Searching for Caleb

Now as she cruised through the darkening house she was aware of how everything here was attached to everything else. There was no such thing as a simple, meaningless teacup, even. It was always given by someone dear, commemorating some happy occasion, chipped during some moment of shock, the roses worn transparent by Sulie's scrubbing, a blond stain inside from tea that Sam Mayhew had once drunk, a crack where Caroline, trembling with a headache, had set it down too hard upon the saucer.

She went out the front door that was dented by Justin Peck's invalid's bed in the fall of 1905. She passed her grandfather's front porch, where Maggie Rose stood in the twilight waiting for a Model T. She climbed Uncle Two's front steps, surrounded by ghostly whispers and murmurs of love and scoldings and reproaches and laughter. Upstairs she found Duncan in his room among Erector Set machines he had built when he was twelve, a full-color poster of Princess Pet in the Land of the Ice Cream Star, the Monopoly board in which all seven cousins had played a thirty-eight-hour world series in the spring of 1944. But Duncan-oh, forever in the present!-was whistling "The Wabash Cannonball" and fiddling with a rectangle of lead-colored metal.

She didn't know how he could whistle.

When she came in the room he stopped. "Do you want to lie down?" he asked her. He began clearing his bed of everything on it, a jungle of wires and soldering irons, tubes of flux, glue, and paint. She sat on the edge of the mattress, but she didn't want to stretch out. It was barely eight o'clock. If she slept now she would lie awake for hours later on, as she had last night and the night before.

"Anything you wanted to say?" Duncan asked.

"No."

"I thought you might have come to tell me something."

"No."

"Well." He went back to whatever he was doing, but he didn't whistle any more. "This is a wire-bending jig," he told her.

She didn't comment.

"These pegs can be moved, see? Then you bend the wire around them any way you want. There are all kinds of curves and angles. I could make you a bracelet. Want a bracelet? Or a necklace, if you like."

She laid her fingers across her eyes, cooling them.

"I've got it," he said. "A nose ring. Want a nose ring?"

When she opened her eyes she found a curve of wire nearly touching her nose, giving off a gray smell, sharp at one end. She batted it away.

"What are you trying to do to me?" she said.

He looked surprised.

"Are you trying to get me angry on purpose?" she asked him.

"Well, not on purpose, no-"

"Why are you acting this way?"

"Justine, I'm not acting any way."

"How can you play around with little pieces of wire when both my parents are dead, and you're the one that took me far off and cut the telephone cord and laughed at Mama's letters and wouldn't bring me to visit?"

"Justine."

"Daddy warned me," she said. "He told me straight out you were marrying me to torment me."

"Oh, did he?"

"Either that, he said, or to lean on me, but I don't picture that ever happening."

"Well, he certainly thought of everything, didn't he," Duncan said.

He went back to bending his wire. He adjusted a peg on the jig and turned a right angle.

"I'm sorry," Justine said finally.

"That's all right."

"I just feel so-"

"It's all right."

"Duncan, couldn't we just stay here a while?"

He looked up at her.

"We could live in Great-Grandma's house," she said. "Wouldn't that be nice?"

"No, it wouldn't."

"Please?"

"I should have known," he told her. "I didn't really believe you would come away with me in the first place."

"But I feel I'm getting pulled. I hate to just go away and leave them.

And I can't stay here without you, but you wouldn't say a word against it when they brought it up."

"I don't want to pull you, Justine."

"But then they're the only ones doing it, and they'll win."

"Is that the only way you go anywhere? Being pulled?"

She was silent.

"All right," said Duncan. "I'd like you to come with me. It's important.

It's more important than they are."

But she went on watching his face.

"Well, how am I supposed to do this?" he asked her. "I was too well trained, I don't feel comfortable saying things straight out. They got to me a little too, you know."

"Oh, Duncan," Justine said. "You've said everything straight out since you were four years old and told Aunt Bea she had hair like broccoli."

"No," said Duncan. "I a Peck. I not talk so good but I give swell presents."

Then he handed her his wire, a stick figure wearing Justine's flat hat and triangular dress, looking so straight-backed and light-hearted that even a tribesman in darkest Africa could tell that someone cared for her.

The family lined up to see them off, their faces papery in the morning sun. "I can't believe that you would be going like this," Aunt Lucy said.