The Excellent Lombards (10 page)

I was standing on the first step of the ladder, starting to cry, handing him up the sheet. “Nothing,” I whimpered.

He pulled himself to sitting and read the questions out loud:

What year were you born?

Where did you go to high school?

What is your profession?

What historical events have you lived through?

What do you consider the greatest invention of your time?

What is the most interesting thing about your town?

William said, “You didn’t ask a single question?”

“I couldn’t. She—she talked.”

“What do you mean?” he said again.

“She talked and talked. More than Dolly. More than anyone, more than Mrs. Bushberger. She kept talking. She has a sort of lisp. A sort of lisp, a lisp.”

He snapped his fingers in my face. “Wake up!”

I cried harder because maybe I had been hypnotized. I had almost thought during the interview that May Hill was something like a normal person but I had to come back, come back, back to my understanding of her true nature.

“Imp! You must have gotten some information. You must know some of the answers.” He read again, “
What is your profession?
”

“
What is your profession?
” I echoed.

“Hmmm,” he logically said. Even though May Hill was a part of our family the question was unanswerable. We felt like numskulls but justified; indignant, even, about our ignorance. Because our bafflement was all her fault. She was like a hired man but she was also like an English gentleman, owning property and working sometimes. Or you could say she was a mechanic in a garage, but then again the stock market had made her wealthy. At least that’s what my mother thought.

I didn’t tell William about the photograph of the nephew. He kept rereading the questions, both of us thinking to ourselves about the answers. “You can interview Pa,” he said to me. “Or someone else. How about Gloria?”

“Gloria?”

“Why not?”

While I knew those people were possible candidates a curious thing had been happening while he’d been repeating the questions. So that the next day, when Amanda came over after school and while she lay on the floor and made Sculpey animals, I typed up the interview. It wasn’t hard to do after all. Because May Hill was old and strange I wrote that she was born at the turn of the century. A twist of a doorknob, the turn of a century, May Hill walking over a threshold and entering a new time. Most of my story—for as it happened it was a story more than an interview—was about May Hill’s father being trapped in the silo, in his case the door closing behind him, no way out of that dark round chamber, the smooth walls, the sink of silage, the gasping as he suffocated. His time over and done. May Hill, a girl, knowing already that her face and her big body would never improve, was standing outside, down below, screaming. Which was why in general she talked so little now, having long ago exhausted herself while her father slowly perished.

That’s the answer I’d wanted from her when I’d asked the question in the interview about her father’s death. I would have liked to have been a real reporter. What were you doing while your father struggled to breathe? Who found him? Did you want to see what he looked like? And then right away, did your mother march to the barn and hang herself? Mrs. Kraselnik always instructed us to write using detail.

She was named May Hill, I wrote, because she was born on a cold winter day, and her parents wished her to know that spring would come. As I was writing, without realizing I began to want May Hill’s story to contain some bit of happiness. It probably wasn’t possible to bring a suitor into the assignment, Mr. Gilbert who kept exotic reptiles maybe a logical man friend? Or Melvin Pogorzelski, the big reader who was writing his novel in the back room of the library, day after day? No. But there could be someone living whom she felt devoted to. So I wrote another something that was perhaps not exactly nonfiction. I wrote that she had a picture in her parlor of a beautiful boy and that every day she closed her eyes and prayed to him, even though he wasn’t a god but a person. For extra credit I thought I might someday write a sequel, a tale about May Hill walking into the manor house for the first time as the orphan. That would be a scene to think about, everyone staring at May Hill, learning that she was going to be the new sister.

Without showing my work to Amanda I penned our names on top of the five-page project, mine in bright purple, hers in standard black, and the next day handed in our assignment to Mrs. Kraselnik.

8.

Meanwhile Stephen Lombard Halfway Moves in with Gloria

T
his was how we knew Stephen Lombard was a certifiable spy. A few summers before the Gloria romance he’d been visiting us. He had come upon William and me in the upper barn, and for some time, without our realizing it, he’d watched us. It was a cool rainy afternoon, no dust streaming in through the slatted boards, the stinging, chaffy heat at bay, the nocturnal creatures, the raccoons and mice and bats, burrowed into the bales or tucked up in the beams, far above us.

That day, first, Sherwood had appeared, as he sometimes did when we played in the barn, calling out
Hallo, Francie, hallo, William
, respectfully announcing himself. He’d taken a swing or two on the rope that hung from the ceiling, jumping onto the wooden seat from the high place, the endless long sweep through the air, Sherwood yipping. We couldn’t believe it, always we could hardly laugh, the rope or the beam, both, creaking, Sherwood sounding like a Native American. “That’s enough for an old man,” he’d say before he went off back to work. Or he might stop to tell us the gravity-defying stunts he’d done when he was a teenager. And we’d say, “Really?”

And he’d reply modestly, “Oh, we did all kinds of hijinks up here.”

Then he’d go away, and we’d begin. We could do hijinks, too. In our games I was the royalty and William the servant. He liked this arrangement because it was then his task to make my splendid life possible, or he could save me from the cruelty of my captors with a contraption he’d have to build. Where Sherwood’s inventions didn’t always work, William’s creations usually delivered water to me or helped me slide down from a high perch.

That afternoon after Sherwood left, I was in my bower of hay, demanding that the two kittens keep their doll bonnets on properly while William worked on his pulley system. We were both talking to ourselves, William explaining his threading process, and I suppose to the cats I was deploring the king for depriving me of food and water.

How long had Stephen been watching us from just inside the granary door? Practicing his spy craft. I went on chattering about my plight even after William had straightened up, staring at the tall man in the shadows. The man with a telephoto lens. When at last I understood that we were being observed I, too, stood still, a scream lodged in my throat. Did Stephen call out to assure us as an average citizen would have? No. He said nothing. For the first time I felt not just embarrassed to be a child, but ashamed. It didn’t seem possible to return to our private world after he went out through the granary door, although we did eventually gather ourselves back into the story. Stephen was nothing like Sherwood coming to have a swing. Stephen was not a yipper, for one, and for another, he had not called out
Hallo
.

Fast-forward a few years, to the summer of Gloria. At dinner one night our mother, having drunk perhaps more than her usual one or two glasses of wine, said so merrily, “We all think you’re a spy, Stephen.”

William poked me under the table. I nodded,
Yes, yes, Stephen is a spy. Remember the time in the barn?
He was slippery in his loyalties and he was probably a practiced liar, we alone understanding the extent of his capacity to infiltrate.

My father laughed at his ridiculous wife. “Not true,” he said to his cousin.

Stephen was in the middle of putting a spoonful of bright green pesto in the center of his glossy noodles. He raised only his eyes, giving my mother a long, keen look, his spoon in midair. He said, “Nellie.” The word chilled us, her name. No one would want to be interrogated by him. “I…am…not…a spy.”

“Okay, okay!” She laughed nervously, her hands up, as if to say,
Don’t shoot
.

To his noodles Stephen said, “If I could find another job that had the same benefits and vacation schedule, a job that offers a sabbatical every ten years, I’d do it.” He suddenly sounded tired.

“I wish you would,” my father said. “It would be good to have you home, really home again.”

We didn’t know what he meant by
home
. Was home for Stephen the entire United States or was it our town or the manor house or maybe—was it our house? His most particular home at the moment didn’t seem to be on the outskirts of the orchard with Gloria, although he’d taken his big duffel bag over to her cottage. Even after he’d moved he sometimes sat in our kitchen for hours after dinner, the last to leave for bed. He was not domesticatable, so said my mother, a word that had something to do with sleeping, eating, folding laundry nicely, picking wildflowers as a present. I’d come downstairs to find the two of them, my mother and Stephen, in quiet conversation at the table. Gloria and my father were long gone, talked out and sound asleep. My mother had once mentioned that Stephen was the kind of person who opened up to you when you least expected it, no knowing when he might reward you with a confidence. Seeing them there at first always gave me a shock: What if—what if time had wavered, backward, forward—what if everything was now the same except that Stephen, Stephen was our father?

During the day for the most part we were happy he was staying on to pick apples. The harvest was a wild living thing that you were trying to tame while all the while it was dragging you behind, arms out, flailing, in the chase. But here was the miracle: Despite the chaos, the lack of planning, the bad feeling between Sherwood and my father, there was also an overriding unity of purpose, a reverence for the family history, a love for the soil within the property lines. Despite Sherwood’s and Jim’s temperamental differences the apples grew. They were harvested, thousands of bushels a year. Money, real currency, flowed from the customers’ pockets into the sellers’ wallets and thereafter to the secret cardboard boxes and elsewhere, and finally, when my mother could get around to it, into the bank. No one else had time to do the deposit. There were weeks in the autumn when there was money everywhere, envelopes hidden in the clean laundry, in the cat food bin, in the sock drawer, the visible reward stashed away. Sherwood, permanently on guard in the manor house, slept with the grandfather’s shotgun by his bed, and May Hill always put a chair against the basement door to trip up the robber, the clatter the big alarm.

On the golden-and-blue afternoons the driveway filled with customers, whole families piling out of cars, to taste and decide, to load up their trunks with bushels of apples and pears, with cider and honey and knitting worsted from the sheep and white packages of lamb chops and legs and shoulders. The Ukrainian women from the city liked the kidneys and tongues, and the Yugoslavs had to butcher the animals themselves, in the back barn. There were plenty of people who felt, the minute they started down our long driveway, that they were returning to a bygone time. “Don’t ever change a thing,” they cried. “Don’t fix that shed,” they beseeched. “The old surrey is down there, isn’t it, and the Model A? We love this orchard, you guys. It’s real, it’s special, it’s—” They sometimes got teary. “Tracie, Lizzy, get in here once and take a whiff of the apple barn, oh Lord, this smell!” Years before those customers had come with their parents or their grandparents, and they were returning with their children. It was nature itself, nature at every level that forced the Lombard operation to work. And if Stephen Lombard, with his great height and long arms, his strength and his stamina, was on the crew, we should not mind that he was in our kitchen far into the night. We shouldn’t care at all that he slept into the morning and that he was sometimes still picking apples in the dark. We should try to be happy he was home.

After Mrs. Kraselnik handed back the interview I put it somewhere or other. She had given Amanda and me ninety-three points. One hundred percent for creativity. Eighty, that shame, for not following the rubric. One hundred for grammar and vocabulary. Not long after that assignment I came downstairs, somewhat walking in my sleep, looking for Butterhead, the old cat, and there Stephen was, not with my mother and not with my father, not with Gloria, who was tucked up in her cottage. Stephen was sitting by himself, staring at the darkness outside even though he wasn’t technically living with us anymore. The light was on over the stove, one dim light, not enough to see even your own reflection in the glass, Stephen looking, then, at nothing. Because I was not quite awake the dreamscape of our kitchen with Stephen in it didn’t seem especially frightening.

I came to the table and began to talk. I told him our farm stories, we, the real children, with our own tales. I mentioned the autumn afternoon when Julia Child, Julia herself, a very old lady, a giant, taller than May Hill, in a tweed skirt and a cardigan, a pooch of a belly, got out of her car along with her friends, the queen of cuisine happening by the Lombard Orchard. Mary Frances Lombard bagged up three pounds of Wealthy apples for her, no charge, a variety from the chef’s youth, an apple that made her raise her famous voice in exaltation. I was the only person in my class who knew Julia Child, I boasted. I said again that she was a giant.