Энн Тайлер - Searching for Caleb

While he watched, she frowned and collected her thoughts. She looked down at what she had laid out. “Why, Duncan,” she said.

“What is it?”

“Why—”

“What is it, Justine?”

“Never mind, don’t worry. Don’t worry.”

“Who says I’m worried?”

But she was already out the door, running down the street with her hat streamers fluttering. It was the first time Duncan had ever known her to leave her cards behind.

Daniel Peck was on the front porch, rearranging a sheaf of correspondence, when Justine came dashing up the walk between the rows of sprouting vegetables. She looked wild-eyed and flustered, but then she often did. “Grandfather,” she called, “have you seen Meg?”

He tried to think.

“ Meg. ”

“Well, now I wonder where she could be,” he said.

“What time is it?”

He fumbled in his pocket and hauled out lengths of gold chain hand over hand, raising his eyebrows when his fingers met up with a watch. “Ah! Five twelve,” he said.

She spun past him, into the house, clattering the screen door behind her. He felt the noise rather than heard it. He felt his bones jar. Then there was peace, and he returned to a letter dated April 10, 1973. He squinted in the twilight at a ragged blue script.

Dear Mr. Peck:

In response to your query of March 17, I am sorry to say that I do not recall my grandmother’s ever mentioning a Caleb Peck or, for that matter, any other young man she used to dance with. I was not aware that she danced. However my cousin Amabel Perce (Mrs. John M.) of Duluth, Minnesota may know more. I myself was never at all close to my grandmother and am certainly not the one to . . .

He sighed. Long white fingers entered his vision, fluttering another letter on top of the first.

Dear Mama,

I have gone to be married in Arthur’s church. We will be living with Arthur’s mother. Don’t worry about me, I’ll finish school in Semple. I will keep in touch.

Love,

“Eh? What’s this?” he asked Justine.

She merely lifted an arm and dropped it, as if she couldn’t speak.

“Why,” he said, “ I didn’t know it was proper for ministers to elope.”

Justine went down the porch steps, back through the vegetables toward the street, drifting along slower than he had seen her in years.

“Justine? Wasn’t that fellow a minister?”

She didn’t answer. In the end he simply filed the letter away among his other correspondence and went on with what he had been doing before.

By May the whole front yard was a tangle of cucumber vines and little green stalks of corn. Neighbors began knocking on the door. “Justine, of course, it’s your lawn to plant as you please although frankly it seems . . . but never mind, what is that smell? What we want to know is, that smell! ”

“Oh, just things from the blender.”

“The—? When you turn down this street it’s the first thing you notice. It smells like a zoo. A city dump. A slaughter -house.”

“I’ll mention it to Duncan,” Justine said. But her face was lit up and her eyes all curly, she was so happy to see somebody. She would reach out to touch visitors on the wrist or shoulder, drawing them in. “Since you’re here, why don’t you stay?”

“Oh, well . . . ”

“We can sit out back. You won’t smell a thing.”

“Oh, well, maybe for a minute.”

“I’ll make you lemonade, or coffee. Anything. What would you like?”

The fact was, Justine hated to be alone. She had felt so restless and unhappy lately, wandering from room to room, trying to start up conversations with her grandfather when he was too busy with his own thoughts to answer. “Grandfather, isn’t there any place you’d like to go?”

“How’s that?”

“Do you want to go somewhere, I said.”

“No, no.”

She sank back and twisted a piece of her hair. It was impossible to drive off on her own; a car was so private. Like a sealed black box. She would end up speeding just to get her isolation over with, or she would run a stop sign because even horns and curses were better than silence. So instead of driving she walked to Duncan’s shop, missing no opportunity to speak to passers-by. “Hello, Mr. Hill, did you get the money I said you would? Where’s Mrs . Hill? Wait, Red Emma, I’ll walk along with you,” and she would run to catch up and travel three blocks out of her way, pausing at each house while Red Emma delivered the mail. She parted from people with difficulty, dragging it out, loitering on the sidewalk fiddling with a button and finding new things to say to them. She dreaded walking even half a block with only her own thoughts for company. And when finally she arrived at the Blue Bottle she would be full of pent-up words that exploded from her before she was fully in the door. “Duncan, Red Emma told me . . . Bertha Miller asked . . . oh, Duncan, I just had a thought, can we borrow a wayward girl from the police station?”

“A what’s that?”

“Surely they must have some, wouldn’t you think? We could leave our name and the next time the police arrest somebody they could bring her to us. I mean the house seems so—”

“Well now, wait a minute.”

But she would be off to something new, picking up merchandise and putting it down. “Oh look, a locket like Aunt Bea’s almost. And Aunt Sarah’s dinner ring but the stone’s a different color. Isn’t it funny they call these antiques? They’re only what our aunts wear every day of their lives. What’s this thing, Duncan?”

“A Victorian slide pendant,” Duncan said glumly. “If you ask me, it’s junk. All this stuff is junk. Yesterday Silas brought in a whole carton full, he’d been to some flea market. ‘Here, take this,’ he said, ‘and get rid of that mess on the table, it doesn’t look nice.’ Do you know what he called mess? A genuine chromatrope I bought from old Mrs. Milhauser, and a Boston bathing pan with a pump that still works . . . where is it now? I wanted to show you. He dumped it in some corner or other. He doesn’t like tools and things with moving parts, he says they clutter the shop. We spend all our time shifting each other’s merchandise into hiding places and out again, in and out. Look at that chair! He likes it. He wants me to ask a hundred and fifty dollars for it.”

Justine looked at a chair with a curved spine that was all pointed leaves and flowers and little sharp berries. On one of its finials Duncan had impaled a liniment ad. “I’ve a good mind to quit this job,” he said, but she didn’t bother answering that. He would never quit in the middle of a fight.

She wanted him to come with her somewhere. “Maybe we could take a trip,” she told him.

“All right.”

“Just spur of the moment.”

“All right.”

“We might even stop and see Meg.”

But then his face grew cold and stubborn. “Not a chance. Not until we’re asked, Justine.”

“But she said . She said in her letters.”

“ ‘We’ll have you over sometime soon,’ is what she said. Pay attention.”

He knew Meg’s letters by heart, the same as Justine. It was all an act, his unconcern. (“Duncan,” she had told him, “Meg has gone to marry Alfred, I mean Arthur,” and he had grown motionless for one split second before continuing to close up shop.) “As long as we don’t come for a meal,” she said now, “why do we have to wait to be invited?”

“We’re not going till we are, I tell you.”

“Oh, that’s ridiculous. She’s our daughter. ”