The Excellent Lombards(31)

It was my mother who announced his departure, coming to the table with the pot filled with butternut squash risotto, cookbooks by a tyrannical Italian woman her new enthusiasm. In our neighborhood noodles had not yet transitioned to pasta, all of us resisting the change, lobbying for regular old macaroni and cheese rather than bucatini with tomato and pancetta. She had stood obediently stirring the mail-order arborio rice for twenty-three minutes without saying a word. It was when she set the pot in front of us that she said, “Stephen is leaving.”

“He’s what?” my father said.

“He’s leaving Gloria, I guess is more to the point. He already returned his library books. Thirty dollars of overdues.”

“You waived his fee,” William said, as if it were an order.

“Sadly, yes.”

Her nonchalance about the departure, her dwelling on the details was her way of saying, Told you so.

“Why would he go now?” My father asked the basic question. “His sabbatical isn’t over yet. He was going to be here through June.”

“I didn’t interrogate him,” my mother said.

“What about Gloria?” William asked the other fundamental question.

“He can’t go,” I said.

“Why, really, would he stay.” My mother’s remark did not seem to be an actual question. William and I would have liked to know how he could leave the kittens, and anyway hadn’t he been wanting to quit his CIA job, get out of that racket? Why wouldn’t he stay for another harvest when he knew we needed him? He’d been devoting himself to reading and therefore weren’t there still books he wanted to check out?

My father shook his head slowly. “Gloria,” he murmured. “Oh, Gloria.”

“Yes,” my mother said, as if that was an answer.

We thought of Stephen bundling everything he owned into his duffel bag, all of his life in that lump, and going to a city like Cairo, a city so thick with people and cars you had to bribe a policeman to get yourself across the street. Or he’d be locked away in a compound in Saudi Arabia, or stuck in a hovel in Africa. He obviously should not go anywhere. He was a gifted and dedicated apple picker, probably as capable as my father and maybe faster than Sherwood. With his tremendous wingspan and grace he could lean and twist to get into a jungly place where the largest, most perfectly ripe apple hung on its thin stem. While everyone else was knocking apples down accidentally you never heard the th-whump th-whump from his tree. And he was swift, running up and down the ladder, a picker who always kept in mind that time was marching on, the cold winds were on the way, the winter snows upon us.

My father, his thick hair in its messy weave, that high hat above his wonderfully lean face, the delicate knobs of his cheekbones, his short dignified nose, and his eyes that were sometimes green and sometimes, no, we thought blue—he finally made the pronouncement: “Stephen should stay. There is no reason for him to leave.”

My mother froze in her pop-eyed amazement. “You do understand, Jim,” she was able to say, “you do understand he cannot do that.”

“Why not?” I said.

“Because.”

“Because why?” William asked.

“Because,” she said evenly, “it would be difficult for him to work alongside the present management. How exactly would he fit in?”

“There’s a place for him,” my father insisted. “He knows that.”

“I’m sorry.” My mother shook her head as if she truly wanted to apologize. “I just don’t see Stephen leaping into the operation, taking any kind of charge. For one, this isn’t something that Sherwood wants. At least that’s my guess. Anointing the little brother who, in his mind, in his exceptional mind, is the goof-off. Which is terribly funny, when you think about it. If he stayed on as a picker—well, being part of the crew is not exactly a career move.”

“He could stay,” William said meekly, doing what he could for our father.

“He’s Adam and Amanda’s uncle,” I reminded the table, the trump card, Stephen’s title surely winning the day.

William said, “He should not go.”

Stephen hadn’t been a child, not really, not in a way we could believe in despite all his stories. But what if—what if, beyond our poor powers to imagine, he actually had been young? For the discussion’s sake, let’s just say he had once been four or five or six. How, then, could he leave? We were at once certain that Stephen was the sorriest person in the world. Through dinner and even into dessert we could almost—I say almost—understand why he’d blown out the pumpkin visitors. They had come to the cottage but he couldn’t have them. They weren’t his anymore. He had gone away and lost the ability to recognize them, all of his life now and forever a poverty. We wanted to call him or maybe even run to the cottage to say, Don’t go, Stephen! You don’t have to leave us! We forgive you about the pumpkin visitors, we do. This sudden generosity ran thickly in us.

The night before his departure for Washington, DC, my mother had a long-planned party for her librarian friends from Chicago. We did not like her parties with book lovers because for a few days beforehand she banished us from the kitchen. It was as if her favorite authors were coming, or real celebrities. Then, once the librarians sat down to dinner, they’d go into their ridiculous swoons over the novels they adored, and they’d end up arguing about who was great and who wasn’t, the professionals growing increasingly noisy and high-spirited while the spouses glumly ate their food. That night, my mother was just about to recite for the assembly what, in her opinion, was a perfect description of a human being, her performance piece for special occasions. In college she had committed an entire page of Edith Wharton to memory, a paragraph devoted to the physical description of a single character. She was about to begin with, “Mr. Raycie was a monumental man.”