Searching for Caleb

Duncan's room was blasting with heat and he was so hot he seemed to have been oiled. He wore a grayish undershirt. His trousers were creased and limp. "Oh, it's you," was all he said, and then he sat back down on his bed and wiped his face with his balled-up shirt.

"Duncan, I brought you a fan from your mother."

"You've been telling her about my room."

"No, I haven't. She just guessed you would need this."

"What's that in the envelope?"

"I don't know."

He broke the string that tied it and pulled out a folded note. First he read it silently and then he groaned and read it aloud.

Dear Duncan, I am taking the liberty of sending you the fan from my bedroom, now that it is so warm.

Everyone is well although I myself have had a recurrence of those headaches. Just a little tension, the doctor says, so I keep my chin up!

Your father has been working very . . .

"What about the fan from my room?" Duncan said. "There is one, you know."

"She gave you her own to show she cares, she didn't know how else to put it," said Justine.

"None of them do. Oh, you can tell who she married into. She's just like all the rest of them now. Too little said and too much communicated, so that if you fight back they can say, 'But why? What did I do?' and you won't have any answer. It all takes place in their secret language, they would never say a thing straight out."

"But that's tact. They don't want to embarrass you."

"They don't want to embarrass themselves," Duncan told her.

She said nothing.

"Isn't that right?"

"Probably it is," she said. "But so is the other. There isn't any right and wrong. I keep looking at them, trying to decide. Well, everything you say is true but then so is everything I say. And what does it matter, after all? They're your family."

"You know who you sound like? Aunt Sarah, Justine. You're going to grow up an old maid. Or you'll marry a stick like Neely and have him change his name to Peck. I can see it coming. I can see it in that flat straight face of yours, just watch."

But he had gone too far. Even he must have known that. When Justine turned away from him, fumbling for something in her purse, he said, "Anyway!" He jumped up and started pacing the floor. "Well, anyway, tell me all the news," he said.

"Oh . . ."

"Come on!"

"There's nothing much."

"Nothing? Nothing in all those four enormous houses?"

"Well, Aunt Bea has had to get glasses," Justine said.

"Ah."

"She's very shy about them, she wears them on a string tucked inside her blouse. She takes them off between sentences in a newspaper even."

"So Aunt Bea has glasses."

"And Mama's bought a TV."

"A TV. I might have known it would come to that."

"Oh, it's not so bad, Duncan. It's very convenient, don't you think, having a moving talking picture in your home that way? I wonder how they do it."

"Actually it's quite simple," said Duncan. "The principle's been around for decades. Have you got a pencil? I'll show you."

"Oh, I wouldn't understand," Justine said.

"Of course you would."

"But I'm not scientific. I don't see how you know those things."

"Those things are nothing," he said, "it's the others I don't get. The ones you take for granted. Like mirrors, for instance," and he stopped his pacing to wave at the mirror on the opposite wall. "I lay awake the other night going crazy over that. I spent hours trying to figure out the laws of reflected images. I couldn't measure the angles of refraction. Do you understand it? Look."

She stood up and looked. She saw herself in the speckled glass, nothing surprising.

"How come it shows my image and not yours?" he asked her. "How come yours and not mine? How come eyes can meet in a mirror when you're not looking at each other in real life? Do you understand the principle?"

In the glass their eyes met, equally blue and distant, as if the mirror were reflecting images already mirrored.

Duncan turned around and set his hands on her shoulders and kissed her on the mouth. He smelled of salt and sunlight. His grip on her was weightless, as if he were holding something back. When she drew away, he let his hands drop to his sides. When she ran out of the room he didn't try to stop her.

Justine wouldn't visit Duncan any more. Her grandfather kept coming around, pressing twenty-dollar bills into her hand, but she didn't know what to tell him and so she took the money in silence. She stuffed it haphazardly into her jewelry box, feeling like a thief even though she never spent it. She quarreled with her mother over a print dress, saying it was old-ladyish, although before she had worn whatever her mother picked out. When school started she studied indifferently and had trouble getting to class on time. Esther had graduated and was teaching nursery school, but now the twins were commuting with Justine and they objected to her late starts. "Is that what you call the point of life?" Justine asked them. "Getting to a class on the dot of nine o'clock?"

The twins looked at each other. Certainly they had never meant to imply that it was the point of life, exactly.