“I’m moving.”
“You are?”
She looked at the back seat. It was like him to leave his clothes behind and take his box of tools and scrap metal.
“But Duncan,” she said, “what are we going to do without you?”
“You’ll manage.”
“What if we need you for something? Where will we find you?”
By now other members of the family were straggling onto Great-Grandma’s porch. She could tell by the look he flashed over her shoulder. “Bye, Justine,” he said. “I’ve already got a place, beside that bookstore on St. Paul, but don’t tell the others.”
“But Duncan—”
“Bye, Justine.”
“Bye, Duncan.”
At first the family assumed he would be home in no time. It was only his age. Everybody eighteen expected deep things of people, but it never lasted. Yet the days stretched on and there was no word of him. They began to question Justine more closely. “He’s all right, he’s got a place to stay,” was what she had said earlier, but now that wasn’t enough. Had he told her where? Because this was not some childhood game any more, surely she was mature enough to realize that. Wasn’t she?
But she had promised Duncan.
Aunt Lucy said Justine was cruel and selfish. Justine’s mother said there was no call for that sort of talk, and then Aunt Lucy broke down and cried. “Now look here. Get a hold of yourself,” the grandfather said, which made her turn on him. Why couldn’t a person let loose a little, after all? Where was the sin? How come a forty-four-year-old woman didn’t have a right to cry in her own house, and state her feelings as she pleased, without a bunch of Pecks crowding around telling her she was not sufficiently dignified, and elegant, and tasteful, and respectable?
“Why, Lucy Hodges!” said Aunt Sarah.
Aunt Lucy gave her a look of pure hatred, there was no other way you could put it.
Justine was miserable. She would much rather tell and be done with it. But even if the grownup rules were different, Duncan was still playing by the old ones and he would be furious if she told. She hoped he would come home by himself—“turn himself in” was how she thought of it. Or that Uncle Two, strolling the Hopkins campus with false nonchalance during class break, would run across Duncan on his own. But Duncan didn’t come and he wasn’t seen on campus, and Uncle Two didn’t want to ask at the Dean’s office outright and involve other people in family matters. “You owe it to us to tell, Justine,” he said. His face was tired and gaunt and there were shadows under his eyes. Aunt Lucy wasn’t speaking. Even the cousins looked at Justine with a new edginess. How had she got herself into this? All she wanted was for the family to be happy together. That was the only reason she had run after Duncan in the first place.
She felt like someone who takes a single short step on solid ice and then hears a crack. She was halfway onto a drifting floe, one foot pulling out to sea and the other still on shore.
Then her grandfather said, “Have you been to see him?”
“Oh, I don’t think he’d like me to, Grandfather.”
“Why not? You’re his cousin.”
“I know.”
“Yes, well,” her grandfather said, and he pulled at his nose. “Well, never mind that. Go anyway. It’s the only way we’ll get any peace around here.”
“Go visit him?”
“You didn’t promise not to do that, did you? Go ahead. Don’t worry, nobody will follow you.”
But Justine half hoped someone would follow. Then life could get back to normal.
She knew the address because she had often gone with Duncan to the bookshop he mentioned—a cluttered place with creaky floorboards and great tilting stacks of used technical books. To the left of the shop was a paper sign, orange on black, saying ROOMS. When she opened the door she found narrow wooden steps, and at the top of the steps a dark hall with a toilet at the end. The doors reminded her of school, all thickly painted with scuffproof brown and marked off with curly metal numbers. But she should have brought a flashlight to read the nameplates by. She moved down the hall very slowly, hunching her shoulders against a feeling of unknown things at the back of her neck, peering at the names scrawled on scraps of ruled paper or adhesive tape: Jones, Brown, Linthicum, T. Jones. No Peck. Only a door to her right with nothing at all, no name in the slot. And that, of course, would be Duncan.
She knocked. When he opened the door she held onto her hat, like someone who has just pressed a fun-house button with no notion of what to expect. But all Duncan said was, “Justine.”
“Hello,” she said.
“Was there something you wanted?”
“I’m supposed to see if you’re all right.”
“Well, now you’ve seen.”
“Okay,” she said, and turned to go.
“But you might as well come in, I guess. Since you’re here.”
His room was small and dingy, with stained wallpaper, a flapping torn shade, a speckled mirror, and a metal bed with a sagging mattress. Over in one corner was his cardboard box. He wore the clothes he had left home in, brown suit pants and a white shirt without a tie. He seemed thinner. “It doesn’t look as if you’re eating right,” Justine said.
“Is that what you came to tell me?”
“No.”
She sat down very delicately on the edge of the bed. She lifted both hands to her hat, making sure it was perfectly level. For some reason, Duncan smiled.
“Well!” she said finally.
Duncan sat down next to her.
“Your mother is really taking on, Duncan. She’s crying where everyone can see her. Your father is—”
“I don’t want to hear about that.”
“Oh. Well—”
“I know what they’re doing. I always know, I can tell, I can see as if I’m sitting there. They’re talking about someone in the outside world. They’re digging the moat a little deeper. They’re pointing out all the neighbors’ flaws and their slipping dentures and mispronunciations, they’re drawing in tighter to keep the enemy out. Why do you think my mother’s crying? Because she misses me? Did she say that? Think a minute. Did she? Did any of them? No. They’re worried I might be with the wrong kind of people. They’re upset to think a Peck is out there in the world someplace. I’ve lowered the drawbridge.”
“Oh no, Duncan—” Justine said.
“Everything they do is calculated to keep others at a safe distance. Everything. Look at your hat!”
Justine’s hands went up again, uncertainly.
“No, no, it’s fine. It’s a fine hat,” he told her. “But what are you wearing it for?”
“Why, I always—”
“Yes, but why? Did you ever take a good look around you? Only old ladies wear hats any more, outside of church. But every woman in our family, even little girls, they all wear hats even if they’re just off to the side yard for a breath of air. ‘A lady doesn’t go without a hat, my dear. Only common people.’ Common! What’s so uncommon about us? We’re not famous, we’re not society, we haven’t been rich since 1930 and we aren’t known for brains or beauty. But our ladies wear hats, by God! And we all have perfect manners! We may not ever talk to outsiders about anything more interesting than the weather but at least we do it politely! And we’ve all been taught that we disapprove of sports cars, golf, women in slacks, chewing gum, the color chartreuse, emotional displays, ranch houses, bridge, mascara, household pets, religious discussions, plastic, politics, nail polish, transparent gems of any color, jewelry shaped like animals, checkered prints … we’re all told from birth on that no Peck has had a cavity in all recorded history or lost a single tooth; that we’re unfailingly punctual even when we’re supposed to come late; that we write our bread-and-butter notes no more than an hour after every visit; that we always say ‘Baltimore’ instead of ‘Balmer’; that even when we’re wearing our ragged old gardening clothes you can peek down our collars and see ‘Brooks Brothers’ on the label, and our boots are English a
nd meant for riding though none of us has ever sat on a horse …”
He wound down like Great-Grandma’s old Graphophone, and slumped forward suddenly with his long hands drooping between his knees.
“But Uncle Two is so sad,” said Justine. “He wanders around the Homewood campus all day hoping to—”
“Justine. Will you please get out?”
She rose immediately, clutching her little suede purse. But in the doorway Duncan said, “Anyhow, thanks for coming.”
“Oh, you’re welcome.”
“I meant it, Justine. I’m sorry I … really, if you wanted to come back sometime I wouldn’t mind.”
“Well, all right,” Justine said.
Then of course when she got home everyone was furious with her, because she hadn’t found out one concrete fact. What was he living on? Where was he eating? Was he going to school? Who were his companions?
“I just know he’s taken up with some—trash, he does have such peculiar taste in friends,” Aunt Lucy said.
And all of them wondered at Justine’s sudden look of sorrow.
What Duncan was living on was a pittance paid him by a Hopkins professor. He was double-checking dry facts in a library, and then writing them into the blanks the professor had left in a very long, tedious book on paleobotany. He was eating saltines and peanut butter, washed down with a quart bottle of milk in his room. He had no companions at all, not even Glorietta, with whom he had had a terrible fight several months ago over her habit of saying “between you and I.” Eventually he was going to go very far away, perhaps to British Columbia, but at the moment it seemed he just couldn’t get up the energy. And no, he was not attending school any more. He was not even reading Dostoevsky, whose writing suddenly appeared to have the squirmy, eye-straining texture of plant cells. As a matter of fact, he thought he might be going crazy. He even liked the idea of going crazy. He waited for insanity as if it were some colorful character his parents had always warned him against, but every morning when he woke up his mind was the same efficient piece of machinery it had always been and he felt disappointed.
Several times a week, his cousin Justine would come bringing irritating, endearing gifts—a ridiculous pair of slippers, his striped bedspread from home, once his old blue toothbrush with Ipana caked in the bristles. Whenever he opened the door to her he felt deeply happy to see her thin, sweet face and her streamered hat, but before she had been there five minutes he wanted to throw her out. She had such a gift for saying the wrong thing. “Can I tell the cousins where you are? They want to come, too.”
“No. God.”
“Do you need any money?”
“I can take care of myself, Justine.”
“Grandfather gave me some to bring to you.”
“Tell him I can take care of myself.”
“But I can’t give it back to him, Duncan. He was so—he just pushed it into my hand all clumsy and secret. He pretended he wasn’t doing anything.”
“Change the subject.”
“Like in the old days when he gave out horehound drops.”
“Justine, I wish you would go now.”
She always went. But she always came back, too, and when she stood in his doorway again a few days later he was all the more touched by her stupid, comical persistence. From earliest childhood she had been his favorite cousin—maybe because she was a little more removed, a Mayhew, a Philadelphian, not quite so easy to know. But he was surprised that she would brave his dark stairs and his rudeness. Here she had always seemed so docile! He made a special effort for her, smoothing the spread and offering saltines from his roach-proof tin and suggesting she take her hat off, which of course she would not do. “Justine, I’m glad you came back,” he said.
“Why, thank you.”
“You may get on my nerves sometimes but at least you show things, you say things outright, you don’t feel it’s a sin. You were the only one to ask me not to go, the Sunday I left.”
“But Grandfather told me to do that,” Justine said.
Right away she had managed to get on his nerves again.
She always had an answer. She drove him up a wall. He reached the point where he would turn on her the moment she entered, letting loose a flood of arguments that he had been storing up. “You know what they’re like?” (There was no need to say whom he meant.) “You know who they remind me of? People choosing a number on a radio dial. The way they ignore anything that isn’t Peck, like flicking past stations that don’t concern them, just a split second of jazz or ballgames or revivalist ministers and they wince and move on, and settle finally on the one acceptable station that plays Mantovani. Nothing uncomfortable, nothing extreme, nothing they can’t tolerate …”
“They tolerate you at the Sunday dinner,” Justine said. “Really you were as rude as can be and they tried to see your side of it and act reasonable. Who are you to say they can’t talk about eggshells?”
Duncan said, “Nothing outside the family matters. Nobody counts if they’re not Pecks. Not even neighbors, not even Sulie. Why, Sulie’s been with us since our parents were children, but does anybody know her last name?”
“Boudrault.”
“Hmm?”
“She married old Lafleur Boudrault, the gardener.”
“Oh, details,” said Duncan.
“He died in nineteen forty.”
“Little church-lady Emily Post details and nothing underneath. And you’re just like them, Justine, you always will be. Who asked you to come here and clutter up my life?”
But when she was gone, her smell of warm grass hung in the air and the memory of her imperturbable Peck face. At night her chilly little voice ran on and on, arguing, reasoning, imposing logic, even in his dreams. He would wake and punch his flattened pillow and toss beneath the spread that carried her smell too, even from its brief stay in her arms. He wished she were there to argue with; then he wished she were there to apologize to; then he wished she were there to lay her long cool body next to his on the sagging mattress and hold him close all through the deep, steamy Baltimore night.
Justine was not herself; everybody noticed it. Even summer vacation didn’t seem to relax her any. She was strange and distant with her family. She began watching her aunts and uncles in a measuring way that made them uncomfortable. “What’s the matter with her?” her father said once, but his in-laws only smiled blankly; they did not believe in asking too many questions.
It seemed that they accepted Duncan’s absence now. Sometimes when Justine came back from visiting him they would forget to ask how he was. Or they would say, “See Duncan, did you?” and go on about their business. Even Aunt Lucy appeared resigned. But one day in August, a particularly hot Saturday morning, Aunt Lucy appeared on Great-Grandma’s front steps with a small electric fan. Justine was drying her hair outdoors and reading Mademoiselle. “Justine, dear,” said Aunt Lucy.
Justine looked up, with her mind still on her magazine. Her aunt wore the expression of a lady heading calm and smiling toward disaster.
“Justine, this is for Duncan,” Aunt Lucy said.
“What? Oh, a fan. He could use it.”
“Oh, I knew it! I’m so glad I—well, whenever you go to see him, then. Are you going today?”
“Today I’m going on a picnic with Neely. Tomorrow I might, though.”
“Don’t you think you might stop by this morning? Wouldn’t you be able to work it in?”
Aunt Lucy’s smile hesitated.
“Of course I could,” Justine said, and she took the fan from her aunt’s shaky hands.
It was not until she had parked in front of the bookshop that she noticed the little envelope dangling from the fan’s grid.
Duncan’s room was blasting with heat and he was so hot he seemed to have been oiled. He wore a grayish undershirt. His trousers were creased and limp. “Oh, it’s you,” was all he said, and then he sat back down on his bed and wiped his face with his balled-up shirt.
“Duncan, I brought you
a fan from your mother.”
“You’ve been telling her about my room.”
“No, I haven’t. She just guessed you would need this.”
“What’s that in the envelope?”
“I don’t know.”
He broke the string that tied it and pulled out a folded note. First he read it silently and then he groaned and read it aloud.
Dear Duncan,
I am taking the liberty of sending you the fan from my bedroom, now that it is so warm.
Everyone is well although I myself have had a recurrence of those headaches. Just a little tension, the doctor says, so I keep my chin up!
Your father has been working very …
“What about the fan from my room?” Duncan said. “There is one, you know.”
“She gave you her own to show she cares, she didn’t know how else to put it,” said Justine.
“None of them do. Oh, you can tell who she married into. She’s just like all the rest of them now. Too little said and too much communicated, so that if you fight back they can say, ‘But why? What did I do?’ and you won’t have any answer. It all takes place in their secret language, they would never say a thing straight out.”
“But that’s tact. They don’t want to embarrass you.”
“They don’t want to embarrass themselves,” Duncan told her.
She said nothing.
“Isn’t that right?”
“Probably it is,” she said. “But so is the other. There isn’t any right and wrong. I keep looking at them, trying to decide. Well, everything you say is true but then so is everything I say. And what does it matter, after all? They’re your family.”
“You know who you sound like? Aunt Sarah, Justine. You’re going to grow up an old maid. Or you’ll marry a stick like Neely and have him change his name to Peck. I can see it coming. I can see it in that flat straight face of yours, just watch.”
But he had gone too far. Even he must have known that. When Justine turned away from him, fumbling for something in her purse, he said, “Anyway!” He jumped up and started pacing the floor. “Well, anyway, tell me all the news,” he said.