The Excellent Lombards

by Jane Hamilton

  “I don’t know, Jim,” she lilted. “I may not be willing.”

  They were talking that way in front of Stephen. He was standing right there on the platform above the press, leaning on the old milk tank where the cider was stored before it was bottled, Stephen reading the newspaper and eating a Danish.

  Just then Aunt May Hill came to check on the mechanism she’d engineered for the bottling line, a clever switch that turned off the flow of the cider at the top of the jug. She walked in with her head down, directly to her work. William and I always straightened up and looked at the ground when she appeared, maybe stealing glances at her but otherwise pretending no one unusual was present. She wore a checked shirt tucked into her high-waisted pants, the faded jeans that were neatly patched, and a blue bandanna on her head, knotted in the back, no hair showing. No part of her broad face with the knobby nose, the manly eyebrows, the fleshy mouth was ever obscured by a coiffure. While she fiddled no one said much of anything and to our relief she soon left the room, looking balefully at the box of sweet rolls on her way out. Next news, Sherwood was at the door. “Did you get the order ready for the Greek Ballerina?” He was speaking to my father.

  “The pears, and she wanted Paula Reds, too?”

  “A bushel.” Sherwood didn’t like the cider. He didn’t think perfectly good apples should be ground up for a drink. He stood at the door staring at the drain, refusing to see the work at hand.

  My father said, “I was thinking you had the order in mind.”

  Sherwood then looked at his brother, at Stephen, a Lombard who had the nerve to read the newspaper during the harvest. Sherwood said, “You want to make yourself useful?”

  “What?” Stephen said.

  “Do you want,” Sherwood repeated slowly, “to make yourself useful.”

  Gloria turned off the grinder in order to come to Stephen’s rescue. She said, “There’s a box of pears in the middle room, Sherwood, a box that would be perfect for the Greek Ballerina. The stage of ripeness she likes.”

  The Ballerina was no starlet but a sixty-year-old who’d been coming to the orchard since she was a young woman. No one had ever thought to call her by any real name.

  Sherwood, with his wondrous red curls and his childlike absorption in his projects, was captivating, and yet it was safe to say that the slab of his forehead and his small, deep-set eyes had knocked him out of the running in the family beauty contest. He said to Gloria, with what seemed like sincerity and also amazement, “Oh, you know that, do you? The stage of ripeness she likes?”

  My father stopped his tinkering with the stack. He said, “Yes, Gloria does know exactly that.”

  We quit eating our long johns, wondering, for the first time, if Sherwood minded that Stephen was living at our house. Stephen, the streamlined Lombard, each of his features in gracious proportion to the whole. Plus, what did he think of Stephen getting together with Gloria, the employee who was in the Jim Lombard camp?

  One more entrance, Dolly sticking her head into the room, three yellow jackets flying straight to the bottling line. A fun fact about Dolly was that she hated most fruits, and especially apples. She didn’t eat them. No one would dream of telling her to shut the door, and while she summoned Sherwood back to the sorting shed four more wasps gleefully sailed through to get a lick of juice coming off the tray. “This order for Mrs. Dolten is driving me up the wall,” she said with an exasperation we all could share, Mrs. Dolten famously impossible. Dolly then looked Stephen up and down as if she, too, could not believe he was taking his leisure. She plucked her donut from the box and disappeared.

  That’s when Sherwood noticed us sitting on two milk crates, sweet rolls in hand. He started to blink, the sign that he was about to have an idea. “Say, Francie,” he said pleasantly. “You might want to talk to May Hill.”

  Talk to May Hill? What for?

  “She knows about our ancestors,” he went on. “She’s the expert around here. She’s the one who’s organized the files.” I must have looked confused. “For your interview,” he explained.

  Having dispensed that piece of advice he went out the door.

  I looked at William, who was alert if not also shocked by the proposal. Always, always and forever, when we saw May Hill or when her name was mentioned, in the back of our minds there was the chime, the word Scram-bambow. Maybe the toolshed had not happened—no, but it had, because that word was lodged within us. Neither one of us had ever been in the upstairs of the manor house, Aunt May Hill’s domain. It was a place we would hate to have to go.

  “The files?” I whispered to him.

  “That’s a great idea, Mary Frances,” Gloria called, she apparently also in the know about our project, even though I hadn’t said a word about it to her. “May Hill has wonderful photographs. And letters. And receipts from the old carriage factory. The diaries of your great-grandmother. There are locks of baby hair tied up in ribbon.”

  “Locks of baby hair?” William said.

  “Pressed in books,” Gloria replied, as if that were an explanation. “And baptismal gowns, elaborate dresses even for the boys in the olden days.”

  Stephen broke an elephant ear in half and started in on that confection. One of the strange things about Gloria was the fact that she could recount far more Lombard family lore than most of us. Because she visited May Hill in the upstairs she knew almost as much as my father about who and where and when. And she knew, for sure, our own histories, quoting our remarkable toddler sentences to us, shaking her head in wonderment. For a reason we could not put in plain words, Gloria’s mastery of our legends embarrassed us for her; and furthermore, we didn’t think Stephen liked her familiarity, either. He was the one to state the obvious. “I doubt May Hill wants to do an interview.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” Gloria said. “She loves to talk about history.”

  All that time my father, while he sloshed around the press in his big galoshes adjusting the wooden forms, was trying to figure out the fifth-cloth mystery. “Liveland Raspberry,” he called out. “You saved some Liveland Raspberries!” There really was an antique variety, a punky-striped early apple with that wrong-fruited name.

  “Oh, Jim!” Gloria cried. “I made it too easy for you.”

  “Wow, Gloria.”

  Stephen was back to reading the paper, no interest, it seemed, in Gloria’s skulduggery. He said, “I hope they choose Birch Bayh to speak at the convention. Indiana! Give up your native son so we know you’ve got more in you than Dan Quayle.”

  My father was maybe laughing at Stephen’s joke but he was also still smiling at Gloria’s whimsy and at the care she took to delight him. He said to his cousin, “That would put Bayh on the map, wouldn’t it?”

  “This is terrific about Bill Foster,” Stephen said, moving on to the sports page, to the Baseball Hall of Fame topic.

  “About time they put him in there,” my father said. The amber liquid was already running down the stack of cloths and into the broad tray at the bottom of the press. He took a paper cup from the sink and stuck it into the flow. “Oh, golly, Gloria, I’ve got it. The tartness of the Liveland. Right at the back of the tongue. This is powerful. This is just the kick I need.”

  Then how pleased she was going to be through the rest of the morning, standing in her yellow waterproofs at the bottling line, filling jug after jug and screwing the caps on very tightly, her bare hands raw.

  “I’m not,” I muttered to William, “interviewing May Hill.”

  He was staring at the press, the way you do when even if you want to you can’t blink, you can’t turn away. In that trance he made a slow pronouncement. “I…think…you should.”

  “I want Mr. Gilbert. I want to see his exotic pets. His poison dart frogs.”

  The grinder started up again, the noise snapping William back to earth. “You can’t,” he said. “He’s a felon.” He said, “Frankie?”

  “What.”

  “You have to. You have to interview May Hill.”
>
  When we were downstairs playing with our cousins we sometimes heard her heavy flat footfall, May Hill doing what up there? Gathering locks of hair, apparently. Pressing the hair in books.

  “Maybe she’ll take you to the attic,” William said.

  “I’m not going!” I wanted to remind him, in case somehow he’d forgotten: Scram-bambow.

  “There’s a sea captain’s trunk up there. The first Lombard’s trunk.”

  “No, there isn’t.”

  “There is. Sherwood told us. Pa said so. And a cage for a circus monkey.”

  “So what?”

  “It’s your chance,” he said. He was staring again as if in the presence of a mystery. “Your chance,” he repeated.

  How could William be on Sherwood’s side? Because, what if it was a trap? Sherwood sending me into the lair. To be put in that cage. I said then what would surely end the discussion. I said, “I’ll go if you come with.”

  “It’s an interview,” he considered, ignoring my proposal. “You ask her questions and she, she talks.”

  We had hardly ever heard May Hill speak and so it was preposterous, the notion of conducting an interview with a subject who was mute.

  “Frankie!” he said.

  “What.”

  “I’ll be downstairs with Adam. I’ll wait for you at the door.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  “But what if?” First of all, there was May Hill herself to consider. As if that danger weren’t enough, what about Sherwood and the cage? And yet if Sherwood was sometimes unhappy about being in business with my father, and bossed around by Dolly, and annoyed by the cider making, he was also full of fun. It didn’t make sense to dream him up wicked. But again, what about the war between Velta and Volta? Maybe the war had made Sherwood want to take us as prisoners.

  “It looks like Joe Klein wrote Primary Colors after all,” Stephen reported, continuing to bring the news of the country to the workers.

  “I don’t want to,” I said.

  “Frankie!” Once more William said, “This is your chance.”

  I was about to stalk away. I almost got up but I stopped. Wait, I said to myself. I could come back from the upstairs—if I came back—like Ernest Shackleton, William’s favorite explorer. He’d be at the door, longing to hear every single detail of the ordeal. All at once I pictured the two of us in our room, in our bunks, it’s dark, and I’m telling him about May Hill—about being in May Hill’s house, and maybe even seeing her bedroom. Her bedroom, seeing her bedroom—supposing she even had one, May Hill with a room, a bed, a hairbrush, a pillow. Maybe lace on the edges of the case.

  “Lace?” William might say. “Really?”

  “They were still pretty firm,” Gloria said to my father about the Livelands. She took a cup from the sink, filled it with cider, and went to the platform, standing below Stephen, holding the drink up to him.

  Finally he looked over the top of his newspaper. “What,” he said to her. He didn’t even realize she was making an offering.

  For just a minute we had to stop thinking about the interview. We could see that it was going to take a great deal of effort and endurance for Gloria to incorporate Husband Number Two, Stephen, into her routine of being Wife Number Two to my father, when Jim Lombard, surely, was always Husband Number One in her heart, Jim Lombard the receiver of the fifth-cloth message.

  7.

  The Mysterious Family Photograph

  For some reason or other, perhaps at Sherwood’s urging, May Hill agreed to the interview. He arranged for it, as if the assignment were solely Amanda’s project. I had never discussed May Hill with my cousin, I suppose because the old aunt was someone we for the most part took for granted. I knew, also without discussion, that even though May Hill lived overhead Amanda did not like the idea of going to her house. And yet we must. Sherwood had said so, had told us the time. He had said we should go up the stairs from the kitchen, that we shouldn’t use the formal front entrance. May Hill, he said, would be waiting for us.

  At the appointed hour after school Amanda and I opened the door according to our instruction. There before us, the back stairs. “You girls are in for—” Dolly for once was unable to finish a sentence. It was no secret that she hardly talked to May Hill, that neither one had much truck with the other.

  “Good-bye,” I called to William, who was through the pantry in the living room. “We’re going.” I didn’t want to say in front of Amanda and Dolly that he had promised to stand at the door. “We’re going now.”

  Sherwood was down the hall in the small room reserved for the piano. He’d been working on Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I for as long as I could remember, thumping out the “Ave Maria,” the metronome holding him steady.

  “Good-bye,” I called again, over the music.

  “Tally-ho,” my brother called back. We were not allowed to watch television after school, one of the reasons William liked to play with Adam, the two of them drifting back and forth between computer and TV. It was too late to go get him, to make him stand exactly by the door.

  A bare lightbulb hung from the ceiling over the staircase, the film of dust on the stairs thick, because May Hill did not use this way for coming and going, of course not, because she’d then have to walk through Dolly’s kitchen. So it was dusty, and up at the top there was not another door, but a wooden gate. Dolly called Yoo-hoo, to let May Hill know we were approaching. Our hearts were beating wildly up those stairs, and harder yet when we couldn’t undo the latch of the gate. Amanda was scared, too. Let’s just forget it, we both thought. But then May Hill appeared, sliding the bolt easily and opening up, letting us through, the gate snapping shut.

  “Come,” she said without looking at us.

  Amanda grabbed my hand, which I was of two minds about. Without my shaking her off we followed Aunt May Hill down the dark hall, past closed doors, one after the next after the next, many small rooms rather than the grand downstairs rooms. May Hill’s portion after all had housed Sherwood and his siblings in the olden days, plus the parents, plus the orphan girl, enough sleeping space for eight people.

  The base line of a fugue from down below was clean and clear. “Dad’s pwacticing,” Amanda needlessly pointed out.

  The hall ended at the living room, the two long windows looking out over the north orchard. If everything that May Hill owned was shabby, all of her belongings were nonetheless arranged neatly. Underfoot was a thick old braided rug of many dark colors, and there was a blond, scratched-up coffee table, and a television on a rickety cart, and shelves sagging under the weight of books, and a corduroy sofa mostly covered up with a diamond-patterned orange-and-green afghan. It was hard to think that May Hill herself had been the crochet artist. The place smelled of coffee, which seemed funny. And apples, there was the fragrance of applesauce on the stove. It was maybe a home, that is, May Hill’s home, where for some reason—neither of us could think it through—we had happened to find ourselves.

  There was surprisingly nothing all that unusual in the living room unless you counted the eight card tables along the wall. Who owned that many card tables? They were set end-to-end, and they were covered with stacks of books bound in worn leather, and photographs in plastic sleeves, and a dagger, it looked like, and teaspoons, and a mink, the whole stuffed animal complete with toenails and the raisin nose and bright glass eyes. There were fragile-looking pieces of paper every inch filled up with faint cursive, and yellowed lace, and ivory kid gloves that a lady with slender fingers would have worn, and a pair of boots that buttoned up, to match. Each object was displayed as if the place were a museum.

  “Sit down, Mary Frances,” she said. Her indoor voice was husky but also soft. She had to clear her throat. “And Amanda,” she added. She pointed at the folding chairs that clearly had been put in place for the interview. My heart was still racing but I was able to think two things: She remembered our names, and mine especially because I’d been named for Mary Frances L
ombard, a special great-aunt, a semi-famous violinist. A woman who, despite the name, was not a Catholic, as I also was not, something I occasionally had to say to adult acquaintances. At any rate, May Hill had given us enough thought to keep track of us, which was either good or bad. And number two: William was downstairs. We could always leap up and make a dash for it back to safety, if, that is, we could figure out how to open the gate.

  “Now then,” Aunt May Hill said. She rubbed her hands together, signaling readiness. Her fingers would not have fit into the lady’s gloves, but they were surprisingly thin. It seemed, even though it wasn’t true, that her lips, dry but fulsome, were for just a second turned up into something nearly like a smile. She appeared to be taller in her house and because she wasn’t wearing a hat or bandanna, an article that was always a part of her outside apparel, I could see her gray hair, which—and this was maybe the very strangest thing—was pulled back into a ponytail. May Hill with a little ponytail? I looked at Amanda, who was staring rudely at the beefy eyebrows. There was the broad, bony front, May Hill flat-chested, May Hill thin in some parts but she had a thick middle, her jeans zipping up snugly over the swell of the stomach, those jeans snapping halfway up her rib cage. You didn’t want to think about that middle part of her, or her wide, flat bottom. Gloria naturally should find someone to love but you’d never, ever think so about Aunt May Hill. My father always said she wasn’t a misfit, that no one should ever have called her by that cruel name. Whatever she was, I might tell him, she had a ponytail.

  She walked back and forth, inspecting her showcase items, touching some of the books, wondering, it seemed, where to start. Although we had made a list of questions according to Mrs. Kraselnik’s specifications we didn’t remember any of them, nor did we recall that the instructions were in my pocket, or that I had a notepad and pen in my hand.

  From the far table she picked up a small clothbound book. “The diary,” she murmured, “of Elizabeth Morrow Lombard.” She smoothed the first page before she looked at us. “Do you know who that is?”