The Excellent Lombards(8)
We could never tell anyone about the real May Hill. Never tell about Scram-bambow. And even though we should have thanked Gloria for trying to soothe us we couldn’t ever mention what had taken place in the tool house.
As time passed there were other things we learned from Gloria in addition to skating and crafts. For instance, we first learned about romance, William and Francie with a bird’s-eye view of the swoon, Gloria falling in love with Stephen Lombard. Although that was a cautionary tale more than a how-to instruction. And it was not a lesson we could thank her for, not least because she had to go away for several months to recover.
“Remember how much she loves you,” my mother said regularly, well before the Stephen crisis, as if we could know the exact amount, the stuff of love made in sizes or judged by weight.
She was a tall, pink-faced woman with heavy blond braids and thick glasses who had come to live in the cottage and work on the farm when we were babies, Gloria Peternell, who had always been with the apple business and the property. It never occurred to us to ask where she’d come from and why. When she was in our house she was almost like a mother for us and nearly like a wife for my father. But after dinner she’d go back to her cottage where she wasn’t either of those things.
In the years and years before the Stephen Lombard episode, most every evening during the harvest long after my mother was in bed, Gloria and my father continued talking at the kitchen table, discussing what apples, out of scores of possibilities, they should pick in the morning, what varieties should be sorted in the sorting shed, what apples should be used in the cider that week, which workers should do what tasks. Gloria, strictly speaking, was the employee of both Jim and Sherwood Lombard but we all knew her devotion lay with my father. So that at some point in their nighttime discussion one of them would make a comment or two about Sherwood. That was the favorite part of their ritual, Sherwood always doing something beyond their comprehension.
“The Macouns are dropping,” my father would say. “You can hear them. And he decides to patch the sheep shed roof?”
Gloria had one response when it came to Sherwood: She shook her head slowly, eyes cast down, as if she were a disappointed teacher.
“He’s had all year to do the project, and he decides to do it now?” My father’s disbelief was always fresh.
“I know, Jim. I know.”
What, they asked, was Sherwood thinking? Even if the project couldn’t wait, even if the whole shed was going to fall to pieces because of the leak, no matter what, the apple crop must always have priority. My father and Gloria seemed confused and upset, but if you looked closely you’d now and again notice on each the slight upward curl of the lip. It was almost indiscernible, that hint of what looked like I told you so. A righteous happiness.
“He won’t speak to me,” Gloria would report. “He walks in the barn, he sees me, he walks out again.”
“That’s appalling!” There it was, my father’s little smile. “I can’t stand it. I’ll talk to him—”
“No! No, Jim—really. That won’t make the situation any better. It’s hard for him because—”
“Because, Gloria, in many ways you know more about the business than he does at this point. It’s true. You understand the realities of the picking and selling, how each aspect goes hand in hand. If only he could see that we’re all working together. Why can’t he understand that? You and I, we aren’t on some kind of team. We aren’t on the opposing side.”
“Of course not. Of course we aren’t.”
It was as if, we sometimes thought, a spell had been put upon both Gloria and my father, so that they had to keep reviewing who had said what and insisting there were no sides. We’d come downstairs in the middle of the night to get a drink of milk, the plastic bottoms of our pajama feet slapping on the steps, and there they were, not even hearing us, Gloria often with a naked face, Gloria without her glasses, rubbing her eyes. In her canvas pants, her faded T-shirt, and, you could tell, no bra for her little titties—even in the same old work clothes—Gloria without her glasses went from looking like welder woman to Nordic princess. If her braids were pulling apart after a long day, and if she’d undone them all the way, her yellow hair fell in its unlashed crinkles to her waist. She was so uncommon-looking with that hair down we were afraid of her, unsure of who she was. She suddenly seemed as if she didn’t belong to the farm anymore.
My father and Gloria weren’t in love, nothing like that. For love, for romance, we knew you had to be beautiful all the time and also you had to have little else to do. Gloria, we thought, should not wear her glasses if she wanted true love, for one, and for another she had a boyfriend in North Dakota, an older man with a messy gray beard and smudgy eyes who visited every few months. When he wasn’t in the state we forgot he existed. This was a proper arrangement, Gloria enjoying my father’s company best, and mostly being too busy for other friends.
My mother used to joke to her library patrons that she liked my father having an alternate wife, a spare, Wife Number Two, that the setup allowed her to go to bed at a reasonable hour, to hog the mattress, to read as long as she wanted to, and Thank you, Gloria, it freed her from having to hear every detail of the apple business, year in and year out. Sometimes she’d make a peculiar pronouncement, as if her short sentence was a truth from out of antiquity. She’d say, “When you are married to Jesus Christ you become mean.”