“Girls are difficult,” Alonzo said. “Fortunately I never had many of them.”
“I think she’s in love with a minister.”
“With a what?”
“Well, an assistant minister, actually.”
“But even so,” said Alonzo.
“She went to his church in Semple. She’s religious, too. Did I mention that? She went to his young people’s group on Sunday evenings. Then they started going out together to lectures and debates and educational slide shows—oh, very proper, but she’s only seventeen! And she brought him to our house so we could meet him. It was terrible. We all sat in the living room. Duncan says she has a right to choose whoever she wants but he doesn’t think she chose this man, she just accepted him. Like a compromise. What else could it be, with a man so meek and puny? He’s one of those people with white shiny skin and five o’clock shadow. Duncan says—”
“But after all,” said Alonzo, “better that than a motordrome rider. My first wife’s girl married a motordrome rider.”
“I would prefer a motordrome rider any day,” Justine said. Then she sighed. “Oh well, I suppose nobody likes who their children go out with.”
“It’s true.”
“When I was courting, my father locked me in my room one time.”
“Oh?” said Alonzo. He squinted, following the arc of the baseball floating across the sun.
“I fell in love with my first cousin.”
“Oh-ho.”
“On top of that, my shiftless first cousin. He drank and ran around. For years he had a girlfriend named Glorietta, who always wore red. My aunts and my mother would whisper whenever they mentioned her, even her name. Glorietta de Merino.”
“Ah, Glorietta,” said Alonzo, and settled back with his face tilted to the sky and his boots stretched out in front of him. “Go on.”
“He made terrible grades all through school and dropped out the first year of college. Nobody could ever find him when they wanted him. While I! I was an only child. I tried to be as good as possible. Would you believe, until I was twenty years old I had never tasted liverwurst?”
“Liverwurst,” said Alonzo, turning it over lazily.
“Because my family didn’t happen to eat it. Not that there was anything wrong with it, of course, they just weren’t in the habit of ordering it from the market. I didn’t know there was such a thing as liverwurst! The first time I tasted it I ate a whole pound. But that was later. First I fell in love with my cousin, and went on trips with him and rode in his unsafe car and had to be locked in my room. Then I discovered liverwurst.”
“But what became of him?” Alonzo asked.
“Who?”
“The first cousin.”
“Oh,” said Justine. “Why, I married him. Who did you think I was talking about?”
“Duncan?”
“Of course Duncan,” said Justine, and she sat up again and shaded her eyes. “Cousin Duncan the Bad,” she said, and laughed, and even Alonzo, drowsy and heavy in the sun, had to see how happy she looked when she located Duncan’s spiky gold head glinting above the weeds.
4
Duncan and Justine Peck shared a great-grandfather named Justin Montague Peck, a sharp-eyed, humorless man who became very rich importing coffee, sugar, and guano during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. On any summer day in the 1870’s, say, you could find him seated in the old Merchants’ Exchange on Gay Street, smoking one of his long black cigars to ward off yellow fever, waiting for news of his ships to be relayed from the lookout tower on Federal Hill. Where he originally came from was uncertain, but the richer he grew the less it mattered. Although he was never welcomed into Baltimore society, which was narrow and ossified even then, he was treated with respect and men often asked his advice on financial issues. Once there was even a short street named after him, but it was changed later on to commemorate a politician.
When Justin Peck was fifty years old, he bought a sycamore-shaded lot in what was then the northern part of town. He built a gaunt house bristling with chimneys and lined with dark, oily wood. He filled it with golden oak furniture and Oriental screens, chandeliers dripping crystal, wine velvet loveseats with buttons up and down their backs, heavy paintings leaning out from the walls, curlicued urns, doilies, statuary, bric-a-brac, great globular lamps centered on tasseled scarves, and Persian rugs laid catty-corner and overlapping. Then he married Sarah Cantleigh, the sixteen-year-old daughter of another importer. Nothing is known of their courtship, if there was one, but her wedding portrait still looms in a Baltimore dining room: a child-faced girl with a look of reluctance, of hanging back, which is accentuated by the dress style of the day with its backward-swept lines and the flounce at the rear of the skirt.
In 1880, only nine months after the wedding, Sarah Cantleigh died giving birth to Daniel. In 1881 Justin Peck remarried, this time into stronger stock—a German cutler’s daughter named Laura Baum, who rescued Daniel from the old freedwoman who had been tending him. Laura Baum’s portrait was never painted, but she lived long enough to be known personally even by Meg, her great-great-step-grandchild. She was a shallow, straight-backed woman who wore her hair in a knot. Although she was twenty when she married, observers said she looked more like forty. But then she looked forty when she died, too, at the age of ninety-seven. And it was clear that she made an excellent mother for little Daniel. She taught him to read and cipher when he was only three years old, and she made certain that his manners were impeccable. When Justin suggested that she stop taking Daniel with her on visits to her father she agreed instantly, even ceasing her own visits although Justin had not asked that of her in so many words. (Her father was very obviously a foreigner, an undignified little man given to practical jokes. His dusty jumbled shop by the harbor was a hangout for seamen and other rough types.) “Always remember, Daniel,” she said, straightening his collar, “that you must live up to your family’s name.” She never explained what she meant by that. Her darkies broke into hissing laughter on the kitchen stairs and asked each other in whispers, “What family? What name? Peck?” but she never heard them.
In 1885, Laura had a son of her own. They called him Caleb. He was blond like his half-brother, but his tilted brown eyes must have snuck in from the Baum side of the family, and he had his Grandpa Baum’s delight in noise and crowds. Even as a baby, being wheeled along in his caramel-colored wicker carriage, he would go into fits of glee at the sight of passing strangers. He liked anything musical—church bells, hurdy-gurdies, the chants of the street vendors selling hot crabcakes. When he was a little older he took to the streets himself, riding an iron velocipede with a carpeted seat. He and Daniel were confined to the sidewalk in front of their house, but while Daniel obeyed instructions, leafing through The Youth’s Companion on the front steps with his chick-yellow head bent low, Caleb would sooner or later be tugged southward by the fire bell or the gathering of a crowd or, of course, the sound of a street musician. He followed the blind harpist and the banjoist, the walking piano that cranked out Italian tunes, and the lady who sang “The Pardon Came Too Late.” Then someone would think to ask, “Where’s Caleb?” His mother came out on the front steps, a fan of creases rising up between her eyebrows. “Daniel, have you seen Caleb?” And search parties would have to be sent down all the streets running toward the harbor. Only everybody soon learned: if you wanted to find Caleb, hold still a minute and listen. Whenever you heard distant music somewhere in the town, maybe so faint you thought you imagined it, so thin you blamed the whistling of the streetcar wires, then you could track the sound down and find Caleb straddling his little velocipede, speechless with joy, his appleseed eyes dancing. The maid would touch his sleeve, or Daniel would take his hand, or Laura would grab him by the earlobe, muttering, “This is where I find you! Out with a bunch of … well, I don’t know what your father is going to say. I don’t know what he’s going to think of you for this.”
Only she never told his father. Perhaps she thought t
hat she would be held to blame. Sometimes, from the way she acted, you would think she was afraid of Justin.
On Sundays the Pecks went to church, of course, and on Wednesday evenings Laura had her Ladies’ Circle. On holidays there were the formal visitors: Justin’s business associates and their wives, along with their starched, ruffled children. But you couldn’t say that the Pecks had friends, exactly. They kept to themselves. They were suspicious of outsiders. After guests left, the family often remarked on the gentlemen’s inferior brand of cigars, the children’s poor manners, the wives’ regrettable overuse of Pompeiian Bloom rouge. Daniel listened, memorizing their words. Caleb hung out the window to hear an Irish tenor sing “Just a Lock of Hair for Mother.”
Daniel was a tall, cool, reflective boy, and from the beginning he planned to study law. Therefore Caleb would take over the importing business. In preparation for this Caleb attended the Salter Academy, walking there daily with his friend Paul and a few of the neighborhood boys. He worked very conscientiously, although sometimes his mother suspected that his heart wasn’t in it. Coming home from school he could be waylaid by any passing stranger, he fell willingly into conversation with all sorts of riffraff. He had no discrimination. And he still followed organ grinders. With his pocket money he bought tawdry musical instruments, everything from pennywhistles to a cheap violin sold him by a sailor; he could make music out of anything. He played these instruments not only in his room but outdoors as well, if he wasn’t caught and stopped. More than once he was mistakenly showered with coins from someone’s window. When Laura heard about it she would grow dark in the face and order him to remember his name. She shut him in the parlor, where he continued to spill out his reckless, made-up tunes on the massive piano draped in fringed silk. Unfortunately the Creole gardener, Lafleur Boudrault, had taught him ragtime. A disreputable, colored kind of music. Justin, home in his study doing the accounts, would raise his head to listen for a minute and frown, but then he shrugged it off.
In 1903, Caleb graduated from the Salter Academy. The day after his graduation Justin took him down to his office to show him around. By now, of course, the importing business was very different from what it had been in the ’70’s. The old fullrigged steamers, which looked like brigantines with smokestacks, had given way to modern ships, and their spectacular journeys to Brazil and Peru and the West Indies had been discontinued in favor of the more profitable coastwise hauls, carrying manufactured goods south and raw materials north. The Merchants’ Exchange had been torn down; Caleb would be spending his days in an office above a warehouse, behind a roll-top desk, dealing with ledgers and receipts and bills of lading. Still, it was a fine opportunity for a young man with ambition, Caleb. Caleb?
Caleb turned from the single, sooty window, through which he had been gazing even though it was impossible to see the harbor from there. He said that he would prefer to be a musician.
At first Justin couldn’t take it in. He was politely interested. Musician? Whatever for?
Then the situation hit him in the face and he gasped and caved in. He felt for the chair behind him and sat down, preparing bitter, harmful words that would convey all his horror and disgust and contempt. But music was so—no young man would ever seriously—music was for women! For parlors! He felt nauseated by the sight of this boy’s intense brown eyes. He could hardly wait to chew him up and spit him out and stamp on what was left.
Instead, all that came from his mouth were strange vowel sounds over which he had no control.
He had to be carried away in his office chair by two men from the warehouse. They laid him in his buggy and folded both arms across his chest, as if he were already dead, and then Caleb drove him home. When Laura came to the door she found Caleb on the topmost step with his father curled in his arms like a baby. But Justin’s eyes were two hard, glittering pebbles, and she could feel his rage. “What happened?” she asked, and Caleb told her, straight out, while struggling upstairs with his burden to Justin’s high carved bed. Laura’s face grew as dark as coffee but she said not a word. She had the kitchen maid fetch the doctor from down the street, and she listened stonily to the doctor’s diagnosis: apoplexy, brought on by a shock of some sort. He did not hold out much hope for recovery. If Justin lived, he said, one side would likely be paralyzed, although it was too soon to say for certain.
Then Laura went downstairs to the parlor where Caleb stood waiting. “You have killed your half of your father,” she said.
On Monday, Caleb started work behind the roll-top desk.
Daniel, meanwhile, had finished his courses at the University in record time and was now preparing himself further by working at the offices of Norris & Wiggen, a fine old respectable law firm. He lived at home and often relieved Laura at his father’s sickbed, reading aloud to him from the newspaper or from Laura’s enormous Bible. Justin would lie very still with one fist clenched, his flinty blue eyes glaring at the wall. He had not recovered the use of his left side. It was apparent suddenly that he was a very old man, with liver spots across his dry forehead and claws for hands. Half of his face seemed to be melting and running downward. He spoke only with difficulty, and when people misunderstood he would fly into a rage. Because he could not bear to have his weakness observed by the outside world (which would take advantage immediately, he was certain of it), he had determined to stay in his bedroom until he was fully recovered. For he assumed that he was suffering only a brief, treatable illness, his convalescence hampered by a worse-than-useless doctor and a half-wit wife. Therefore he undertook his own cure. He had all the panes in his windows replaced with amethyst glass, which was believed to promote healing. He drank his water from a quassia cup and ordered Laura to send away for various nostrums advertised in the newspaper—celery tonic, pectoral syrup, a revitalizing electric battery worn on a chain around the neck. His only meat was squirrel, easiest on the digestive tract. Yet still he remained flat on his back, whitening and shriveling like a beached fish.
On Friday nights Caleb came and summarized the week’s business in a gentle, even voice, directing his statements to the foot of the bed. Justin looked at the wall, pretending not to hear. As a matter of fact it seemed that Caleb was handling everything quite adequately, but it was too late now. The time for that was past, there was no undoing what had been done. Justin went on looking at the wall until Caleb left.
Laura brought out an old busybody she had—a mirror arrangement placed to reflect passers-by on the street below. She thought he might like to keep in touch with things. But when Justin turned his face to the busybody he saw Caleb just descending the front steps, turned faded and remote and long-ago by the blue glass of the windowpanes. He told Laura to take her nonsense elsewhere.
In February, 1904, the Great Fire burned out the heart of Baltimore, sweeping away every tall building in the city and most major businesses, including Justin Peck’s. When it was over Justin insisted upon being taken to see the damage for himself. His sons carried him to the buggy and drove him downtown, through the peculiar yellowish light that hung over everything. It was the first trip Justin had made since his illness. From the satisfied look he gave to the rubble and the littered streets and the jagged remains of walls, it seemed that he credited the destruction not to fire but to his own absence. Without him Baltimore had gone up in smoke. Under Caleb’s care the warehouse had caved in, the office had disappeared, the roll-top desk had dissolved into ashes. He turned to Daniel with a crooked, bitter smile and waved his good hand to be taken home again.
Now he developed a new obsession: he wanted to leave this combustible city entirely and build further north, way out on Falls Road. He dreamed his room was alight with flames and not a member of his family would come to rescue him. He called in the night for Laura, whose bed he had left some fifteen years ago following her third miscarriage, and he made her sleep by his side with her hand on a brass bell from India. He jarred her awake periodically and sent her out to the hall to sniff for fire. And Caleb, who was
working around the clock to rebuild the warehouse, had to come to his father’s room every evening and listen to interminable garbled, stammered instructions for the buying of land in Roland Park. Nowadays Caleb always smelled of smoke from the city and he moved in a deep, tired daze. He would rest his cheek against the doorframe and slump until his sooty white shirt appeared to have nothing inside it, while his father wove his tangled mat of words: builders, masons, two fire, two fireproof houses.
Two?
Well, Justin figured Daniel would be marrying Margaret Rose Bell.
Now Margaret Rose Bell was a Washington girl who had come to spend the winter with her cousins, the Edmund Bells. And although it was true that she and Daniel were often seen together, the fact was that she was not yet eighteen years old, and Daniel was still working at Norris & Wiggen. Customarily a man would wait till he was able to buy and furnish a house by himself before he would take a wife.
Yes, but Justin planned to have a great many descendants and he was anxious to get them started.
Land was purchased in Roland Park. Master builders were hired to supervise the construction of two large houses set side by side, with almost no space between them, although great stretches of land lay all about. And meanwhile Margaret Rose was fitted for a complicated ivory satin wedding dress with one hundred and eight pearl buttons running down the back. They were married in the summer. Because the houses were not yet finished Margaret moved into Daniel’s boyhood room, where his wooden-wheeled roller skates sat next to his shelf of lawbooks. She was a small, vivid girl who generally wore dresses of soft material like flower petals, and at any moment of the day she could be seen running up and down the stairs, or flinging open windows to watch some excitement in the streets, or darting into Justin’s room to see if he needed anything. At the sight of her Justin would begin blinking and nodding in his doddering old man’s way, and he would go on nodding and nodding and nodding long after she had kissed the top of his head and left again. Oh, he hadn’t been mistaken, Margaret Rose was what this house had needed. And she would be certain to provide descendants. Why, by the fall of 1905, when Justin Peck’s golden oak and wine-colored household set off on a caravan of wagons to Roland Park, Margaret Rose was already holding a baby in her lap and expecting another. Things were working out just fine. Everything was going according to plan.