Энн Тайлер - Searching for Caleb

“Once a month? ”

“The first Sunday of every month, for dinner. We’ll go home at three.”

“But Sam— ” his wife said.

“Make your choice, Caroline.”

He continued to gaze above her head. Caroline turned to her family. She was still baby-faced, although the years had worked like gravity pulling on her cheeks. Her weight had settled in upon itself. She looked like a cake that had collapsed. To each brother and sister, to her father and her grandmother, she turned a round lost stare while twisting the pearls on her fingers.

“What’s your decision, Caroline?”

“I can’t just leave them like that.”

“All right.”

“Sam?” she said.

He walked over to Justine. Duncan rose instantly to his feet. “Justine,” Sam Mayhew said, “you have been a disappointing daughter in every way, all your life.”

Then Justine rocked back as if she had been hit, but Duncan already stood behind her braced to steady her.

The wedding was to be held in a church. All the family insisted on that. Duncan had not been to church in several years and detested Reverend Didicott, a fat man who came from Aunt Lucy’s hometown and had a Southern accent that would surely double the length of the ceremony; but he said he would do whatever Justine wanted. And Justine, half willing anyway, went along with the others, submitting to a long satin dress, Sarah Cantleigh’s ivory veil, and a little old lady consultant with an emergency cigar box full of pins, white thread, spirits of ammonia, and a stick of chalk for stains. “Oh, Duncan!” Justine said, as she sped by him on the way to the photographer. “I’m sorry! I know how you must hate this!” But he was surprisingly tolerant. He had agreed to give up his room and move home for the month preceding the wedding; he went without a word to buy a black suit that turned him stern and unfamiliar. During lulls in the excitement, he seemed to be observing Justine very closely. Did he think she would change her mind? Reading Bride’s magazine, she felt his eyes upon her, weighing her, watching for something. “What is it?” she asked him, but he never would say.

Her mother was everywhere: She bustled and darted, giving commands, trilling out fitting schedules in a voice so gay it seemed about to break off and fly. “Really, no one would guess her husband’s left her,” Justine told Duncan.

“Don’t speak too soon.”

“Why?”

“Now she’s got the wedding to keep her busy. What about later?”

Later Justine would be far away. One thing Duncan would not agree to was living in Roland Park. Nor even in Baltimore, not even long enough for Justine to finish school. And he would not go back to school himself. So they were renting a little house and a plot of land an hour’s drive out in the country, where they used to go on their trips. Duncan planned to start a goat farm. It was what he had always wanted, he said. It was? Justine had never heard him mention it before. But he couldn’t go on forever looking up facts for professors; and anyway, he kept losing those jobs, he gave in to a temptation to rewrite their material, making it more colorful, adding his own startling scraps of knowledge and a few untruths. And he and Justine each had a share of old Justin’s trust fund. Because of the proliferation of heirs it amounted to almost nothing, but they could manage till the dairy started paying off. “You’re strapping yourself in, boy,” his grandfather said. “You want an education. And renting’s no good, it’s a shoddy way to do things.”

“Sure, Grandfather.”

But Duncan went on reading the Dairy Goat Journal , rummaging through his shocks of hair as he always did when he was absorbed in something. And a week before the wedding he helped supervise the loading of a Mayflower van containing ancient, massive furniture from the relatives and rolled-up rugs, crates of crystal stemware, gifts of silver and china, linens monogrammed by Aunt Laura May and heavy damask curtains, all meant for their three-room cabin. Justine wasn’t entirely sure that everything was suitable, but how else would you furnish a place? She didn’t know. Duncan made no comment, only watched without surprise as she directed the movers toward a claw-footed bureau, a tasseled floor lamp, a bedstead with pineapple knobs.

“Prepare your mother, now,” he told her. “I mean it. Get her ready for doing without you, because it’s going to be a shock for her once it happens.”

“I will.”

“Prepare yourself , Justine.”

“Prepare for what?”

“Do you really understand that you’ll be leaving here?”

“Of course I do,” she said.

Well, naturally she would rather not be leaving. It made her sad just to think about it. But nothing mattered as much as the lurch in her stomach when she saw him. When they sat apart in Great-Grandma’s study, some inner selves seemed to rise up and meet while their bodies remained seated. In halls and pantries and stairwells, they kissed until they were sick and dizzy. She missed Duncan’s room downtown: his jingling bed, the warm pulse in the hollow of his throat, the leathery arch of his right foot curving exactly to the shape of her calf when they fell asleep.

“Still,” Duncan said, “I wish I could be sure you know what you’re getting into.”

At the rehearsal, Esther took the part of the bride for good luck. It was terrible to see her up there so close to Duncan. Her emerald-green sheath showed off her figure, which was better than Justine’s. “Tell me,” Justine said to Duncan later. “Did you ever think of marrying Esther?”

“No.”

“But why me?” she asked.

“Why me , for that matter?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Why are you marrying me, Justine?”

“Oh, well, Claude is too fat and Richard’s too young.”

She didn’t understand the strange look he gave her.

On Justine’s wedding morning, a pale cool day in April, her mother woke her by pulling open the curtains in her bedroom. “Justine,” she said, “listen. Are you awake?”

“Yes.”

“I want you to listen a minute.”

She was wearing a slithery pink silk dressing gown and already her doll-like face was made up perfectly, her curls precisely flattened. She carried a torn scrap of paper. She sat on Justine’s bed and held the paper out to her, smiling a coaxing smile like someone offering medicine. “Your daddy’s telephone number,” she said.

“My what?”

“Hear what I say, now. I want you to go out in the hall to the phone. I want you to dial this number. It’s your grandmother Mayhew’s. Ask to speak to your daddy. Say, ‘Daddy, today is my wedding day.’ ”

“Oh, Mama.”

“Listen! Say, ‘Daddy, this is supposed to be the happiest day of my life. Won’t you make it perfect and come give me away?’ ”

“But I can’t talk like that,” Justine said.

“Of course you can. And he has that fine suit that’s still in the cleaner’s bag, I know he took it with him. Why, it wouldn’t be any trouble at all! Justine? I beg you, Justine.”

“Mama—”

“Please, I’ve been counting on it. I know it will work. See, I’ve written the number so neatly? Take it. Take it.”

She pressed it into her hands. Justine climbed out of bed, still unwilling.

“Go on, Justine.”

In the hall, the telephone sat on a piecrust table. The window above it was party open, so that Justine in her flimsy cotton nightgown shivered while she dialed.

“Hello,” Sam Mayhew said.

She had been expecting her grandmother, a static-voiced old lady she hardly knew. She wasn’t prepared for her father yet.