Энн Тайлер - Searching for Caleb

“But you haven’t said what the choice is,” Justine told him. “What are you selling it for? Are you joining another gold rush?”

“No, I thought just something quiet. I have a friend who’s in merchandising, he would find me something or other.”

“ Merchandising? ”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“I’m going to have to study these cards a bit,” Justine said, and she bent over them again and rested her forehead on her hand.

“This life is hard, Justine,” Alonzo told her. “That tent out there cost five thousand dollars and has a life span of only six years. I pay very high taxes on this pasture but Maryland has gypsy laws so we have to live here, it’s too expensive to camp around. And occasionally people fail to pay me or the weather keeps the customers away, and a ride rusts to bits at exactly the time I clear the mortgage on it. I have so many people to be responsible for. Also these kids all the time. Can’t you understand?”

“Yes, yes,”

“Then why are you studying the cards for so long?”

“Because I don’t know what to say,” she said, and she laid an index finger on the six of hearts and thought a moment. “I see the woman and the money, but everything else is indecisive. No sudden fortune and no disasters. A few petty reverses, a friendship breaking off, but otherwise just — weak.”

“ Weak? ” said Alonzo.

She looked directly at him. “Alonzo,” she said. “Don’t sell your business.”

She left it up to him to decide whether it was she or the cards who spoke.

In the late afternoon, when the sun grew warmer, they sat outside on a collapsed sofa and watched two of Alonzo’s teenaged boys pitching a baseball back and forth in the long grass behind the trailers. A girl was hanging out diapers, and a man was rotating the tires on his Studebaker. In the field beyond the baseball players, Duncan and Lem were fiddling with a hunk of machinery. Really it was time they started back, but Duncan said this machine was something special. He wanted to invent a ride for it to run. And the sun was warming the top of Justine’s head right through her hat, and the dexterous twist of the baseball glove as it rose to meet the ball and the slap of leather on leather lulled her into a trance.

“If I were president, I would not have a personal physician in the White House with me but you, Justine,” said Alonzo. “You could read the cards for me every morning before the Cabinet meeting.”

She smiled and let her head tip against the back of the sofa.

“Till then, you can join my carnival. Why do you always say no? Coralette, who works the concession stand, she just takes her husband and kids along. They stay in the trailer and read comic books.”

“Duncan doesn’t like comic books,” Justine said.

Out in the field, Duncan raised a sprocket wheel in one gaunt, blackened hand and waved it at her.

“And Meg, she’s all grown up? She doesn’t come on visits with you now?”

“She doesn’t come anywhere with us,” Justine said sadly. “She studies a lot. She works very hard. She’s very conscientious. Other girls wear blue jeans but Meg sews herself these shirtwaist dresses and polishes her shoes every Sunday night and washes her hair every Monday and Thursday. I don’t think she approves of us. To tell the truth, Alonzo, I don’t believe she thinks much of carnivals either or fortune telling or moving around the way we do. Not that she says so. She’s very good about it, really, she’s so quiet and she does whatever we tell her to. It kills me to see her bend her head the way she sometimes does.”

“Girls are difficult,” Alonzo said. “Fortunately I never had many of them.”

“I think she’s in love with a minister.”

“With a what?”

“Well, an assistant minister, actually.”

“But even so,” said Alonzo.

“She went to his church in Semple. She’s religious, too. Did I mention that? She went to his young people’s group on Sunday evenings. Then they started going out together to lectures and debates and educational slide shows — oh, very proper, but she’s only seventeen! And she brought him to our house so we could meet him. It was terrible. We all sat in the living room. Duncan says she has a right to choose whoever she wants but he doesn’t think she chose this man, she just accepted him. Like a compromise. What else could it be, with a man so meek and puny? He’s one of those people with white shiny skin and five o’clock shadow. Duncan says—”

“But after all,” said Alonzo, “better that than a motordrome rider. My first wife’s girl married a motordrome rider.”

“I would prefer a motordrome rider any day,” Justine said. Then she sighed. “Oh well, I suppose nobody likes who their children go out with.”

“It’s true.”

“When I was courting, my father locked me in my room one time.”

“Oh?” said Alonzo. He squinted, following the arc of the baseball floating across the sun.

“I fell in love with my first cousin.”

“Oh-ho.”

“On top of that, my shiftless first cousin. He drank and ran around. For years he had a girlfriend named Glorietta, who always wore red. My aunts and my mother would whisper whenever they mentioned her, even her name. Glorietta de Merino.”

“Ah, Glorietta,” said Alonzo, and settled back with his face tilted to the sky and his boots stretched out in front of him. “Go on.”

“He made terrible grades all through school and dropped out the first year of college. Nobody could ever find him when they wanted him. While I! I was an only child. I tried to be as good as possible. Would you believe, until I was twenty years old I had never tasted liverwurst?”

“Liverwurst,” said Alonzo, turning it over lazily.

“Because my family didn’t happen to eat it. Not that there was anything wrong with it, of course, they just weren’t in the habit of ordering it from the market. I didn’t know there was such a thing as liverwurst! The first time I tasted it I ate a whole pound. But that was later. First I fell in love with my cousin, and went on trips with him and rode in his unsafe car and had to be locked in my room. Then I discovered liverwurst.”

“But what became of him?” Alonzo asked.

“Who?”

“The first cousin.”

“Oh,” said Justine. “Why, I married him. Who did you think I was talking about?”

“Duncan?”

“Of course Duncan,” said Justine, and she sat up again and shaded her eyes. “Cousin Duncan the Bad,” she said, and laughed, and even Alonzo, drowsy and heavy in the sun, had to see how happy she looked when she located Duncan’s spiky gold head glinting above the weeds.

Duncan and Justine Peck shared a great-grandfather named Justin Montague Peck, a sharp-eyed, humorless man who became very rich importing coffee, sugar, and guano during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. On any summer day in the 1870’s, say, you could find him seated in the old Merchants’ Exchange on Gay Street, smoking one of his long black cigars to ward off yellow fever, waiting for news of his ships to be relayed from the lookout tower on Federal Hill. Where he originally came from was uncertain, but the richer he grew the less it mattered. Although he was never welcomed into Baltimore society, which was narrow and ossified even then, he was treated with respect and men often asked his advice on financial issues. Once there was even a short street named after him, but it was changed later on to commemorate a politician.