaches were ferocious and no doctor could do a thing, the chandelier had fallen smack out of the ceiling, the landlord was impossible, Claudia showed no respect, there had been a very depressing story in the paper Sunday, Justine was turning sulky, Sam was out of town too much, and really it was entirely the fault of the City of Philadelphia. If he had any feeling, if he cared even a little, she knew it was asking a lot but she wished he would come and straighten things out.

He always came. She was his youngest daughter after all and very far from home, the only one of his children to leave the safety of Roland Park.

Which was not to say that he approved of her. Oh, no. As soon as he stepped in the door, late that very night, he was curling his mouth downwards at the welter of pastry boxes and her crumb-littered, used-looking bed, and he was telling her outright that she had grown too fat.

"Yes, Father," Caroline said meekly, and she sat a little straighter and sucked in her stomach.

The next morning, when Justine got up unusually late after an unusually calm, dreamless sleep, she would find the apartment bright with sun and all the curtains open. Claudia was wearing a crisp white scarf and briskly attacking the dust in the cushions. Her mother sat in the dining room fully dressed, eating fresh grapefruit. And in the foyer her grandfather stood at the telephone announcing that he, Judge Peck, would personally drag the landlord through the entire United States judiciary system if that chandelier were not replaced by twelve noon sharp. Then he hung up and cupped Justine's head with his right hand, which was his way of greeting her. He was a bony man in a three-piece pinstriped suit, with fading hair like aged gardenia petals and a gold wafer of a watch that he let her wind. He had brought her a sack of horehound drops. He always did. Justine was certain that no matter what, even if he had rushed here through fires and floods and train wrecks, he would not forget to stop at Lexington Market first for a sack of horehound drops and he would not fail to cup her head in that considering way of his when he had arrived.

Generally during those visits Sam Mayhew would vanish, or if he did come home he wore a gentle, foolish smile and tried to keep out of the way. At any rate, the grandfather was never there for very long. He was a busy man. He came up over the weekend usually, just long enough to get his daughter to her feet again, and he left Sunday evening. Only once did he come on a working day. That was for Justine. She was supposed to be starting kindergarten, the first time she would ever be away from home alone. She refused to go. She wouldn't even get dressed. She became very white and sharp-faced and her mother gave in, sensing that there was no use arguing with her. The next morning when Justine awoke her grandfather Peck was standing by her bed carrying her plaid dress, her ruffled underpants with "Tuesday" embroidered on them and her lace-edged socks.

He dressed her very slowly and carefully. Justine would have refused even her grandfather but his hands were so thick and clumsy, untying the bow of her nightgown, and when he stooped to pick up her shoes she could see the pink scalp through his thin pale hair. He even did her braids, though not very well. He even sat across from her and waited with perfect patience while she dawdled over breakfast. Then he helped her with her coat and they left, passing her mother, who wrung her hands in the doorway. They went down streets that were bitterly familiar, where she had shopped with her mother in the dear, safe days before school was ever thought of. At a square brick building her grandfather stopped. He pointed out where Claudia would meet her in the afternoon. He cupped her head briefly and then, after some fumbling and rustling, pushed a sack of horehound drops at her and gave her a little nudge in the direction of the brick building. When she had climbed the steps she looked back and found him still waiting there, squinting against the sunlight. Forever after that, the dark, homely, virtuous taste of horehound drops reminded her of the love and sorrow that ached in the back of her throat on that first day in the outside world.

In summer the leather suitcases would come up in the elevator to be packed, and Justine and her parents would board the evening train to Baltimore. Their arrival was never clear to Justine. She was half asleep, carried off the train and laid in the arms of some white-suited uncle.

But when she awoke the next day there she was in Roland Park, all rustling with trees and twittering with birds, in her great-grandmother's white brick house, and if she went to the window she knew that all the houses within her view belonged to Pecks and so did the fleet of shiny black V-8 Fords lining one side of the street, and all the little blond heads dotting the lawn were Peck cousins waiting for her to come out and play.

Her mother would be talking in the dining room, but such a different mother-twinkling and dimpling and telling terrible giggling stories about Philadelphia. Aunts would be grouped around her, drinking their fifth and sixth cups of coffee. Aunt Sarah and Aunt Laura May were spinsters and still lived next door in the grandfather's house along with the bachelor Uncle Dan. Uncle Two's wife Lucy and Uncle Mark's wife Bea were Pecks by marriage only, and lived in the other two houses. They were not as important as the true Peck aunts, but then they were the mothers of the cousins. And of course, presiding over everyone was the great-grandma, a tidy, brownish woman. The white rims showing beneath her irises gave her a look of reproach, but as soon as she saw Justine she smiled and the rims disappeared. She offered Justine an enormous Baltimore breakfast-two kinds of meat, three kinds of pastry, and a platter of scrambled eggs-but Justine wasn't hungry. "Naturally," her mother said, laughing her summer laugh, "she's anxious to see her cousins," and she tied Justine's sash and gave her a pat and sent her off.

Justine had six cousins. All of them looked like her and talked like her, all of them knew the story of how Grandfather Peck had fooled the burglar. It was very different from Philadelphia, where her mother, coming to the school play, referred to "that dark little boy" and asked, "Who was the child who spoke with such a nasal twang?" With her cousins, there was no need to worry. Baltimore was the only place on earth where Justine would not be going over to the enemy if she agreed to play Prisoner's Base.

Yet even here, wasn't she an outsider of sorts? Her last name was Mayhew.

She lived in Philadelphia. She did not always understand her cousins' jokes. And though they drew her into every game, she had the feeling that they were trying to slow down for her in some way. She envied them their quick, bubbling laughter and their golden tans. Occasionally, for one split second, she allowed herself to imagine her parents painlessly dead and some uncle or other adopting her, changing her name to Peck and taking her to live forever in Roland Park with its deep curly shadows and its pools of sunlight.

At such times Aunt Bea, coming out to the front porch to shade her eyes and check the children, would smile and sigh over poor little plain Justine, whose pointed face was wisped with anxiety so that it looked like crazed china or something cobwebbed or netted. And who ran so artifically, so hopefully, at the edge of the other children's games, kicking her heels up too high behind her.

In the evening they all went home. The four houses gave the illusion of belonging to four separate families. But after supper they came out again and sat on Great-Grandma's lawn, the men in their shirtsleeves and the women in fresh print dresses. The children grew overexcited rolling down the slope together. They quarreled and were threatened with an early bedtime, and finally they had to come sit with the grownups until they had calmed down. Sweaty and panting, choking back giggles, itchy from the grass blades that stuck to their skin, they dropped to the ground beside their parents and looked up at the stars while low measured voices murmured all around them. The oldest cousin, Uncle Mark's daughter Esther, held her little brother Richard on her lap and tickled him secretly with a dandelion clock. Nearby, Esther's twin sisters, Alice and Sally, were curled together like puppies with Justine in the middle because she was new and special. And Uncle Two's boys, Claude and Duncan, wrestled without a sound and without a perceptible movement so they wouldn't be caught and sent to bed. Not that the grownups really cared.