The Excellent Lombards (14 page)

11.

My Mother Is Right

A
s my mother had predicted, there came an end to the Stephen Lombard era. In that next spring his so-called sabbatical was over, Langley no doubt offering him a plum position. I alone knew that he had somehow proved to the CIA that he could successfully insert a battery into his alarm clock. Even if Stephen was merely the writer of spy manuals his work would be plentiful. The first World Trade Center bombing had already occurred, those years a time when agents were brushing up on their Arabic and being redirected. We later considered that maybe he had gone to try to prevent everything that was going to happen, listening in on phone conversations, attempting to avert the tide of history.

It was my mother who announced his departure, coming to the table with the pot filled with butternut squash risotto, cookbooks by a tyrannical Italian woman her new enthusiasm. In our neighborhood noodles had not yet transitioned to pasta, all of us resisting the change, lobbying for regular old macaroni and cheese rather than bucatini with tomato and pancetta. She had stood obediently stirring the mail-order arborio rice for twenty-three minutes without saying a word. It was when she set the pot in front of us that she said, “Stephen is leaving.”

“He’s what?” my father said.

“He’s leaving Gloria, I guess is more to the point. He already returned his library books. Thirty dollars of overdues.”

“You waived his fee,” William said, as if it were an order.

“Sadly, yes.”

Her nonchalance about the departure, her dwelling on the details was her way of saying,
Told you so
.

“Why would he go now?” My father asked the basic question. “His sabbatical isn’t over yet. He was going to be here through June.”

“I didn’t interrogate him,” my mother said.

“What about Gloria?” William asked the other fundamental question.

“He can’t go,” I said.

“Why, really, would he stay.” My mother’s remark did not seem to be an actual question. William and I would have liked to know how he could leave the kittens, and anyway hadn’t he been wanting to quit his CIA job, get out of that racket? Why wouldn’t he stay for another harvest when he knew we needed him? He’d been devoting himself to reading and therefore weren’t there still books he wanted to check out?

My father shook his head slowly. “Gloria,” he murmured. “Oh, Gloria.”

“Yes,” my mother said, as if that was an answer.

We thought of Stephen bundling everything he owned into his duffel bag, all of his life in that lump, and going to a city like Cairo, a city so thick with people and cars you had to bribe a policeman to get yourself across the street. Or he’d be locked away in a compound in Saudi Arabia, or stuck in a hovel in Africa. He obviously should not go anywhere. He was a gifted and dedicated apple picker, probably as capable as my father and maybe faster than Sherwood. With his tremendous wingspan and grace he could lean and twist to get into a jungly place where the largest, most perfectly ripe apple hung on its thin stem. While everyone else was knocking apples down accidentally you never heard the
th-whump th-whump
from his tree. And he was swift, running up and down the ladder, a picker who always kept in mind that time was marching on, the cold winds were on the way, the winter snows upon us.

My father, his thick hair in its messy weave, that high hat above his wonderfully lean face, the delicate knobs of his cheekbones, his short dignified nose, and his eyes that were sometimes green and sometimes, no, we thought blue—he finally made the pronouncement: “Stephen should stay. There is no reason for him to leave.”

My mother froze in her pop-eyed amazement. “You do understand, Jim,” she was able to say, “you do understand he cannot do that.”

“Why not?” I said.

“Because.”

“Because why?” William asked.

“Because,” she said evenly, “it would be difficult for him to work alongside the present management. How exactly would he fit in?”

“There’s a place for him,” my father insisted. “He knows that.”

“I’m sorry.” My mother shook her head as if she truly wanted to apologize. “I just don’t see Stephen leaping into the operation, taking any kind of charge. For one, this isn’t something that Sherwood wants. At least that’s my guess. Anointing the little brother who, in his mind, in his exceptional mind, is the goof-off. Which is terribly funny, when you think about it. If he stayed on as a picker—well, being part of the crew is not exactly a career move.”

“He could stay,” William said meekly, doing what he could for our father.

“He’s Adam and Amanda’s uncle,” I reminded the table, the trump card, Stephen’s title surely winning the day.

William said, “He should not go.”

Stephen hadn’t been a child, not really, not in a way we could believe in despite all his stories. But what if—what if, beyond our poor powers to imagine, he actually had been young? For the discussion’s sake, let’s just say he had once been four or five or six. How, then, could he leave? We were at once certain that Stephen was the sorriest person in the world. Through dinner and even into dessert we could almost—I say
almost
—understand why he’d blown out the pumpkin visitors. They had come to the cottage but he couldn’t have them. They weren’t his anymore. He had gone away and lost the ability to recognize them, all of his life now and forever a poverty. We wanted to call him or maybe even run to the cottage to say,
Don’t go, Stephen! You don’t have to leave us! We forgive you about the pumpkin visitors, we do.
This sudden generosity ran thickly in us.

The night before his departure for Washington, DC, my mother had a long-planned party for her librarian friends from Chicago. We did not like her parties with book lovers because for a few days beforehand she banished us from the kitchen. It was as if her favorite authors were coming, or real celebrities. Then, once the librarians sat down to dinner, they’d go into their ridiculous swoons over the novels they adored, and they’d end up arguing about who was great and who wasn’t, the professionals growing increasingly noisy and high-spirited while the spouses glumly ate their food. That night, my mother was just about to recite for the assembly what, in her opinion, was a perfect description of a human being, her performance piece for special occasions. In college she had committed an entire page of Edith Wharton to memory, a paragraph devoted to the physical description of a single character. She was about to begin with, “
Mr. Raycie was a monumental man
.”

Right before she opened her mouth my father made a face that was a problem for both of them. He didn’t just close his eyes. He shut them hard, he shut them tight, not, however, as if he were going to have a restful little pause. No, in order, it seemed, to blot her out. It was hard for him when she was that animated, when she was that monstrously joyful. Maybe there was a Lombard gene that made it difficult for the men in the family to endure too much enthusiasm or energy, so that even someone as quiet as Gloria was excessive for Stephen. My mother happened to notice her husband as he was bracing himself, right before he shut his eyes, just before the wince sealed his face. That wall against her seemed to have a specific temperature; for her, it, his very head, that wall, was hot. So hot it scalded her eyeballs, so hot she had to scrabble for her empty plate, blindly grabbing at it to save it from the heat. Instead of rescue, though, she raised it, she turned her whole body from the table, from him, the plate in the air, for a moment still whole. And then with all her strength she brought the china down, the blue-and-white pagoda scene smashing into slivers at her feet.

The librarians looked at my mother. They looked at my father, and next not at anyone. “Whoops,” Mrs. Lombard cried.

“Whoooa, Nellie!” one of the women brayed, the oldest joke in my mother’s book.

Even before one of the husbands said, “Time to go!” my father was leaping up to fetch the coats.

William and I had already gone through the D.A.R.E. program at school and we knew our mother was a real true Alcoholic, and that the glass or two of wine she had at dinner on many evenings, and the three she had at her parties, were going to ruin her life and eventually kill her. My father occasionally joined her but usually he drank cider so he was safe. When there was half a bottle corked on the counter we sometimes poured the rest of it down the drain, to save her from herself. She made the excuses that Alcoholics make, the kind of thing Officer Radewan at school had warned us about. My mother insisted that red wine was good for the heart, that it reduced low-density lipoproteins and was also instrumental in reducing breast cancer—at least some doctors thought so. “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” she’d say, “wine is food. It’s part of a meal. William, do not look so sad. I’m not in danger. Get this out of your heads, you two, that wine is evil, will you please? If you don’t, I’ll really have to become a drunk.”

She said that if we wanted to see what an Alcoholic looked like we should inspect the postmaster more carefully, or her patron, Mrs. Prinks. But we were not fooled. We usually forgot during the day that she had an addiction, a
disease
, but at dinner we again remembered, her affliction on full display. Officer Radewan had shown the class a photograph of an Alcoholic’s liver, the crusty, shriveled black slab, our mother probably already secretly on the list for an organ transplant. When we recalled that she was an Alcoholic we knew that her occasional violence was first and primarily the result of the wine. But even if she was merely drinking water the closing of my father’s eyes, the blotting-out, always made her temporarily lose her mind. Sometimes we did think he could have closed his eyes a little less firmly, that he didn’t have to look as if he were about to have a knife plunged into his chest just because she was going to recite Edith Wharton. We didn’t know that our parents were objecting to the other’s self, that enormous hulking thing each possessed, that a self of course is not inconsequential.

The day after the party my mother went off to work, still furious with her husband. Stephen, all set for Washington and beyond, had asked my father for a ride to the airport. Gloria, he said, probably wouldn’t be equal to the task. We had to go along to pick up the secret agent because on the way to the city we were hopping off at our friends, the Plumlys.

My father parked on the gravel down the slope from Gloria’s cottage. We got out of the car thinking to quickly play with the cats on the porch while the luggage was loaded, while Stephen and Gloria had their smoochy good-byes. When we all got up the little hill Stephen opened the door. He leaned out, saying to my father, “Got a small problem here. A glitch.”

“You all right?”

“My passport is not, ah, it’s not available.”

Gloria appeared next to him, her face a reddish blotch, the puffiness of her eyes magnified by her glasses. She crossed her arms over her chest and stood staring as well as she was able at Stephen, her lids so swollen her irises were hardly visible.

My father talked softly to her. Stephen went back inside but she remained guarding the entrance, now staring at my father’s lips, staring in a determined blank way, as if to say that every word coming from his mouth had nothing to do with her. He made simple statements. “You know you can’t hold him here.” “It’s time.” “In a few minutes you’ll go and get the passport.” “Gloria, please, now, get the passport.”

His lulling, gentle demands finally prompted her to disappear into the house, the clock ticking away to the airplane’s departure. Stephen returned to the door, he and my father standing there not saying anything. When she came back she slapped the document into her lover’s hand.

“Thanks,” he said.

“No.” She shook her head and began to cry. “No!” She tried to get the passport out of his clutches even though she’d just given it to him.

My father grabbed Stephen’s arm and pulled him onto the porch. “It’s time,” he said again.

“No!” This was a crooked noise, jagged, not at all a Gloria kind of sound. She pitched herself at Stephen, as if by sticking hard she might be able to go along with him to Washington. Even though she didn’t look or sound or behave like herself, so that it seemed private, these various aspects of her, we set the cats down and gawked.

My father yanked Stephen toward the car. Gloria jerked him by the other arm toward the house. Stephen had a felt hat with a ribbon around it, the kind of hat fathers wore to work in the 1950s, which made him especially look like someone who should not be at the center of a tug-of-war. In one brilliant motion my father both let go of his cousin and plucked Gloria from Stephen’s coat. He held her, her back to his chest while she screamed and kicked and flapped her arms, trying to scratch. “Go,” my father cried to Stephen over her commotion, “get in the car right now.”

Stephen stumbled down the slope of the yard holding his hat to his head with one hand, and in the other the long green sausagey duffel. He threw it in the back of the van, dove in after it, and locked the doors. To us my father said, “Find Mama.”

The library wasn’t far off. This errand was more important than being the instruments of the pumpkin visitors. We had rarely been so excited and certainly never felt so essential as we ran, as we steamed into the library to the circulation desk. When she saw us she instantly intuited the general circumstances. She called to Hildegard Bushberger to keep an eye on the place, and somehow, in her clogs, she galloped across the baseball diamond, through the stand of cedars, and up the incline to the cottage. She took Gloria from my father’s arms—Gloria was beginning to get tired out, bent over and sobbing—and led her into the house while my father hurried to the car to drive Stephen away. In the heat of the moment we had all forgotten that we were supposed to go to the Plumlys’ house.