Searching for Caleb (22 page)

   If Duncan minded this permanent visit, he never said so. In the beginning Daniel had asked him outright. (Well, as outright as he could get.)

   "Nowadays, people seem to prefer a minimum of adults in one household, have you noticed?" he had said. But Duncan only smiled. "Some do, some don't," he said. Another of those unexplained remarks of his. He did it on purpose. Daniel mulled for several days, and then he went to Justine.

   "Duncan of course has never kept close family ties," he told her, and waited, trustingly, for her to understand. She did.

   "That's true," she said, "but he hasn't said anything so far." And Daniel was careful to see that he never gave Duncan reason to. He held back from advice (which Lord knows the boy could have used) and praise and criticism. He accepted every change of address without question, although none of them were the least bit necessary. Didn't it occur to Duncan that other people had low periods too, and just sat them out instead of packing up bag and baggage? You endure, you manage to survive, he had never heard of someone so consistently refusing to. But never mind, he didn't say a word. He went uncomplainingly to each new town, he accepted Justine's half-hearted cooking and cleaning, which were, he assumed, the natural result of failing to give a woman any permanence in her life. Why should she bother, in those shabby, limp houses that looked flung down, that seemed to be cowering in expectation of the next disaster? And meanwhile Laura's fine place was sitting empty. (He didn't count Esther and the twins living there, for really they belonged at home with their parents.) But leave it be, leave it be. The only change he made in their lives was to deed his Ford to them once he quit driving. It made him nervous to ride about in the Graham Paige, for which Duncan had to haunt antique shows every time a part wore out. "But I don't like Fords,"

   Duncan said. "I have a deep-seated hatred of Fords," and for half a year they had been a two-car family, Justine darting about in the Ford and Duncan in the Graham Paige, whistling cheerfully and looking down from time to time to watch the highway skating along beneath the holes in the floorboards. The engine, he said, was in fine shape, and no doubt it was, for Duncan was an excellent mechanic. But you have to have something to put an engine in, not this collection of green metal lace and sprung springs; and on moving day that year, without a word, Duncan had left it sitting in front of the house and driven off in the U-Haul. His grandfather pretended not to notice. He was a tactful man.

   He lived in his own tiny, circular world within their larger one. While they moved up and down the eastern seaboard, made their unaccountable decisions, took up their strange acquaintances and then lost them and forgot them, Daniel Peck buttoned his collarless shirt and fastened his pearl-gray suspenders and surveyed his white, impassive face in the bedroom mirror. He wound his gold watch. He tidied his bed. He transformed even his journeys, the most uncertain part of his life, into models of order and routine and predictability. For Justine was always with him, he always had the window seat, she read her National Geographic, they carried on their spasmodic, elliptical conversations over the noise of the road. Now they had to ride the buses more and more often, since that was all most towns had these days. They would take long circuitous routes in order to join up someplace, somehow, with a railroad, and even then it was usually Amtrak, a garish untrainlike train where nothing went right, where certainly Caleb had never set foot in his life. But still Daniel traveled calm and expressionless, his hands on his knees, a ten-dollar bill pinned inside his undershirt, and his granddaughter's hat brim comfortingly steadfast in the right-hand corner of his vision.

   They were drawing close to what's-its-name, Caro Mill. He noticed people rising to put their coats on, and lifting suitcases down from the rack.

   He noticed within himself a sudden feeling of emptiness. So they were back again, were they? He sighed. Justine looked up again from her magazine.

   "We didn't get much done," he told her.

   "Why, no."

   To her it didn't matter. She thought he felt the same, he had ridden content beside her for so many years now. But lately he had had a sense of impatience, as in the old days when he first began his search. Did that mean he was drawing close to Caleb? Once he almost asked her outright for a reading from her cards-ridiculous business. Of course he had stopped himself in time. Now he stared bleakly out the window at a jumble of service stations and doughnut shops. "So this is where we're headed," he said.

   "What?"

   "It's not much of a place to come back to."

   "Oh-" said Justine, and then something else he couldn't catch, but he knew it would be cheerful. Justine did not seem to be easily disappointed. Which was fortunate. Whereas he himself was leaden with disappointment, sinking fast. He felt there was something hopeless about the deep orange sunset glowing beyond an auto junkyard. "Grandfather?"

   Justine asked, in her most carrying tone. "Are you all right?"

   "Yes, certainly."

   The bus wheezed past a dismal hotel with tattered windowshades. It stopped in front of the Caro Mill Diner. Place couldn't have a regular terminal, no. Out they had to climb, in the middle of the street. The driver did not so much as give Justine a hand down the steps, or either of the other ladies; Daniel had to do it. He touched his temple for each one in turn as he let go of her arm. "Why, thank you," one lady told him.

   The other didn't say a word, or else he missed it.

   In front of the diner sat the Ford, three feet from a hydrant, battered and dusty and bearing a long new dent in the rear bumper. He studied the damage. In the old days people left notes about such things, giving their names and telephone numbers. Not any more. When he finally climbed into the car he said, "Conscience has vanished."

   "Excuse me?"

   Justine looked at him, one hand outstretched toward her own door which was flapping open and snarling traffic. "What's vanished?"

   "Conscience, I said. They dent your bumper and don't even leave a note."

   "Perhaps I," said Justine, and something else.

   "No, if you had done it I would have noticed. Besides, you've had this week's accident." His little joke. He laughed, covering his mouth with his fist to turn it into a cough.

   Then, wham! He was jarred and knocked into the windshield. Aches and pains started up all over, instantly. It seemed that someone had reached down a gigantic hand and flung him like a doll. "Grandfather?" Justine asked. There was a long red welt on the inside of her arm, and a few dots of blood. Just past her, a car had stopped and a man was climbing out.

   And where the door had been swinging open there was nothing now at all, just clear blank air and then the man's angry face. The man was shouting but all his words were a blur. It didn't matter; Daniel was just relieved to see the cause of his shake-up. Of course, a door torn off! Yet he continued to feel disoriented. When the man had driven away, and Justine stepped out to drag the door to the trunk and heave it in, he was still so dazed that he didn't offer to help. He watched numbly as she slid behind the wheel again. "At least we're well ventilated," she told him. A strange thing to say, or perhaps he had misunderstood. He wished he were home. He raced through the hallways of his mind calling out for Laura, his father, Caleb, Margaret Rose. But really he should never have married Margaret Rose. A shared background was the important thing. If he had not been such a fool for her chuckling laugh and the tender, subtle curve at the small of her back he would have made a more sensible choice, a person he had known all his life. Who was that little girl who used to come visiting with her parents? Melissa, Melinda? But he had wanted someone new and surprising. A terrible mistake. How he hated Margaret Rose! The thought of her made him grind his teeth. He would like to know where she was now so that he could do something dreadful to her, humiliate her in front of all her fancy, tinkling friends. But no, she was dead. He was so disappointed to remember. As usual she had done something first, run ahead of him laughing and looking back at him over her shoulder, and for once he could not refuse to follow.

   "Once you're alive, there's no way out but dying," he told Justine.

   She looked over at him.

   "You've set a thing in motion, you see."

   "It's like being pregnant," said Justine. Of course she couldn't really have said that. His ears were bad. His mind was bad. He was going to have to get a hold of himself. He straightened his back and looked out the window, a respectable elderly gentleman admiring the view as they rattled homeward.

   Meg Peck and the Reverend Arthur Milsom were sitting in the living room waiting for Meg's parents. Or Arthur was sitting; Meg kept moving around.

   First she chose the armchair because she wanted to look proper and adult.

   Then she thought it was more natural to sit next to Arthur on the couch.

   They were about to ask permission to get married; what would they be doing across the room from each other?

   Arthur had on his clerical collar, which wasn't absolutely required but it looked very nice. He was a young, pale, tense man, small but wiry.

   When he was nervous he cracked his knuckles and his brown eyes grew so dark and sober that he seemed to be glaring. "Don't be nervous," Meg told him, sitting back down on the couch. She reached over and took his damp hand.

   The visit had been planned for weeks. The first Monday after she turned eighteen, he said, he would come talk to her parents. (Monday was a slow day at the church.) They had worked it out by letter. It was Arthur's feeling that Duncan was the important one, but as Meg pointed out they needed Justine there to smooth things over. For certainly Duncan would be at his sharpest. He didn't like Arthur. (How could anyone not like Arthur?) What they hadn't counted on was Justine's vanishing, taking Grandfather on one of his trips. Now there was no telling when she would be back, and meanwhile Duncan was coming home from work at any minute.

   They would have to handle him alone after all.

   Meg always thought of her parents as Duncan and Justine, although she didn't call them that. It might have been due to the way they acted. They were not very parent-like. She loved them both, but she had developed a permanent inner cringe from wondering how they would embarrass her next.

   They were so-extreme. So irresponsible! They led such angular, slapdash lives, always going off on some tangent, calling over their shoulders for her to come too. And for as long as Meg could remember she had been stumbling after, picking up the trail of cast-off belongings and abandoned projects. All she really wanted was to live like other people.

   She tried to keep the house neat, like her friends' houses, and to put flowers in the vases and to hide, somehow, whatever tangle of tubes and electrical wires Duncan was working on at the moment. But then it seemed so hopeless when she knew how soon they would be moving on. "We're nomads," Justine told her, "think of it that way"-as if making it sound romantic would help. But there was nothing romantic about this tedious round of utility deposits, rental contracts, high school transcripts and interrupted magazine subscriptions. "He's ruining our lives!" she told Justine. Justine looked astonished. "But Meggie darling, we can't be the ones to say-" Then Meg's anger would extend to her mother, too, who was so gullible and so quick to give in, and she closed herself up in her room (if they were in a house where she had a room) and said no more.

   She kept herself occupied with sewing, or pasting pictures in her scrapbook full of model homes-French windows and carpeted kitchens and white velvet couches. She straightened up her closet with all her shoes set side by side and pointing in the same direction. She ironed her own dresses, as she had since she was nine. (Justine thought there was no point to ironing, as long as things were clean.) At the age of ten she had baked her first cake, which everyone admired but no one ate because they were too busy rushing off somewhere; they seemed to live on potato chips from vending machines. Nothing ever worked on a schedule. She was encouraged to bring her friends home at any hour of the day or night.

   "This family is not a closed unit," Duncan told her-apparently his only rule, if you could call it that. But how could she bring friends when her parents were so certain to make fools of themselves? "Oh, I just love your folks," girls were always saying, little dreaming what agony it would be to have them for their own. For Justine might be found barefoot and waving her dirty playing cards, or sitting at the kitchen table with three or four unsuitable friends, or racing about looking for her broken straw carry-all in order to go to the diner whose food she preferred to her own. She had a high-handed, boisterous way of acting sometimes and she was likely to refer to Duncan publicly as "Meg's second cousin," her idea of a joke. And Duncan! Spouting irrelevant, useless facts, thinking out loud in startling ways, leaving her friends stunned and stupid-looking. His idea of a joke was to hang idiotic newspaper and ladies' magazine pages all over the house, bearing what he thought were appropriate messages. On Justine's birthday he pasted up a bank ad saying WE'RE INCREASING OUR INTEREST, and after Meg spent too much money on a dress (only because she wanted to look like the other girls for a change, not all homemade and tacked together) she found a page Scotch-taped to her closet door:

   HAVE YOU EVER HAD A BAD TIME IN LEVI'S?

   Then she had snatched up the page and stalked in to where Duncan sat inventing a new keyboard arrangement for the typewriter. "Act your age!"

   she told him. But when he looked up his face was so surprised and unguarded, and she saw that he really was aging, there were dry lines around his eyes and two tiny crescents left by his wide, dippy smile. So she laid the paper down gently, after all, and went away defeated.

   Now she sighed, remembering, and Arthur squeezed her fingers. "In an hour this will all be over," he told her.