Searching for Caleb (21 page)

   Dear Mrs. Dillard, March 5, 1973

   I write to express my appreciation for your hospitality. Your butter mints were extremely tasty, and it was very kind of you to take the time to see us. We shall remember our visit to you with a great deal of pleasure.

   Respectfully, Daniel J. Peck, Sr.

   When he got back to Caro Mill or wherever he would type a copy of this note for his files. He liked to keep a record of all correspondence, particularly that regarding Caleb. His old Underwood typewriter, with its metal keys and high black forehead, was forever set up on the bureau by his bed; his file cabinet was packed solid with letters of inquiry, thank you letters, follow-up letters, for how many years back? How many years?

   Well, his stepmother died in 1958. That was a hard time. She was the last person on this earth who called him Daniel. He had not realized that until she died. She had journeyed through all his life with him, minus the first few months: seventy-seven years. The only person who remembered his kid soldier doll, and his father's way of widening his eyes when displeased, and the rough warm Belgian blocks that used to pave the streets downtown. She left her house to Justine, and he knew why. (She was uneasy in her mind about that girl, the sweetest of his granddaughters and the most defenseless, dragged from pillar to post by harum-scarum Duncan, whom marriage had not toned down in the least.) But for months after her death Daniel would not enter her house or look at it, and although he allowed Esther and the twins to move in he told them to stay out of her bedroom. He would sort her things later, he said; he was just a little busy right now. He walked around feeling wounded, struck as if for the first time by the fact that the world kept progressing and people aged and died and nothing in life was reversible.

   Where had it all gone to? Whatever happened to that little brown German step-grandfather he used to have? Or Sarah Cantleigh's family, who cried whenever they saw him, were they all dead by now? Where was that silent, musical brother of his with the tilted head?

   But he was a sensible man, and in time he recovered. Then he sent for Sulie with her ring of keys. They went to sort Laura's belongings. "Oh, my soul," Sulie kept saying. "My soul." She had been mad at Laura for decades, but she looked stricken as she gazed around the dark, stale room. Her eyes were triangular and the cords stood out in her neck. She had a wrinkled face like a yellow paper kite, "So this is what it all come to," she said.

   "Now if you don't stop that," Daniel told her, "you can just go on back to the kitchen, hear?"

   He left the clothes for the women to deal with; that was none of his business. What concerned him were her desk drawers, jewelry boxes, and knick-knack shelves, which held little mementos that should be parceled out among the family. He opened drawers guiltily, shamed by the puffs of lavender scent that rose from everything as if she were still in the room somewhere. "Well, I just don't know," he said to each new object they found, and then when he had laid it aside Sulie would pick it up and say, "Miss Sarah always admire this," or "Miss Bea always saying how she wish she had one like it."

   "Take it to her then. Fine. Fine," said Daniel.

   He kept nothing for himself. Those neat drawers, with everything arranged so precisely and all for nothing, took away his interest in life. And maybe Sulie's, too. At any rate, when he offered her the oval brooch that contained a plait of Laura's mother's hair and had only one little thing wrong with the clasp, Sulie's mouth turned downward. "I don't want it," she said.

   "Suit yourself," he told her. Not everyone would put up with Sulie's rudeness the way he did.

   In a desk drawer behind a stack of stationery he found an ancient brittle advertisement for Baum's Fine Cutlery. Beneath it, an envelope that looked as if it had been handled a great deal. Inside was a photograph of Caleb playing the cello in a stable loft.

   Now, where did that come from?

   He had never seen it before, but from the poor focus and the haphazard composition he guessed that it was the work of Margaret Rose that summer she got her Brownie. For a few months she had wandered everywhere, photographing the most unlikely things: Sulie stringing beans, Sarah on her rocking horse, Lafleur Boudrault playing cigar-box guitar and Mark with a mouthful of honeysuckle blossoms. (Daniel had known she was gone for good when he found all her photos of the children missing. But enough of that.) He peered at Caleb's blurred, sharp-featured face. So far as he knew this was the only picture of Caleb in existence. Not counting the one in the album: age two, wearing a ruffled dress and holding an open book he could not possibly have read. And of course all traces of Margaret Rose had been systematically destroyed long ago. Yet in a sense this was a picture of her too, a permanent record of her hasty way of doing things; and her presence could be inferred from the head-on, quizzical look Caleb directed to the camera holder-an expression he reserved for Margaret Rose. Daniel passed a hand over his eyes. "I believe that will be all for today, Sulie," he said.

   "What, you quitting?"

   "For now."

   "Leaving this mess any which old way?"

   Later I'll tend to it."

   When he left she was poking the piles of belongings with angry, crabbed hands, muttering beneath her breath. He didn't care to hear what she was saying.

   Then for several evenings in a row he sat alone in his bedroom studying the photograph, testing the new feeling of sorrow that drove straight through his ribcage. And when that was absorbed (not lessened, just adjusted to) he became, he admitted, a little crazy. He began wondering if this photo didn't have some secret message to it. It was impossible for such an object just to be, wasn't it? He studied the angle of Caleb's hat, the set of his cello, the shreds left on the stable wall by some old poster. What was the significance? Meanwhile his bachelor son and his two spinster daughters whispered downstairs, wondering what he could be doing. When Laura May knocked on his door, he jumped and shoved the photo into his pocket. All she found was her father in his easy chair with his arms folded unnaturally across his front.

   Then he went to Lucy, who played a little piano still. He pulled her aside one day when she was counting Mason jars in the pantry. "Lucy," he said, "you know music."

   "Oh, Father Peck, I-"

   "Look here. What note is this man playing?"

   He showed her the photo. Surprise set little sharp pleats across her forehead. "Why, who-" she said.

   "What note is he playing?"

   "Oh, well, I don't-actually, it doesn't look to me as if he's playing any note."

   "What? Speak up."

   "Not any note."

   "Why, how is that possible? No note at all? I never heard of such a thing."

   "It looks to me as if he's just resting his bow on the strings, Father Peck."

   "But that would be ridiculous."

   "Oh, no, it's really quite-"

   "I never heard of such a thing," he said, and then he slammed out of the pantry.

   Already he knew he had made a mistake. For Lucy, of course, had to go and tell Two, and Two out of all the family was the most certain to recognize a description of Caleb. Then everybody knew, and everybody asked him what he thought he was up to. Caleb was best forgotten. He was surely dead by now. What did it matter what note he had played on a summer's day in 1910?

   When Justine visited home that August, she came to where he sat in his slat chair beneath an oak tree. She kissed his cheek and drew back and looked at him. He could tell she had heard something. They had all been discussing him behind his back. He snorted. "You know, of course, that I am non compos mentis," he told her.

   She went on studying him, as if she took what he had said seriously. A literal-minded girl, Justine. Always had been.

   "Could I see Caleb?" she asked finally.

   "Pardon?"

   He thought he had heard wrong.

   "Your picture of Caleb."

   "The others are asking not to see it."

   "But I don't even know what he looks like," she said.

   He frowned at her. Well, no, of course she wouldn't. Probably didn't know much of anything about him. Laura never let his name cross her lips; he seldom had himself; and to the others Caleb was nearly forgotten, a distant grownup uncle whom they had never found very interesting.

   "Well," Daniel said.

   He drew out the photograph, protected now by glass.

   "My brother," he said.

   "I see," said Justine.

   "Generally he did not go about in his shirtsleeves, however."

   Justine bent over the photograph. Her lowered eyelids reminded him of wings. "He looks like you," she said.

   "But his eyes were brown."

   "His face is the same."

   "Yes, I know," said Daniel, and he sighed. He took back the picture. "The others, you see, they don't count him any more. To them he's a deserter."

   Justine said something he couldn't catch.

   "Eh? To me," he said, "he is still a member here. He goes back to nearly as long ago as I can recollect. I just like to think of him, is all.

   What's wrong with that?"

   "Not a thing," Justine said.

   "I would give all the remaining years of my life if I could set eyes on him again."

   She said something else. He took a swipe at the air, protesting the curtain of muffled sound that separated them.

   "If I could just walk to church with him once more," he told her, "only this time, paying closer attention, don't you see. If I could pass by the Salter Academy and look in the window and see him wave, or hear him play that foolish messy music of his on the piano in the parlor-if they could just give me back one little scrap of time, that's all I ask!"

   "Oh, well," said Justine. "Come around to the front. Grandfather, see how Meg's grown." And then she took him by the hand, so that he had to rise and follow. In a way, he was a little disappointed in Justine. He had thought she might understand his viewpoint, but if she did she didn't let on.

   In November of that year, on a cold, waterlogged day, he received an envelope postmarked Honora, Maryland, where Justine was living at the time. There was no letter, only a clipping from the Honora Herald, a whole page devoted to education. He was puzzled. Education did not much interest him. But wait: at the bottom was a very old-fashioned photograph of rows and rows of young boys. The caption said:

   THE GOOD OLD DAYS

   Above, the author's own school, Salter Academy in Baltimore, around the turn of the century. Note gaslights along the walls. Author is in seated row, second from left.

   Daniel took off for Honora within the hour, driving his V-8 Ford. He arrived at Justine's house waving the clipping. Justine was in the kitchen reading some lady's future-an occupation he and all the family preferred to ignore. "Never mind that," he told her. "I want to see Ashley Higham."

   "Who's Ashley Higham?"

   "The man who wrote this piece, of course."

   "Oh, then you do know him!" Justine said.

   "No I don't know him, don't know him from Adam, but it says right here he went to Salter Academy, doesn't it? Says this is him seated, second from left, and not an arm's length away from him is my own brother Caleb, isn't it?"

   "Is that right?" said Justine. She set down her cards and got up to have a look. So did the lady, not that it was any of her business.

   "Now all I've got to do is find Ashley Higham," Daniel said.

   "Oh, well. Grandfather, I don't really know where-"

   "I know," said the lady.

   So it was the lady who led the way to Ashley Higham. And Mr. Higham did, in fact, remember Caleb well, but had not seen him since graduation day in 1903. However, he had a remarkable mind and could reel off the name of every boy, his shaky white index finger slowly traversing the rows of faces. Daniel recorded each name on a sheet of paper. Later he would copy them into a pocket-sized ring notebook that he carried with him everywhere, gradually stuffing it fatter and fatter. For one thing led to another, one man remembered another who had been a friend of Caleb's and that man remembered Caleb's elocution teacher, who turned out to be deceased but his grandson in Pennsylvania had saved all his correspondence and from that Daniel found the name of the geography teacher, and so on. His files began filling up. His Ford clocked more miles in a year than it had in all its past life. And bit by bit, as the rest of the family grew more disapproving (first arguing reasonably, then trying to distract him with television and scrapbooks and homemade pie, finally stealing his car keys whenever his back was turned) he began staying for longer periods of time with Justine. Only visiting, of course. It would never do for Caleb to come home unexpectedly and find him vanished without a trace. His house still waited for him in Baltimore, his daughters still kept his room made up. But Justine was the only one who would hop into the car with him at a moment's notice, and go anywhere, and talk to anyone and interpret all the mumbled answers. And when he was discouraged, Justine was the one who bolstered his confidence again.

   For he did get discouraged, at first. At first he was in such a hurry. He thought he was right around the corner from success, that was why. Then when he traveled clear across the state to find Caleb's oldest, dearest friend and learned that he had last seen Caleb in 1909, he grew morose and bitter. "I always assumed," he told Justine, "that people keep in touch, that if they lose touch they go back and pick it up again, don't you know. Of course I am more a family man myself, family's been my social life. But I would suppose that if you just watched a man's best friend long enough, you would be certain to see the man himself eventually. Well, not Caleb. In fifty years he has not once gone back to pay a call, and his friend has never done a thing about it. What do you make of that?"

   Justine said, "Never mind, Grandfather. It will work out." (Was she speaking professionally?) And the next morning she was perfectly willing to set off again, cheerful as ever, never losing patience. So there was no need to hurry after all. He began to relax. He began to enjoy the search itself, the endless rattling rides, the motionless blue sky outside the window of his train. (For they had quickly switched to railroad, as his deafness had caused several near accidents and Justine's driving terrified him.) In the old days, merely a business trip to New York had made him feel like a ball of yarn rolling down the road, unwinding his tail of homesickness behind him in a straight line back to Roland Park. But now he learned to concentrate solely on the act of traveling. He liked to imagine that Caleb himself had ridden this very train. He bobbled along on the Southern Railroad Line or the B & O, on dusty plush seats, occasionally stretching his legs on some small-town platform where, perhaps, Caleb had stood before him. And he returned home as confident as when he left, for there was always time to search further, next week or next month or whenever he felt up to it.