The Excellent Lombards(10)

Every few years he came back in the late summer to revisit his childhood by picking apples and to purchase his big shoes and the fleecy warm clothes he couldn’t get in the desert. At least that’s what he said he wanted to do at home, shop and help out on the farm. Maybe, though, he was in hiding. Maybe in his line of work it was important to disappear periodically. He didn’t have an office in the United States, one of the clues he was a rootless agent, and also he wouldn’t talk directly about his projects, and furthermore, he insisted that his job was really just entry-level grunt work. While he was in the trees, perilously reaching with his tremendously long arms for the highest apple, he’d gossip about foreigners as if they were people we knew. For instance, after the first World Trade Center bombing he was making idle conversation, saying, “Ramzi Yousef ordered the chemicals for the bomb from his hospital room. He’d been in a car accident, he lands in the hospital in New Jersey, he orders urea nitrate over the phone while a nurse’s aide is in the bathroom, emptying the bedpan.” The aluminum ladder made a warping sound as he reached for another apple. “The deal with these characters? They believe only jihad can bring peace to the world.” No one in our neighborhood in 1993 was using the word jihad then, and we thought he was maybe talking about a beautiful, princely person named Jihad. Stephen Lombard absolutely was a spy, my mother always said.

“If he was truly a spy he’d have some completely unrelated job as his cover,” was my father’s position. “He’d lead safaris or be a mapmaker or a computer technician. A plumber.”

“Not necessarily, Jim. Maybe the thinking is, he’s doing something so obviously related to the CIA, it’s staring you in the face so you don’t suspect it.”

“I think,” William said. We all waited, wanting to know. “I think he is a…”

A what?

“A genie of the Orient.”

My parents laughed.

I said, “He is! He is!” He was tall enough and he had a full lower lip and could cross his muscly arms over his chest in an imposing way. When he frowned, as genies must, his brows would surely make two slanting lines toward the bridge of his nose, a telltale sign.

The probable spy/genie stayed in our guest room even though Sherwood was his brother, even though the manor house had eleven bedrooms. Even though he was uncle to Adam and Amanda. He wouldn’t stay in the upstairs with May Hill—no one did that—and he couldn’t be in the downstairs house because there the Lombard hoarding trait was on full display, no place in Sherwood and Dolly’s quarters for a person to fully stretch out. So Stephen stayed on our side of the road, in Velta; Stephen was ours, like it or not.

With or without his glasses the genie of the Orient was handsome, the planes of his large face broad and smooth, his lashy brown eyes tapering delicately, his supple mouth often nicely moistened with ChapStick. One of the things I liked about him was his dark-brown hair that curled prettily at the neck. I liked also how he dipped his head in a shy way when he came into a room, not letting anyone see his beauty, and when he spoke he held his hand to his chin and cheek, as if he were in hiding, as his true job must have demanded. He was a genius, my mother said, and complicated, which William told me a spy/genie had to be, pretending to be one thing when you were another.

Back to Stephen’s appearing in the orchard in that summer of Gloria. She had just broken it off with the North Dakotan. Even though she’d spent a lot of effort on the boyfriend she hadn’t been able to get him to do what she wanted. Why she hadn’t fallen in love with Stephen in previous years we didn’t know, or maybe she’d been pledged to the old man in their long-distance fashion.

A week or two after Stephen arrived we saw her walking out of the orchard with him at day’s end, both of them with their picking bags slung carelessly over their shoulders. But wait, was it Gloria? Her head was tipped back, her face shining and open in a way that was not usual. He was different, too, his hand wasn’t covering his cheek, Stephen unguarded, gazing down at her. Both of them heedless of any stone or stick that might be on the path. And one standard feature of Stephen, usually, when he got himself talking? He couldn’t stop the story, the story driving hard and sure until the end, and beyond, the very end. Even so, you had to wait for a good while to be sure it was truly over before you tried to make a comment or ask a question or change the subject, no point in two people trying to squeeze through the needle’s eye at once.

And yet, with Gloria on their walk that day, he was waiting, waiting for her to say her part. He was listening. He said a sentence or two, and then she spoke. Neither one was confused or struggling. Along they came, in and out of the lavish long rays of the late afternoon, the two of them sometimes bumping a little against each other and also, most alarming, looking at one another for an impolite length of time. We were on the roof of the old chicken coop and we felt funny watching them, somewhat dizzy even, as if we were the pair in the staring contest.

They came in for dinner and as usual Gloria and my father discussed who had picked what, how many bushels, how the trade was at the apple barn, what was tasting good and should be picked next, and what they should include in the market load. What was strange, bizarre, even, was Gloria’s being almost bubbly. “Thirty-one customers,” she sang out, as if there had never been such a number on a sunny afternoon. William gave me a Huh? sort of look. My mother moved around the table and finally she sat, pouring herself another glass of wine, Nellie Lombard on her own path to happiness. Gloria, who was usually hungry at dinner and eager, pushed her plate up to her glass of milk. She stared at the lamb chop, the ear of corn, the pink applesauce, the mashed potatoes fluffed with butter, everything we ourselves had grown, as if she had no idea what food was for. That’s when Stephen started his story, when with good reason she could turn her full attention to the storyteller. We all knew his tales were always funny in parts, but also they were sad. They almost always involved him as the hero who does exactly the wrong or clumsy thing, so that even if we didn’t want to we found ourselves listening.