The Excellent Lombards

by Jane Hamilton

  A what?

  “A genie of the Orient.”

  My parents laughed.

  I said, “He is! He is!” He was tall enough and he had a full lower lip and could cross his muscly arms over his chest in an imposing way. When he frowned, as genies must, his brows would surely make two slanting lines toward the bridge of his nose, a telltale sign.

  The probable spy/genie stayed in our guest room even though Sherwood was his brother, even though the manor house had eleven bedrooms. Even though he was uncle to Adam and Amanda. He wouldn’t stay in the upstairs with May Hill—no one did that—and he couldn’t be in the downstairs house because there the Lombard hoarding trait was on full display, no place in Sherwood and Dolly’s quarters for a person to fully stretch out. So Stephen stayed on our side of the road, in Velta; Stephen was ours, like it or not.

  With or without his glasses the genie of the Orient was handsome, the planes of his large face broad and smooth, his lashy brown eyes tapering delicately, his supple mouth often nicely moistened with ChapStick. One of the things I liked about him was his dark-brown hair that curled prettily at the neck. I liked also how he dipped his head in a shy way when he came into a room, not letting anyone see his beauty, and when he spoke he held his hand to his chin and cheek, as if he were in hiding, as his true job must have demanded. He was a genius, my mother said, and complicated, which William told me a spy/genie had to be, pretending to be one thing when you were another.

  Back to Stephen’s appearing in the orchard in that summer of Gloria. She had just broken it off with the North Dakotan. Even though she’d spent a lot of effort on the boyfriend she hadn’t been able to get him to do what she wanted. Why she hadn’t fallen in love with Stephen in previous years we didn’t know, or maybe she’d been pledged to the old man in their long-distance fashion.

  A week or two after Stephen arrived we saw her walking out of the orchard with him at day’s end, both of them with their picking bags slung carelessly over their shoulders. But wait, was it Gloria? Her head was tipped back, her face shining and open in a way that was not usual. He was different, too, his hand wasn’t covering his cheek, Stephen unguarded, gazing down at her. Both of them heedless of any stone or stick that might be on the path. And one standard feature of Stephen, usually, when he got himself talking? He couldn’t stop the story, the story driving hard and sure until the end, and beyond, the very end. Even so, you had to wait for a good while to be sure it was truly over before you tried to make a comment or ask a question or change the subject, no point in two people trying to squeeze through the needle’s eye at once.

  And yet, with Gloria on their walk that day, he was waiting, waiting for her to say her part. He was listening. He said a sentence or two, and then she spoke. Neither one was confused or struggling. Along they came, in and out of the lavish long rays of the late afternoon, the two of them sometimes bumping a little against each other and also, most alarming, looking at one another for an impolite length of time. We were on the roof of the old chicken coop and we felt funny watching them, somewhat dizzy even, as if we were the pair in the staring contest.

  They came in for dinner and as usual Gloria and my father discussed who had picked what, how many bushels, how the trade was at the apple barn, what was tasting good and should be picked next, and what they should include in the market load. What was strange, bizarre, even, was Gloria’s being almost bubbly. “Thirty-one customers,” she sang out, as if there had never been such a number on a sunny afternoon. William gave me a Huh? sort of look. My mother moved around the table and finally she sat, pouring herself another glass of wine, Nellie Lombard on her own path to happiness. Gloria, who was usually hungry at dinner and eager, pushed her plate up to her glass of milk. She stared at the lamb chop, the ear of corn, the pink applesauce, the mashed potatoes fluffed with butter, everything we ourselves had grown, as if she had no idea what food was for. That’s when Stephen started his story, when with good reason she could turn her full attention to the storyteller. We all knew his tales were always funny in parts, but also they were sad. They almost always involved him as the hero who does exactly the wrong or clumsy thing, so that even if we didn’t want to we found ourselves listening.

  He told the one where he was little, when he and his father were picking in the Cortland line. His father, straining for a huge, deep-red apple growing from a leader that was impossibly high, fell eighteen feet to the ground. Thwump. There he lay in a heap. Five-year-old Stephen froze to the rungs of his own ladder.

  “Oh, Stephen!” Gloria cried.

  “One of my first existential crises,” Stephen said modestly. “Where was God? Was there a God? What was God going to do for me?”

  Everyone except Gloria laughed.

  “Couldn’t find God, but probably more important, couldn’t locate my feet. Or my vocal cords. Not only my first existential crisis but my first stunning public display of ineptitude. If only I’d known how many more were to come.”

  Gloria smacked her hand to her mouth. It seemed as if she might cry. We all knew how the story came out, how eventually the father was loaded onto an old door for a stretcher and put in the apple truck and taken to the emergency room, that he’d miraculously sustained only a few broken ribs. There was no reason to cry.

  William and I also knew we were supposed to love the fumbling, sweet boy, young Stephen, just as everyone else did. But how could we? When Stephen talked about his childhood we got the feeling he didn’t actually believe that any child had come after him on the farm. For that reason we couldn’t laugh or feel very sorry for him. He hardly seemed to notice that we were at the table, that we, Mary Frances and William, were the actual, real true children.

  When he’d finished the story, the father alive and hardly wounded, Stephen abruptly pushed back in his chair and stood up. “Thanks,” he said to my mother. “You cook lamb better than the Saudis.”

  My mother, so pleased by the compliment, tittered girlishly. Gloria watched him hastily tie his shoes and land a short pat pat on Butterhead, the old yellow cat. She stared at the aged tom, both of them glazy-eyed, while Stephen crossed the yard and started out to the hay field. After a minute Gloria blinked away her dream, she looked at her full plate, and then—what did she do but go to the sink and scrape all of that bounty into the bucket for the chickens.

  “Gloria?” my mother said. “You all right?”

  “Fine!” Gloria said so brightly we knew she had to be ill. Nonetheless she was putting on the smock she wore at our house so she could wash the dishes.

  What’s going on? It was my mother who first asked the question of my father with the look, eyebrows raised, the wide glare of alarm.

  Next we knew Gloria was ripping off the smock, throwing it on the counter, and she was gone, out the door.

  “Oooooh…sweeeet…” My mother’s oath was coming from her mouth, a slow leak. “…Geeeesus.”

  “What’s the matter?” William said.

  “Do not, Gloria, go after Stephen.” My mother spoke as if Gloria were still in the room.

  “Is that what’s happening?” my father wondered.

  She shook her head mournfully, which seemed to mean yes.

  “Why are you doing that, Mrs. Lombard?” William had started using her formal title when strictness was required.

  “It’s just that—it’s just that if, if Gloria likes Stephen—if she likes him very much—he just won’t—he just can’t attend to—”

  “Is that what’s going on?” My father’s same basic question.

  “Yes, Jim, yes it is.”

  “Gloria likes Stephen?” I said.

  “All the signs indicate yes,” my mother explained. Not only was she the person in the family who knew about the world in general, but she had also once followed Stephen all the way from her college in Ohio to the orchard. So she should know.

  William looked at me, I looked at him. We were thinking about how Gloria had recently scooped up a batch of late-summer kittens fro
m our barn, the mother, Piggy, having eaten the first two, the glutton Piggy feasting on her own young. In rushed Gloria to rescue the remaining babies from both Piggy and my murderous father, who, if given a chance, would slit their throats, a quicker, kinder death, he always said, than drowning them in a bucket. What remained were three blind little mewlers who required feeding with a syringe. So, right away, if Stephen and Gloria got married, they’d have something like an instant family.

  “It’s not going to work out,” my mother pronounced, pushing back to clear the plates.

  My father, always hopeful where love was concerned, said, “Maybe it will, Nellie. Maybe he’s ready.”

  “Oh God, Jim.”

  “He’s got this sabbatical situation. Maybe he’s ready for a new life.”

  “You know Stephen is not domesticatable,” my mother said, going to her husband’s chair, standing behind him, draping her arms down his front. “You know you are utterly out of your mind.”

  He smiled as if she’d given him a compliment, as if she’d said something factual.

  “You’re not crazy, Papa!” I cried.

  My parents laughed, the way they did when, without warning, they were in their own realm where everything was funny. If anyone was crazy it was Gloria. She had flung down her smock. She’d torn away. So that’s how it happened, not eating any of your dinner, abandoning the dishes, having to run to try to catch, maybe not even the man, but the love itself? None of it seemed like a good idea, but we weren’t going to worry about Gloria’s disappointment in the event it didn’t work out. We wandered off upstairs to our room. We got to wondering whether, if it did work out, if she and Stephen would then have real children instead of cats. If they did, those children would be our cousins. Because Gloria was a knowledgeable gardener, unlike my mother, whose plot was a tangle, and because Gloria was interested in farming, those children might want to live on the orchard. They might want to take it over. Those future relatives would be our rivals, our enemies, and furthermore they would have extensive knowledge, something we had neglected to get. We would then be sorry we hadn’t loved Gloria more, so that she would have been satisfied with just us.

  That night, though, we forgot as usual everything that was going on around us, forgot to worry. My father always lay on the floor in our room in order to tell us a continuing story that came out of his own head. He could only do it lying down. The story featured a hero named Kind Old Badger. Kind Old Badger seemed doddery and was sometimes baffled but, surprising to some, he was remarkably strong and wise. Not to mention shrewd. The story highlighted William and Mary Frances, too, we who performed feats of astonishing bravery with the dearest of Badgers. We were always having to run swiftly over hill and also over dale, the two of us run, run, running like the hobbie-a, my father said. We knew what that meant and also couldn’t have explained it. Neither Gloria nor my mother ever made an appearance in Kind Old’s kingdom. They never had to run like the hobbie-a; they would have been unable to. My father also read us the stories about queens being in prison for years, and wife after wife getting her head chopped off. All King Henry wanted was for the right boy to be born, that child standing at the ready to take over when the time came. If my father temporarily ran out of steam with Kind Old we loved second best hearing about the princes and princesses wearing sables and golden gowns, studying the countries on the globe, realms that would be theirs once they assumed the throne.

  5.

  The Four–Five Split

  In addition to the romance situation out in the orchard, Stephen and Gloria almost literally sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g, there was another crisis that summer that, although I didn’t know it right away, also involved true love. At the end of July the thing William and I had feared for at least a year came to fruition. Time, we could see, was beginning to run as if it were leading somewhere, as it had not exactly done when we were very small, time occurring back then only in bursts. At any rate, the dread event took place, a radiologist and his wife moving not only to our town but into a house on our side of the road, next to Velta. Dr. and Mrs. Michael Kraselnik. They had two teenagers, David and Brianna, hard to think how students with KRASELNIK on the backs of their gym shorts would manage at high school, although we were hardly concerned with their problems. The prospect of their coming was at first so alarming William and I couldn’t stand to imagine it.

  For a full year the building of their sprawling four-story house had been in progress on land that should have been ours. My father and Sherwood had tried to buy the ten acres, as a buffer, they said, between the farm and the village, but they’d waited too long to make the offer and lost the chance. When the hole for the doctor’s foundation was dug we looked on from our fence line. William’s mouth, which under usual circumstances was like a little bunched bud, had the further tightness of a person gathering spit. To have neighbors on our side of the road? Even if we were separated by eight acres of orchard and a row of scrubby pines we would see, in winter, the lights of their château. This outrage could not, must not happen—the river, the river would know to flood, the water climbing the hillside, or a meteor might fall into the hole, a tornado smash the building to pieces. Or a sweep of flame would run through the timbers and the stacks of sod waiting to be laid—the doctor paying for earth as if regular old ground wasn’t good enough for him.

  But it wasn’t just that a family was moving in, that we were going to have something like next-door neighbors on good farmland. It was stranger than that. Our town, as it happened, was not famous for its races and creeds or lifestyles. There were no blacks, no Filipinos, no Native Americans, the arrival of the Hispanics and the Hmong migration a few years in the future. We did have the men who operated the bed-and-breakfast, two or three adopted Koreans, an occasional Japanese or Brazilian AFS student, and the gym teacher, Miss Manning, so aptly named. For well over a hundred years, then, the job of drawing the line in the sand had been left to the English and the Germans. However, now into our field of Caucasian Christians and Catholics were going to come Dr. and Mrs. Kraselnik, from Chicago. The husband’s people were originally from Poland, my father thought. “Ashkenazi Jews,” he said to my mother because he knew those kinds of things, the history and dispersal of populations. They were moving because the radiologist had a job in Milwaukee and because his wife wanted to own a horse and raise vegetables. Most of all, for her children’s sake, she needed to escape the tony Illinois North Shore where the high school students were crippled with sports injuries and also were under so much academic pressure they became drug addicts. That’s what my mother said.

  I first learned about our new neighbor when I was in Volta, at the manor house kitchen table, doing an art project with Amanda. Sherwood and Dolly’s daughter was a round little ball of a girl with long black hair, a year younger than me, a girl who in a babyish way couldn’t say her r’s, saying vewwy instead of very, which the adults thought adorable especially in a person who was so intelligent. She was obsessed by topics such as the Suez Canal and Pompeii and predictably she went through a big hieroglyphics phase. Because she was my cousin I must automatically love her.

  I was taking great care with my glitter art when Amanda told me, with a proprietary air, that the KWaselniks were moving in. Sometimes she irritated me more than anyone else I knew even though she was my playmate, and also loving her was mandatory. I didn’t look up. A delicate puff, a little blow to the paper, to scatter the excess glitter, the cat coming into focus. I then pointed out that the information about the foreigners was not news, first, and second the family was going to be living on our side of the road. While I didn’t want neighbors anywhere near the Lombard Orchard it seemed necessary in our conversation to make my rightful claim. “And it’s the KRaselniks,” I said in not at all a nice tone.

  “They came ovuh to talk to Dad,” Amanda bragged, ignoring my correction. “We alweady know them.”

  “They’ll be in Velta,” I said, letting loose the secret name, something I’d never
done before, Mary Frances full of mystery, full of knowledge. “In Velta,” I repeated, tossing my head.

  Adam came through the hall and went to the refrigerator, opening it and removing a package of ham. He was going into seventh grade, possibly smarter than Amanda, preoccupied with NASA, Stephen Hawking, and especially the particle accelerator in Batavia, Illinois.

  “What’s Velta?” he said, rolling three thin pieces of ham into a cigar and sticking it between his fingers.

  “We’re talking about the Kwaselniks,” Amanda said, as haughty as I’d been.

  Dolly came up the back stairs just then carrying a basket of tomatoes. She had to be mindful to not activate a burglar alarm that Sherwood had made, one of my favorite things about the kitchen, the marble-type run that involved an egg beater, a cow bell, a wind chime, and a bicycle horn. It was a golf ball that got the whirring and tinkling and honking going.

  “Don’t eat that ham,” she cried, Adam retreating with the booty down the hall.

  Amanda’s mother was nothing like a real Lombard, having before her marriage been a Muellenbach, a local girl, Dolly with a puff of black hair, everything about her soft, a little blurry, her round face with what kind of nose, what color eyes, how shapely the mouth? You couldn’t recall the details in someone who was merely Dolly, tall enough, not thin but not fat, the mother who happened to be in the background.

  Before she’d set the basket down she was talking to us. “If I was a doctor’s wife I wouldn’t work.” Her slow easy speech filled the kitchen. “What would I do with myself?” She was fetching an enormous tray from the pantry. “What would I do with myself?” she repeated. She started to arrange the tomatoes on the tray. “She’s not Jewish, she’s not the religious one. Nobody would have argued with her if she’d kept her own name. But then she wouldn’t be Doctor and Mrs. Kraselnik. You girls will be the doctors, the men lining up to sponge off you. If I didn’t have a job in the apple business I’d ride my horse—me with a horse! Spend a lot of time grooming old Chief. And shopping for supplies, you have a horse you need supplies. Saddle soap, maintain the leather, nothing worse than brittle leather.” Dolly was a champ at merrily keeping herself entertained, the interviewer and the subject in one person. “What else? A curry comb. And oats, got to have oats and a feedbag. And those Klan-type hoods, keep the gnats out of Chief’s eyes. Mrs. Kraselnik is teaching the four–five split so you girls will both have her—that’ll be nice for you. I’ll bet she’ll have pictures of Chief on her desk. I’d do steeplechase, get a black velvet helmet, that’s what I’d do, taking the fences, a little noodge with the boot to the flanks, over you go, a little noodge.”