The Excellent Lombards

by Jane Hamilton

  So William again took me by the hand, and out we crawled, back into the night, trying to find the voices, again stumbling, again getting scratched, our legs and shorts soaked with dew. We again wrapped our arms around each other, and went slowly. At the moment when we came out of a tangle into the back field the moon burst from under a cloud, a half-moon but there was enough light to see where we were. Instead of running, for the first time in our lives we cried tears of joy. That made us laugh, how funny that tears could be for something other than a wound or fear. We went skipping along the real path with the heavy ruts, the path that would take us to the manor house and the barn.

  On our way we were surprised by Gloria, her headlamp shining along the rise. In our giddiness we’d forgotten that we were still the objects of the search party. She had to start whimpering, clutching us to her, and at the same time trying to shout for our parents, saying we were found. We kept holding hands, William and I stiff in her embrace. We had rescued ourselves and did not appreciate her claim. We hadn’t been frightened, we insisted. Our cuts didn’t hurt. No, we weren’t cold. We’d known where we were the whole time. We knew the woods, our woods. We had only been out for a walk, hungry for some raspberries.

  When we came from the path to the manor house, Sherwood and Dolly were walking up the drive from the east orchard, and Aunt May Hill was standing on the porch. Amanda and Adam were in the living room window looking out, pale and still on our account. Everyone had been concerned and everyone was now relieved, even, oddly enough, Aunt May Hill. There was chatter that we didn’t pay attention to, my parents thanking the search party, Gloria recounting her part, Sherwood expressing gratitude to the moon herself for shining. He was the tallest Lombard, the man with the magnificent forehead and wild red curls, the man who right then made us laugh by baying like a coyote at the heavens.

  In William’s bed that night we continued holding hands, thrilled by our near-death and our own powers, certain just then that we would always find our way home.

  4.

  Our Gloria

  Just as the farm could not have been the farm without Sherwood and Dolly and Aunt May Hill, we understood without ever thinking about it that Gloria, too, was ours. But that did not mean that we were hers. We didn’t want to have to thank her for saving us, though we were told we must. But even if she had rescued us, say she’d found us in the jaws of a beast, that simple offering, thank you, those two worthless words were hardly compensation for our full long lives.

  Well before that night, thanking Gloria for her many kindnesses, how best to thank her, was often a subject at the breakfast table. “She does so much for you,” my mother reminded us, as if we could forget that Gloria had taught us to skate backward and leap, to knit dishcloths, to make cinnamon rolls in knots, to shrink great clumps of fleece into tennis-size balls for the cats, the short list of our skills.

  “We do thank her,” William said. “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, Gloria.”

  He was the funniest boy in the world!

  But the business about thanking her always reminded us of that time. We’d suddenly remember, we’d look at each other, quickly we’d have to look away. May Hill, we’d whisper in our minds. One long-ago afternoon we’d been in the tool house, a small building near the apple barn with the usual junk, boards with rusty nails in unruly stacks, coffee cans of bolts, drill bits in a mess on the workbench, the floor covered with tires and watering cans, broom handles and the guts of lawn mowers. A power saw, a pile of chain saws, gasoline cans. There was also a nest of kittens in a bag of rags; somebody had said so. We were clambering over a heap trying to find them when the door burst open. Aunt May Hill, the lady giant in her dungarees, her mouth ripped down to her neck. She waved her arms, more than two arms, four or five arms sprouted in order to scatter us.

  We couldn’t move. We were too terrified to cry out.

  So then she had to say a word. We’d never heard that voice or the spell. It was a thin, high screech and long, the word. “Scram,” it started—“bambow!” She wailed it again. “Scram-bambow!”

  We each were exactly like a cornered cat when she said it, chasing any which way to get out, knocking over boards and cans, a box of old nails clattering to the floor. We ran without knowing where we were going, run, run, run and who did we smack into on the orchard path but Gloria.

  “Whatever is the matter?” she said. “William? Mary Frances! What happened to you?”

  We both fell into her arms. We couldn’t help it. We started to sob, pressing ourselves into the available softness of her skinny chest. Scram-bambow! We’d never heard such a word, but worse, the voice, the screech—

  “Oh, my darlings,” Gloria cried, she herself crying with us. “Now, now.” She urgently petted our hair, rocking us. We covered our ears as if we could keep that voice out of our heads. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” Gloria crooned. “You’re safe. You’re safe with me.”

  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—real
ly. 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.”

  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?

  Every few years he came back in the late
summer to revisit his childhood by picking apples and to purchase his big shoes and the fleecy warm clothes he couldn’t get in the desert. At least that’s what he said he wanted to do at home, shop and help out on the farm. Maybe, though, he was in hiding. Maybe in his line of work it was important to disappear periodically. He didn’t have an office in the United States, one of the clues he was a rootless agent, and also he wouldn’t talk directly about his projects, and furthermore, he insisted that his job was really just entry-level grunt work. While he was in the trees, perilously reaching with his tremendously long arms for the highest apple, he’d gossip about foreigners as if they were people we knew. For instance, after the first World Trade Center bombing he was making idle conversation, saying, “Ramzi Yousef ordered the chemicals for the bomb from his hospital room. He’d been in a car accident, he lands in the hospital in New Jersey, he orders urea nitrate over the phone while a nurse’s aide is in the bathroom, emptying the bedpan.” The aluminum ladder made a warping sound as he reached for another apple. “The deal with these characters? They believe only jihad can bring peace to the world.” No one in our neighborhood in 1993 was using the word jihad then, and we thought he was maybe talking about a beautiful, princely person named Jihad. Stephen Lombard absolutely was a spy, my mother always said.

  “If he was truly a spy he’d have some completely unrelated job as his cover,” was my father’s position. “He’d lead safaris or be a mapmaker or a computer technician. A plumber.”

  “Not necessarily, Jim. Maybe the thinking is, he’s doing something so obviously related to the CIA, it’s staring you in the face so you don’t suspect it.”

  “I think,” William said. We all waited, wanting to know. “I think he is a…”