The Excellent Lombards(33)
“No!” This was a crooked noise, jagged, not at all a Gloria kind of sound. She pitched herself at Stephen, as if by sticking hard she might be able to go along with him to Washington. Even though she didn’t look or sound or behave like herself, so that it seemed private, these various aspects of her, we set the cats down and gawked.
My father yanked Stephen toward the car. Gloria jerked him by the other arm toward the house. Stephen had a felt hat with a ribbon around it, the kind of hat fathers wore to work in the 1950s, which made him especially look like someone who should not be at the center of a tug-of-war. In one brilliant motion my father both let go of his cousin and plucked Gloria from Stephen’s coat. He held her, her back to his chest while she screamed and kicked and flapped her arms, trying to scratch. “Go,” my father cried to Stephen over her commotion, “get in the car right now.”
Stephen stumbled down the slope of the yard holding his hat to his head with one hand, and in the other the long green sausagey duffel. He threw it in the back of the van, dove in after it, and locked the doors. To us my father said, “Find Mama.”
The library wasn’t far off. This errand was more important than being the instruments of the pumpkin visitors. We had rarely been so excited and certainly never felt so essential as we ran, as we steamed into the library to the circulation desk. When she saw us she instantly intuited the general circumstances. She called to Hildegard Bushberger to keep an eye on the place, and somehow, in her clogs, she galloped across the baseball diamond, through the stand of cedars, and up the incline to the cottage. She took Gloria from my father’s arms—Gloria was beginning to get tired out, bent over and sobbing—and led her into the house while my father hurried to the car to drive Stephen away. In the heat of the moment we had all forgotten that we were supposed to go to the Plumlys’ house.
My parents had also forgotten their anger about the dinner party and the broken plate, so that was good. We thought every time the librarians visited and my mother tried to behave in a sophisticated way, like an intellectual, maybe Gloria could have an emergency that would force them to work together. We sat on the porch and petted the cats, not looking at each other, for a while not speaking while we listened to Gloria wailing inside. She must have realized the truth about Stephen, that he’d once been a Lombard child, and that’s why he needed to stay. She’d only been trying to get him to live where he was meant to live, everyone, except my mother, who liked to complicate matters, on the same side. We had to cover our ears, Gloria’s sorrow pooling out, as if she thought her distress would reach Stephen even as he drove farther and farther away.
When she quieted somewhat we remembered how she had found us in the woods when we were lost, and so it seemed only fair that we perform a feat to help her. I reminded William that when we’d been curled up in the tree’s roots he had told stories to comfort me.
“I didn’t tell you stories,” he said.
“You did too. You told me about the girl who lived near the end of the world. Our own house picked up its skirts and came to find me.”
“You made that up. That’s your own stupid fairy tale.” He pinched me on my arm. William almost never hurt me, and although I could not have put words to it I understood, I think, that he was pinching me because of Gloria’s upset. Still, it was unjust. I was about to screech when a Gloria blast came from the house, a cry out of proportion to my injury. William and I looked at each other and shut up. Maybe I was mistaken about our fright in the woods but it didn’t matter because I would always believe that while we were lost William told me stories, and also, with or without stories, we would never be as lost as Gloria seemed to be in her own cottage.
After some time Dolly came along the path from the manor house, the news apparently having traveled. It wasn’t that she didn’t see us, right there on the porch, but that we didn’t concern her. She didn’t say hello. Her approach to the door was cautious, her voice at the screen tentative. “Yoo-hoo? Nellie? Are you there?”
My mother came clonking down the stairs from Gloria’s bedroom. She let Dolly in, instructing us to go to the library and make sure Hildegard was all right. We again felt important as if, if Hildegard wasn’t all right, looking after her own children and the circulation desk, we would manage the library ourselves.
Later we learned that my mother and Dolly were trying to settle Gloria and at the same time figure out how to get her committed; her case seemed that acute. It was my father who ended up staying in the cottage for three days and three nights before Gloria’s mother could come to care for her. He had to stay with her because she refused to come to our house, his camping there the last resort. The work of the orchard was suspended for him, no way to get those spring days back, a long falling-behind. Gloria then went away for two months, back to her hometown in Colorado, two entire months when the Lombard Orchard needed her for grafting and planting, mowing and lambing.
When the excitement was over my mother asked my father, “Why did you save Stephen? Why didn’t you let him figure out how to get out of his own mess? You betrayed Gloria by doing the rescue, you know.”
“It wasn’t possible to stand by and do nothing,” he said.
“No, I suppose not.” She went behind him and chop-chopped his shoulders the way he liked. “They’d probably still be in a standoff on the cottage porch if you hadn’t shown up.”