The Excellent Lombards

by Jane Hamilton

  Wait. Four–five split? What did that mean? I stared at Dolly, hoping for the same loop to repeat, as it often did, before she went on to a different loop. Amanda and I were going to be in the same class? Is that what Dolly had said? I was starting the fifth grade, Amanda in fourth, the two classes joined? My cousin looked up from her paper, she, too, registering the essential sentence. And yet she didn’t seem alarmed. She said, “Mom says Mrs. Kwaselnik is intwested in geogwaphy, that we’uh going to pawticipate in the National Geogwaphy Bee.”

  “I know,” I lied.

  “Mrs. Kwaselnik will want me to bwing in my Suez Canal memowabilia for Show and Tell.” Amanda really did have a collection, Stephen Lombard having once sent her maps and a key chain from Suez when he’d passed through Egypt. “She’ll teach us to use a dweidel.”

  It was a matter of urgency that I leave the manor house immediately, that I get to the library where my mother worked. The Mrs. Kraselnik information could not possibly be true. Amanda and I were nothing to each other in school. In the mornings we waited for the bus together on our driveway but once we climbed the steps, even before we found our own seats, we no longer knew each other. This unknowing was an unspoken and mutually agreed-upon law. We weren’t embarrassed by our connection. It was only that we were entirely different persons outside of the orchard. On the way home we were with our friends and could not say hello. The second our feet touched the gravel drive we were again familiar, restored to our Velta-Volta selves, planning our after-school activities. It could not be explained to my mother why Amanda being in my class was a violation; I knew only that it must not happen.

  Because my mother was the director of the library, and because there was no place in town except the tavern to gather, the gossips came to the circulation desk to tell all. In that way Nellie Lombard knew everything, the font of knowledge. I made an excuse to Amanda and left my glitter picture. Always in the Dolly kitchen I hurried past the door that led up the stairs to May Hill’s part of the house. It was a fact that she lived right overhead, but it was a fact I did my best not to consider. Her house, even though it belonged to the same structure as the downstairs, was in a different plane, a different realm. This truth also could not be explained. In any case, I ran down the back stairs of Amanda’s house, only to see Sherwood at the basement sink.

  “Hallo, Francie,” he said. “You interested in seeing—” He held up a root of some kind but I didn’t look, didn’t stop, said I had to get home, although Velta was not my precise destination. I ran down the drive, past the barn, down the orchard path, up along the potato garden and the marsh, skirting the near hay field, past Gloria’s cottage, up to the baseball diamond, and ragged with running that quarter mile I burst into the library. My mother was at the circulation desk checking out the Bushberger children, Mrs. Bushberger putting no limit on the number of picture books each of her six children was allowed to take home.

  “Francie, my goodness,” Mrs. Lombard called to me. But she wasn’t going to pay real attention until every single Bushberger book had been scanned and neatly stacked in the six baskets, each child talking about the plot of the book she loved best, Mrs. Lombard somehow listening to all of them at the same time.

  Here is the reason my mother was a favorite person, children and adults, men and women flocking to speak to her: Mrs. Lombard was on the board of the American Library Association, headquartered in Chicago, the representative of rural libraries, and furthermore she’d won the Outstanding Librarian Award (for Populations Under Five Thousand) in 1991. But even if she hadn’t been a nationally famous librarian you wanted to loll around in her company because of her very form, her skinny legs and broad hips, her nice, midsize plush bosom, the gap between her two long front teeth, comic and also glamorous, and in addition to those pleasant encouragements her brown eyes were soft with what seemed like sincerity. You wanted to be with her in the cozy library that was filled with only the good books. She was no beauty by any standards, she once told us, but she said in her la-di-da voice and trailing a moth-eaten scarf that beauty was unimportant as long as a person was captivating. We knew she had something, whatever you wanted to call it, because our father with his tremendous shock of straw-colored hair was famous among his apple-selling haunts, his smile, his beamy, white straight teeth a radiance. Every woman apple customer surely was in love with him, and in fact there wasn’t one person we knew of, besides Sherwood, who didn’t think the world of him.

  When at last the Bushbergers were gone I burst out with it, I cried, “What is this about Mrs. Kraselnik? Teaching us, me and Amanda? I’m not going to be in the same class as Amanda. I’m not.”

  The librarian of the year usually knew exactly what to say. In this circumstance, however, she was not her usual quick-witted, award-winning personality. I reinforced my position. “Mrs. KWaselnik,” I spit.

  My mother coughed a little. “That will be a tough one,” she had to admit.

  Mrs. Lombard didn’t try to assure me that competing with my genius cousin would be perfectly all right, and she didn’t predict that I’d change my mind, nor did she insist on the situation. She said, “I wonder what she’s like, the doctor’s wife. They’re moving in this week sometime. We’ll have to go up to greet them.”

  Another patron came to the desk, cutting me off, and another, my complaint strung out for quite some time.

  That very night the new neighbor herself came to our door. My future teacher on the porch, knocking. I was in the middle of telling William that under no circumstances was I going to be in the same class as Amanda when the rapping started. My intuition told me: Mrs. Kraselnik. We slunk into the living room, waiting for my mother to be the greeter.

  It’s hard to say when I first knew I adored her. Certainly in our hall, in that glimpse, I noted her loveliness. She was slender, her features delicate, her hands graceful, her clavicle, her wrists, every part of her a bony elegance. Later, when she leaned on her desk in the classroom, her hip settling on the edge there, you thought flank, the horsewoman’s firm flank on display. Her silky brown hair was always in a ponytail, bound by a grosgrain ribbon, and she had a little mole near her nose, the first real beauty mark I’d ever seen.

  “Where’s the doctor?” I whispered to William.

  “Doctors are never home.” He somehow knew this.

  In a very backward welcome Mrs. Kraselnik had brought us cookies and a plant, my mother going berserk about how wrong this was, thrusting the goods back into Barbara’s—that was her name—into Barbara’s hands. They were laughing, and before we knew it the equestrian was in the kitchen, and my father was there, too, all of them sitting at the table. Never before had there been a teacher in our house drinking a cup of tea. Jim Lombard offered up every kind of country living help he could think of: machinery, books, advice, his own strength.

  When my mother called us in from the living room, as we approached the table Mrs. Kraselnik said, “Mary Frances Lombard. My heavens. It is…it is you.” She didn’t smile. Her voice was surprisingly low, her diction a little severe and in truth somewhat frightening. “A face for a name. This is always a thrilling moment, when the list becomes real. The real girl right here.”

  I looked at my mother. And back to the woman with the thin, pliant lips in a fresh light-plum shade, the tenderly etched lines by her large blue eyes, her softly glowing skin, the peach tones. There was sweetness itself, but sweetness tempered by the tang of her voice and her erect bearing, Mrs. Kraselnik the horsewoman of summer fruits. “William,” my teacher said, “I’m very sorry you’re too old for me.”

  My parents laughed. “I’m sorry, too,” William said sincerely.

  There was no further discussion at home about the four–five split, my objection forgotten. Both Amanda and I, even before the first day of school, were determined to make Mrs. Kraselnik love us best, both of us full of Mrs. Kraselnik lore. “Her name,” I told Amanda, “is Barbara.”

  “Befowah she mayweed huh name was Bawbawa Baker.” />
  “The doctor is bald and he looks a little black.” I added knowledgably, “That’s because he’s an Ashkenazi Jew.”

  “He’s a wadiologist.”

  “Her horse is Suzie. Not Chief.”

  “She’s a Thowoughbwed.”

  Where was she getting her information? “Brianna Kraselnik,” I said, “has hair to her waist.”

  “She’s going to babysit me sometime.”

  This stopped me cold. I had never been babysat in my life, one of my parents always at home, or Gloria came over if necessary. I had only seen Brianna from a distance and maybe she was nearly as regal and lovely as her mother, but still—I said scornfully, “Babysit!”

  I had gathered some of the facts myself, on occasion quietly making my way up to the Cortland line, the row that abutted the Kraselnik property. On several afternoons I’d climbed a tree, keeping watch for our teacher. Once I saw her drive into the garage, a heart-stopping moment. Followed by her taking groceries into the house. As children have been for time immemorial I, too, was stricken by the revelation: My teacher cooked food and she ate. On another day I watched her work with her horse, walking the animal around on a lead-line. Any view from the Cortland line was partially obstructed by the cedar trees but I could usually see the bright ribbon on her ponytail, and here and there the swish of Suzie’s own tail, and I could hear the firm commands, Suzie naturally being a good girl for her trainer. When I mentioned to Amanda that she might join me in the reconnaissance we both sat on a sturdy limb, waiting. We ate Fig Newtons. Our patience was at last rewarded, the goddess appearing on the driveway, and there she shook out a small blue rug. Amanda froze. She fortunately understood how still a witness should be. Amanda, my companion in Velta, observing the rite, the Mrs. Kraselnik devotion. She couldn’t even chew.

  Then school started and by order of the law we were required to be in Mrs. Kraselnik’s presence for roughly six hours for the next 188 days, not counting holidays and weekends. It was on the very first morning that our teacher told us we were going to be studying Shakespeare and the Greek gods and the planets, and we were going to investigate big cats at risk, and also we would memorize the highest elevations, the longest rivers, the driest deserts, we’d track violent storms, as well as study our school neighborhood and climate. We would do so, she said, in service to learning, each of us creating our own minds. “Do you realize, boys and girls, that you can create your own mind? Creating your own minds,” she repeated, a habit she had when the message was crucial. Our learning, she went on, would also be essential preparation for the Geography Bee.

  So, Amanda had been right. She smiled at me not in a gloating way but as if to say, Can’t you hardly wait, Fwances?

  What Amanda didn’t know was that when Mrs. Kraselnik came to the apple barn on the weekends to buy a bushel, a forty-pound weight that would include all my favorite varieties, I would be on hand to assist her. Amanda never helped at the barn. Instead of giving my teacher one red apple I could bestow upon her a whole orchard’s worth. Mary Frances, how in the world can you tell all these varieties apart? Never have I seen a girl who could do such a thing!

  There wasn’t a moment to be lost, Mrs. Kraselnik was saying. Each of us was going to participate in the bee in November in order that the winning student could go on to the county competition, and then state, and possibly to Washington, DC, in March. “You will discover this year, boys and girls, why geography is at the heart of every subject you could ever hope to study. You will discover this secret and at the same time you will become informed citizens of the world.”

  Informed citizens of the world? Amanda and I, pencils in hand, notebooks open, were prepared. I was already certain that it would be I, Mary Frances Lombard, who would go to Washington, DC, in March, boarding a plane, hand in hand with Mrs. Kraselnik, turning to wave on the steps to Amanda and the rest of the family, and also pausing to respectfully listen to the high school band’s selection for our send-off.

  6.

  The Incident During

  the Fifth Cloth

  A few weeks later we had a day off from school, a misery, a punishment. When we left the classroom it was clear that Mrs. Kraselnik didn’t want to be without us on a weekday, either, a mournful tone in her good-bye. The so-called holiday took place right after she announced an assignment that she said we could do in pairs. To my dismay, before I could make my choice Amanda had raced across the room and chosen me for her partner. There was nothing I could do, no wriggling out of her hold. It was an important, primary-source research project—that’s how Mrs. Kraselnik had described it. We were to interview someone in our community, someone who had valuable information about the history of our region, or who held a job of interest. Because Amanda had snapped me up I told her that I would chose the subject of our interview, that this was only fair. I was thinking of my father, because he was the chairman of the Farmland Preservation Committee for our town. Or Mrs. Bushberger, who was a member of the Reverend Moon’s church. She’d even had a baby for someone in her congregation in Chicago, Reverend Moon having demanded that charity of her. Stephen Lombard then crossed my mind as a subject. Did any other classmate have a relative who was probably a secret agent? He was going to be with us at least for the harvest and maybe longer now that he and Gloria were supposedly in love. But he was not someone who was truly a part of our community, Mrs. Kraselnik probably taking off points for our failure to follow directions.

  At dinner the assignment slipped my mind because Mr. Gilbert, a library patron, the man who always came in with his snake, Rosy, wrapped around his neck, had been arrested for possession of drugs. My mother told us all about it. The police had discovered not only marijuana in his house but also his exotic pets, the bearded dragon, the leopard geckos, the poison dart frogs, the veiled chameleons. My mother said that the one time she’d gone to his door to collect a fine the smell was overpowering. So because of the Mr. Gilbert story I had forgotten to ask my father if he would submit to the interview.

  The next morning, with no school, William and I wandered over to the apple barn. By eight o’clock my father and Gloria were already hours into their ritual of cider making on the precarious old press that had been in service ever since we could remember. Their fuel, their drug, was the assorted sweet rolls in the bakery box, bismarcks stuffed with crimson jelly and long johns with the jolt of chocolate inside, fritters and crullers, Danishes and elephant ears, and if Dolly happened by she’d want an ordinary dull brown donut, so my mother, the shopper, always included that drab puff in the mix. When the cider makers wished most to sleep they ate another cruller. William and I had a few questions about Gloria, questions a person couldn’t ask her directly, which was one of the reasons, besides wanting a sweet roll, that we made the trip over to Volta.

  For years, for all of our lives, cider day was the fourteen-hour stretch wherein Gloria always sent my father her love note. So, the immediate questions: Was she going to do it, now that she had run after Stephen? If Stephen himself was in the cider room would she act as if she’d never done the love note, not ever, and would my father understand that the fifth-cloth fun was over?

  To make the juice, ten thickly woven cloths held in place by wooden forms were one by one filled with apple pulp and stacked up on a stainless-steel tray, a stack taller than my father. The cloths were submitted to pressure, short planks set in crisscrossing fashion on the stack, stout blocks of wood on top of all of that, and finally the jacks, which would be turned periodically, the whole package compressed, tighter, tighter, every last drop forced from the pulp. Gloria’s job was first to put the apples through the washer, giving them one last inspection to make sure there was no habitat for an E. coli–type mold, or mold of any kind, no cuts or deep bruises. From the washer the fruit went into the grinder. My father then poured the pulp from the buckets into the cloths, cloths one to ten, folding them up just exactly so. My father, the master. Together he and Gloria would have decided the recipe to make the best possib
le blend from the available seconds. A Jonathan–Golden Delicious recipe—we are not talking the green, dimpled atrocities from Washington State, but our yellow, delicate, ripe, blushy feminine Goldens, ours a lovely, shy apple—this blend was a favorite, with whatever odds and ends were on hand and needed to be used up, varieties that wouldn’t tip the sweet-tart balance.

  Every week, for the fifth cloth, Gloria put a surprise through the grinder for my father. It might be a bushel of pears or a wild variety she’d gone and picked for the occasion, or a box of something special she’d hidden away in the cooler. He’d watch the mystery pulp coming through the grinder into the bucket, white mash speckled with the green or pink skins. With his hands sheathed in the XXX Large rubber gloves he spread what looked like coleslaw evenly into the cloth. He’d smell the mash as he smoothed it, he’d pause to think, he’d take a guess. On that morning of our holiday he said, “The wild tree by the Jonathans? Is that it? Those little apples, the spotty—”

  “Afraid not,” Gloria said sadly.

  “Am I close?”

  “You mean geographically?”

  “Glooria,” he said in a teasing fashion. “I need a hint.”