Энн Тайлер - Searching for Caleb

“Yes, dear.”

Once they hit the open road they were dazzled by too much sunshine and too wide an expanse of fields. It was some time since they had been in the country. (One year ago today, to be exact.) Lucy longed for her wing chair in which she could sit encircled, almost, with the wings working like a mule’s blinders to confine her gaze to the latest historical romance. The upholstery was embroidered in satin-stitch, which she loved to stroke absently as she read. Then in the back yard her Sea Foam roses were just opening; there were going to be more this year than ever before and she was missing one entire day’s worth. And it was so much cooler and greener at home, so shadowy, so thickly treed that when you spoke outdoors your voice came echoing back, clear and close, as if reflected from a vaulted green ceiling not far above your head. Here the sun turned everything pale. Pinkish barns sped past and bleached gray roadbanks, and beige creeks spanned by wooden bridges like dried-up whitening bones. Lucy turned and sought out her sisters-in-law — a double pair of webbed eyes reluctantly drawn to hers. “Really, traveling makes me sad,” Lucy told them. But they didn’t answer (Lucy always said such personal things), so she faced front again.

At Plankhurst there was a very confusing crossroads and she sent Two thirteen miles out of the way before the mistake was realized. “Oh, I’m just so — I just can’t tell you how badly I feel about this,” she said. Two grunted. In the back seat her sisters-in-law gave her disappointed looks that made her want to cry. “I just seem to do everything wrong,” she said. Nobody denied it.

Two hours out of Baltimore they began to encounter signs for Caro Mill, although still it seemed they were in the depths of the country. The only buildings were farmhouses, widely scattered, and occasionally a little grocery store patched with soft drink ads. Then they swooped over a hill and there was the town all spread out before them, a clutter of untidy buildings. They had traveled this Main Street annually for years, although each time in a different location. They had passed this very Woolworth’s, diner, pizza parlor, fabric store displaying dingy bolts of cloth turning gray along the creases. Still, Lucy sat up straighter and began perking the lace at the neck of her dress. Two pressed his thin white hair flat against his head, and in back there were rustles and whispers. “Oh, I do hope Father likes the—” “Remind me to ask Father if he wouldn’t care to—” But Duncan was the one Lucy thought of, not her father-in-law at all. It was for Duncan she had bought this hat (only wouldn’t he think the wooden cherries were — old-ladyish, maybe?) and put on these coins of rouge and her eighteen-hour girdle and the Sunday pearls. (Only come to think of it, hadn’t he always laughed at the family’s fondness for pearls?) She twisted her rings. “Perhaps he won’t be home,” she said.

“Who?” Two asked, although of course he knew.

“It is a working day. Though Justine said he comes home for lunch. But perhaps he won’t. I mean, one time—”

One time when they visited he had gone fishing with a friend. A plumber or something. Another time he had wandered around the house all afternoon wearing earphones on a very long cord, following a baseball game. You could only grasp the depth of the insult when you remembered that Duncan did not like sports and would prefer to do almost anything but listen to a game. “ One time—” she said, but Two’s voice cracked across hers like a whip.

“Leave it,” he said. “What’d you do with Justine’s letter?”

“Letter?”

“Her letter , Lucy. Telling us how to get to their house.”

“Oh. Oh, why I—”

She remembered suddenly that she had left the letter at home on the dining room buffet, but she didn’t want to say so. “Why, someplace here,” she said, riffling through her pocketbook. Two let out a long puff of air. He slowed and beckoned from the window, startling a fat lady standing on the median line. “Pardon me,” he said. “We are looking for Watchmaker Street. For twenty-one Watchmaker Street.”

“Oh, Justine ,” the lady said.

Everyone flinched. Justine’s name was always bandied about so. Like common property.

“Why, you just turn left at the next light,” she said, “go two blocks and turn left again. That’s Watchmaker Street.”

“Thank you.”

He rolled the window all the way up.

Now they were silent, concentrating on the view, wondering what sort of house they were headed for. Hoping, just this once, for something really fine. But no. Of course: there it was, a flimsy, no-account little place. Tacked to the screen was what appeared to be a magazine ad for traveler’s checks. YOU ARE FAR, FAR FROM HOME, it said, IN UNFAMILIAR TERRITORY . . . But then out flew Justine, barefoot, glowing, in a dress with a lopsided hem. “Uncle Two!” she cried. “Aunt Lucy! You got here!” She hugged them — some of them twice over. She called for her grandfather, who naturally couldn’t hear. She showed Laura May and Sarah up the rickety steps and into the house to find him, and then she ran out again to help Two and Lucy unload the trunk. “Duncan will be here in a minute,” she said. “He’s coming for lunch. Oh look! This is Aunt Bea’s gift, I know the wrapping. Will you look at that bow?” But then she dropped it. Fortunately it was not breakable. Lucy had often wondered: was accident-proneness catching? Justine had been such a careful little girl. “I wrote and asked Meg to come too but they’re having final exams,” Justine said. “It seems to me these birthday parties get smaller every year. She sent her love to all of you.”

“Oh, bless her heart,” Lucy said. “Well, some of these things are her wedding presents. Did we tell you we’re giving her your great-grandma’s silver?”

Not a one of them was tactless enough to comment on Meg’s manner of marrying.

“Now,” said Two. “Tell me straight. How’s Duncan’s business going?”

“Oh, fine, Uncle Two. Just fine.”

“What is it again? Jewelry?”

But then Grandfather Peck came down the steps, bending in an odd flimsy way at the knees, and he had to be greeted and fussed over. Lucy kissed his bristly white cheek, Two shook his hand. “Happy birthday!” Lucy shouted.

“How’s the what?”

“Happy birthday!”

He looked at her for a moment, considering. “Oh, very well, thank you,” he said finally.

“You don’t have to shout, Aunt Lucy,” Justine told her. “Only narrow in . You know what I mean?”

“Oh yes,” said Lucy, although she didn’t. They went through this on every visit.

Once they were inside the house, there was the usual difficulty in knowing what to say about it. Certainly some comment seemed called for. But the rooms were small and dark. The windows were curtained only by great tangles of plants all merging and mingling and sending long runners clear across the floor. There were not nearly enough places to sit. In one of the little back bedrooms, Lucy was horrified to glimpse an absolutely bare, rust-stained mattress, striped blue and white. It reminded her of the time her church group had toured a flophouse for their social service project. “Justine, dear heart,” she said, “have we interrupted your bedmaking?”

“My what? Oh no, I’m going to run the sheets down to the laundromat this evening.”

“Perhaps I could help you put the fresh ones on.”

“But I don’t have any others,” Justine said.

Lucy sat down very suddenly on a chrome-legged chair that had been dragged out of the kitchen.

Grandfather Peck never would open his presents until after lunch. He had them taken to the table, and meanwhile he and Two settled themselves in the living room and discussed business affairs. Since both of them were retired, it was a vague, wistful, second-hand sort of discussion. “Dan I believe is very much involved with that Kingham matter,” Two said. “ You remember Kingham.”