Searching for Caleb

He was too much present still, and would not have approved. Instead she slightly altered the position of his pillow, causing his head to lie straighter; and when the movement set up a resulting of papers she pulled from beneath his shoulder the sheaf of letters he had held, his carbon copies on onionskin. Their new creases and the blurred gray softness of the type made them seem to have come from someone already long dead and forgotten. "Dear Caleb," she read, from the top page. "I take pen in hand to express my hope that . . ." Her eyes slid down, line by line. When she reached the end of the letter she lowered it and stared at her grandfather's closed, set face.

"Justine!" Duncan called.

She spun around.

"Justine? Dorcas says-"

He stopped in the doorway, and then walked in and picked up his grandfather's wrist. "Well," he said after a moment, and when he set the wrist back down he was so gentle that there was no sound at all. Then he came to stand in front of Justine. "I'm sorry," he told her.

She held the letter out to him, and he took it from her to read it. First he sighed, then he smiled; then he stopped reading and looked over at her.

"Oh, Duncan," Justine said, "how could he write such a thing?"

But when he reached for her, she dodged his hands and went to the opposite side of the room.

16

Down the curved, gleaming staircase (which in her girlhood she used to descend holding onto her chest, to prevent exercising off what little she had), across the porch where her great-grandmother had often sat listing the three permissible excuses for typing a note of condolence (paralytic stroke, severed tendons, and amputation) Justine moved dimly beside her husband, wearing the suit she had worn to her mother's funeral and clutching one frayed white glove. (She had not been able to find the other.) She entered her Uncle Mark's car; she rode through Roland Park, alighted in front of the church, and climbed the steps leaning backward slightly as if she feared what she would find inside. But inside there was only a density of carpet and shadowy pastel light from the windows, and up front an anonymous coffin. Then a cemetery as flat and well mown as a golf course, rows upon rows of glazed granite headstones including PECK Justin Montague, PECK Laura Baum, MAYHEW Caroline Peck and finally an admirably well cut rectangular ditch beside which the coffin lay like something forgotten, abandoned at the brink, while more words were said.

Afterwards the family went home to receive their callers, who had been streaming in for the past two days and continued even now that it was over-elderly gentlemen, ladies in hats and gloves and veils and crocheted shawls in spite of the heat. "My," they said to Justine, "are you that little girl of Caroline's? But you used to be so-well, you certainly have-now, this is your husband, isn't it? Him I recognize."

Him they recognized. From her new distance Justine turned and looked at him, at his boyish pointy chin and his gawky way of standing, twining one leg about the other and rocking slightly with his hands in his back pockets so that his elbows jutted out to spear passers-by. The upturned corners of his mouth made him appear to be smiling mysteriously, teasingly, and perhaps he was. "Why, Duncan!" said Justine, dropping her glove. "You haven't changed a bit!"

An old lady mumbled, embarrassed at her mistake. Plainly these two were not married and perhaps not even related, in spite of the resemblance.

Then Duncan stooped for the glove and handed it formally to Justine, and Justine turned and went off alone.

Not only had Duncan remained the same but so had her aunts and uncles, solidified in their flowery dresses and summer suits, and her cluster of cousins passing trays of tea cakes as they had when they were children.

Only Justine stood swaybacked, chewing the empty finger of her glove, in a distant corner of the room.

"You were that little girl who used to be so sweet," a spindled-shanked lady told her. "And still are, I'm sure. You used to bring me little handfuls of flowers. You would never stay and talk because you were too shy."

Justine removed the glove from her mouth and gave her a sweet, shy smile, but the lady was not deceived and moved on immediately.