The Excellent Lombards

by Jane Hamilton

  My mother let go of the ponytail. Time, it seemed, skipped a beat or two, a stillness in the room, no tick of the heart. Did Nellie Lombard have any idea what she’d done? What you’d know instantly if you’d been in the audience? The hands on the clock then moved, the filter in the aquarium remembered to purr. A child shouted on the playground. Did she have a clue that Mrs. Lombard and Mrs. Lombard could never be jolly or even cordial again? The friendship over now that my mother had laid out what had been a fine secret charitable thing, now that she had declared herself the martyr. Dolly was reduced, her pride smashed. For once in Mrs. Sherwood Lombard’s life she was unable to say even one word.

  But my mother wasn’t done yet. She felt the need to say more. Of course she did, because in her blackhearted way she’d been dying to speak about the money, to rub it in, ever since she’d given up her treasured chunk. “I know that May Hill has completed the transfer,” she said, “that the land contract is legal, and that we have to accept it. I know she didn’t consult us, which is too bad, but it’s over. I so wish, Dolly, that you’d understand that May Hill has saved us. For the time being. Saved the farm for now. We need Philip. Surely you do know that.”

  Then Dolly did something I couldn’t believe even though it was happening before my eyes. She picked up a book on the counter and threw it as far as she could across the room toward the stacks. That’s how she made her exit, back to the hedgerow path.

  My disks were forgotten, the cloth having fallen to my feet.

  “My God,” my mother said, staring at the door.

  I got up from my chair in the nook, walked out onto the floor, across the carpet, past the magazine rack, a short distance to the book, a thick Elizabeth George mystery. It was a heavy book to have thrown so far. I didn’t want to touch it, to pick it up. The book Dolly had thrown.

  Nellie was pressing her fingers into her eye sockets. “Oh God,” she moaned, “I’m such an idiot.”

  As much as it was true I almost for just a second felt sorry for her, that she herself had to know it and say it. It would have been better on my end if I’d been able to point out that fact to her. I kept looking at the book and thinking of Dolly’s soft drooping face, the openmouthed frown. How pretty she’d looked at her entrance. My mother started to talk in her hokey, preternaturally calm tone. Whatever she was stumbling around saying, though, she wasn’t anywhere near the root of the matter. Because, the thing is, I knew precisely what she’d done. Be still, Mrs. Lombard, so I can tell you. The following, in case she didn’t realize, had occurred: My mother in the showdown had won. She had pulled up the prizewinning fact. She’d obliterated her opponent. Good for her in the moment. Score for the librarian. Congratulations.

  But now in the aftermath? Now and forever? She maybe was coming to see it, the error slowly revealing itself. Oh no. She should have let Dolly think Dolly herself was the winner. A trick so simple. Let Dolly, who did not have the advantages, who had not gone to college, who did not have any spare family money, let her at least have the satisfaction of prevailing at the library.

  I no longer wanted to be in the nook. My feet were moving toward the door. It was cold outside and I’d left my coat behind but I didn’t care.

  At dinner no one said much of anything. It was as if somehow William and my father understood that Dolly had thrown a book across the library. My father did say obligatorily, “How was your day, Marlene?”

  Sherwood had once told Jim Lombard to shove grass up there. And Dolly had thrown a book. Those adults from across the road in Volta were the people who had to be violent in the face of my nice, even-tempered parents, so nice and polite and generous, so selfless, giving up their money, the couple of Velta, the upstart Lombards who had come to the farm from the outside world. On my walk home from the library I’d switched over to their side, to Dolly and Sherwood’s side. I could clearly see their position, could see why you’d have to shout unpleasant things and throw heavy books. Those hateful nice people, Jim and Nellie. The small acts of rebellion against them. It was all you could do, the book, the grass.

  22.

  The Fruit Sale

  The next morning when I woke up the sunshine was too bright to bear. The sun had hardly risen and already in my window it was terrible. “Francie!” my mother screeched from the kitchen. “It’s late!” The Elizabeth George novel was presumably still on the floor at the library, no one daring to move the object that spelled our doom. “Francie! The bus in twenty minutes!” In my room the daylight at once glowed red. It was difficult to open my eyes to such luridness. To keep them open. In the night I’d started to understand a few other unspeakable facts, most especially that everything was ruined because of me.

  The story was back to MF Lombard. It was I who had unraveled the place I loved more than anything else in the world, I, who had steadily been at work not only at my own wreckage but at Dolly’s and everyone else’s, too. It was I who, from the day of the interview in fifth grade, so long before, had started May Hill plotting, May Hill determined to keep the farm from me. The interview during the four–five split was her first hint about my character, and then there was the capture in her room, followed by any number of indications that MF Lombard was the silliest of persons, MF crying in the shed, MF dressed in an outlandish costume going to a school dance, a girl of no substance. A…mongrel. And now it was done, Philip a part of us, Philip the foreigner on our very soil.

  With great effort I pulled myself to sit up in bed. MF, a pie dog, destined to roam, bloodied ear, hungry. A cur. It was almost impossible to assemble my Future Farmers of America uniform. To pick up my books. The Norton Anthology for AP English, the heaviest. Everything supposedly important in one volume. Putting it in the backpack. Scowling at my mother about breakfast. I could hardly manage the rudimentary motions. Going out, step after step, as the bus made the bend in the road, rattling toward me. No William, because he had departed early for one of his clubs. I would have stayed home if the FFA annual fruit sale, of which I was in charge, hadn’t been taking place at school. I did know—I was aware—that William was waiting to find out if he’d been accepted Early Decision at the college of his and my mother’s choice in Minnesota. It was one of any number of schools that claim to be the Harvard of the Midwest, a school that had aggressively courted him.

  After the weary day going from class to class I found myself standing at the banquet table in the cafeteria, surrounded by boxes of Florida oranges and grapefruits. The Sunshine State. Invaded by pythons. I was looking at the list to see who had yet to show up when my brother appeared with a large white envelope in hand. The collar of his Oxford shirt was carefully folded down over the neck of his respectably drab sweater. He was a boy who was going to go out of state, a place very few students at our school dared to venture.

  “What are you doing here?” I said to him. He was not ordinarily in my FFA world.

  “I got the letter.” He put it on the table in front of me. “The fat envelope.”

  Although there had been little doubt that William would be admitted I hadn’t expected to learn about it at the fruit sale. He had gone home to check the mail, and he’d returned to tell me, as if for some reason he needed to do so in public.

  “Are you going to go?” I knew even as I was asking that it was a terribly stupid thing to say. You don’t apply Early Decision to the college you most want to attend because you’re thinking you might not matriculate. In fact you are honor-bound to show up.

  “I think I will,” he said.

  “Oh,” I said. I said next, “When does it start?”

  He laughed a little, a small hiccup escaping his mouth. Currently it was November, ten months before college would begin. But the thing is he knew; he knew the exact date without even looking. “September ninth,” he announced.

  “September?”

  “If I was going to be on a team or something, I’d probably go earlier.”

  “What kind of team? You’re not on teams.”

  “I do
n’t know. Cross-country, maybe?”

  “How can you be on cross-country? You’re not a runner. You have to already be that in high school to compete on a college team.”

  He wiped his upper lip, as if he’d been working hard, as if he was sweating. “I mean, I probably won’t, but it’s not out of the question. The team there is pretty lame, which means I might be able to join.” He looked down at the envelope. “You can come and visit sometime, Frankie.”

  And I said, “I most certainly would not visit during apple season.”

  At that point, who should come to the table with her check to pick up her fruit but Brianna Kraselnik, a girl who was supporting her alma mater. We knew she’d returned to our town after dropping out of college, returned to shack up with not a Bershek twin but another local boy, and she was about to have a baby. Mrs. Kraselnik had gone to Connecticut with her horse and was remarried, and Dr. Kraselnik also had a new wife and was living in Milwaukee. Surely the daughter was a tremendous disappointment to her mother, Brianna an uneducated, small-town, unwed, pregnant twenty-three-year-old.

  “Mary Frances and William,” she cried, “ohmyGawd, you’re in high school!” She, with her sleek hair now only midway down her back, and with no makeup, her eyelashes no longer tarred over with mascara, spoke with the astonishment of a gaga adult. “So, how’s it going!”

  “Great,” William said, his greatness having just been confirmed by the fat envelope.

  I thought to add a fee to her fruits, compensation for all the apples she’d surely stolen through the years.

  “Your uniform is so cool,” she said to me, as if she meant it, as if she really did like my dark-blue FFA jacket with the emblem, and the blue tie, the white shirt. She turned to Ashley Klemko, who was also at the table. She said, “Hey! I love your hair.” She said this about starchy bangs teased to look like a fistful of curling ribbon. “So, wow!” she went on. “I ordered some fruit for my little guy.” She actually squealed, patting her grotesque bulge.

  William, I noted, was wincing, as if he were three seconds into the future. He had assumed it would be safest to tell me about college in public but he was realizing he’d miscalculated, that wherever he made the announcement there might be surprises. Nothing for me to do then but fulfill his expectations. I heard the questions, posed firmly and yet pleasantly, issuing from my mouth. I said, “You know all those times, Brianna, those times you used to roll around in the grass in our orchard? On our property? Those clothing-optional sessions?”

  She made one little startled birdlike cock of her head.

  “I just hope,” I said, “that the residue from the spray isn’t still in you, that the toxins won’t affect your—little guy.” I lifted the box onto the table. “Here’s your fruit.”

  “Oh, my God, Mary Frances!” She burst out laughing. “OhmyGod, ohmyGod! I’m so sorry. I am so incredibly sorry you ever had to see me like that—you poor thing! We were so crazy, me and that bad old Nick Bershek!” She squealed once more, a piercing awful noise. “OHMYGOD!”

  William was looking at her with both gratitude and curiosity.

  “I’m more worried about the drugs I did than pesticides, believe me. But you—! We probably scarred you for life, am I right? We were very naughty, really very very deranged.” She turned to William, shaking her steepled hands at him. “Please, please tell me you never saw us.” Mrs. Kraselnik’s daughter, the only token of my beloved teacher, felt compelled to again say, “Oh, my God.”

  My urbane brother, so suave, said, “I’m afraid I never had that pleasure.”

  Brianna whacked his arm. “Oh, my God, you are a laugh riot!”

  William was going to college on September 9, and in college he’d say many witty things to many girls, all of whom would incessantly say OhmyGod, and he would be gone. He would be gone.

  23.

  Future Farmers of America

  When was the last time I’d felt even a little glimmer of happiness? I couldn’t remember. It seemed certain that never again would joy be accorded to me, my mother going as far as to wonder, to my face, if I would consider going to the doctor. She meant a shrink. It was right after the fruit sale when she said to me, “Francie, I want to talk to you.”

  I was in my room reading Heart of Darkness, lying on my bed. She wanted to talk to me? Fine, talk away. She pulled up a chair as if I was in a ward and she was a nun paying the patient a visit. In a conversational tone she said, “I’m worried about you.”

  Rivets were in short supply in the jungle. I kept reading.

  “You seem so unhappy.”

  I shut my eyes.

  “I just wonder,” she went on, as if she was having a fun idea, “why you’re so hard on us. You walk around glaring at everyone. I wonder if you realize how combative you always seem. And negative. I wonder if you’re aware of it.”

  I rolled to my side in order to look at her, not in a glaring sort of way but because of my astonishment at how little she understood me. If she had known me even somewhat she would have appreciated how full of love I was. She would have understood that in fact I was overtaken by love. Love, at a basic level, was all I had inside of myself. “I don’t walk around glaring,” I said.

  “But you do. I’m trying to help you, Francie. I’m wondering why you’re so unhappy, first. And second, I’m telling you that in company you look somewhat murderous. When you’re talking to us.”

  I’m full of love, I wanted to yell. Most of the time I love you. More than you deserve. I love everyone! I love our life!

  But I didn’t shout. I didn’t even speak. Because to reveal that information would have been to invite a diagnosis that would sound like a line from a Lifetime movie. That’s the trouble, Francie, she would no doubt say. You just can’t love the world as much as you do.

  She next said, “I think you should consider going back to Dr. O’Connor.”

  “I just had my appointment.”

  “He might be able to give you something to feel better. An anti-depressant. And he could recommend someone for you to talk to, a therapist.” When I didn’t answer she said, “Francie?”

  “No,” I said dully. “No, thank you.”

  “Please don’t rule out—”

  “I don’t need therapy. I don’t need birth control pills. I don’t need Prozac.”

  There was no help for my condition. No help for the situation. Nothing to be done.

  And still no help for it a week later when William was invited, along with a few other accepted bright stars, to meet with the Math and Computer Science Department professors at the College of His Choice. It was apparently a very special select weekend party, probably all-you-can-eat macaroni and cheese and garlic bread, fluffy French toast, starch and song, obeisance to Alan Turing, prayers and candle lighting, thanks be to Steve Jobs. My father, who so rarely had an outing, was going to drive him to Minnesota, the trip commencing on Friday at 2 p.m., the soonest William felt he could get away from his obligations at school. I was unwell that day, taking the opportunity to reread some of my old favorite books, impossible to get enough of Anne Boleyn’s capers with the king.

  At about one o’clock, having been in bed long enough, I thought I might take some air. My father was over at the unheated apple barn, standing ready in his thick blue coveralls to wait on any customer who might happen by. My mother was as always at the library. I got the old picnic hamper and stocked it with apples, cheese, bread, water, cookies, and my books, along with a bag of other necessities. Off I headed into the woods in my parka with the fur-trimmed hood. It was a sunny December afternoon, mild for the season. Also, I had, in my pocket, the keys to the car. I went straight to our place of refuge, William’s and mine, that old gouge where the tree roots had been upended. In all the years since we’d first used it as our safe haven, that night when we’d been lost, no one had gotten around to cutting up the limbs for firewood.

  I climbed into the cold damp chamber. It was considerably smaller than I remembered. A blanket an
d a duvet just fit, the blanket for the floor of the tomb, the duvet for wrapping up. Cozy, actually. A branch ledge for my basket, enough food to stave off starvation for a day or two. The headlamp in my pocket with the car key, so when it got dark I might read and not strain my eyes. The books beside me, my very old favorites, going way back to The Baby-Sitter’s Little Sister series and The Boxcar Children.

  As I read about children who triumph I began to get angry, angrier than I had been in general. Why were children always heroic in literature? Why the brutish lies to us? How patronizing! No, evil, it was evil to deceive young life. Even—yes, it was true—even Kind Old Badger was statistically improbably successful, like a drug those happy endings, the parents feeding the tykes narcotics, so many zombies set out into the world. It was cold in the hole, it was loveless. I should have brought matches. Why hadn’t I brought matches to build a fire? It was everyone’s fault! And especially William’s, that I was freezing out in this hole. Why did he need to go and visit a place he already knew he liked? Why would professors invite high school students to campus when they had plenty of college boys to instruct? I was opening one of the Baby-Sitter books when a strange thing happened. The photographs that Stephen Lombard had taken years before, of William and me in the barn playing, those five black-and-white pictures that the spy had snapped, slipped from the pages.

  They stared up at me, one after the next. There I am sitting way up high on a bale with the basket of kittens, splintered light coming through the cracks of the barn. The rope is hanging from a beam, the thick braid we used to swing from, that delirious long back-and-forth. Someone had removed it a few years before, May Hill, we’d thought. William is down below, making a pulley device to get water up to my perch, to save me. He’s wearing a junior tool belt, bent over his work. Even though in my hiding place darkness had not yet fallen I shone my light on the photographs. They seemed to have appeared out of creation or maybe years before I had stashed them in the book. However they’d materialized, I’d fallen straight down into the barn scene, MF Lombard no longer in her dugout. In one of the pictures William is looking up at me, the girl with the cats, as if he’s worried, as if it’s almost too late for the rescue, he knows he must hurry.