Энн Тайлер - Searching for Caleb

On the fourth Sunday in August, the three of them drove to Semple to visit Meg. They were supposed to go earlier but always at the last minute Duncan claimed that something had come up. He had to attend an auction, or a special flea market, now that Silas was urging him to buy more tools. Yet he returned without any tools whatsoever — only, once, a carton of Rusty Prince Albert tobacco tins. “These are antiques?” Justine asked. “Imagine, they used to be garbage. I used to see them in the weeds along Roland Avenue. But where are the tools? What about the kitchen utensils?”

“None of them appealed to me,” said Duncan. “Only Prince Albert.”

“In the end, the silliest things get valuable. We shouldn’t throw anything out.”

“It doesn’t seem to me that we do,” said Duncan.

Now he wanted to cancel the trip yet another time (he said there was a Tailgate Treasures near Washington) but Justine had caught on to him. “It’s not possible,” she said. “You know how long we waited for Meg to invite us. Now we’ve put her off twice. What will she think?”

“Maybe just you and Grandfather could go. I could go to Washington alone.”

“What on, bicycle?”

“I could borrow Silas’s station wagon,” he said.

“Besides, I don’t want to go just with Grandfather. I’d really like you with me this time.”

“Maybe in the fall, when things are quieter.”

“I don’t understand you, Duncan,” Justine told him. “What is it you have against this visit?”

But then he grew touchy. He always did object to the way she dragged his secret feelings into the open.

Still, on the fourth Sunday in August there he was, maybe a little grimmer than usual but resigned to the trip, heading the Ford along a gritty two-lane highway toward Semple with Justine sitting beside him and Grandfather Peck next to the window. On the rear seat was a stack of Meg’s summer dresses and a paper bag containing a dozen ears of corn. (“But the corn will be wasted,” Duncan said. “Reverend Mildew will try to eat it with a knife and fork.”) Meg’s other belongings — her set of Nancy Drew mysteries and her pennants and bottles of cologne — remained in her room. Duncan had thought they should bring everything in one fell swoop but Justine preferred not to. “All she asked for were her summer dresses,” she said. “Maybe she doesn’t have space yet for the rest.”

Duncan, who never dragged anyone’s secret feelings into the open if he could possibly help it, merely nodded and let her have her way.

They reached the outskirts of Semple at two in the afternoon. WELCOME TO SEMPLE, VA., “PRETTIEST LITTLE TOWN IN THE SOUTH,” the sign said, looming above a stack of pine boards weathering in a lumberyard. They bounced over railroad tracks, past rusty, gaping boxcars. “Now there was a town,” said Grandfather Peck. “Had its own train.”

“Only freight trains, Grandfather,” Justine said.

“Pardon? Freight? Didn’t we go to Nashville once from here?”

“That was from Fredericksburg. Three years back.”

“Oh yes.”

“Here we had to take a bus to Richmond and then catch a train.”

“Nashville was where that boy played the banjo,” said her grandfather. “His great-uncle taught Caleb how to work a stringed instrument when they were both fourteen.”

“That’s the place,” Justine said.

He slumped, as if the conversation had taken everything out of him.

On Main Street Justine saw someone she knew — old Miss Wheeler, who used to ask the cards whether she should put her father in a nursing home — and she wanted to stop and speak to her, but Duncan wouldn’t hear of it. “I’d like to get this over with, Justine,” he said. Going back to places always did make him cross. When they passed the Wayfarer’s Diner and then the Whole Self Health Food Store, whose tattered awning and baggy screens leapt out like familiar faces, Justine could feel the edginess in the skin of his arm. “Never mind, we’re only visiting,” she told him. But she had trespassed again and he drew himself in, moving slightly away from her so that their arms no longer touched and there was a sudden coolness along her left thigh.

Arthur Milsom’s church was a large brick building on the other side of town. Justine had never attended it, but of course Meg had pointed it out to her — she remembered how the steeple had seemed sharper than necessary, barbed with some glittery metal at the tip. The rectory was brick also, but the house of the assistant pastor, next door to the rectory, was a small white cottage without trees or shrubs, set on a square of artificial-looking grass. There was a bald picture window with a double-globed, rosebud-painted lamp centered in it, and beside the front walk a hitching post in the shape of a small boy with a newly whitened face and black hands. Duncan stopped to study it, but Justine took her grandfather by the elbow and hurried him up the steps. “ Where is this?” he asked her.

“This is Meg’s, Grandfather. We’re visiting Meg.”

“Yes, yes, but—” And he revolved slowly, staring all about him. Justine pressed the doorbell, which was centered in a brass cross with scalloped edges. From somewhere far away she heard a whole melody ringing out in slow, measured, golden tones. Then the door opened and there was Meg, thinner and more poised, with longer hair. “Hello, Mama,” she said. She kissed Justine’s cheek, and then her great-grandfather’s. When Duncan had turned from the hitching post and climbed the steps she kissed his cheek as well. “Hello, Daddy,” she said.

“Well, Meggums.”

“I thought you might change your mind and not come.”

“Would I do a thing like that?”

She didn’t smile.

She led them across sculptured blue carpeting into the living room, where Christ gazed out of gilt frames on every wall. Most of the furniture seemed to come in twos — two identical tables flanking the sofa, two beaded lamps, two ice-blue satin easy chairs with skirted ottomans. On the spinet piano in the corner there were two framed photographs, one of Arthur in a clerical robe and the other of Meg with some sort of shiny drapery across her bare shoulders — but so retouched, so flawlessly complexioned, her hair so lacquered, that it took Justine a moment to recognize her. Besides, what right did some unknown woman have to set Meg’s photo in her living room? Justine picked it up and studied it. Meg said, “Oh, that’s my — that’s just the picture we put in the paper when we—” She snatched the photo away and set it down. “I’ll get Mother Milsom,” she said.

Justine sought out Duncan, who was slouched on the sofa leafing through a Lady’s Circle . His feet, in enormous grease-spattered desert boots, were resting on the coffee table. “Duncan!” she said, slapping his knee. He looked up and then moved his feet carefully, picking his way between china rabbits and birds, candles shaped like angels, a nativity scene in a seashell and a green glass shoe full of sourballs. Justine let out a long breath and settled down beside him. Across the room, her grandfather paced the carpet with his hands clasped behind his back. He did not like to sit when he would have to struggle up again so soon for the entrance of a lady. He paused before first one Christ and then another, peering closely at a series of melancholy brown eyes and lily-white necks. “Religious art in the living room?” he said.

“Ssh,” Justine told him.

“But I was always taught that that was in poor taste,” he said. “Unless it was an original.”

“Grandfather.”

She looked at the door where Meg had disappeared. There was no telling how much could be heard. “Grandfather,” she said, “wouldn’t you like to—”