The Excellent Lombards(61)

“The farm’s not going down the tubes,” I repeated, interrupting her monologue.

“Repairs are in order, Marlene,” my father said. “Don’t say it, Nellie—don’t.”

My mother started to laugh in that terribly annoying fashion of hers. “Let’s see,” she said. “Two of the barn roofs have gaping holes. How many sheds are on their last legs? Sherwood spent all spring on that contraption to wash boxes and all summer picking garlic mustard? I mean, really?”

“Sherwood works plenty hard,” my father said.

“I mean, really?” I mocked my mother.

“Where’s May Hill going to live?” William thought to ask.

“She has the right to live in the house until her death,” my father replied.

Philip actually owning a piece of Volta? I kept asking that question to myself. He had been learning how to spray, studying for the Pesticide Applicator’s Test, something Gloria had never done. But even if he had skills, even so we would always own more of the land than he did and if necessary we could put in a different driveway. We could get to the apple barn without his precious holding. I wondered then about William’s question, why May Hill didn’t just give her nephew her land, why she needed him to buy it. But wait, I thought, would we have to buy our portion from my father?—No, of course not, he would give it to us. But maybe we’d have to buy Sherwood’s shares, something I’d never considered before. How could we possibly find the money to purchase Volta? I very much wanted to ask how William and I would take over, how the mechanics of it would happen. Instead I said, not looking at William, I said, in the spirit of helpfulness and charity and also fear, “Philip is a good worker. And strong.” Ah, I was having an epiphany! “He’ll be like our Gloria, William.” In a snap I’d figured out at least part of the puzzle, Philip always willing to do any task at our bidding.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Francie,” my mother said. “He will not be like Gloria. He’ll have ownership.”

“It’s a dramatic change, Marlene,” my father said soothingly, “but it’s important for him to have a stake—”

“It’s not something you have to think about right now,” my mother butted into my father’s comforting words. “You don’t have to decide your future right this minute.”

“You just said someone has to think about the future,” I cried. “You just said that. But what you meant is, You, MF Lombard, don’t have to think about the future you yourself want. You meant that I only have to think about the future you want for me.”

My father said, “Let’s talk about this tomorrow. The morning,” he quoted, “is always wiser than the evening.”

“Just sign me up for camp, Nellie,” I said. “Pay an enormous deposit you won’t get back, money that could be used for the farm, just send it off without telling me.”

With that point made, MF Lombard, the winner of the round, went upstairs. I had a momentary satisfaction before I remembered the more significant point, that Philip was going to own a portion of our property.



My mother’s assumption that we would go to college was so stubbornly imbued in her—and probably, to be fair, in my father, too—that there had been little need for her to speak much about it until we were teenagers. Unlike Dolly, who herself only held a high school diploma, Dolly whispering collegecollegecollege into her newborns’ ears.

By the time we got to high school my mother had become generally cranky, bent on making her pitch both overtly and subliminally for the colleges of her choice. She served us cocoa in her college mugs. She often related her adventures in higher education, stories that she’d suddenly recall.

There seemed also to be more visits than usual from her best college pals, one of whom was the dean of admissions at one of Nellie’s top ten picks. The dean, over breakfast at our kitchen table, had intimated that when we applied to Swarthmore, as of course we must, we could very likely expect not only the fat envelope but substantial aid. “You’ve got everything going for you,” she said to me. “Brains, naturally, grades, extracurriculars, and let’s not forget, you’ve got the farm card.”

The farm card?

My mother glared, Do not be rude.

It seemed to me that the exact minute I’d gone to high school she’d become disapproving of me full-time, a shocked look on her face when I told her I’d joined Future Farmers of America, as if FFA was beneath the station of a girl with a pedigree like MF Lombard’s. And when I’d wanted to sign up for auto mechanics instead of honors biology you might have thought I was throwing my life away by shooting heroin or having unprotected sex. She even discouraged me from continuing on in 4-H. “Oh please, Francie,” she’d sighed, “not another year showing your zucchinis.”

Whereas Dolly’s aspiration for Amanda and Adam was a brag-worthy university that would provide them with a marketable skill, Mrs. Lombard wanted William and Francie to become fully rounded, truly educated, cultivated people. She seemed to think that without Oberlin or Bates or Carleton or Williams we’d not know who Hesiod was, we’d forget to vote, we’d vote Hitler into power, we’d confuse good and well, we’d not appreciate a symphony orchestra, we’d track mud into museums, and most frightening, we’d admire terribly written thrillers and bosom heavers. College was four short beautiful years, she’d go on, when we could open out, all blossomy, when we could experience new ideas, when we could have the privilege of freedom, a time when we could study whatever interested us, although presumably she did not mean auto mechanics. If she hadn’t met Stephen Lombard, she reminded us, never would she have visited the farm, never married my father, and therefore we would never have been born. In the beginning was Oberlin College, the light, the way, world without end.