Justine drove the Ford down Main Street with the cat racing back and forth across the rear window ledge, yowling like an old, angry baby while people on the sidewalks stopped and stared. Meg sat with her hands folded; by now she was used to the racket. The grandfather simply shut his hearing aid off and gazed from his bubble of silence at the little wooden Woolworth’s, the Texaco, the Amoco, the Arco, a moldering A&P, a neat brick post office with a flag in front. This time Duncan’s truck was ahead, and Justine followed him in a right-hand turn down a side street lined with one-story buildings. They passed a drugstore and an electric shop, and then they came to a row of small houses. Duncan parked in front of the first one. Justine pulled in behind him. “Here we are!” she said.
The house was white, worn down to gray. On the porch, square shingled columns rose waist-high and then stopped, giving the overhang a precarious, unreliable look. Although there was no second floor the dormer window of some attic or storage room bulged out of the roof like an eyelid. A snarl of wiry bushes guarded the crawlspace beneath the porch. “Oh, roses!” Justine cried. “Are those roses?” Her grandfather shifted in his seat.
“This house is even worse than the last,” said Meg.
“Never mind, here you’ll have a room of your own. You won’t have to sleep in the living room. Isn’t that going to be nice?”
“Yes, Mama,” Meg said.
Duncan was already pacing the yard when the others reached him “I’m going to put a row or two of corn here,” he told them. “Out back is too shady but see how much sun we get in front? I’m going to plow up the grass and plant corn and cucumbers. I have this plan for fertilizer, I’m going to buy a blender and grind up all our garbage with a little water. Pay attention, Justine. I want you to save everything, eggshells and orange peels and even bones. The bones we’ll pressure-cook first. Have we got a pressure-cooker? We’ll make a sort of jelly and spread that around here too.”
Meanwhile the cat had streaked under the crawlspace, where she would stay till the moving was over, and the grandfather was climbing the front steps all hunkered and disapproving, muttering to himself, making an inventory of every splinter and knothole and paint blister, every nail worked loose, windowscreen split, floorboard warped. Meg sat down on the very top step. “I’m cold,” she said.
Justine said, “Your father’s going to take up farming. Maybe we’ll have tomatoes.”
“Will we be here to harvest them?” Meg asked nobody.
Justine found the keys in one of her pockets and opened the door. They stepped into a hall smelling of mildew, littered with newspapers and broken cardboard boxes. The kitchen leading off it contained a refrigerator with a motor on top, a dirty gas stove, and a sink on stilts. There was a living room with a boarded-up fireplace. In the back were the bathroom and three bedrooms, all tiny and dark, but Justine swept through flinging up windowshades and stirring the thick, musty air. “Look! Someone left a pair of pliers,” she said. “And here’s a chair we can use for the porch.” She was a pack rat; all of them were. It was a family trait. You could tell that in a flash when they started carrying things in from the truck—the bales of ancient, curly-edged magazines, zipper bags bursting with unfashionable clothes, cardboard boxes marked Clippings, Used Wrapping Paper, Photos, Empty Bottles. Duncan and Justine staggered into the grandfather’s room carrying a steel filing cabinet from his old office, stuffed with carbon copies of all his personal correspondence for the twenty-three years since his retirement. In one corner of their own room Duncan stacked crates of machine parts and nameless metal objects picked up on walks, which he might someday want to use for some invention. He had cartons of books, most of them second-hand, dealing with things like the development of the quantum theory and the philosophy of Lao-tzu and the tribal life of Ila-speaking Northern Rhodesians. But when all of this clutter had been brought in (and it took the four of them two hours) there was next to nothing left in the truck. Their furniture was barely enough to make the house seem inhabited: three rust-stained mattresses, four kitchen chairs from Goodwill, Great-Grandma’s hand-carved rosewood dining table, a sagging sofa and easy chair donated by a neighbor two moves back, and three bureaus of Justine’s mother’s, their ornate feet and bow fronts self-conscious next to the bedsteads Duncan had constructed out of raw pine boards that gave off a yellow smell. For dishes they had a collection of dimestore plates, some light green, some flowered, some dark brown with white glaze dripped around the edges, and thermal mugs given away free when Esso changed to Exxon. The cutlery with its yellow plastic handles had been salvaged from Aunt Sarah’s English picnic basket. There were two saucepans and a skillet. (Justine did not like cooking.) They owned a broom and a sponge mop, but no dustpan, no vacuum cleaner, no squeegee, scrub bucket, or chamois cloth. (Justine did not like cleaning either.) No washing machine or dryer. When all the clothes in the house were dirty the family would lug them to the laundromat. Of course that was not much fun—the four of them struggling with their bulging pillow slips, the grandfather’s head ducked way, way low in case of passers-by, all of them a little bedraggled in their very last clean clothes unearthed from the bottom of the drawer or the back of the closet—but wasn’t it better than moving those shiny, heavy appliances from place to place? Why, by late afternoon they were completely settled in. There was nothing more to do. It was true that most of the boxes remained to be opened but that was nothing, some were still packed from the last move. There was no hurry. Justine was free to stretch out on her mattress, which had the piney-wood smell of home, and work her feet from her shoes and smile at the ceiling while the cat lay on her stomach like a twenty-pound, purring hot water bottle. Duncan could sit on the edge of the bed fooling with a stroboscope he had forgotten he owned. Meg could shut her door and unwrap, from its own special box, from seven layers of tissue paper, her framed photograph of a young man in a clerical robe at least a size too large, which she rewrapped almost immediately and slid to the back of her closet shelf. And in his room across the hall the grandfather could take a photo of his own from his pocket: Caleb Peck in tones of brown, framed in gold, wearing a hat and tie, his face stark and dignified, playing a violoncello while seated in an open stable door twenty feet off the ground.
3
Duncan took a tour of the Blue Bottle Antique Shop with Silas Amsel, the owner. Since he had already seen it when he applied for the job, he was not very interested. He ambled along behind fat, bearded Silas, yawning and drumming his fingers on passing tabletops. Spider-legged spinet desks, clocks with cherubs and shepherdesses and Father Time, dusty goblets, mirrors framed in knobby gold plaster, occasional tables too weak to bear the weight of a lamp—what was the sense in all this? To tell the truth, he had never thought about antiques before. He had been reared in a world where they were taken for granted. No one ever bought them, no one bought anything; the rooms were crowded with mellowed, well-kept furniture that appeared to have grown there, and whenever children departed they took several pieces with them but left the rooms as crowded as ever, somehow, as if more had sprouted in the night. No, what interested Duncan was the bin of contrivances he had found behind Silas’s counter: rusty cherry pitters, potato quillers, apple corers, fish scalers, an ingenious spiral cone for separating the white of an egg from the yolk. Beside the bin was a wicker valise that opened to make a chair for sitting by the seashore. Where had all that inventiveness got to, now? How had it faded away? The bin was marked with a felt-tip pen: Your choice, $1. The valise, which was broken, could be bought for $2.50, if anyone could find it among the boots and paper bags. When Duncan took over, he would put the valise in the front window. (He leered suddenly at Silas’s broad, ponderous back.) He would polish the utensils and lay them out in rows. He would sell everything humdrum and buy ancient tools at barn auctions and flea markets, until the shop resembled a nineteenth-century inventor’s workroom and he could sit inhaling a combination of machine oil and wood and oxidizing iron, his favorite smells.
“O
h, I’m getting old, getting old,” said Silas, creaking up the steps at the back of the store to show him where the telephone was. “Be sorry to let loose of the reins but glad of the rest, believe me.”
In fact Silas was a good thirty years younger than Grandfather Peck, who could have run the shop with one hand tied behind him, but Duncan was used to this premature aging among people outside the family. Besides, if Silas weren’t retiring Duncan would still be looking for a job. He had thought, this time, that he might finally have used up all his mother’s relatives. He had wondered if he would ever escape from the health food store, which he had turned into a paying proposition and then, out of boredom, allowed to run down again. Weevils took over the stone-ground wheat and mold got the soy grits and the unsulphured raisins turned to pebbles. He lost his natural gaiety and his recklessness, he fell back on bourbon, solitaire, and a flat-faced silence that not even Justine could penetrate. Was there anything worse than feeling you were sealed in a place, to grow old and stale and finally die? His careless bookkeeping and erratic hours, already a matter of principle, became so obvious no employer could overlook them. That was the pattern of Duncan’s life—ventures begun light-heartedly, with enthusiasm but only half his attention, the other half devoted to plans for a perpetual motion machine made entirely of screen door springs or a method of breeding stingless honeybees or the entering of a contest, sponsored by an Englishman, for a one-man flying machine no bigger than an armchair. In the last twenty years he had been, among other things, a goat farmer, a photographer, and a cabinetmaker; he had worked in a pet store, a tobacconist’s, a record bar, and a gourmet shop; he had taken census, shorn sheep, and fertilized the lawns of a suburban development on a toy tractor. Almost all these jobs had been enjoyable, but only briefly. He began to grow restless. He noticed that he was treading an endless round of days just as his pinched, unimaginative family had done before him. He would start going to work at ten and then eleven, four days a week and then three; and next came the bourbon, the solitaire, the silence in which to reflect upon the bars of his cage. Next another venture. He was his own perpetual motion machine.
Sometimes he worried about Justine. He didn’t want to be the way he was, uprooting her yearly or even more often, switching Meg to still another school. He knew how the neighbors shook their heads over him. Yet it seemed he suffered from some sort of chronic dissatisfaction which came and went like malaria, and the only way to hold it back was to learn more and more new facts, as if continually surprising his mind. Now peculiar scraps of knowledge were stuck to him like lint from all his jobs. He knew a Toggenburg goat from a Saanen, he could measure a dachshund, by sight alone, for a plaid mackintosh with matching Sherlock Holmes-style hat. He was an authority on the making of yogurt and the application of poisons to broad-leafed weeds during dandelion season. He had also discovered that every shop, even the most unlikely, has a circle of daily customers who become its experts—the elderly gentlemen capping each other’s list of imported cheeses, the ladies debating on the use of slippery elm bark, the teenagers intoning the life history of every member of every rock band. At the tobacconist’s, college boys could spend hours recalling the time a legendary freshman had found a fully aged and yellowed, hand-carved meerschaum pipe sitting on the top of someone’s garbage can. Perched on his stool behind the counter, gloating over the drawings for his pedal-driven flying machine, Duncan absorbed this stray knowledge like sunlight. Never mind that it was useless. And now he was about to find something else to learn, here among these ancient navigating devices and cracked foggy lanterns and ropes of amber beads like half-sucked butter rum balls.
“This is potassium lactate,” said Silas, tapping a brown bottle on the telephone table. “We use it to replace the acids in the covers of old leather books.”
And he looked surprised at the sudden light that flashed across Duncan’s face.
“Now this pad I always keep handy, and the pencil chained. People will call with items to sell, you want to get their addresses. Here, by the way, is a message for you.”
He ripped it off the pad. Habit-Forming Entertainments called, come to lunch first Sun. in Feb.
“What?” said Duncan.
“He said you would know him. He phoned four times in the last two days. He said if you couldn’t make it call back, he’s still listed as Exotico.”
“Ah,” said Duncan, and pocketed the slip. Silas waited but Duncan didn’t explain.
“Well, then,” Silas said finally, “if you can’t think of any questions—but I’ll be by, I’ll drop by often, of course.”
“Of course,” said Duncan, and he sighed, but Silas was groaning back down the steps by now and didn’t hear him.
Habit-Forming Entertainments, which had been Exotico, Inc., last year and Alonzo’s Amazing Amusements the year before that, was located in a cow pasture on the outskirts of Parvis, Maryland. It was a carnival company, of sorts—the kind that is called a forty-miler, although in this case the circuit was considerably wider. It traveled from one tiny town to another, supplying the entertainment for firehouse fairs, church and school bazaars, homecoming celebrations, and the gala openings of new shopping malls. In between trips the entire company lived in trailers in the cow pasture, with a pumpkin-colored tent flying pennants in the middle. They worked year round. Even in the dead of winter, Habit-Forming Entertainments would come trundling across the frost-bitten Maryland countryside to whoever asked for them. They brought mechanical rides, two ponies, a concession stand, a few simple games of chance whenever local law allowed, and five girls to run the games in satin bathing suits with dirty seams. There was also a merry-go-round. It was hard to transport and something was always going wrong with it, the mechanism sticking or the animals toppling over, but Justine preferred it to any other merry-go-round she had ever known. It played only one piece: “The St. James Infirmary Blues.” Whenever Justine heard that tune sawing through the air she had to climb on, she didn’t care if she was too old. She sat astride a laughing white horse, hugging the mane and laughing herself or occasionally crying, because the music was so tinny and sweet and sad and made her nostalgic for times before she was born. And whenever she saw Alonzo Divich, who owned that merry-go-round and all the other equipment, he was whistling “The St. James Infirmary Blues” like a theme song. He said it was the only tune he knew, too. He and the merry-go-round: two clumsy, hopeful, cheerful creatures, lumbering along where you would least expect to find them.
He was whistling when Justine and Duncan arrived; they tracked him down by his song. They left the car at the edge of the field and made their way across the frozen stubble toward the trailers, which sat around the tent in a cold, huddled circle like covered wagons braced for Indian attack. In the spring, when the countryside was blooming, this sort of life could seem pleasant, but not today. Today everything was lit with a sickly white winter sun, the inhabitants were shut inside their trailers, the ponies hung their heads. “Oh, the poor things!” Justine cried, and she felt the same when she passed an orange ride all folded on its truckbed like a crumpled baby dinosaur. But the whistling continued, happy as ever, sailing out from behind a plowshed, and when they had rounded the shed there was Alonzo Divich looking untouched by cold or loneliness or time. He was sitting on a boulder braiding rawhide—a large, dark man with a drooping black mustache and drooping eyes. He wore too many colors of clothing, all a little soiled, greasy, strained across the stomach and crotch and under the arms: a rose shirt, a woven Mexican vest, suede dungarees and crumpled boots. When he stood to hug them, he gave off a smell of leather and honey. “Aha!” he said to Justine. “But you haven’t changed at all! Even the hat is still the same! Is it rooted there?”
He had no accent—only a curious certainty to his speech. But where did he get his hybrid name, and his coloring, and his flashing gold molars and his habit of hugging other men so unself-consciously? Justine had asked him outright, once, what nationality he was. “You’re the fortune teller, you te
ll me,” he said.
“I read the future, not the past,” she told him.
“Well, the past should be easier!”
“It’s not. It’s far more complicated.”
But he had never told her, even so.
He led them to the tent, where folding chairs were grouped around long wheeled conference tables. This was the company’s communal hall, although in cold weather it was nearly empty. In one corner a blonde wearing slacks, gilt sandals, and several sweaters was combing out a miniature poodle. Two men in overalls were seated at a table drinking coffee from green mugs, but they left when Alonzo entered. “Aah, don’t go,” he said, flopping an arm toward their backs. He pulled out chairs at the center table, and seated himself at the head. Almost immediately a dark old lady appeared and spread a tablecloth. Then she brought a bottle and three small glasses, which she set before Alonzo. He filled the glasses exactly to the brim. The old lady reappeared with paper plates, plastic forks, and then trays of rice, hunks of meat in tomato sauce, eggplant, chicken dusted with some peculiar red powder, wrinkled black olives, bowls of beet soup and chopped cucumber in yogurt, great flat disks of bread and pitchers of green Kool-Aid. Steam rose from the platters, and from Alonzo’s mouth as he talked in the cold, rubbery-smelling air. “Take some, don’t be shy. First Duncan, he’s thinner than ever. He’s stretching out tall and thin like a dandelion. How tall are you, Duncan?”
“Six two.”
“Double rice for Duncan, Nana!”
The old lady shoveled a mountain onto Duncan’s plate.
“Rice prevents heart attacks, stroke, and impotence,” said Alonzo.
“It’s the thiamine,” said Duncan.
“More slivovitz?”
“Oh, I might as well.”