By 1908 they had bought a snorting black Model T Ford with a left-hand steering wheel and splashless flower vases. Each morning the two brothers rode off to work in it—handsome young men in hats and high white collars. Daniel had his own law office now, a walnut-paneled suite of rooms with an oil portrait of his father over the mantel. He was taking on no partners because, he said, he wanted to have his sons for partners, not just anyone. And Caleb had rebuilt his father’s warehouse, bigger and better than before. He had a brand new roll-top desk with twice as many cubbyholes.
Whenever Caleb chose to marry, another house would be built beside the first two, but meanwhile he lived at home with his parents. He was a quiet man who became quieter every year. It was a known fact that he drank sometimes, but he never troubled anyone and he never became rowdy or noisy. In fact Margaret Rose said she wished he would get noisy, once in a while. She was fond of Caleb. Between them they had a few old jokes, which would cause Margaret to laugh in her low, chuckly way until Caleb, in spite of himself, would let his own mouth turn up shyly at the corners. He would come talk to her in her shady back yard, waiting patiently through all her children’s interruptions and requests and minor accidents. And several times she gave evening parties expressly to introduce Caleb to one or another of her pretty cousins. Girls always liked Caleb. But though he might dance with them or take them for a drive, he didn’t seem interested in marriage. More often now he stayed home in his room, or he toured the taverns, or he went someplace else, no one knew where. Really, not even Margaret Rose could say for sure what Caleb did with himself.
For Christmas one year, Margaret persuaded Daniel to buy Caleb a Graphophone. She thought it would be the perfect gift for someone so musical. Along with it came disc recordings of Caruso, Arturo Toscanini, and Jan Kubelik on the violin. But these discs affected Caleb the way formal concerts did; he became restless and absent-minded and unhappy. He started pacing across the carpet and up and down the hall and eventually straight through the front door and out of sight, and was not seen again for the remainder of the day. So the Graphophone was never taken up to his bedroom, as Margaret had intended, but drifted into Justin’s room instead, where it amused the old man for hours on end. He seemed particularly fond of Caruso. He would order Margaret to stand beside his bed cranking the machine and changing the heavy black discs. Margaret was surprised. If this was the way he felt, why had he forbidden Caleb’s music in the house?
For Caleb continued to spend all his money on musical instruments—wooden flutes and harmonicas and cellos and even stringed gourds that only colored people would think of playing. He kept them in his room, but he was not allowed to sound a note on them where Justin could hear. In fact, even the piano was forbidden now, and had been exiled to Daniel’s house, where Margaret Rose could tinkle out Czerny without disturbing her father-in-law. If Caleb wanted to make music he had to go far away, usually to the old Samson stable on the other side of a field. He would sit in the loft door blowing whistles or sawing out stringy little street tunes, and only wisps of his music drifted up to the house, never as far as Justin’s densely curtained sickroom. Yet Justin always seemed to know when Caleb had been playing, and he would turn his face away irritably when Caleb stopped by later to offer his meticulous, patient account of the previous week’s business.
Meanwhile Daniel’s house was filling up with children, and his practice was swelling, and he already had it in the back of his mind to become a judge someday while his sons carried on with the law firm. When he came home evenings, and Margaret ran up in her rustling, flowery dress to fling her arms around him, he would be remote and sometimes annoyed. His head was still crowded with torts and claims and statutes. He would set her gently aside and continue toward his study at the rear of the house. So for someone to talk to, Margaret tried giving afternoon tea parties. She invited her cousins and her girlfriends, who came tumbling in crying, “Maggie! Maggie Rose!” and kissing both her cheeks in the new way they had learned from Aunt Alice Bell, who had recently been to Paris. But Daniel said that he was not partial to these affairs. Oh, in the evening maybe, clients or business friends occasionally … he didn’t want to be unreasonable, he said, but actually he expected his home to be a refuge from the outside world. And nowadays when he came in from a hard day’s work he would be sure to find some unknown lady sitting on his leather chair, or a spectacular feather hat on the dining room buffet beneath Sarah Cantleigh’s portrait, and once even the brass paperweight moved to the other side of his blotter, when everyone knew that his desk was forbidden territory. Besides, didn’t she think she would be better off devoting those hours to her children?
They had six children. In 1905 Justin II was born, in 1906 Sarah, in 1907 Daniel Jr., in 1908 Marcus, in 1909 Laura May, in 1910 Caroline.
In 1911, Margaret Rose left home.
She had wanted to take the children to Washington on the train for her mother’s birthday. Daniel didn’t think she ought to. After all, she was a Peck now. What did she want with the Bells? Who at any rate were an undisciplined, frivolous, giggling lot. She said she would go anyway. Daniel pointed out that she was her own mistress, certainly, as everyone in his family had noticed more than once, but the children were his. And sure enough, there sat Daniel’s children in a little bundle staring up at her, all Peck, blue Peck eyes and hair that matched their skin, solemn measuring Peck expressions, not a trace of Margaret Rose. She could go, Daniel said, but she couldn’t take the children. And he expected her back on Saturday evening, as there was church to attend Sunday morning.
She went.
Saturday evening Caleb met the train but Margaret was not on it. When Daniel found out he merely pressed his lips together and walked away. Later he was heard telling his mother’s servant Sulie to put the children to bed. Apparently no inquiries were going to be made.
On Wednesday Daniel received a letter from Margaret’s father. He wrote in brown ink. Everyone knew that ink, because when Margaret’s father wrote she would race through the house reading passages to different people and laughing at the funny parts. But Daniel read this letter in silence, and then went up to his room. When he came down again nothing at all was said about it.
In a month the children stopped asking for their mother. The baby stopped crying and the older ones went back to their games and nursery rhymes. Only Caleb seemed to remember Margaret Rose. He went up to Daniel one day and asked him point blank why he didn’t go after her. Or Caleb himself would, though Daniel would be better. Daniel looked straight through him. Then Caleb went to Justin, who certainly loved Margaret Rose too and used to wait every day for the fluttering of her petal skirts against the banister. Now Justin merely closed his eyes and pretended not to hear. “But why?” Caleb asked him. “Don’t you care? Life is not the same here when Maggie Rose is gone.”
In all the accounts of the family history, told by all the aunts and uncles and upstairs maids, that was the only direct quotation of Caleb’s that was ever handed down. Two generations later it was to ring in Justine’s ears like poetry, taking on more depth and meaning than Caleb had probably intended. But Justin was not moved at all, and he kept his eyes shut very tightly and waited for his son to leave.
Now Laura ran both households, upright and energetic as ever in her ugly brown dresses with her hair screwed back so tightly it stretched her eyes. To the Peck children she was the center of the universe, sometimes the only family member they saw for days. Justin was too old and sick to be bothered, and Daniel hardly ever came home before their bedtime. As for Caleb, he kept to himself. They might catch sight of him striking out across the field toward the Samson stable, the sunlight pale on his Panama hat; or leaving for work in the morning, already tired and beaten-looking; or returning late in the evening with his manner of walking curiously careful. He never played with them. Sometimes on those extra-careful evenings he even got their names confused. He did nothing to earn their attention. So they failed to notice how he appeared to be dimming an
d wearing through, almost transparent; and how his only friends now were the questionable types in taverns, and how the music from the stable had thinned and shredded until you almost couldn’t hear it. Laura noticed. But what could it mean? She pondered over his long, unbreakable silences, the likes of which she had not seen before and would not again until the days of Caleb’s great-nephew Duncan, as yet unborn and unthought of. She tried to shame him into more normal behavior. “Where is your common courtesy? At least think of the family.” But he would only wander off, not hearing, and sometimes he would not reappear for days.
On a Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1912, Daniel was standing at the bay window watching Justin Two ride his bicycle. It was a heavy black iron one, hard for Two to manage, but he had just got the hang of it and he teetered proudly down the driveway. From out of nowhere, Daniel saw a small, clear picture of Caleb on his velocipede merrily pedaling after a flutist on a sidewalk in old Baltimore. The memory was so distinct that he left his house and crossed the yard to his mother’s and climbed the stairway to Caleb’s room. But Caleb was not there. Nor was he in the kitchen, where he most often ate his meals; nor anywhere else in the house, nor outdoors nor in the stable. And the Ford was parked in the side yard; he wouldn’t be downtown. Daniel felt uneasy. He asked the others—the children and Laura. They didn’t know. In fact, the last time anyone could remember for sure he had been walking off down the driveway three days earlier, carrying his fiddle. The children saw him go. “Goodbye now,” he called to them.
“Goodbye, Uncle Caleb.”
But of course that didn’t mean a thing, he would surely have … Daniel went to Justin’s room. “I can’t find Caleb,” he said. Justin turned his face away. “Father? I can’t—”
A long, glittering tear slid down Justin’s stony cheek.
Really, the old man was beginning to let his mind go.
Years later, whenever he was fixing some family event in its proper time slot, Daniel Peck would pause and consider the importance of 1912. Could there be such a thing as an unlucky number? (Justine would look up briefly, but say nothing.) For in 1912 it seemed that the Peck family suddenly cracked and flew apart like an old china teacup. First there was Caleb’s disappearance, without a trace except for a bedroom full of hollow, ringing musical instruments and a roll-top desk with an empty whisky bottle in the bottom drawer. So then they had to sell the business, Justin’s last link with the outside world. And after that Justin started dying, leaving his family in the same gradual, fading way that Caleb had until it was almost no shock at all to find him lifeless in his bed one morning with his bluish nose pointing heavenward.
In the winter of 1912 there was another envelope from Washington addressed in brown ink. After Daniel read it, he told his children that Margaret Rose had been killed in a fire. They were to pray for her to be forgiven. Now her children wore brown to school and could properly be called poor motherless orphans, although they continued to look surprised whenever some well-meaning lady told them so. They were calm, docile children, a little lacking in imagination but they did well in their lessons. They did not seem to have suffered from all that had happened. Nor did Laura, who continued as spry and capable as ever. Nor Daniel, of course—a man of even temper. Although sometimes, late at night, he would take the Ford and drive aimlessly over the moonlit roads, often ending up in the old section of the city where he had no business any more, and knew no one, and heard nothing but the faint, musical whistling of the streetcar wires in the dark sky overhead.
5
Justine’s childhood was dark and velvety and it smelled of dust. There were bearded men under all the furniture, particularly her bed. When her door was shut at night blue worms squiggled through the blackness, but when it was open the knob stuck out exactly like a shotgun barrel sidling through to aim at her head, and she would have to lie motionless for hours pretending to be a wrinkle in the blankets.
In the mornings her father was away, either at the office or out of town, and her mother was in bed with a sick headache, and Justine sat in the living room with the curtains shut so that even to herself she was only a pale glimmer. She was waiting for the maid. First there was the scrabbling of the key in the apartment door and then light, air, motion, the rustle of Claudia’s shopping bag and her thin cross mosquito voice. “Now what you doing sitting there? What you up to? What you doing sitting in that chair?” She would yank the curtains open and there was the city of Philadelphia, a wide expanse of blackened brick apartment houses and dying trees in cages and distant factory smokestacks. Then she would dress Justine in a little smocked dress and braid the two skinny braids that she called plaits. “Don’t you go getting that dress dirty. Don’t you go messing yourself up, I’ll tell Miss Caroline on you.” By that time maybe her mother’s headache would be lifting, at least enough so that her parched voice could trail out from the bedroom. “Justine? Aren’t you even going to say good morning?” Although not an hour ago she had buried her face in the pillow and waved Justine away with one shaky, pearl-studded hand.
Justine’s mother wore fluffy nightgowns with eyelet ruffles at the neck. Her hair was the color of Justine’s but tightly curled. She was the youngest of Daniel Peck’s six children, the baby. Even total strangers could guess that, somehow, from her small, pursed mouth and her habit of ducking her chin when talking to people. Unfortunately she tended to put on weight when unhappy, and she had become a plump, powdery, pouchy woman with her rings permanently embedded in her fingers. Her unhappiness was due to being exiled in Philadelphia. She had never guessed, when agreeing to marry Sam Mayhew, that the Depression would close down the Baltimore branch of his company just six months after the wedding. If she had had any inkling, she said—but she didn’t finish the sentence. She just reached for another chocolate, or a petit-four, or one of the pink-frosted cupcakes she grew more and more to resemble.
But Justine loved her mother’s soft skin and her puffy bosom and the dimples on the backs of her hands. She liked to huddle beneath the drooping velvet canopy of the bed, which was her mother’s real home, surrounded by a circle of chocolate boxes, empty teacups, ladies’ magazines, and cream-colored letters from Baltimore. Of course there were days when her mother was up and about, but Justine pictured her only in the dim rosy glow of the bedside lamp. She dwelt on the suspense of entering that room: was she welcome this time, or wasn’t she? Some days her mother said, “Oh Justine, can’t you let me be?” or wept into her pillow and wouldn’t speak at all; but other days she called, “Is that my Justine? Is that my fairy angel? Don’t you have one tiny kiss for your poor mama?” And she would sit up and scoop Justine into a spongy, perfumed embrace, depriving her of breathing room for a moment, not that it mattered. Then she flung back the ruffled pink sleeves of her bedjacket and taught Justine the games she had played when she was a child—cat’s cradle and Miss Fancy’s Come to Town and the doodle story, where you drew a map that turned out to be a goose. Or she would have Justine fetch scissors and she would cut, from the Baltimore newspaper, folded stars and paper dolls with pigtails and standing angels made from a circle cleverly slashed here and there as only she knew how. She would tell true stories, better than anything in books: How Uncle Two Scared the Hobo Away, How Grandfather Peck Fooled the Burglar, How the Mayhews’ Ugly Dog Buttons Ate My Wedding Dress. She told how Justine was born in Baltimore thanks to split-second timing and not in Philadelphia as everyone had feared. “Well, luckily I had my way,” she said. “You know how your daddy is. He didn’t understand at all. When you started coming two months early I said, ‘Sam, put me on that train,’ but he wouldn’t do it. I said, ‘Sam, what will Father say, he’s made all the arrangements at Johns Hopkins!’ ‘I just hope he didn’t lay down a deposit,’ your daddy said. So I picked up my suitcase that I had all ready and waiting and I said, ‘Listen here, Sam Mayhew …’ ”
At six in the evening Claudia would leave, slamming the door behind her, and Justine’s mother would look at the clock and
her fingers would fly to her mouth. “How in the world did the time pass?” she would ask, and she would slide to the edge of the bed and feel for her pink satin slippers. “We can’t let your daddy catch us lazing about like this.” She would put on a navy blue dress with shoulder pads, and cover her rosebud mouth with dark lipstick, turning instantly from pink-and-gold to a heavy, crisply defined stranger like the ones hurrying down the sidewalk five stories below. “Of course my headache hasn’t improved one bit,” she would say. “I’d go back to bed but your daddy would never understand. He doesn’t believe in headaches. He certainly doesn’t believe in going to bed for them. It just is not his custom, I suppose.”
To hear her talk, you would think Sam Mayhew was as different and exotic as an Asian prince, but he was only a small pudgy man with a Baltimore accent.
Then there were days in a row when Justine was not allowed in her mother’s room at all, when she would puzzle and puzzle over what magic password had given her entry before. No one could go in but Claudia, carrying the latest string-tied box from the Parisian Pastry Co. Justine was marooned on a scratchy brocade chair in the living room and the bearded men beneath it were only waiting for her to lower one foot so that they could snatch her by the ankle and drag her down. Even Sam Mayhew’s homecoming could not rouse his wife from bed. “Oh, go away, Sam, let me be, can’t you see a crack is running down in front of my ears?” Sam and Justine ate supper alone, on the gold-rimmed plates that Claudia had laid out in the dining room. “Well, now, Justine, what have you been doing with yourself?” Sam would ask. “Did Claudia take you to the playground? Did you have a nice time on the swings?”