by Anne Tyler
“This is not business, Michael! It’s a central fact of our lives! A terrible, unthinkable, unendurable fact of our lives!”
“There’s no need for melodrama,” he told her.
“Well, at least I’m not a block of wood, like some others I could name!”
And so on, and so on, and so on.
Now that he no longer thought “Maybe today” or “Maybe next week,” he began to look for Lindy at family milestones instead. Labor Day, for instance when they traditionally threw a backyard barbecue. Surely she wouldn’t skip that; she used to love it! But she stayed stubbornly, cruelly absent. Christmas Eve of 1961 he left the tree lights lit through the night, fire hazard or no, and Christmas morning he got up at the crack of dawn like some overexcited toddler and crept out to the living room, but all he found was Pauline sound asleep in an armchair.
He knew Pauline had hopes for her birthday—at least for a card or a phone call. When he asked if she would like to go out to dinner, she said she’d just as soon eat in. He suspected she spent the day watching for the mailman, dashing for the telephone every time it rang. But all for nothing. Michael offered her the only kindness he could think of: he pretended not to notice. Not that she did the same for him, on his own birthday three months later. As they were going to bed at the end of the day she said, “Honey, don’t take it to heart. I’m sure she just forgot.”
“Who forgot?” he demanded, and she kissed his cheek and turned out the light.
If George and Karen nourished their own expectations, they never let on to their parents. They had changed since Lindy’s leaving—become more muted and withdrawn. The house grew uncomfortably quiet. Now the tumult that had surrounded Lindy—the dinner-table arguments, power struggles, scenes of open defiance—seemed the natural accompaniment to a vital, free-thinking spirit; and Michael was guiltily aware that he found the younger two dull by comparison. George’s plodding conformity and Karen’s good-girl blandness filled him with irritation. He wanted to shake them up; he wanted to say, “Show some life, there!”
Although he knew that he himself was equally lackluster.
Sometimes the police detective phoned. Michael imagined he had a reminder note jotted on his calendar. “Just touching base; nothing much to report. Young lady caught stealing a car in Oklahoma looked for a minute like she answered your daughter’s description, but no; false alarm . . .” Michael was barely polite to the man. He had come to believe that the police were worse than useless. If they had acted fast enough, the trail would still have been warm and they could easily have found her. But they’d been so sure she would come back on her own at the very first little hardship—first rainstorm or spell of cold weather—that they hadn’t taken things seriously. And then after the one kid, Smoke, sent a postcard to his cousin (the Grand Canyon in full color, and on the reverse, “Check it out, man! We camped last night where the X is”), the police grew all the more casual; for this proved to them that there’d been no foul play. Kids would be kids, was their attitude.
But she was only eighteen! She was out there alone in the universe!
Smoke’s parents moved to Florida and stopped keeping in touch. In 1963 the second boy, Clement Ames, was found living in Chicago with a Puerto Rican girl. He told his parents he’d parted ways with the other two less than a week after leaving home—some argument about money. He had no idea what had become of Lindy.
The thought of her clouded every day. It meant that Michael never again had a moment of pure joy. In the midst of a family gathering, or celebrating a special event, or just savoring a good meal, he would wonder, What is Lindy doing now?
Is she all right? Is she hungry? Sick?
Is she alive?
It flabbergasted him, when he thought about it, that he could still watch a basketball game. Make love to Pauline. Whistle to a tune on the radio.
The milestones at which he looked for Lindy grew farther apart and more improbable: Pauline’s mother’s funeral, the grand opening of his new store in the suburbs, George and Sally’s wedding. How likely was it that she would have heard about those? But even so, his eyes swept the crowd. And each time she failed to appear, it was as if she had left them all over again. Her absence seemed pointed; it seemed mean, a slap in the face. He always felt the wind whoosh out of his lungs as he acknowledged yet again that she wouldn’t be coming.
Lately it had occurred to him that even if she did come, he might not recognize her. What would she look like now? She was almost twenty-five years old. She’d been gone for more than a quarter of her life. And Michael didn’t have the slightest idea what those years had done to her.
On a warm, breezy afternoon in May of 1968, Pauline telephoned Michael at work and started talking a mile a minute as soon as he answered. “Your cousin Adam just phoned and Lindy’s in San Francisco and they’ve put her in a hospital and her son’s been left with the landlady and we have to go and get them.”
Michael sat down on a carton of payroll forms.
The only chair in his office was occupied at the moment by the woman who did his accounts. She went on placidly punching the buttons of her adding machine, although Michael would have thought that she could hear his heart racketing in his chest.
“We have to go, you have to come home, how will we get there?” Pauline was asking, but all Michael seemed able to think of was “Cousin Adam? I don’t understand.”
“We have to buy airplane tickets, how do people do that?”
“Cousin Adam as in Uncle Bron’s Adam? I barely even know Cousin Adam! I’ve seen him maybe twice in my life!”
“Michael, please. Concentrate.”
He paused. He made himself take a deep breath. “What’s wrong with her?” he asked finally.
“It’s something mental, I don’t know; some kind of mental thing.”
“Oh, God.”
“Will you come home, please?”
“I’m coming,” he said. He hung up.
Mrs. Bird’s fingers had slowed now, and her back gave off an air of alertness, but he left the office without explaining. He walked past the meat counter, past the dairy cooler, past the three registers up front. This wasn’t a very large store. It was bigger and brighter than the old one but still small enough so that he knew each employee intimately. All he said to his manager, though, was “You’ll have to close tonight, Bart.” Then he pushed through the glass door and went out to the parking lot.
While he was driving home he tried to picture Lindy in a hospital. For the first time in seven years he knew her whereabouts, but the old uncertainty seemed preferable to this new image of Lindy huddled white-faced and shivering in a room with a barred window.
Well, she would be all right. She’d be fine. They would bring her home and take care of her and she would recover in no time.
But a son.
A son would take a little while to get his mind around. He would deal with that one later.
Pauline said that the landlady must have been proceeding in alphabetical order, and that was why she’d phoned Adam first. “I guess she told the operator to begin with the A’s and work down,” she said. She was packing as she talked, moving between the bureau and a suitcase laid flat on the bed while Michael watched from the doorway. She wore nothing but a white lace slip and nylons, as if she planned to dress right now for the trip even though they’d found out they couldn’t get a flight until tomorrow. Two scratched-looking patches of pink stained her cheeks. Her hands shook slightly as she smoothed one of Michael’s T-shirts. She said, “The landlady asked Adam if he had a daughter named Linnet, and Adam said no, he didn’t, but he thought he could tell her who did.”
“I’m surprised he was able to,” Michael said. “It’s not as if Adam’s ever had much to do with the Anton side of the family.”
“Well, maybe from that newspaper item back when Lindy first left.”
Michael winced. It mortified him all over again to recall how their private troubles had been bandied about in public.
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“Then she asked if he would get in touch with us because she was on the long distance, and he said yes, and he looked us up in the book and called and announced it like a weather report. ‘Mrs. Anton,’ he said—’Mrs. Anton!’ Can you imagine?—’I believe your daughter Linnet’s in San Francisco and you should phone this number.’”
When Pauline quoted other people she captured their tone so exactly that Michael always felt he was hearing them in person. His cousin Adam had been a thick, pale, bulgy-eyed boy, a carbon copy of Uncle Bron’s ex-wife, and now he trudged into Michael’s mind six feet tall but still that young boy, his hands hanging limp at his sides and his mouth perpetually open.
“So I called and I guess the landlady was waiting by the phone because she answered right away. I said, ‘This is Pauline Anton, Lindy Anton’s mother. I just had word from my husband’s cousin that—’”
“But what did she say?” Michael broke in. He had reached the point where he didn’t think he could stand another minute of this.
Pauline gave him a hurt look, her mouth pooched out like a wrinkled red raspberry. “Well, I was preparing to tell you, Michael, if you’d give me half a chance. She said Lindy and her little boy had been renting one of her rooms for the past few weeks and she didn’t know where they’d lived before or who the little boy’s father was or . . . and then two days ago Lindy ‘freaked out,’ was how she put it; I don’t know, just ‘freaked out,’ and now she’s in a, maybe she didn’t say hospital but some sort of clinic or facility . . . and someone has to come take care of the little boy because the landlady’s not used to children and besides which he seems upset.”
“How old is he?” Michael asked.
“She said she didn’t know.”
“Well, she must know more or less.”
“He’s not in school yet, evidently, because she kept complaining about him being there at the house every minute of the day.”
“Does he talk?”
“She said he’s stopped talking.”
“Jesus,” Michael said.
It occurred to him, all at once, that he was a grandfather. Pauline was a grandmother. A child directly related to them was so upset that he’d stopped talking.
“I wish they’d had a flight that left today,” he said.
“We have to pick up our tickets when we get to the airport,” Pauline told him. She was padding out to the hall now in her stocking feet, no doubt heading for Karen’s bedroom closet, which she had taken over the instant Karen left home. (Was it from superstition that of the three children’s rooms, only Lindy’s remained unchanged—no clothing packed away, no sewing machine or income-tax records moved in?) “I don’t even want to tell you how much this is going to cost,” she said. She returned, carrying over her arm a daisy-splashed minidress on a hanger.
Michael said, “You think I care how much it costs?”
“Destiny gave me the number of a not-too-expensive tourist home and I called and reserved a room.”
He thought this over a minute. He said, “Destiny gave you . . .”
“Destiny, the landlady.”
“Well, that was quick,” he said, meaning the intimacy of first names. Pauline appeared not to understand; she sent him an innocent, round-eyed look before she turned away to hang the dress on her closet door. “How long did you take the room for?” he asked her. “When’s our return flight? Do you think they’ll let us bring Lindy home right away?”
“Well, of course,” Pauline said. “We’re her family! I’ve got the room booked for just the one night. And I reserved us four seats on the plane coming back the next morning.”
He tried to imagine that: the four of them seated two by two, he and Pauline and then Lindy (in a hospital gown, he pictured) and a faceless little boy.
He couldn’t figure out how his life had come to be so strange.
Neither one of them had ever been on a plane before, but Sally—George’s wife—was an experienced flier, and she kept reassuring them as she drove them to the airport. “Don’t worry about crashing,” she said. “Look at the statistics! Air travel is a whole lot safer than automobiles.”
It wasn’t crashing that worried Michael; it was the question of proper behavior. What would he do with their suitcase? Where should he pay for their tickets? Did the tickets get punched, as they did on trains? He was relieved when Sally insisted on parking and coming in with them. Sometimes he found his daughter-in-law a little wearing—she was a sunny, bouncy blond gal with a take-charge attitude—but today he gratefully followed the confident sashay of her tennis skirt through Friendship Airport.
Pauline was the one who feared crashing. She wrung several tissues into shreds while they were waiting to board, and as she was kissing Sally goodbye she said, “If anything should happen to us, I’ve left a note in my jewelry box about what should go to whom.”
“Listen to you!” Sally cried. “Nothing’s going to happen!”
“I know it’s only costume stuff, but there are several pieces that different people have admired in the past.”
Sally hugged her. “You-all have a good trip,” she said. “Give Lindy my love, hear?”—although of course she and Lindy had never met. She shooed the two of them toward the door, and they turned to follow the others onto the tarmac.
The flight itself struck Michael as something of a disappointment. He had expected more of a sense of being airborne, but once the plane had taken off (laboriously, like some out-of-practice water bird), it was steady as a locomotive, and the rows of other passengers on either side of the aisle made him feel that he was just in an extra-narrow waiting room. He almost couldn’t tell they were moving. “Look!” Pauline told him, pointing out her window. (She was her usual dauntless self again.) He leaned past her and saw a river far below, long and winding and yet apparently motionless, reflecting a striated, silvery gray like the trail left by the broad side of a pencil lead. No highways or buildings showed anywhere; nothing but clustered tree-tops as green as broccoli florets. Hawks would have seen this sight, and bald eagles, when the country was unexplored wilderness. Then the plane climbed into a bank of clouds and the window turned white, and Michael sat back in his seat.
“I’m wondering if I should have brought Lindy’s medical records,” Pauline said.
“What medical records?” he asked.
“They must still have them on file at her pediatrician’s office.”
“Oh, hon . . .” he said. But he didn’t add that their daughter was long past the age for a pediatrician.
Pauline was quiet after that. While he watched, her eyelids began to flutter shut, and several times she blinked and sat straighter before she let her head nod against the window. Michael couldn’t sleep himself, although they’d had to wake up very early for their flight. He studied the emergency instructions he found in the seat-back pocket; he leafed through a Newsweek handed to him by the stewardess. Pauline gave a little snorting sound and her mouth fell open. She would have been embarrassed if she’d known. In honor of the trip she had put on a darker-red lipstick, which always made her look older, and powder that was caking in her dimples. He saw that her dimples were more like tiny dry incisions now—something he hadn’t noticed till this moment. And her eyelids had a crumpled look, and her stockinged thighs bulged like sausages below her miniskirt.
Back in 1957, for their fifteenth anniversary, Pauline had proposed that they dress up and have a formal photograph taken. She said that already she’d had to pluck four gray hairs from her head and that was just the beginning; she was starting to grow old and she would never, ever look this good again. Michael had been amused. Okay with him, he’d said, if that was what she wanted. So they’d gone to Aronson’s Portrait Studio—Michael in his suit, Pauline in her gray silk—and the photographer had arranged them in front of a velvet curtain that puddled in artful folds around their feet. “A little closer together,” he’d said. “Mrs., lift your chin a bit . . . Mr., put your arm around Mrs. . . .” Michael had obeyed
, encircling Pauline’s waist and clasping her elbow just inside the hem of her sleeve; and something or other—the new sponginess of her bare skin, perhaps, or the unfamiliar scent of the silk—had made him feel for just an instant that he was standing next to a stranger. Who was this woman? What did she have to do with him? How could they be expected to share a house, rear children together, combine their separate lives for all time? The knob of her shoulder pressing into his armpit had felt like an inanimate object.
Yet the finished photo on Pauline’s bureau showed an ordinary couple: Mr. and Mrs. Perfectly Fine, standing side by side and smiling the same stiff smile. A gilt-framed commercial. An advertisement for marriage.
From the air, San Francisco looked beautiful. It appeared to be mostly water, so much so that for a moment, Michael thought their plane was going to miss dry land altogether; and Pauline pointed out a distant bridge that could be the Golden Gate, although it was actually red. Then during the cab ride from the airport, they saw more water and dramatic mountains with picturesque little settlements tumbling down their sides. Poor, plain, humble Baltimore wasn’t even in the running.
The cabdriver was an elderly man in a brown felt hat that rested squarely on his ears. He was not the talkative sort, although Pauline tried to get a conversation going once she’d given him the address. “Have you lived here all your life?” she asked him.
He said, “Yup.”
“Well, it sure is a pretty place.”
He said, “Mmhmm.”
“We just got in from Baltimore, Maryland. This is the first time I personally have been west of the Mississippi.”
No response.
The silence made Michael feel self-conscious, so that he spoke in a soft, furry mumble when he picked up the tail of an argument they’d been having before they landed. “The trouble with going to the hospital first—” he confided to Pauline.
“What, Michael? I can’t hear you,” she said in a bugle voice.
He closed his eyes and then opened them and started over, more distinctly but just as quietly. “If we go to the hospital first, we’ll have to carry our luggage.”
