The Excellent Lombards(11)
He told the one where he was little, when he and his father were picking in the Cortland line. His father, straining for a huge, deep-red apple growing from a leader that was impossibly high, fell eighteen feet to the ground. Thwump. There he lay in a heap. Five-year-old Stephen froze to the rungs of his own ladder.
“Oh, Stephen!” Gloria cried.
“One of my first existential crises,” Stephen said modestly. “Where was God? Was there a God? What was God going to do for me?”
Everyone except Gloria laughed.
“Couldn’t find God, but probably more important, couldn’t locate my feet. Or my vocal cords. Not only my first existential crisis but my first stunning public display of ineptitude. If only I’d known how many more were to come.”
Gloria smacked her hand to her mouth. It seemed as if she might cry. We all knew how the story came out, how eventually the father was loaded onto an old door for a stretcher and put in the apple truck and taken to the emergency room, that he’d miraculously sustained only a few broken ribs. There was no reason to cry.
William and I also knew we were supposed to love the fumbling, sweet boy, young Stephen, just as everyone else did. But how could we? When Stephen talked about his childhood we got the feeling he didn’t actually believe that any child had come after him on the farm. For that reason we couldn’t laugh or feel very sorry for him. He hardly seemed to notice that we were at the table, that we, Mary Frances and William, were the actual, real true children.
When he’d finished the story, the father alive and hardly wounded, Stephen abruptly pushed back in his chair and stood up. “Thanks,” he said to my mother. “You cook lamb better than the Saudis.”
My mother, so pleased by the compliment, tittered girlishly. Gloria watched him hastily tie his shoes and land a short pat pat on Butterhead, the old yellow cat. She stared at the aged tom, both of them glazy-eyed, while Stephen crossed the yard and started out to the hay field. After a minute Gloria blinked away her dream, she looked at her full plate, and then—what did she do but go to the sink and scrape all of that bounty into the bucket for the chickens.
“Gloria?” my mother said. “You all right?”
“Fine!” Gloria said so brightly we knew she had to be ill. Nonetheless she was putting on the smock she wore at our house so she could wash the dishes.
What’s going on? It was my mother who first asked the question of my father with the look, eyebrows raised, the wide glare of alarm.
Next we knew Gloria was ripping off the smock, throwing it on the counter, and she was gone, out the door.
“Oooooh…sweeeet…” My mother’s oath was coming from her mouth, a slow leak. “…Geeeesus.”
“What’s the matter?” William said.
“Do not, Gloria, go after Stephen.” My mother spoke as if Gloria were still in the room.
“Is that what’s happening?” my father wondered.
She shook her head mournfully, which seemed to mean yes.
“Why are you doing that, Mrs. Lombard?” William had started using her formal title when strictness was required.
“It’s just that—it’s just that if, if Gloria likes Stephen—if she likes him very much—he just won’t—he just can’t attend to—”
“Is that what’s going on?” My father’s same basic question.
“Yes, Jim, yes it is.”
“Gloria likes Stephen?” I said.
“All the signs indicate yes,” my mother explained. Not only was she the person in the family who knew about the world in general, but she had also once followed Stephen all the way from her college in Ohio to the orchard. So she should know.
William looked at me, I looked at him. We were thinking about how Gloria had recently scooped up a batch of late-summer kittens from our barn, the mother, Piggy, having eaten the first two, the glutton Piggy feasting on her own young. In rushed Gloria to rescue the remaining babies from both Piggy and my murderous father, who, if given a chance, would slit their throats, a quicker, kinder death, he always said, than drowning them in a bucket. What remained were three blind little mewlers who required feeding with a syringe. So, right away, if Stephen and Gloria got married, they’d have something like an instant family.
“It’s not going to work out,” my mother pronounced, pushing back to clear the plates.
My father, always hopeful where love was concerned, said, “Maybe it will, Nellie. Maybe he’s ready.”
“Oh God, Jim.”
“He’s got this sabbatical situation. Maybe he’s ready for a new life.”
“You know Stephen is not domesticatable,” my mother said, going to her husband’s chair, standing behind him, draping her arms down his front. “You know you are utterly out of your mind.”
He smiled as if she’d given him a compliment, as if she’d said something factual.
“You’re not crazy, Papa!” I cried.
My parents laughed, the way they did when, without warning, they were in their own realm where everything was funny. If anyone was crazy it was Gloria. She had flung down her smock. She’d torn away. So that’s how it happened, not eating any of your dinner, abandoning the dishes, having to run to try to catch, maybe not even the man, but the love itself? None of it seemed like a good idea, but we weren’t going to worry about Gloria’s disappointment in the event it didn’t work out. We wandered off upstairs to our room. We got to wondering whether, if it did work out, if she and Stephen would then have real children instead of cats. If they did, those children would be our cousins. Because Gloria was a knowledgeable gardener, unlike my mother, whose plot was a tangle, and because Gloria was interested in farming, those children might want to live on the orchard. They might want to take it over. Those future relatives would be our rivals, our enemies, and furthermore they would have extensive knowledge, something we had neglected to get. We would then be sorry we hadn’t loved Gloria more, so that she would have been satisfied with just us.