In the fall of 1966, Luray found out she was pregnant again. She was not very happy about it. Money seemed scarcer than ever, the twins were getting to be a handful, and already the apartment was cramped. Caleb slept on the couch now, and the babies were in his old room. When he got up in the night he stumbled over blocks and wheeled toys and cold soggy diapers all the way to the bathroom, where likely as not Luray had shut herself in ahead of him. “Go away!” she would shout. “Go back to bed, you old skunk!”
One morning she went out all dressed up, leaving Roy to tend the café and Caleb to mind the babies. When she came back she told Caleb she had found him a place to move into. “Oh! Well,” Caleb said.
He had thought a couple of times himself about moving, but not so concretely. And then there was the money. “This café just can’t support two apartments, Luray,” he said.
“It’s not an apartment.”
“Oh, a room? Well, fine, that’ll be—”
“This is a place the county helps out with.”
Then she flashed Roy a sudden look, and Roy hung his head in that bashful way he had and his face got red. But still Caleb didn’t understand.
He understood only when they deposited him in the gray brick building with the concrete yard, with attendants squeaking in their rubber-soled shoes down the corridors. “But—Luray?” he said. Roy wandered off and looked at a bulletin board. The back of his neck was splotchy. Only Luray was willing to face Caleb. “Now you know they’ll take good care of you,” she told him. “Well, after all. It’s not like you were any real relation or anything.” She was balancing a baby on each arm, standing swaybacked against their weight—a thin, enormously pregnant woman with washed-out hair and cloudy skin. What could he say to her? There was no way he could even be angry, she was so dismal and pathetic. “Well,” he said. “Never mind.”
Though later, when the nurse told him he couldn’t keep his harmonica here, he did feel one flash of rage that shook him from head to foot, and he wondered if he would be able to stand it after all.
Now he had to hum to make his music. Unfortunately he had a rather flat, toneless voice, and a tendency to hit the notes smack dab instead of slithering around on them as White-Eye Ramford used to. Still, it was better than nothing. And as time went by he made a few acquaintances, discovered a dogwood tree in the concrete yard, and began to enjoy the steady rhythm of bed, meals, social hour, nap. He had always liked to think that he could get along anywhere. Also he did have visitors. Some of these old men had no one. He had Roy and Luray coming by once a month or more with their four little towheaded boys—Roy as young as ever, somehow, Luray dried and hollowed out. But she was very kind now. When the clock struck four and the matron shooed them from the visitors’ parlor Luray would reach forward to touch Caleb’s hand, or sometimes peck his cheek. “Now we’ll be coming back, you hear?” she said. She always said, “Don’t see us out, you sit right where you’re at and stay comfortable.” But he came anyway, out the steel door and across the concrete yard, to where the gate would clang shut in his face. He would wave through the grille, and Luray would tell her boys to wave back. And maybe halfway up the street, heading toward the bus stop, she would turn to smile and her chin would lift just as it used to, as if she were letting him know that underneath, she was still that sweet perky Luray Spivey and she felt just as bewildered as he did by the way things had worked out.
In his patched vinyl chair in the social room he hummed old snatches of song, joyous mournful chants for St. Louis and East St. Louis, Memphis and Beale Street, Pratt City and Parchman Farm. But it was a fact that he never hummed the “Stringtail Blues” at all, though White-Eye Ramford sang it continually in the echoing streets of his mind:
Once I walk proud, once I prance up and down,
Now I holds to a string and they leads me around …
The morning the letter came he had been sitting like this in the social room. He remembered that when the attendant tossed the envelope into his lap he had expected a good half hour, perhaps, of studying pictures of floral arrangements. (Altona Florists were his only correspondents.) Bouquets named “Remembrance,” “Friendly Thoughts,” and “Elegance,” which you could send clear across the continent without ever setting foot in a shop. But when he ripped open the envelope what he found instead was a typewritten letter of some sort. He checked the outside address. Mr. Caleb Peck, yes. All the postmark said was “U.S. Postal Service Md.” Whatever had happened to postmarks?
Maryland.
He shook the letter open. “Dear Caleb,” he read. He skipped to the signature. “Your brother, Daniel J. Peck, Sr.” A stone seemed to drop on his chest. But he was glad, of course, that his brother was still alive. He remembered Daniel with affection, and there were certain flashing images that could touch him even now, if he allowed them to—Daniel’s yellow head bent over a Schoolbook; the brave, scared look he sometimes gave his father; the embarrassed pride on his face when Maggie Rose came down the aisle in her wedding dress. Yet Caleb shrank in his vinyl chair, and glanced about the room as if checking for intruders. Then he read the rest of the letter.
It seemed that Daniel was inviting him to pay a visit. He was asking him to come to a place called Caro Mill. Caleb had never heard of Caro Mill. He found it difficult to imagine his brother anywhere but Baltimore. And when he pictured accepting the invitation he pictured Baltimore still, even with this letter before him—a streetcar rattling toward the sandy, shaded roads of Roland Park, a house with cloth dolls and hobbyhorses scattered across the lawn. Daniel descending the steps to welcome him, smiling with those clear, level eyes that tended to squint a little as if dazzled by their own blueness. Caleb smiled back, nodding gently. Then he started and returned to the letter.
He learned that his parents were dead, which of course he had assumed for many years. (Yet still he was stunned.) And the baby, Caroline, whom he had forgotten all about. But where was Maggie Rose, had she ever returned? Daniel neglected to say. Caleb raised his eyes and saw her small, dear, laughing face beneath a ribboned hat. But she would be an old lady now. She had grandchildren. Her sons were lawyers, her husband a judge. It was 1973.
Yet the language in this letter came from an earlier age, and the stiff, self-conscious voice of the young Daniel Peck rang clearly in Caleb’s ears. All the old burdens were dropped upon him: reproaches, forgiveness, reproaches again. An endless advancing and retreating and readvancing against which no counter-attack was possible. “You must surely have guessed …” “But we will let bygones be bygones.” But, “You were always contrary, even as a child, and caused our mother much …” Then Caleb reached the final paragraph, skimming rather than reading (so that none of it should really soak in). “To tell the truth, Caleb,” his brother said, and held out his hand and stood waiting. As in the old days, when after weeks of distance he would climb all the steps to Caleb’s room simply to invite him for a walk; or some other member of the family would, for they were all alike, all advancing and retreating too, and Caleb had spent far too many years belatedly summoning up his defenses only to have them washed away by some loving touch on his shoulder, some words in that secret language which, perhaps, all families had, but this was the only one Caleb had ever been able to understand. He was angry and then regretful; he rebelled against them all, their niggling, narrow ways, but then some homeliness in the turned-down corners of their mouths would pull at him; then he reached out, and was drowned in their airless warmth and burdened with reminders of all the ways he had disappointed them.
So he asked an attendant for writing paper, chafing and excited for the three hours it took her to bring it, but once it came the stony feeling weighed him down again and he found it impossible to form the proper words. Besides, his hands ached. His fingers would not grasp the pencil firmly. He folded the blank page and stuffed it in his pocket, where Daniel’s letter was. Days passed. Weeks passed. For a while his family infiltrated every thought he had, but eventually they faded, returning onl
y occasionally when he put on the coat that served as bathrobe and a rustle in the pocket cast a brief shadow over his morning.
For lunch there was chicken á la king on toast. After lunch came naptime. Wheelchair patients were laid out like strips of bacon on their beds, but most of the others—rebelling in little ways—wandered in the aisles or stood at the window or sat upright in bed in nests of thin, patched blankets. Caleb himself lay down but did not sleep. He was mentally playing the fiddle. Anyone watching closely could have seen the fingers of his left hand twitch from time to time or his lips just faintly move, uttering no sound. He was playing the “Georgia Crawl” and every note was coming just the way he wanted.
After naps they were supposed to stay in the social room till supper. Caleb, however, wandered out into the yard, and since he always went to the same place nobody tried to stop him. He sat on a bench beneath the little dogwood tree growing from a circle in the concrete. Its upper branches were dry and bare. Lower down, a few red leaves shook in a cold wind. Caleb turned up the collar of his raincoat and huddled into himself. Before long it would be winter and they wouldn’t let him come here any more. By next spring the tree might have died. He was not much of a nature lover, but the thought of sitting in utter blankness, unsheltered by even this cluster of dry twigs, made him feel exposed. He glanced around, suddenly wary. All he saw was a woman in a flat hat picking her way across the concrete.
Now visiting hours were well under way and outsiders would be everywhere, their unexpected colors turning the Home drabber than its residents had realized. Perhaps this one was lost. She moved toward him as if fording a river full of slippery stones. Her straw-colored hair, hanging gracelessly to her shoulders, made him think of the very young girls of his youth, but when she came closer he saw that she was middle-aged. She looked directly at him with a peculiarly searching expression. She held out her hand. “Caleb Peck?” she asked.
“Why, yes.”
He took the hand, although she was a stranger. He would go along with anything; he always had.
“I am Justine Peck.”
“Oh.”
He looked at her more closely, past the helter-skelter hat and the aging clothes to her sandy face, sharp nose, blue eyes. He would know her anywhere, he thought. (But he hadn’t.) A sad kind of shock went through him. He continued holding onto her bony hand.
“I am Daniel Peck’s granddaughter.”
“Oh yes. His granddaughter.”
“Whom he didn’t feel connected to,” she said.
“Yes, I seem to remember …”
He let go of her hand to reach toward his pocket, the one that rustled.
“I have bad news,” he heard.
His—niece? Great-niece. Sat beside him on the bench, light as a bird. He knew what she was going to say. “Daniel is dead,” he told her. How could he have awakened this morning so contented, not guessing what had happened?
“He had a heart attack,” she said.
He felt cheated and bitter. A deep pain began flowering inside him. His hand continued automatically to his pocket, found the letter and pulled it out. “But I hadn’t yet answered,” he said. “Eventually I was going to.”
“Well, of course.”
Which was not what he had been afraid she would say.
He opened out the letter, blinking through a mist, and smoothed it on the bench between them. Daniel’s typing was conscientious and stalwart and pathetic. This wasn’t fair; it was like having him die twice. “It isn’t fair,” he told Justine.
“It’s not. It’s not at all.”
She sat watching a pigeon while Caleb reread the letter. The margins wobbled and shimmered. Now everything came clear to him. He saw kinder, gentler meanings in Daniel’s words; the other meanings were no longer there. He understood the effort involved, the hesitations, searches for the proper phrase, false beginnings tossed in wastebaskets.
“I should have written,” he told Justine.
She went on watching the pigeon.
“It always seemed to work out with them that I didn’t do what I should have. Did do what I shouldn’t have.”
Her gaze shifted to him, transparent blue eyes whose familiarity continued to confuse him.
“How did he find me?” he asked her. Before, he had barely wondered.
“A detective did it,” said Justine,” but we’d been hunting for years.”
“I thought they would just forget about me.”
She started to say something, and stopped. Then she said, “I used to read the cards for you.”
“The—?”
“Fortune-telling cards.”
“Oh yes,” he said.
“I asked, would Grandfather ever locate you? The cards said yes. However there was always room for error, because Grandfather didn’t cut the cards himself. He wouldn’t have approved. I never thought of asking would he actually see you.”
Caleb folded the letter and put it back in his pocket. He was not sure what they were talking about.
“Uncle Caleb,” said Justine, “will you come home with me?”
“Oh well I—that’s very kind of you.”
“You know we’d love to have you. Duncan and I. Duncan is another grandchild, I married him. You’d like him.”
“Married him, did you,” said Caleb, unsurprised. He sniffed, and then blotted both eyes on the sleeve of his raincoat. “Well now,” he said. “Whose little girl are you?”
“Caroline’s.”
“Caroline’s? I thought she was the baby, I thought she died.”
“Only after she grew up,” said Justine. “Duncan is Uncle Two’s.”
“Two’s? Oh, Justin Two.”
He contemplated the pigeon, whose feathers reminded him of a changeable taffeta dress that Maggie Rose had once worn. Justin Two was the most demanding of all her children, he seemed to remember; the loudest and the shrillest, the most likely to interrupt a conversation. “Tell me,” he said, “is he still the same?”
“Yes,” said Justine, as if she knew what he meant.
He laughed.
Justine said, “Listen. You can’t stay here! I went to that office in there to ask for you and they said, ‘He’s out by the tree, but you’ve only got twenty minutes. Then visiting hours will be over,’ they said. I said, ‘But I’ve been traveling since yesterday! I am his great-niece Justine Peck and I’ve come all the way from Caro Mill, Maryland. I have to spend more than twenty minutes!’ ‘Sorry, Miss,’ they said, ‘rules are rules.’ You can’t stay in a place like this!”
“It’s true,” said Caleb, “they do like rules.”
“Will you come? We could leave this evening.”
“Oh, well you see they’d never let me do it,” Caleb said. “No. You weren’t the person who signed me in here, they’d never just let me … or if they did, there’d be so much paperwork. It would take some arranging. Perhaps several weeks before they would allow me to—”
“Allow you?” Justine said. “What, are you in prison?”
Caleb blinked and looked around him.
“Never mind, just come,” said Justine. “You already have your coat on. There’s nothing you want from inside, is there? We can go over the wall in back, where it’s lowest. They won’t even see us leave.”
“You mean—escape?” said Caleb.
“Won’t you just come away with me?”
People had been saying that to him all his life. He had still not learned to turn them down.
19
Every now and then Justine would catch a glimpse of Caleb—as he passed a doorway, or skimmed in and out of view in front windows while walking the porch—and she would mistake him for Grandfather Peck and her heart would leap. She had never managed to believe that some people truly will not be seen again. Look, there was that jutting head, the glint of silver hair, the long nose pinched white at the tip! But then she would notice his eyes. The shock of brown eyes in her grandfather’s face. Or she would call and he would answer instantly
, wincing if she spoke to him too loudly, which she was always doing, out of habit. Or his clothes gave him away—her grandfather’s, yes, but on Caleb they looked scruffy and poorly cut. She sank back, wherever she was, and Duncan looked at her curiously but said nothing.
Duncan was playing Battue now, moving yellow plastic disks among a triangle of pegs. For him it appeared to be another game of solitaire, not a puzzle; he had solved the puzzle years ago. The disks clicked steadily like the beads of an abacus or a rosary, their rhythm dictated by the churning of private thoughts. What were Duncan’s private thoughts? He wouldn’t say. He kept the bourbon bottle beside him, always nearly empty, it seemed, its cheap wavery glass perfectly clear down to the inch or so of yellow in the bottom. Occasionally he smoked a doll-sized metal pipe containing foul-smelling leaves and seeds and stems. Then he would grow dreamy and whimsical, although the leaves were so old now (having been stored nearly forever in an oregano bottle in the kitchen) that Justine suspected they had lost all their potency. He suggested unusual projects—for instance, planting the little round seeds on some village green. “Once a year we could have a new ritual, the Burning of the Green. All the villagers could sit around breathing the smoke and getting happy on a specified day.” Justine looked sideways at Caleb to see if he were shocked. He didn’t seem to be. He was not above accepting a slug or two of bourbon himself (those rigid, grandfatherly lips poised at the rim of a bottle!) and perhaps would have tried the pipe as well, if smoke did not make him cough. Nevertheless, Justine continually felt the need to tell him, “You mustn’t think Duncan’s always like this.”
“He’s not?” said Caleb.
“No, really he’s just—it will pass.”
Then she wondered why she bothered explaining, for Caleb only looked disappointed. He had some sort of expectation of them that Justine couldn’t understand. On the trip, for instance, his moods had kept shifting until she hadn’t known what to think of him. First he was elated, almost all the way to New Orleans. It was her favorite view of Caleb so far: his face alight, looking much like Duncan’s, just as she had always known it would. He was tense with excitement and his hands moved rapidly as he spoke. (Yet Justine had been taught that a Peck does not gesticulate.) He told her his whole life, everything that had happened to him since leaving Baltimore—buckets of life, torrents of names and places, snatches of song broken off and sentences left unfinished. She had the feeling that he had been saving it up for sixty years, until he could locate a family member. But then when he had finished and she questioned him on the fine points—“Whatever happened to the friend you went to New Orleans with?” “What sort of man was White-Eye Ramford?” “Did you ever think of coming home?”—he became morose and short of words. “I don’t know. I don’t know,” he muttered. Thinking to cheer him up, she said “When we get to New Orleans we’ll buy you some shoes. You can’t get on a plane in paper slippers.” But if anything, that only deepened his gloom. He looked out the window, his thumb and middle finger steadily stroking the corners of his mouth in a way that made her uncomfortable. But of course: he was mourning his brother. She should have thought. No doubt he had only been making an effort for her sake, earlier, and it had worn him out. So she let him sit in silence, and when they reached New Orleans she didn’t mention his shoes again. He did, though. He became suddenly brisk. “Say now!” he said. “Weren’t we going to change out of these paper scuffs? We can’t go back to the family looking unkempt.”