The Excellent Lombards(30)
When he returned it was Halloween night. He was almost too tired to eat, my mother sitting close by, pointing out what was most delicious.
She had instructed us to do the work of the evening. The pumpkin visitors, she claimed, would cheer him up. Even though it was Grandmother’s time, even though she’d died in her sleep, he still would need the comfort of tradition. We understood the importance of doing it perfectly. While my mother went on speaking quietly to my father William and I stole outside. The barn cats were like minnows in the shallows, moving around our legs as we carried the visitors from the bushes and went pumpkin to pumpkin, lighting the candles. Once the faces were illuminated even the big-headed torn-up toms crouched low, frightened and full of respect.
When my father at last turned to see the toothless beauty in the kitchen window he did something that surprised us. All of him right there at the table seemed to dissolve. My mother didn’t shush him or say that soon he’d feel better. Together they huddled in his wide old chair, both of them weeping. There was no comfort—we could see this, none to be had—and so we crept away to our room and into our bunks. We cried not for our grandmother, a woman so ancient she didn’t know us. We were crying because the visitors, for the first time in their long history, had failed to bring happiness. We had done the work wrong, or it wasn’t for us to do, or their powers were over and done? Somehow, we had made a mistake.
Later, my father came upstairs to tell us how much he loved the magic. He said he couldn’t have imagined a better homecoming, and if Grandma were still with us—plus, he meant, still had her mind—she would have enjoyed the story. It was a nice try. We appreciated his effort but we knew that the pumpkin visitors would never come again.
It must have been the next Halloween when Stephen was more or less living with Gloria. Again my mother was the one who made the suggestion about the visitors. Why didn’t William and I make them appear at the cottage? We promptly forgot about the disaster of the previous year, all of a sudden excited and serious. With utmost care we picked out several pumpkins from our private patch. There was the carving to do, the four of us working together at the table, the great emptying to make the creatures live, the wet pulp in mounds on the newspaper.
When all was ready we set out. My father had the brute in his arms, my mother with the moderate girlish one, William and I each carrying two small howling faces. In a line we crossed the road and went through the old orchard, the long knobby branches laid out in shadows on the moonlit ground. We trooped past the potato garden and the marsh, considering the muskrats deep inside their thatchy houses. At the cottage we went to our stations, working in complete silence, as a spy must, setting the visitors on the porch and the walkway and in the back window. My father had hidden a ladder near the barn early in the day for the purpose of placing one pumpkin on the roof, outside the bedroom.
We were hiding in the bushes, admiring the display, when the door opened. Gloria came sweeping out in a long, floaty gown, her hair wrapped in a leaning and towering scarf. She wasn’t wearing her glasses, but on that night perhaps full vision was hers. Gloria, who never wore jewelry of any kind, was covered in beads and bangles and she had long glittery earrings, each a set of chimes, a percussion section unto herself. In her hand she held a taper, her face ghoulishly lit. We laid ourselves flat, trembling with glee as she drifted among the pumpkins, singing in her high thin voice, greeting them one by one, a shivery vibrato in her thank yous. We remembered what was easy to forget, that Gloria every year often became nearly as magical as the visitors. On that night, there the peculiar and graceful spirit was, dancing in the yard. A spirit who had somehow intuited that she should be ready for the spectacular.
The door opened once more. Stephen, in ordinary clothes, stepped out. “Where’d these come from?” he called. He apparently, somehow, was not familiar with our customs.
“The pumpkin visitors,” Gloria sang in her fairy voice, the coins around her waist jangling. “The pumpkin vis-it-ors, oh, the pump…kin visitors, have come”—up went the note in a wild leap—“have come to us.”
Without saying a word Stephen leaned over the big fellow on the porch and blew out the candle.
“What’s he doing?” William whispered.
On the walk Stephen pinched the light inside my little screamer. “Make him stop,” I said.
“Time’s up,” my father pronounced, moving low on monkey hands, he and my mother going in their knuckled run. We started to scoot after our parents but in the same instant we turned back. Gloria had stopped singing. She was standing at the bottom of the slope facing her dark cottage. There was only the single pumpkin on the roof still shining into her bedroom, the one visitor who must do all the work, trying to bring generosity and merriment to that place and to that couple.
“Come on, Frankie,” William said, but I wanted to look a little longer at the last pumpkin visitor. There would never be another. And so together we stood saying our own private farewells.
11.
My Mother Is Right
As my mother had predicted, there came an end to the Stephen Lombard era. In that next spring his so-called sabbatical was over, Langley no doubt offering him a plum position. I alone knew that he had somehow proved to the CIA that he could successfully insert a battery into his alarm clock. Even if Stephen was merely the writer of spy manuals his work would be plentiful. The first World Trade Center bombing had already occurred, those years a time when agents were brushing up on their Arabic and being redirected. We later considered that maybe he had gone to try to prevent everything that was going to happen, listening in on phone conversations, attempting to avert the tide of history.