Энн Тайлер - Searching for Caleb

“Widow of Lafleur Boudrault?”

She nodded.

“You wouldn’t happen to know where Mr. Caleb Peck has got to.”

Then she stopped polishing.

“Well, I thought they wouldn’t never ask,” she said.

She settled him on a china barrel, and she herself sat on a stack of St. Nicholas magazines with her dustcloth clutched daintily in her lap. She was a very small woman with stretched-looking skin and yellow eyes. Her manner of speaking was clear and reasonable, and her story proceeded in a well-ordered way. No wonder: she had had over half a century in which to arrange it.

“When first Mr. Caleb had left us,” she said, “I told Lafleur, ‘Lafleur, what do I say?’ For I know where he had went to yet I would hate to give him away. ‘Lafleur, do I lie?’ ‘That ain’t never going to come up,’ he say. ‘Them folks don’t think you know nothing .’ Well, I was certain he was wrong. I waited for old Mrs. Laura to fix me with her little eyes. She the one to watch for. Mr. Justin the First couldn’t do nothing, maybe wouldn’t have anyhow, but he had that Mrs. Laura so scared she would do it for him and more besides. She was one scared lady, and it had turned her mean and spiteful. Watch out for Mrs. Laura, I told myself, and so I watch and waited and plan how to answer what she ask. But she never do. Never once. Never even, ‘Sulie, do you recollect if you served Mr. Caleb breakfast that day?’ Never a word.”

Sulie set her skirt out all about her — a long draggled white eyelet affair that hit halfway down her skinny calves, with ankle-high copper-toed work shoes swinging below them. After thinking a moment, she dug down into her pocket and came up with a handful of Oreos, mashed and limp. “Have you a cookie,” she said.

“Thank you,” said Eli.

“She never ask. Nor none of the others. Took me some time to see they never would. ‘Why, looky there!’ I say to Lafleur at last, and he say, ‘Told you so. They don’t reckon just old us would know nothing ,’ he say. So my eyes was opened. That was how. I made up my mind I wouldn’t tell till they say straight out, ‘Sulie, do you know?’ And Mrs. Laura I wouldn’t give the time of day even. I never did. She live forty-six years after Mr. Caleb had went and I never spoken to her once, but I don’t fool myself she realize that. ‘Sulie is getting so sullen ,’ was what she say. Even that tooken her five or so years to notice good.”

Eli finished the Oreo and dusted off his hands. From his pocket he took a spiral notebook and a Bic pen. He opened to a blank page.

“Now,” said Sulie.

She stood up, as if to recite.

“Mr. Caleb was a musical man,” she said.

“I had heard he was.”

“He like most music, but colored best. He like ragtime and he copied everything Lafleur do on the piano. He like stories about them musicians in New Orleans, which is where Lafleur come from. Lafleur had got his self in a speck of trouble down there and couldn’t go back, but he would tell about the piano players in Storyville and what all went on. Understand this was back long time ago. Didn’t many people know about such things.

“Then times got hard and Miss Maggie Rose left us. I had to move on over to Mr. Daniel’s house and tend the babies. I was not but in my teens then. I had just did get married to old Lafleur. I didn’t know much but I saw how Mr. Caleb was mighty quiet and maybe took a tad more to drink than was needed. But I never thought he’d leave. One night he come down cellar to our bedroom, me and Lafleur’s. Knocks on our door. ‘Lafleur,’ he say, ‘this fellow down at the tavern is talking about a trip to New Orleans.’

“ ‘Is that so,’ say Lafleur.

“ ‘Wants me to go along.’

“ ‘That so.’

“ ‘Well, I’m thinking of doing it.’

“ ‘Why, sure,’ Lafleur tell him.

“ ‘Permanent,’ Mr. Caleb say. ‘Unannounced.’

“But still, you see, we didn’t have no notion he was serious.

“He ask Lafleur was there someplace to go, to stay a whiles. Lafleur mention this white folks’ boardinghouse over near where his sister live at. Mr. Caleb wroten it down on a piece of paper and fold it careful and left. We didn’t think a thing more about it. Come morning he arrive for breakfast, sometime he would do that. Eat in Mr. Daniel’s kitchen. ‘Fix me a lot now, Sulie,’ he say. ‘Can’t travel far on an empty stomach.’ Well, I thought he meant travel to town . I fix him hotcakes. I set out his breakfast and when he had done finished he thank me politely and left. I never did see him again.”

She considered her fingernails, ridged and yellowed like old piano keys.

“Could I have that boardinghouse address?” Eli asked her.

“Yes, why surely,” she said, and she gave it to him, slowly and clearly, having saved it up on purpose all these years, and he wrote it in his notebook. Then she faded off, so that Eli thought she had forgotten him. He rose with care and tiptoed to the attic steps. He had already dipped one ankle into the coolness below when she called him. “Mr. Whoever-you-are!”

“Ma’am?”

“When you tell how you found him,” she said, “make certain you put in that Sulie known the answer all along.”

So now he had an address, but it was sixty-one years old. He knew he couldn’t expect too much. He caught a plane to New Orleans that night. He took a cab to where a boardinghouse had stood in the spring of 1912. All he saw was a supermarket, lit inside with ghostly blue night lights, hulking on an asphalt parking lot.

“I reckon there’s no sense hanging around,” he told the cab driver.

Eli registered at a small hotel from which immediately, despite the hour, he called every Peck in the telephone book. No one had an ancestor named Caleb. He went to bed and slept a sound, dreamless sleep. On the following day, he set out walking. He picked his way past suspicious-looking hidden courtyards and lacy balconies, secret fountains splashing, leprous scaly stucco, monstrous greenery and live oaks dripping beards of moss, through surprising pockets of light where the air seemed to lie like colored veils. In various echoing buildings, archives both official and unofficial, he wandered gloomily with his hands in his pockets peering at yellowed sheet music, clippings, menus, and sporting-house directories under glass, as well as cases full of dented trumpets and valve trombones that appeared to have come from the dime-store. In the evenings he attended nightclubs, where, wincing against the clatter of brass and drums, he sidled between the tables to stare at the curling photographs on the walls and the programs once handed out during Fourth of July celebrations. There was no Caleb Peck. There was never that stiff, old-fashioned white man’s face or Panama hat.

Eli’s wife called, sounding lank and dragged out with the heat. “But it’s hotter here,” he told her. “And you ought to see the bugs.” She didn’t care; she wanted him home. What was he doing there, anyhow?

“I’ll be back in another week,” he told her. “In a week I’m going to have this thing wrapped up.”

It was August eighteenth. Although he did not have a single new clue, he was beginning to feel excited.

Now he started shadowing the gaudy, sunglassed tourists, who seemed to know something he did not. They were always in possession of secret addresses: the lodgings of palsied old saxhornists, clarinetists, past employees of the Streckfus Excursion Lines and granddaughters of Buddy Bolden’s girlfriends. (Who was Buddy Bolden?) Eli slipped in behind them through narrow doors, into dingy parlors or taverns or bedrooms. Sometimes he was ushered out again. Sometimes he would pass unnoticed. Then he introduced questions of his own, all of them out of place: