The Excellent Lombards(9)
Her patrons, the women, laughed.
She’d say next, “Gloria is Jesus’s nice wife.”
This, too, must have been funny because Mrs. Lombard’s fan club always snorted at her quips. They laughed even though it was not a humorous fact that Gloria was nice. She was quiet and steady in her jobs as the hired man and Wife Number Two and the lady-in-waiting, and additionally she was the nanny and the scullery maid. All those helpers in one woman. Nellie Lombard was always singing her praises and thanking her and from the kitchen window if Gloria was outside pushing a wheelbarrow full of manure or digging a deep hole or dragging a sheep by its hind leg back to the shed my mother cried, “Don’t strain your back! Gloria! Wait until Jim can help you.” My mother, always considering Gloria’s happiness and comfort.
But sometimes she also came downstairs in the night to get a drink and there Gloria and my father were at the table staring at the candle. My mother had to transform herself then, had to turn into the monstrous shape of a shrill housewife, a cupboard opening, we thought, and this ugly warty woman stepping out. “What is wrong with you people!” she’d cry. “You don’t have the sense to go to sleep?”
“Oh!” Gloria pawed around the table for her glasses. “How did it get so late?” And she scuttled away home for a few hours of sleep, Gloria always up at daybreak for the great work of the harvest.
The tangle in our minds, the Gloria problem, if laid out end-to-end, went something like this: As much as she put her time and strength and creativity into the picking and the cider making, the selling at the markets and at our barn, and sorting fruit, and trying to keep order in the storage barn, and doing her best to preserve the peace with Sherwood; as kind as she was to Dolly and even to May Hill; and as much as she slavishly went marching side by side with my father during the day and throughout the seasons; could it be that more than all that activity she wanted to find an actual husband—someone different from the bearded old North Dakotan—and have her own children? Years were passing while maybe she secretly held on to that wish, and then an entire decade had gone by. Through her thick glasses, with her steady gaze boring down into our wobbly selves, she watched us grow up. She put her arms around us, clasping us to her, kissing our hair. My mother did that to us all the time, which was right, which was something we didn’t have to hold still on purpose for. Gloria every year gave us handmade Valentines that said BE MINE, a message we knew she’d send us every day if the holiday calendar allowed her to. And sometimes she looked at us as if—if we weren’t careful—we’d get beamed up through her magnified eyeballs into some magical Gloria realm that might be an uncomfortable place. She bloodied her fingers sewing me a doll with braids and a wardrobe to go with her and for William she made a knight with knitted chain mail. All those gifts were items my mother was incapable of producing, Gloria, in technical terms, a superior mother.
Our concerns therefore: If she couldn’t have enough of us would she quit her post, abandon my father and the farm? Was it our responsibility to hold her? And if so, what did we have to do to keep her? That is, how much did we have to love her?
Always, when we were leaving her cottage, after doing an extensive cooking or sewing project, she’d solemnly give us one last instruction. “William. Mary Frances. Thank your mother for sharing you with me.”
She was the only person outside of school who called me Mary Frances, as if she alone had license to call me by my real name.
William and I didn’t say anything. Because: No matter our duty, we were not something to be shared. We didn’t really know what she meant by saying such a thing, and also we were certain that if we conveyed that wrongheaded, awful gratitude to Nellie she would be furious with Gloria. So we didn’t agree outright to say thank you, and we never, not once, told our mother.
It was late summer when Stephen Lombard appeared in the orchard. That was his habit, showing up with no warning. We were nine and ten. He was Sherwood’s youngest brother, another of my father’s cousins, and here was a curious and unsettling fact: He had been my mother’s boyfriend in college. After their graduation she came to visit Stephen on the orchard but somehow or other instead of going off into the world with her classmate she married my father. The natural, right choice but ticklish. Jim Lombard had been living for many years with his aged aunt Florence, so my mother had to barge in on that situation. She said that’s what you had to do to catch a farmer. Jim was a far older person than my mother, a previously uncaught man who worked such long hours and so hard any future wife had to run alongside him on the orchard path, grab his collar, and say, “We are getting married right now, hold still.” It mostly seemed to us a funny idea, that Stephen could have been our father.
After my parents fell in love, after my mother wed the Lombard family, Stephen went away. He eventually found a job with a nameless American contractor instructing secret agents. That’s the story he told, anyway. He wrote manuals for the CIA, he said, educating operatives about the country they’d be living in, about the culture and religion, and also he figured out guidelines in the event of emergency, if the airport blew up, say, if the embassy was attacked, if you were held hostage by so-and-so or such-and-such. He had to go to the region in question, do the research in person to best preach safety to the recruits. We’d watch Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, and my mother, passing through the room, might mutter, “Where in the hell is Stephen Lombard?” Sudan, for instance, was where, and Iran and maybe Egypt. Suspicious, unnerving places, no place that could ever be your home. This was what we all very much wanted to know for certain: Was he himself a spy?