His daughter, Justine, who had been undersized and pathetic when he left, was now a tall narrow beige girl. She had changed into one of those damned Pecks, clannish and secretive with a veiled look in her eyes, some sort of private amusement showing when she watched an outsider. And Sam was an outsider. Not that she was rude to him. All the Peck girls had excellent manners. But he knew that he had lost her, all right.
“What do those damned kids do all day? Don’t they have any outside friends?” he asked his wife.
“Oh, they’re all right. We were that way,” she said serenely.
And she smiled out across the lawn at her brittle spinster sisters and her stuffy brothers who were all dressed alike, all lawyers as their father had wished them to be, and at the two wives who might have been chosen merely for their ability to be assimilated. Who were chosen for that. He looked down suddenly at his own colorless suit, so baggy that it seemed to be uninhabited. Then he sighed and walked away. Nobody noticed him leaving.
None of the girl cousins dated much in high school. At the mixers that were held with the boys’ school up the road they were thought to be standoffish. Especially Justine, whose tense, pinched face stopped most of the boys from asking her to dance. Sometimes Sally, the prettier of the twins, might circle the floor with someone, but she tipped her pelvis away stiffly and seemed relieved when the music was over. As for the boy cousins, only Duncan had a steady girlfriend.
Duncan’s girlfriend was a dimestore clerk named Glorietta de Merino. In an age when nice girls wore short skirts, Glorietta’s swirled just above her ankles. She had a tumbling waterfall of black hair and a beautiful vivid face. There appeared to be sugar crystals on her eyelashes. Her waist was tiny and her breasts precisely cone-shaped, like the radio speakers Duncan was constructing in his basement. Anyone who talked to her appeared to be talking into the speakers—Grandfather Peck included, as Justine noticed when Glorietta came for Sunday dinner. Duncan was the only one who enjoyed that dinner. Even Glorietta must have suspected that things were not going exactly right. For afterwards, she never was seen in any Peck house again. Instead she took up residence in Duncan’s car, a forty-dollar 1933 Graham Paige that smelled suspiciously of beer. Whenever the Graham Paige was parked outside, a green blemish in the row of Fords, you could glimpse a flash of Glorietta’s red dress through the window. When Duncan taught Justine to drive, Glorietta rode in the back like a lap robe or a Thermos bottle, part of the car. She hummed and popped her chewing gum, ignoring the shrieking gears and the quarrels and near accidents. Later, when Justine had learned the rudiments of driving, Duncan sat in the back as well. Justine could look in the rear view mirror and see his arm cocked carelessly around Glorietta’s neck, his face peaceful as he watched the passing scenery. She did not think she could ever be so relaxed with someone outside the family.
Once for a school bazaar Justine was asked to run the fortune-telling booth, which she knew nothing about. A very peculiar old biology teacher sent her to a seeress named Olita. “She is my fortune teller,” she said, as if everyone should have one, “and she’ll teach you enough to get by.” Duncan and Glorietta drove Justine to a cleaner’s in east Baltimore and parked to wait for her. Olita had a room upstairs, behind a plate glass window reading MADAME OLITA, YOUR DESTINY DISCOVERED. Justine began to think that wasn’t such a good idea. She turned back toward the car, planning to tell Duncan she had changed her mind, but she found that Duncan was looking squarely at her, half smiling, with a spark in his eyes. It reminded her of the time he had hung from the tree limb. She went on up the stairs.
Madame Olita was a large, sloping woman with a stubby gray haircut, wearing a grandmotherly dress and a cardigan. Her room, which was bare except for two stools and a table, smelled of steam from the cleaner’s. Since the biology teacher had called ahead, she already knew what Justine wanted. She had written out a list of things to tell people. “Palms will be simplest,” she said. “Palms take much less time than cards, and for a bazaar that’s all that counts. Just sound sure of yourself. Take their hands, like so.” She reached for Justine’s hand and turned it upward, smartly. “Start with the—you could be telling fortunes yourself, if you wanted,” she said.
“But I will be,” said Justine.
“I mean seriously telling fortunes. You have the knack.”
“Oh,” said Justine. “Well, I don’t think I—”
“Do you ever have flashes when you know something is going to happen?”
“No! Really,” said Justine. She pulled her hand away.
“All right, all right. Here’s the list, then, of the major lines of the palm. Life, mind, heart, fate …”
But later when she had heaved herself up to see Justine to the door, she said, “This is really not a parlor game, you realize.”
“No, I’m sure it isn’t,” Justine said politely.
“You know it isn’t.”
Justine couldn’t think what was expected of her. She went on buttoning her coat. Madame Olita leaned forward and jabbed the back of Justine’s left hand with one stubby finger. “You have a curved ring of Solomon, a solid line of intuition, and a mystic cross,” she said.
“I do?”
“Even one of those denotes a superior fortune teller.”
Justine straightened her hat.
“I have a mystic cross too,” said Madame Olita, “but I’ve never found one on anybody else. They are very rare. May I see your right palm, please?”
Justine held it out, unwillingly. Madame Olita’s hands felt like warm sandpaper.
“Well?” Justine said finally.
“You are very young,” Madame Olita told her.
Justine opened the door to go.
“But you’re going to enter into a marriage that will disrupt everything and break your parents’ hearts,” said Madame Olita, and when Justine spun around Madame Olita gave her a small, yellow smile and lifted a hand in farewell.
Out in the car, Duncan and Glorietta were kissing in broad daylight. “Stop that,” Justine said irritably, and Duncan broke away and looked up at her, surprised.
Justine wondered if some aura of Duncan’s had rubbed off on her, so that Madame Olita had told the wrong person’s fortune.
In the church hall after the sermon one Sunday a boy named Neely Carpenter asked Justine what time it was. “It’s approximately twelve thirteen and a half,” she told him.
“Approximately twelve thirteen and a half?”
“My watch says that, you see, but my watch is a little off,” said Justine. “It’s logical, really.” She started laughing. Neely Carpenter who had always thought of her as a spinster-faced girl, looked surprised for a moment and then asked if she would like a ride home from church.
After that he gave her a ride every Sunday, and he took her to the movies every Saturday night. Justine’s mother said she thought that was very sweet. It was the fall of Justine’s senior year, after all; she was seventeen. It was about time she had a steady boyfriend. And Neely was a doctor’s son recently moved to Roland Park, a serious-looking boy with very straight black hair and excellent manners. “Why don’t you invite this Neely boy for Sunday dinner?” Justine’s mother asked her.
Sunday dinner was always held at Great-Grandma’s house, with four leaves extending the table so that everyone could sit around it. Neely looked a little stunned when he saw how many Pecks there were, but he found a seat between Aunt Sarah and Uncle Dan and did his best to keep his place in the conversation. “Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am,” he kept saying. Justine thought he was doing fine. She was proud of her family, too—her aunts in their new rust-colored fall outfits, her handsome cousins, her stately grandfather with his hair turned silvery white and his face puzzled-looking from the effort he had started having to make in order to hear. So she was surprised when later, after Neely had gone home, Duncan said, “You’ll never see him again.”
They were out on Great-Grandma’s lawn, where Justine had gone to see Neely off and where Dunc
an, up to some project or other, was unrolling a gigantic reel of baling wire across the grass. When he raised his head to speak to her Justine was struck by his expression, which was almost the same as his grandfather’s. “Why do you say that?” she asked him.
“Nobody takes Sunday dinner with the Pecks and comes back for more.”
“Well! Just because Glorietta! And besides, you’re wrong. He’s already asked me to Sue Pope’s birthday dance.”
“Then he’s a fool,” said Duncan. “No, I don’t mean because of you, Justine. I mean, who would willingly mix with that crowd in the dining room?”
“I would,” said Justine. “I thought they were very nice to him.”
“Ah, yes! ‘Ask if your little friend there would like another potato, Justine.’ Little friend! And, ‘Tell me, is it true that you go to public school? How are the public schools?’ And, ‘I understand your father is a doctor, um, Reilly. How nice! It’s a very rewarding profession, I hear, though a little—mechanical, don’t you think? We are all lawyers, I suppose you know—’ ”
“What’s wrong with that? They were only showing an interest,” Justine said.
“Ho! And then when he asked Great-Grandma if he could help to clear the dishes. Then he got it twice! ‘Oh, my, no, we have a servant, dear.’ And, ‘Besides,’ Aunt Caroline says, ‘it’s the very best china.’ ”
“Well?” said Justine. “We do have a servant. And it was the best china.”
Duncan stopped unreeling the baling wire. He straightened up and wiped his face on his sleeve. “You really don’t see it, do you,” he said.
But Justine wouldn’t answer. She folded her arms against an autumn wind and looked instead at the four brick houses behind them, where everybody was getting comfortable now with newspapers and needlework and cups of spiced tea. “You know what those houses remind me of?” Duncan said, following her gaze. “Hamsters. Or baby mice, or gerbils. Any of those little animals that cluster in one corner piled on top of each other even when they have a great big cage they are free to spread out in.”
“Oh, Duncan,” Justine said.
She knew he only talked that way because he was going through a difficult time. Next year he would enter college and he wanted to go to Hopkins instead of the University and study science instead of law. But Grandfather Peck and the uncles kept arguing with him, nagging, pushing him. Of course he could study science, it was a free country, they said, but all the same there was something so materialistic about science, whereas law … “Peck, Peck, Peck & Peck,” said Duncan, referring to the family firm, which was actually called Peck & Sons. “What a perfect name for them.” And he would shut himself away in his room, or go riding aimlessly with Glorietta so close beside him that if the Graham Paige were a matchbox (which it almost appeared to be) they would have tipped over long ago.
So Justine didn’t worry when he spoke so bitterly. And sure enough, Neely kept on asking her out. He never came to Sunday dinner again but that was because he really had to eat with his own family, he said. He did take her to movies and dances and birthday parties. He drove her home the long way around and parked some distance from the Pecks’ in order to kiss her good night. He asked if she would like to move to the back seat where they would be more comfortable. “Oh well, oh no—” said Justine, uncertain of the proper answer. She really didn’t know what she was supposed to do in this situation. None of her girl cousins could help her, either. All they knew about sex was what Duncan had told them when he was eight; that and the vague, horticultural-sounding information their mothers had given out. So Justine would flutter and debate with herself, but she always ended up saying, “Well actually I’m very comfortable where I am but thank you just the—” Neely, who might have been uncertain too, would look almost relieved. Going home he hummed along with “Good Night, Irene” on the radio. He was starting to talk about their getting married someday, after he was through with medical school. Justine thought he was the best-looking boy in Roland Park and she liked his eyes, which were gray and translucent like quartz, and his quiet, level way of speaking. It was possible that she might even love him, but she didn’t know what her mother would say.
By the fall of 1951, Justine had started attending a girls’ junior college nearby. She thought she would do English or preschool education or something. It didn’t much matter. Although she had always been a fair student she didn’t have any real curiosity and she couldn’t think of any career she wanted to aim for. So she and Esther drifted off to college every day in the Ford their grandfather had bought them for commuting, their bright kerchiefs flickering and their hair whipping in the wind. Almost every evening Neely would come over (he was at Hopkins now) to study in the dining room with her. And there were still the Sunday dinners, the cousins alternating with grownups around the table to discourage mischief, and Claude’s round face shining with the relief of being home from the University even if just for a day.
But Duncan!
Something came over Duncan that year. No one could quite put a finger on it. He had what he wanted, didn’t he? He was studying science at Hopkins, wasn’t he? Yet it seemed sometimes that he was more dissatisfied than ever, almost as if he regretted winning. He complained about living at home, which he had to do because Hopkins was so expensive. He said the expense was an excuse; this was just the family’s way of punishing him. Punishing! To live at home with your own close family? He was morose and difficult to talk to. He did not appear to have any friends at all, at least none that he would introduce, and Glorietta was no longer to be seen. Well, of course he had always been somewhat of a problem. Surely this was just another of his stages, the aunts told his mother.
But then he started reading Dostoevsky.
Naturally they had all read Dostoevsky—or at least the uncles had, in college. Or Crime and Punishment, at any rate. At least in the abridged edition. But this was different. Duncan didn’t just read Dostoevsky; he sank in, he buried himself in Dostoevsky, he stopped attending classes entirely and stayed in his room devouring obscure novels and diaries none of the rest of the family had heard of. On a soft spring evening, in the midst of a peaceful discussion on the merits of buying a home freezer, Uncle Two’s branch of the family might be startled by the crash of enormous footsteps down the stairs and Duncan’s wild, wiry figure exploding into the living room to wave a book at them. “Listen! Listen!” and he would read out some passage too loudly and too quickly for them to follow. A jumble of extravagant Russian prose, where emotions were stated outright in a surprising way and a great many extreme adjectives were used and feverish fancies kept darting and flashing. Paragraphs were layered and dense and complicated like chunks of mica. “Did you hear?” he shouted. His parents nodded and smiled, their embarrassed expressions giving them the look of sleepers dazzled by bright light. “Well then!” he would say, and off he spun, up the stairs. His parents stared at each other. His father went to talk to the grandfather, who understood it no better. “But I thought he was scientific!” he said. “What is he reading for?” And then, “Ah well, never mind. At least it’s the classics, they surely can’t hurt him.”
But that was before Easter Sunday. On Easter Sunday, at the dinner table, the aunts were discussing Mrs. Norman Worth’s extensive collection of eggshell miniatures. The uncles were arguing the details of a hypothetical legal problem: If a farmer, while turning on the water to irrigate the fields, accidentally startled another farmer’s mule, which, in turn, kicked down the fence enclosing a prize-winning Angus bull, who thereupon …
“Neither of these subjects is fit table conversation,” Duncan said.
Everybody thought about that for a minute.
“But what’s wrong with them, dear?” his mother said finally.
“They’re not real.”
Great-Grandma, who had lived longest and was hardest to shock, poured more ice water into her tumbler. “To you they may not be,” she said, “but I myself find eggshell miniatures fascinating and if I didn’t
have this tremor I would take them up myself.”
“You owe us an apology, Duncan boy,” said Uncle Two.
“You owe me an apology,” said Duncan. “I’ve spent eighteen years here growing deader and deader, listening to you skate across the surface. Watching you dodge around what matters like painting blue sea around boats, with white spaces left for safety’s sake—”
“What?”
“Can’t you say something that means something?” Duncan asked.
“About what?” said his mother.
“I don’t care. Anything. Anything but featherstitch and the statute of limitations. Don’t you want to get to the bottom of things? Talk about whether there’s a God or not.”
“But we already know,” said his mother.
What was so terrible about that? None of them could see it. But Duncan stood up, as wild-eyed as any Russian, and said, “I’m leaving. I’m going for good.”
He slammed out of the dining room. Justine jumped up to follow him, but then she stopped in the doorway, undecided. “He’ll be back,” Uncle Two said comfortably. “It’s only growing pains. Ten years from now he’ll talk the same as all the rest of us.”
“Go after him,” the grandfather said.
“What, Father?”
“Well, don’t just—somebody go. You go, Justine. Go after him, hurry.”
Justine went. She flew out the front of Great-Grandma’s house and paused, thinking she had already lost him, but then she saw him just coming from Uncle Two’s with a cardboard box. He crossed the lawn and heaved the box into the back seat of the Graham Paige. Then he climbed in himself. “Duncan! Wait!” Justine called.
Surprisingly, he waited. She ran up out of breath, clutching her dinner napkin. “Where are you going?” she asked him.