Searching for Caleb

On a Saturday night in October, Justine was watching television with Neely in her great-grandma's study. Neely was stroking her neck up and down in a particularly rasping way, but she had been so short-tempered with him lately that she didn't want to protest. Instead she concentrated on the television: a mahogany box with a snowy blue postage stamp in its center, showing a girl who had become engaged due to cleansing her face with cold cream twice a night. She flashed a diamond ring at her girlfriends. "Your diamond's going to be twice as big," said Neely. "My father's already promised me the money."

"I don't like diamonds," said Justine.

"Why not?"

"I don't like stones that are transparent."

"You don't like anything any more, Justine."

On the television, a man held up a watch that would keep running steadily through everything, even a cycle in a washing machine.

"How about me?" Neely asked.

"What?"

"Do you like me?"

His finger kept annoying her neck. Justine winced and drew away.

A man in downtown Baltimore was interviewing people coming out of a movie theater. He wanted to see if they had heard of his product, an antibacterial toothpaste. "Goodness, no," said a lady.

"Well, think a minute. Say you have a cold and get over it. You wouldn't want to catch it right back again from your toothbrush, would you?"

"Goodness, no."

He stopped a man in a raincoat.

"Sir? Have you ever thought how risky it is, using the toothbrush you used when you were sick?"

"Why, no, now I never considered that. But you got a point there."

He stopped Duncan.

"Say!" said Neely. "Isn't that your cousin?"

Duncan was wearing some dark shade of jacket that Justine had never seen before. His face was clamped against the cold. There was no one in the world with such a pure, unwavering face. He stooped a little to hear the question, concentrating courteously with his eyes focused on something in the distance. When the man was finished Duncan straightened and thought a moment.

"Actually," he said, "once your body's built up enough resistance to overcome those bacteria in the first place it's very doubtful if-"

The man discontinued the conversation and ran after a ^fat lady.

Justine went to the front hall for her coat. "Justine?" Neely called. She ignored him. Probably he thought she was out of hearing, maybe gone to the kitchen for soft drinks. At any rate, he didn't call again.

All she told herself was that she owed Duncan a visit. He was her cousin, wasn't he? And she really should give him their grandfather's money.

(Which was still crammed in her jewelry box at home.) She had herself convinced. But Duncan must have known exactly how her mind worked, because when he opened the door he stood looking at her for a minute, and then he drew her in and kissed her, and then he said, "Look, I can see the layers sliding across your eyes like shutters until you can properly explain this away." Then he laid her on his bed, with its hollow center that rolled her toward him so that she could feel his warm bones through the thin white fabric of his shirt. He took off her clothes and his. Still she didn't make a single objection, she said none of the things that she had said to Neely. She felt happy and certain, as if everything they did was already familiar. She seemed to be glinting with some secret laughter at this newer, more joyous mischief that they were just inventing, or at Duncan's Puckish face turned suddenly gentle, or at her own self in his mirror eyes, a naked girl wearing a Breton hat.

Duncan came home in March of 1953. He walked into his great-grandma's dining room one Sunday at dinnertime. "Duncan!" his mother said, half rising. Then, "What on earth is that you're wearing?"

He was wearing a peajacket he had bought from Navy surplus. His hair needed cutting. He had been gone nearly a year and in that time his face had changed in some indefinable way that made him an outsider. The grownups stared and his cousins gave him self-conscious, sidelong glances. All but Justine, who raised her face like a beacon and smiled across the room at him. He smiled back.

"Well, my boy," his grandfather said. "So you're home."

"No," said Duncan, looking at Justine.

But they didn't believe him. "Pull up a chair," his mother said. "Take mine. Get yourself a plate. Have you had one decent meal since you left us?"

"I'm going to get married," Duncan said.

"Married?"

The ghost of Glorietta flashed scarlet through their minds. All the grownups shifted uneasily.

"I'm marrying Justine."

First they thought it was a joke. A tasteless one, but just like him.

Then they saw how grave and still the two of them were. "My God," said Justine's mother. She clutched suddenly at a handful of ruffles on her chest. "My God, who would have thought of such a thing?"

Though it seemed to all of them, now, that they should have thought of it long ago. Those visits Justine had paid him! Those trips!