The Excellent Lombards

by Jane Hamilton

  William was squinting at her, as if she were difficult to see and hear. I had literally just about thrown up in my mouth. If my father was going to say one thing that made them laugh I was going to ax murder the both of them. Fortunately he looked nearly as disgusted as we felt. He’d even closed his eyes against her for a second. “It’s getting late,” he noted.

  Nonetheless, we arranged our cards, trump was called, we began to take the tricks. It occurred to me, it hit me that Nellie Lombard, as grotesque as her little story was, had been speaking in a riddle, and that the riddle was for me. When it came my turn to deal I couldn’t help it. I said, “Why did you bring that up?”

  “Bring what up?” my father said.

  “I’m talking to Nellie.”

  “What?” she said.

  “Are you trying to say that our birth was the result of the immaculate conception? Teeth plus egg, the clinking becomes William? Is that it? The big reveal? You were not adopted, kids, but there’s something we need to tell you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said breezily. “I just remember feeling like I was having a baby by all the Lombards and for all the Lombards.”

  “Hearts,” William called out, staring at me—this isn’t happening! “Hearts is trump.”

  “I…don’t know…what! You are doing,” I said elocutionarily to my mother. I was going to remain at home all summer long to be the good, kind, strong daughter to my father, to be indispensable to him. I was going to do so even if I had been conceived to be a worker bee, a Lombard slave. I said, “I’m not going to Camp Four Rivers, in case you did not understand my earlier comment. I have no interest in the rustic cabins, the bonding, the stupid girls, the stupider boys, the competition for parts, and whatever else. I don’t care if Coral is signed up. Get it through your head that I am not going to Hayward.”

  “It’s not like Frankie needs drama camp,” my brother pointed out.

  My mother’s jaw was wonderfully clenched, the muscles twitching near her ears. I had perhaps never been so satisfied by anyone else’s suppressed rage, but then we Lombards, we freaks, were a tribe renowned for our decorum.

  For the rest of the spring I did my best to maintain silence when in my mother’s company. Furthermore, when she signed me up for camp without my approval or knowledge, when I found out, I also said nothing. I went through the house and slammed all the doors, making the tour four times. The violence to the structure was, I hoped, permanent. Coral was very excited about going, and maybe secretly I was a little bit interested, but I did nothing to pack, that chore left for Madame Librarian. On the seven-hour drive north I said absolutely nothing to my mother. I did not say good-bye to her or even look at her when the time came to part. During the course of the one-month session, I did not write as much as a line on a postcard, even though we were supposed to correspond with our parents. I lied about my output to the beautiful, amazing counselor Nona Nelson, whom I loved even more than I’d loved Mrs. Kraselnik, something I had not known was possible. When my mother came to pick us up I didn’t say hello to her. I got in the car with Coral, and both of us cried all the way home, writing letters to our new friends and gazing at our jars of water that we’d collected from the lake.

  When I got back I was further enraged to find that in my absence Philip had returned to the orchard, and that he was once again living upstairs with May Hill.

  18.

  Mail-Order Bride

  Oh, by the way, Philip is spending the summer with us,” my mother said as we were pulling in our driveway. That’s how she told me. Before I could recover from the shock she said in a haughty way, “And in case you’re interested, Gloria is moving on.”

  “Moving on?” I was able to say.

  “Our Gloria, Francie, has found love.” Her tone was softer and sad. “We need to be happy for her.”

  I got out of the car and slammed the door. I shouted, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  My mother smiled without showing her teeth. “We were checking the obituaries daily from up north,” she said. “Finally we called the camp to see if you were alive.” What could I say to that? “When we found out you were doing very well it hardly seemed right to bother you with Gloria’s news.” She added, “It was a surprise to us, too.”

  In her spare time Gloria had taken the plunge, using the library computers, and signed herself up for a dating service. She didn’t tell anyone about it until she’d snagged a mate. After sixteen years in the stone cottage she was moving to Cortez Island in Canada, to live with a man named Corey, a man she’d gone down to Chicago to meet, also unbeknownst to us. Gloria, who had been our fake mother and my father’s stand-in wife, now was going to be like a mail-order bride before she became an old maid. Through the years, aside from her wipeout with Stephen Lombard, we were sure she’d loved my father better than anyone else and that she’d stay indefinitely to help him live and work. It turned out, however, that her loyalty wasn’t as permanent as we’d imagined. She packed up the relics of our childhood, the miniature bread pans, the heart-shaped muffin tins, the spindle, her knitting mushrooms, the boxes of fabric scraps—our craft supplies—for her unborn children, as well as the bedding and toys for the two cats she’d kept from the time of Stephen.

  It made me furious that not a single person had written about Gloria’s departure, and that Gloria herself had not mentioned it in any of her postcards to me.

  Two weeks after I’d returned from camp the cottage was empty and she was going, she was leaving. We stood by the car before she pulled away. “Thank you,” my father said, holding her with both hands at her slender waist. “Gloria—oh, Gloria.” His voice was gloggy because—were there? Yes, tears were running down his cheeks. Suddenly we wanted to cry, too. “Be well,” he said to her. “Be well, dear, dear Gloria. Take care. Please take care.” No one, we realized right then, would ever again send him a fifth-cloth note, never again the fifth-cloth surprise. “We love you,” Nellie said, “so much,” the two of them clasped tight. “How can we ever thank you? How can you know what you mean to us?”

  Gloria covered her face and shook her head, which didn’t exactly answer the questions. “William,” she quavered, moving on to him. “You’re amazing. You’re practically grown up. You’re practically on your way to college. Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for being my friend.” He submitted to her embrace, placing his own hands on her back. At my turn she held my cheeks and one last time bore down into whatever there was to see of my personality. “Mary Frances, my Mary Frances. You’ll use your fierceness well, I know you will. Oh, my fierce Mary Frances.”

  I looked at William through the hug. Was I fierce? Was he her friend? Was he crying? I wasn’t going to cry, I wasn’t.

  Gloria had been a pair of hands, a sturdy back, a loving presence, in exchange for ten dollars an hour and a house, the highest-paid Lombard employee in the history of the orchard. Just like that she could leave us. We stood on the cottage porch waving her off, sobs in our throats, our arms wild flags. “Good-bye! Good-bye!”

  When she turned onto the road my mother wiped her eyes, there were great purging exhales, and she blew her nose. “Do you suppose,” she managed, “do you think Stephen will feel free to come and visit now?”

  My father was still waving even though Gloria was out of sight. He said, “Is there much to do to get the cottage ready for Philip?”

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “Philip’s going to move in,” he said, continuing to wave at nothing.

  I turned to my mother because it was surely she who was responsible for that plan.

  “He can’t live with May Hill forever,” she said.

  That night I happened into William’s room, the farewell comment of Gloria’s pricking my mind, and also the word forever applied to Philip’s living situation. William, Gloria had said, was practically in college. Assuming he got through the rest of high school, that is. I lay on his bed. He was at his desk, scrolling through the Posse Messag
e Board. I said, “Do you really want to go?”

  “Go where?”

  “College.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But why?”

  “Why?” When I didn’t elaborate on the question he said, “Imp, we’re going to college. You know that.”

  “What for?”

  He broke away from his work, turning in his chair to look at me. “Frankie—”

  I sat up. I asked him, “What do we need to know that we can’t learn from Pa and Sherwood?”

  His eyes, still dark brown as the river, widened.

  “Who will pick the apples?” I said.

  “Ah…the crew? It’s not like we’re out working night and day. There are, you know, Lombard Orchard employees.”

  “I always pick after school.” This statement was somewhat although not completely true. William, though, hadn’t worked much for a few years because of his cushy tech job at the bike factory. When he was in seventh grade they’d started him at $12.50 an hour. They were lost, they said, without him. “I’m a fast picker,” I told him. “Papa even says so.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said again. “That’s great.” He started to spin slowly in his chair. “Think of it this way.” He was taking tiny steps, a tap-dance circle on his plastic rug guard. “College is our rumspringa. Seeing the world so we can decide if we want to run the orchard. Or to get some education in case—”

  “In case what?”

  He swung around and stopped in front of me. “Sherwood and Pa can’t—”

  “Can’t what?”

  “You know how hard it is for them to make a decision, how they never talk to each other. How they don’t plan.”

  “They can plan.”

  “I don’t know. Ma says—”

  He was talking to our mother about orchard affairs? “She says what?”

  “I don’t know,” he said again. “She says the whole thing, the whole organization is maybe too complicated for—”

  “Everyone,” I said scornfully, “knows it’s complicated.”

  He started to turn in his chair once more, propelled by those little tappy steps. “We should see what it’s like to live in a place where people have gotten rid of their rotary phones. Join the twenty-first century.”

  I said, “We can get a new phone.” He was in the nighttime of his slow spin, his back to me. “William?” I said his name as I used to, when I’d reverently asked any question of the boy who knew everything.

  Instead of waiting for me to say more he started to spin very quickly, his feet sweeping the floor. Around and around he went. When I grabbed hold of his legs he and the chair jerked to a halt. “Stop spinning,” I cried.

  His face, which I knew better than my own, all at once seemed swollen and ugly, his eyes flaring, his mouth wide open. “I’m not stopping!” he yelled. “You hear me?” But he had stopped. He was at a complete standstill. “I’m not,” he said more distinctly, “stopping.” I might have pointed out to him that he was mistaken in both speech and action because in fact he was no longer spinning. But who would I have been talking to? I ran out of the room and slammed my own door shut and turned out the lights and got into bed, covering my head with the pillow.

  19.

  My Father Holds Back the Waters

  No one, however, made me angrier than Philip. As if he had always been part of the farm, as if Gloria had never walked the earth, as if the universe existed to favor him, he took up the role of best right-hand man, the new star orchard worker. May Hill wasn’t squiring him around anymore, Philip no longer strictly in the role of her houseboy. Sherwood talked to him and enlisted him in projects and so did my father, Philip on everyone’s side. Which, admittedly, was not an easy position, being both a Velta and a Volta man. What else was supposedly good about him? He was strong. There was no doubt about that. He could throw bales and tackle a running sheep, and stack apple boxes, each one fifty pounds, eight-high in the cooler, one after the next, the top one over his head, unloading the whole wagon single-handedly. That was something my father could no longer accomplish—or anyway that’s what he said to my mother. But I knew if Jim Lombard had to he could still lift whatever he wished in order to get a job done.

  Generally speaking Philip was gung-ho. He acquired a pair of denim coveralls so he could look the part, Philip coming along the path wearing a red baseball cap that said on the front, in black letters, WICKED. Farming had been his dream from his earliest memory, he’d done the whole WWOOF experience in his Gap Year, the work exchange on a farm, his in Italy, and to further his scheme he’d studied global environmental policy in college. Very likely now that he’d graduated he was going for world domination. At college it was he who had started the organic garden, growing produce for the cafeteria, Philip a Slow Food, locavoring, hipper-than-Alice-Waters pioneer. It was in Portland, Oregon, where he’d performed this awesome tilling of the earth. As if any effort was required to foment the revolution in that city.

  So technically there was nothing to dislike about him, our cousin. He made friends with Gideon Hup, my fiancé, and they sometimes had beers together at the bar in town, sharing knowledge. My mother issued him a library card and although she was breaking the privacy law she freely told us what he was reading. Middlemarch, for one, Philip no slouch. He planted not just a standard vegetable garden in Gloria’s yard, but perennials such as asparagus, and he made a strawberry bed. That behavior, that long-term putting down roots, was unbelievable. The cheek of it. His furniture was from local yard sales, great finds, apparently, rugs on the floors, art on his walls, too, tasteful block prints, my mother said. Somehow or other I was never available when he invited us to dinner, off to rehearsal or busy with Coral. As if assisting May Hill wasn’t enough for him he was helpful to the ladies who had plots in the community garden. Everything about him, clearly, was intolerable.

  Furthermore: Old Seattle friends occasionally turned up to marvel at his new life, which he was proud to show off, the extensive tour for childhood friends with names like Billy and Shaver. He called our place, our land, his home. I actually heard him say that.

  What was going on? When I asked how long he was staying my parents would say extremely vague nothings such as “We’ll see,” or “He’s trying it out,” or “He’s very young.” Of course someone so smart and energetic would naturally have a girlfriend. He felt himself at liberty to visit her on weekends in Chicago, the two of them flitting around the Art Institute and eating artisanal cheeses and going to microbreweries. But that was one of the most critical identifying factors—the letting loose of the mouse to see who in the lineup of so-called princesses would actually faint. He didn’t even know that real farmers do not have weekends off!

  I did my best not to speak to him when he was at our house for dinner or be in the same room with him alone not only because of my inborn dislike of him, but because of the kiss I had planted in his composition notebook. He may have come to understand that those were my lips, something I hated more than almost anything to remember, that kiss I would’ve so liked to have been able to erase.

  He was always trying to draw me out at the supper table, which was unnecessary since there were plenty of conversational topics. My mother was ridiculously enthusiastic in his presence, and he and my father had a great deal of shop talk, and for William he often had specific questions about hardware and software, updates and crashes. For me, though, the ruby-lipped kisser, it seemed worth his while, for some reason, to struggle.

  “You’re in Our Town, I heard,” he said.

  I nodded, buttering my bread.

  “The stage manager? It’s great they gave that part to a girl.”

  There was no law that said the stage manager had to be a male.

  “A lot of lines to learn.”

  So what. Learning lines was not difficult.

  “It’s one of my favorite plays.”

  What do you want, a medal? And also, what really are you doing here?

  My mother at that point woul
d bust in with a smattering of questions about Philip’s experience with high school drama, Mrs. Lombard coming to the rescue. I’d eat and excuse myself because after all I had a lot of lines to learn.

  Nonetheless, against my will I was learning a few details about him, facts a person couldn’t help hearing and thinking about. For instance, his mother had been in the grip of breast cancer for years. She’d died when he was sixteen. Which was why he and his father hadn’t visited the farm in all the time he was growing up; because that mother had been sick for nearly Philip’s entire life, the father and son tending to her, and if they traveled it was to exotic places to try out a treatment that was not available in America. But there was something else I learned, something I could hardly stand to consider. When Philip was in fifth grade he’d had to do a family history project. An assignment for a teacher who was perhaps close to his heart, his own Mrs. Kraselnik. And so what did he do? What must all children do who have a resource such as we Lombards had at our disposal? He wrote a letter to May Hill requesting information, May Hill after all his true aunt. He was her only younger kin, the only nephew and there were no nieces. Apparently she’d written him back a very long letter that included a hand-drawn family tree. Also precious photographs. And then what happened? They began to correspond. They had what my mother called an epistolary relationship, a courtship, you might even say. They became pen pals, not just temporarily, not only for the first flush of interesting stamps and news from foreign lands, but for years.

  He was a very special, unusual person, my mother often said.