Anne Tyler - Searching for Caleb

But all Duncan said was, "Justine."

"Hello," she said.

"Was there something you wanted?"

"I'm supposed to see if you're all right."

"Well, now you've seen."

"Okay," she said, and turned to go.

"But you might as well come in, I guess. Since you're here."

His room was small and dingy, with stained wallpaper, a flapping torn shade, a speckled mirror, and a metal bed with a sagging mattress. Over in one corner was his cardboard box. He wore the clothes he had left home in, brown suit pants and a white shirt without a tie. He seemed thinner.

"It doesn't look as if you're eating right," Justine said.

"Is that what you came to tell me?"

"No."

She sat down very delicately on the edge of the bed. She lifted both hands to her hat, making sure it was perfectly level. For some reason, Duncan smiled.

"Well!" she said finally.

Duncan sat down next to her.

"Your mother is really taking on, Duncan. She's crying where everyone can see her. Your father is-"

"I don't want to hear about that."

"Oh. Well-"

"I know what they're doing. I always know, I can tell, I can see as if I'm sitting there. They're talking about someone in the outside world.

They're digging the moat a little deeper. They're pointing out all the neighbors' flaws and their slipping dentures and mispronunciations, they're drawing in tighter to keep the enemy out. Why do you think my mother's crying? Because she misses me? Did she say that? Think a minute.

Did she? Did any of them? No. They're worried I might be with the wrong kind of people. They're upset to think a Peck is out there in the world someplace. I've lowered the drawbridge."

"Oh no, Duncan-" Justine said.

"Everything they do is calculated to keep others at a safe distance.

Everything. Look at your hat!"

Justine's hands went up again, uncertainly.

"No, no, it's fine. It's a fine hat," he told her. "But what are you wearing it for?"

"Why, I always-"

"Yes, but why? Did you ever take a good look around you? Only old ladies wear hats any more, outside of church. But every woman in our family, even little girls, they all wear hats even if they're just off to the side yard for a breath of air. 'A lady doesn't go without a hat, my dear.

Only common people.' Common! What's so uncommon about us? We're not famous, we're not society, we haven't been rich since 1930 and we aren't known for brains or beauty. But our ladies wear hats, by God! And we all have perfect manners! We may not ever talk to outsiders about anything more interesting than the weather but at least we do it politely! And we've all been taught that we disapprove of sports cars, golf, women in slacks, chewing gum, the color chartreuse, emotional displays, ranch houses, bridge, mascara, household pets, religious discussions, plastic, politics, nail polish, transparent gems of any color, jewelry shaped like animals, checkered prints . . . we're all told from birth on that no Peck has had a cavity in all recorded history or lost a single tooth; that we're unfailingly punctual even when we're supposed to come late; that we write our bread-and-butter notes no more than an hour after every visit; that we always say 'Baltimore' instead of 'Balmer'; that even when we're wearing our ragged old gardening clothes you can peek down our collars and see 'Brooks Brothers' on the label, and our boots are English and meant for riding though none of us has ever sat on a horse . . ."

He wound down like Great-Grandma's old Graphophone, and slumped forward suddenly with his long hands drooping between his knees.

"But Uncle Two is so sad," said Justine. "He wanders around the Homewood campus all day hoping to-"

"Justine. Will you please get out?"

She rose immediately, clutching her little suede purse. But in the doorway Duncan said, "Anyhow, thanks for coming."

"Oh, you're welcome."

"I meant it, Justine. I'm sorry I ... really, if you wanted to come back sometime I wouldn't mind."

"Well, all right," Justine said.

Then of course when she got home everyone was furious with her, because she hadn't found out one concrete fact. What was he living on? Where was he eating? Was he going to school? Who were his companions?

"I just know he's taken up with some-trash, he does have such peculiar taste in friends," Aunt Lucy said.

And all of them wondered at Justine's sudden look of sorrow.

What Duncan was living on was a pittance paid him by a Hopkins professor.

He was double-checking dry facts in a library, and then writing them into the blanks the professor had left in a very long, tedious book on paleobotany. He was eating saltines and peanut butter, washed down with a quart bottle of milk in his room. He had no companions at all, not even Glorietta, with whom he had had a terrible fight several months ago over her habit of saying "between you and I." Eventually he was going to go very far away, perhaps to British Columbia, but at the moment it seemed he just couldn't get up the energy. And no, he was not attending school any more. He was not even reading Dostoevsky, whose writing suddenly appeared to have the squinny, eye-straining texture of plant cells. As a matter of fact, he thought he might be going crazy. He even liked the idea of going crazy. He waited for insanity as if it were some colorful character his parents had always warned him against, but every morning when he woke up his mind was the same efficient piece of machinery it had always been and he felt disappointed.

Several times a week, his cousin Justine would come bringing irritating, endearing gifts-a ridiculous pair of slippers, his striped bedspread from home, once his old blue toothbrush with Ipana caked in the bristles.

Whenever he opened the door to her he felt deeply happy to see her thin, sweet face and her streamered hat, but before she had been there five minutes he wanted to throw her out. She had such a gift for saying the wrong thing. "Can I tell the cousins where you are? They want to come too."

"No. God."

"Do you need any money?"

"I can take care of myself, Justine."

"Grandfather gave me some to bring to you."

"Tell him I can take care of myself."

"But I can't give it back to him, Duncan. He was so-he just pushed it into my hand all clumsy and secret. He pretended he wasn't doing anything."

"Change the subject."

"Like in the old days when he gave out horehound drops."

"Justine, I wish you would go now."

She always went. But she always came back, too, and when she stood in his doorway again a few days later he was all the more touched by her stupid, comical persistence. From earliest childhood she had been his favorite cousin-maybe because she was a little more removed, a Mayhew, a Philadelphia!!, not quite so easy to know. But he was surprised that she would brave his dark stairs and his rudeness. Here she had always seemed so docile! He made a special effort for her, smoothing the spread and offering saltines from his roach-proof tin and suggesting she take her hat off, which of course she would not do.

"Justine, I'm glad you came back," he said.

"Why, thank you."

"You may get on my nerves sometimes but at least you show things, you say things outright, you don't feel it's a sin. You were the only one to ask me not to go, the Sunday I left."

"But Grandfather told me to do that," Justine said.

Right away she had managed to get on his nerves again.

She always had an answer. She drove him up a wall. He reached the point where he would turn on her the moment she entered, letting loose a flood of arguments that he had been storing up. "You know what they're like?"

(There was no need to say whom he meant.) "You know who they remind me of? People choosing a number on a radio dial. The way they ignore anything that isn't Peck, like flicking past stations that don't concern them, just a split second of jazz or ballgames or revivalist ministers and they wince and move on, and settle finally on the one acceptable station that plays Mantovani. Nothing uncomfortable, nothing extreme, nothing they can't tolerate . . ."