The Excellent Lombards(18)

He was staring at the press, the way you do when even if you want to you can’t blink, you can’t turn away. In that trance he made a slow pronouncement. “I…think…you should.”

“I want Mr. Gilbert. I want to see his exotic pets. His poison dart frogs.”

The grinder started up again, the noise snapping William back to earth. “You can’t,” he said. “He’s a felon.” He said, “Frankie?”

“What.”

“You have to. You have to interview May Hill.”

When we were downstairs playing with our cousins we sometimes heard her heavy flat footfall, May Hill doing what up there? Gathering locks of hair, apparently. Pressing the hair in books.

“Maybe she’ll take you to the attic,” William said.

“I’m not going!” I wanted to remind him, in case somehow he’d forgotten: Scram-bambow.

“There’s a sea captain’s trunk up there. The first Lombard’s trunk.”

“No, there isn’t.”

“There is. Sherwood told us. Pa said so. And a cage for a circus monkey.”

“So what?”

“It’s your chance,” he said. He was staring again as if in the presence of a mystery. “Your chance,” he repeated.

How could William be on Sherwood’s side? Because, what if it was a trap? Sherwood sending me into the lair. To be put in that cage. I said then what would surely end the discussion. I said, “I’ll go if you come with.”

“It’s an interview,” he considered, ignoring my proposal. “You ask her questions and she, she talks.”

We had hardly ever heard May Hill speak and so it was preposterous, the notion of conducting an interview with a subject who was mute.

“Frankie!” he said.

“What.”

“I’ll be downstairs with Adam. I’ll wait for you at the door.”

“No.”

“I’ll be right there.”

“But what if?” First of all, there was May Hill herself to consider. As if that danger weren’t enough, what about Sherwood and the cage? And yet if Sherwood was sometimes unhappy about being in business with my father, and bossed around by Dolly, and annoyed by the cider making, he was also full of fun. It didn’t make sense to dream him up wicked. But again, what about the war between Velta and Volta? Maybe the war had made Sherwood want to take us as prisoners.

“It looks like Joe Klein wrote Primary Colors after all,” Stephen reported, continuing to bring the news of the country to the workers.

“I don’t want to,” I said.

“Frankie!” Once more William said, “This is your chance.”

I was about to stalk away. I almost got up but I stopped. Wait, I said to myself. I could come back from the upstairs—if I came back—like Ernest Shackleton, William’s favorite explorer. He’d be at the door, longing to hear every single detail of the ordeal. All at once I pictured the two of us in our room, in our bunks, it’s dark, and I’m telling him about May Hill—about being in May Hill’s house, and maybe even seeing her bedroom. Her bedroom, seeing her bedroom—supposing she even had one, May Hill with a room, a bed, a hairbrush, a pillow. Maybe lace on the edges of the case.

“Lace?” William might say. “Really?”

“They were still pretty firm,” Gloria said to my father about the Livelands. She took a cup from the sink, filled it with cider, and went to the platform, standing below Stephen, holding the drink up to him.

Finally he looked over the top of his newspaper. “What,” he said to her. He didn’t even realize she was making an offering.

For just a minute we had to stop thinking about the interview. We could see that it was going to take a great deal of effort and endurance for Gloria to incorporate Husband Number Two, Stephen, into her routine of being Wife Number Two to my father, when Jim Lombard, surely, was always Husband Number One in her heart, Jim Lombard the receiver of the fifth-cloth message.





7.


The Mysterious Family Photograph




For some reason or other, perhaps at Sherwood’s urging, May Hill agreed to the interview. He arranged for it, as if the assignment were solely Amanda’s project. I had never discussed May Hill with my cousin, I suppose because the old aunt was someone we for the most part took for granted. I knew, also without discussion, that even though May Hill lived overhead Amanda did not like the idea of going to her house. And yet we must. Sherwood had said so, had told us the time. He had said we should go up the stairs from the kitchen, that we shouldn’t use the formal front entrance. May Hill, he said, would be waiting for us.

At the appointed hour after school Amanda and I opened the door according to our instruction. There before us, the back stairs. “You girls are in for—” Dolly for once was unable to finish a sentence. It was no secret that she hardly talked to May Hill, that neither one had much truck with the other.

“Good-bye,” I called to William, who was through the pantry in the living room. “We’re going.” I didn’t want to say in front of Amanda and Dolly that he had promised to stand at the door. “We’re going now.”

Sherwood was down the hall in the small room reserved for the piano. He’d been working on Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I for as long as I could remember, thumping out the “Ave Maria,” the metronome holding him steady.