Энн Тайлер - Searching for Caleb

Luray took over his job, whipping an apron around her little tiny waist. She acted as if she thought Caleb had grown weak in the head. She sent him up to tend the babies. Caleb had never been good with children. The sight of them made him wretched; he was so sorry for humans in the state of childhood that he couldn’t stand to be near them. When one of the babies cried his insides knotted up and he felt bleak and hopeless. So he tended them as if from a distance, holding himself aloof, and as soon as it was naptime he hurried downstairs to socialize with the customers. He sat turning on a stool, talking and laughing, a little silly with relief, plunking down money from his own pocket to pay for a cup of coffee so Luray wouldn’t send him off. He would fish out his harmonica with stiff, thickened fingers and give the men “Shut House” or “Whisky Alley.” Till Luray stopped in front of him with her hands on her hips and her head cocked. “Hear that? Hear what I hear? Hear them babies crying?” Then Caleb put away his harmonica and went back upstairs on slow, heavy feet.

In the fall of 1966, Luray found out she was pregnant again. She was not very happy about it. Money seemed scarcer than ever, the twins were getting to be a handful, and already the apartment was cramped. Caleb slept on the couch now, and the babies were in his old room. When he got up in the night he stumbled over blocks and wheeled toys and cold soggy diapers all the way to the bathroom, where likely as not Luray had shut herself in ahead of him. “Go away!” she would shout. “Go back to bed, you old skunk!”

One morning she went out all dressed up, leaving Roy to tend the café and Caleb to mind the babies. When she came back she told Caleb she had found him a place to move into. “Oh! Well,” Caleb said.

He had thought a couple of times himself about moving, but not so concretely. And then there was the money. “This café just can’t support two apartments, Luray,” he said.

“It’s not an apartment.”

“Oh, a room? Well, fine, that’ll be—”

“This is a place the county helps out with.”

Then she flashed Roy a sudden look, and Roy hung his head in that bashful way he had and his face got red. But still Caleb didn’t understand.

He understood only when they deposited him in the gray brick building with the concrete yard, with attendants squeaking in their rubber-soled shoes down the corridors. “But — Luray?” he said. Roy wandered off and looked at a bulletin board. The back of his neck was splotchy. Only Luray was willing to face Caleb. “Now you know they’ll take good care of you,” she told him. “Well, after all. It’s not like you were any real relation or anything.” She was balancing a baby on each arm, standing swaybacked against their weight — a thin, enormously pregnant woman with washed-out hair and cloudy skin. What could he say to her? There was no way he could even be angry, she was so dismal and pathetic. “Well,” he said. “Never mind.”

Though later, when the nurse told him he couldn’t keep his harmonica here, he did feel one flash of rage that shook him from head to foot, and he wondered if he would be able to stand it after all.

Now he had to hum to make his music. Unfortunately he had a rather flat, toneless voice, and a tendency to hit the notes smack dab instead of slithering around on them as White-Eye Ramford used to. Still, it was better than nothing. And as time went by he made a few acquaintances, discovered a dogwood tree in the concrete yard, and began to enjoy the steady rhythm of bed, meals, social hour, nap. He had always liked to think that he could get along anywhere. Also he did have visitors. Some of these old men had no one. He had Roy and Luray coming by once a month or more with their four little towheaded boys — Roy as young as ever, somehow, Luray dried and hollowed out. But she was very kind now. When the clock struck four and the matron shooed them from the visitors’ parlor Luray would reach forward to touch Caleb’s hand, or sometimes peck his cheek. “Now we’ll be coming back, you hear?” she said. She always said, “Don’t see us out, you sit right where you’re at and stay comfortable.” But he came anyway, out the steel door and across the concrete yard, to where the gate would clang shut in his face. He would wave through the grille, and Luray would tell her boys to wave back. And maybe halfway up the street, heading toward the bus stop, she would turn to smile and her chin would lift just as it used to, as if she were letting him know that underneath, she was still that sweet perky Luray Spivey and she felt just as bewildered as he did by the way things had worked out.

In his patched vinyl chair in the social room he hummed old snatches of song, joyous mournful chants for St. Louis and East St. Louis, Memphis and Beale Street, Pratt City and Parchman Farm. But it was a fact that he never hummed the “Stringtail Blues” at all, though White-Eye Ramford sang it continually in the echoing streets of his mind: Once I walk proud, once I prance up and down,

Now I holds to a string and they leads me around . . .

The morning the letter came he had been sitting like this in the social room. He remembered that when the attendant tossed the envelope into his lap he had expected a good half hour, perhaps, of studying pictures of floral arrangements. (Altona Florists were his only correspondents.) Bouquets named “Remembrance,” “Friendly Thoughts,” and “Elegance,” which you could send clear across the continent without ever setting foot in a shop. But when he ripped open the envelope what he found instead was a typewritten letter of some sort. He checked the outside address. Mr. Caleb Peck, yes. All the postmark said was “U.S. Postal Service Md.” Whatever had happened to postmarks?

Maryland.

He shook the letter open. “Dear Caleb,” he read. He skipped to the signature. “Your brother, Daniel J. Peck, Sr.” A stone seemed to drop on his chest. But he was glad, of course, that his brother was still alive. He remembered Daniel with affection, and there were certain flashing images that could touch him even now, if he allowed them to — Daniel’s yellow head bent over a Schoolbook; the brave, scared look he sometimes gave his father; the embarrassed pride on his face when Maggie Rose came down the aisle in her wedding dress. Yet Caleb shrank in his vinyl chair, and glanced about the room as if checking for intruders. Then he read the rest of the letter.

It seemed that Daniel was inviting him to pay a visit. He was asking him to come to a place called Caro Mill. Caleb had never heard of Caro Mill. He found it difficult to imagine his brother anywhere but Baltimore. And when he pictured accepting the invitation he pictured Baltimore still, even with this letter before him — a streetcar rattling toward the sandy, shaded roads of Roland Park, a house with cloth dolls and hobbyhorses scattered across the lawn. Daniel descending the steps to welcome him, smiling with those clear, level eyes that tended to squint a little as if dazzled by their own blueness. Caleb smiled back, nodding gently. Then he started and returned to the letter.

He learned that his parents were dead, which of course he had assumed for many years. (Yet still he was stunned.) And the baby, Caroline, whom he had forgotten all about. But where was Maggie Rose, had she ever returned? Daniel neglected to say. Caleb raised his eyes and saw her small, dear, laughing face beneath a ribboned hat. But she would be an old lady now. She had grandchildren. Her sons were lawyers, her husband a judge. It was 1973.

Yet the language in this letter came from an earlier age, and the stiff, self-conscious voice of the young Daniel Peck rang clearly in Caleb’s ears. All the old burdens were dropped upon him: reproaches, forgiveness, reproaches again. An endless advancing and retreating and readvancing against which no counter-attack was possible. “You must surely have guessed . . . ” “But we will let bygones be bygones.” But, “You were always contrary, even as a child, and caused our mother much . . . ” Then Caleb reached the final paragraph, skimming rather than reading (so that none of it should really soak in). “To tell the truth, Caleb,” his brother said, and held out his hand and stood waiting. As in the old days, when after weeks of distance he would climb all the steps to Caleb’s room simply to invite him for a walk; or some other member of the family would, for they were all alike, all advancing and retreating too, and Caleb had spent far too many years belatedly summoning up his defenses only to have them washed away by some loving touch on his shoulder, some words in that secret language which, perhaps, all families had, but this was the only one Caleb had ever been able to understand. He was angry and then regretful; he rebelled against them all, their niggling, narrow ways, but then some homeliness in the turned-down corners of their mouths would pull at him; then he reached out, and was drowned in their airless warmth and burdened with reminders of all the ways he had disappointed them.