Энн Тайлер - Searching for Caleb

“Yes.”

“I see,” Justine said.

She thought a moment. Then she went to the open window and leaned out. Next door, Ann-Campbell stood in a wading pool wearing bikini underpants, tilting her face into the rain and singing,We are fine mermaids of high pedigree,

We eat baby sharks and we pee in the sea . . .

“Ann-Campbell!” Justine called. “Go get your mother. Hurry. I want her to call the ambulance in Plankhurst.”

Ann-Campbell broke off her song.

“Hurry, Ann-Campbell! Tell her to call Duncan too. My grandfather’s having a heart attack.”

Ann-Campbell darted off, all flashing angles and freckles and patches of peeled skin. Justine turned back to her grandfather. “A what?” he said, bewildered. “Having a what?”

“Well, maybe not.”

He pressed a hand to his chest.

“Is there anything I can get you?” she asked him. “Do you want a drink of water? Or — I don’t know, maybe you aren’t supposed to. Just lie still, Grandfather.”

He did not look capable of doing anything else. He seemed to be flattened, sinking into his mattress. Nevertheless, his neck was tightly strung as if he were determined to keep his head just slightly off the pillow; it was not dignified to be seen in a horizontal position. Perhaps he even wished she would leave him in privacy, but she couldn’t. She paced around and around the tiny room, willing into him all her strength and her burning, aimless energy. She kept being drawn to the window, which opened onto the side yard and would not have shown her the ambulance even if it could come so soon. “Oh, I wish Caro Mill had a hospital of its own!” she cried.

“I would never agree to a hospital,” her grandfather said. He closed his eyes.

Then the screen door slammed and Justine could breathe again. “Duncan?” she called. “Is that you?”

But it was only Dorcas, clattering across the floor on her spike-heeled sandals. She stuck her bubbly head in the door and rounded her eyes at Grandfather Peck, who pretended to be asleep. “Justine honey, I called right away,” she said. “They’re sending an ambulance. Now I’m going to stand on the corner and wave it down.”

“And Duncan? Did you call Duncan?” Justine asked.

Dorcas was already leaving, but her voice floated back. “He’s coming too, he’ll be here in a minute.”

Justine went back to the bed and sat down on the edge of it. She laid a hand on her grandfather’s cold, damp forehead. His eyes flew open and he gave her a look she had not seen him wear before: he seemed to be asking something from her. “What is it?” she said.

“Justine, I — there seems to be a considerable amount of pain starting up.”

“Oh, where is Duncan?”

“I believe that I’m having a heart attack.”

She picked up both his hands, which passed on their shakiness to her. His eyes withdrew and he thought something over in the gray of the ceiling. “Well,” he said finally, “I had certainly hoped for more than this out of life.”

“Don’t talk!” she told him. She jumped up and ran to the window again. “Oh, where is—”

Then something made her turn, some sound much smaller than a click, and she saw that her grandfather had let his head rest at last and his hands were still and his face was calm and dead.

While she waited for Duncan she went into the living room, but it made her sad to abandon her grandfather and she returned to the bedroom. Even now, after all, there was that pinstriped collarless shirt and the silvery slant of hair, those perfect teeth glinting between the thin Peck lips, the waxy gray cord of his hearing aid and the deep-socketed eyes, closed but still leaking their blueness into the white of the lids. There was more to him than soul; there was this body, which would have looked different worn by any other man. She memorized the single stark line running alongside each corner of his mouth, drawn by pride and firmness of purpose. She willed his gnarled hands to press into hers, one more time, a bitter oval of horehound, but she did not reach out to touch him. He was too much present still, and would not have approved. Instead she slightly altered the position of his pillow, causing his head to lie straighter; and when the movement set up a rustling of papers she pulled from beneath his shoulder the sheaf of letters he had held, his carbon copies on onionskin. Their new creases and the blurred gray softness of the type made them seem to have come from someone already long dead and forgotten. “Dear Caleb,” she read, from the top page. “I take pen in hand to express my hope that . . . ” Her eyes slid down, line by line. When she reached the end of the letter she lowered it and stared at her grandfather’s closed, set face.

“Justine!” Duncan called.

She spun around.

“Justine? Dorcas says—”

He stopped in the doorway, and then walked in and picked up his grandfather’s wrist. “Well,” he said after a moment, and when he set the wrist back down he was so gentle that there was no sound at all. Then he came to stand in front of Justine. “I’m sorry,” he told her.

She held the letter out to him, and he took it from her to read it. First he sighed, then he smiled; then he stopped reading and looked over at her.

“Oh, Duncan,” Justine said, “how could he write such a thing?”

But when he reached for her, she dodged his hands and went to the opposite side of the room.

Down the curved, gleaming staircase (which in her girlhood she used to descend holding onto her chest, to prevent exercising off what little she had), across the porch where her great-grandmother had often sat listing the three permissible excuses for typing a note of condolence (paralytic stroke, severed tendons, and amputation) Justine moved dimly beside her husband, wearing the suit she had worn to her mother’s funeral and clutching one frayed white glove. (She had not been able to find the other.) She entered her uncle Mark’s car; she rode through Roland Park, alighted in front of the church, and climbed the steps leaning backward slightly as if she feared what she would find inside. But inside there was only a density of carpet and shadowy pastel light from the windows, and up front an anonymous coffin. Then a cemetery as flat and well mown as a golf course, rows upon rows of glazed granite headstones including PECK Justin Montague, PECK Laura Baum, MAYHEW Caroline Peck and finally an admirably well cut rectangular ditch beside which the coffin lay like something forgotten, abandoned at the brink, while more words were said. Afterwards the family went home to receive their callers, who had been streaming in for the past two days and continued even now that it was over — elderly gentlemen, ladies in hats and gloves and veils and crocheted shawls in spite of the heat. “My,” they said to Justine, “are you that little girl of Caroline’s? But you used to be so — well, you certainly have — now, this is your husband, isn’t it? Him I recognize.”

Him they recognized. From her new distance Justine turned and looked at him, at his boyish pointy chin and his gawky way of standing, twining one leg about the other and rocking slightly with his hands in his back pockets so that his elbows jutted out to spear passers-by. The upturned corners of his mouth made him appear to be smiling mysteriously, teasingly, and perhaps he was. “Why, Duncan!” said Justine, dropping her glove. “You haven’t changed a bit!”

An old lady mumbled, embarrassed at her mistake. Plainly these two were not married and perhaps not even related, in spite of the resemblance. Then Duncan stooped for the glove and handed it formally to Justine, and Justine turned and went off alone.