The Excellent Lombards

by Jane Hamilton

“I want to ask you something.” The beating of my heart, for some reason, sped up. She said, “How will you feel if you win?”

  What kind of question was that? The answer was: Elated. Triumphant. Victorious. I will feel victorious. She saw she needed to elaborate. “If you win and Amanda doesn’t?” Gloria with her long blond braids and her enormous gray eyes behind her glasses said something more. She said, “Do you understand that it can be harder to be the winner, harder to win than to lose?”

  That could hardly be true. She was making something simple seem complicated and confused. I said, “I’m older than Amanda.” All things being equal that was the reason I should win. However, in our after-school practice sessions lately I often had the slightest edge, Amanda probably spending too much time on pre-algebra.

  “Yes, you are older,” Gloria said, as if my logic had been wrong, as if I should let Amanda win precisely because of my greater age. Was that what Gloria was asking me to do? Amanda had recently gone to the hairdresser with high expectations, Dolly allowing the stylist to cut her daughter’s long hair and give her a perm. Instead of glossy curls, though, the black hair fell straight from a center part before it became a dry frizz. Was that disappointment my responsibility? She’d gotten glasses, too, the frames tinted purple.

  I had not envisioned Amanda being the winner until Gloria let a sliver of that darkness into my mind. If anyone else had made the suggestion I would have thought it mean, a jab intended to knock me off balance. I didn’t want to think why Gloria would wish me to lose, and I left the cottage soon after, trying as best I could to dismiss her idea.

  I wandered over to the library, where right away there was another disturbing conversation. Traditionally, if Dolly had the need to tell my mother something she’d walk the hedgerow path and no matter the delicacy of her news bulletin she’d stand at the circulation desk and talk. She and my mother rarely spoke on the phone, and I doubt they wrote each other emails. Even if Mrs. Sherwood Lombard went into my mother’s office, the rest of us out in the stacks, the patrons and those people who had jobs shelving, could hear at least her side of the conversation. The two wives had the joke of calling each other Mrs. Lombard. “Mrs. Lombard,” my mother would say, “how are you?”

  “Don’t ask, Mrs. Lombard”—Dolly usually laughed—“don’t ask.”

  In any exchange Dolly had to first tell my mother a little something about Adam and Amanda because a day didn’t pass without one or another of them excelling, and there was always a catastrophe involving her Muellenbach relatives.

  After I’d left Gloria’s cottage and had been in the library for about five minutes, in comes Dolly for the usual exchange, Mrs. Lombard, hello, and, Don’t ask, Mrs. Lombard.

  Dolly said to my mother after the opening bit, “It’s going to be tough, is what I think.”

  I looked up from my spot in the beanbag chair by the Junior section.

  “I know, I know,” my mother said, lowering her voice, glancing my way, “but maybe, you know, someone else—”

  “Mine is fixated on the money.”

  “Oh God.”

  “…already planning how to finance college.”

  They both laughed.

  “You think we could rig it?” my mother said, which made them laugh again.

  “Oh well, Mrs. Lombard,” Dolly sang out.

  “It’s in the Lord’s hands, I guess,” my mother said.

  Maybe I had heard most all of their conversation and maybe I hadn’t but whatever drift I’d gotten made me understand that my mother, who was not religious, who for some reason had invoked Jesus, was talking about me.

  In those weeks before the bee I was only happy in school, when Mrs. Kraselnik said to all of us, but looking at me, that she’d never had a group of students who were so enthusiastic about geography. She’d never seen all of her boys and girls working so hard together to learn such interesting facts and to master map reading. In her book, she said, we were all winners, even though Amanda and I, and maybe Max Peterson and Derek Casper, were clearly in a realm apart from our classmates. Sometimes, though, in the middle of thinking and working, in the middle of eating or brushing my teeth, Gloria’s absurd question rang out: Do you understand that it can be harder to be the winner?

  I’d chew briskly. I’d brush with more vigor. If Gloria ever had a real baby, I felt sorry for it already.

  The night of the competition we were lined up on stage in the gym, all twenty-seven of Mrs. Kraselnik’s champions. I was wearing a French brushed cotton blue-and-white-striped dress with a yoke, which Gloria had found in a resale shop, white tights, and blue ballet flats. My clean straight hair was without tangles in the customary pageboy. For the occasion Amanda had decided on navy pants and a red blazer, a jacket a businesswoman, a banker, would wear. She had nylon stockings under her pants, and black pumps with a slight heel. Nowhere in evidence was the girl who wanted to eat her crackers like a beaver. She stood next to me with her hands folded behind her back, and she stared far past the audience, the EXIT sign apparently her portal to knowledge. I remembered right then that I should put good in the world, a generosity that surely would ricochet back to me. And so I said to that weirdly dressed girl, my cousin, I said, “Good luck, Amanda.” That moment was something no one knew about but the two of us, a secret, the virtue of Mary Frances, a point on the scorecard.

  I looked out to the audience, to the way the spectators had arranged themselves, as if there were the bride’s section and the groom’s section. Sherwood and Dolly and Adam were on one side of the gym, and my mother and father and William and Gloria were on the other. Everyone in their proper places, waiting for the action to begin. Even before Derek Casper was eliminated, before it was just the two of us, Amanda and I, goodness must have been working its wayward logic in my mind, winding itself up of its own accord. Goodness waiting to pop up again, the cheery clown, goodness bobbling helplessly.

  Many of our classmates were serious and well prepared and it therefore took an hour for everyone else to go down. Sherwood always blinked in that thoughtful way of his when Mrs. Kraselnik asked the question, Sherwood thinking, thinking, weighing his own answer. You felt he was on the side of each contestant in the freighted moment. Adam was playing his very own new Game Boy, a forbidden item for us. Dolly also had a new haircut, her hair spun into a glossy black bubble. She had taken so much trouble with her hair but nothing she could do would ever make her beautiful. I didn’t want anyone in the world to be ugly—what if you were ugly?—and yet ugliness for some reason had to exist. Someone had to do the job of carrying it.

  When Derek Casper was finally out we arranged ourselves, Amanda and I, on either side of Mrs. Kraselnik.

  “Well, here we are,” she said. “Amanda. Mary Frances.”

  I looked at Amanda, her shoulders pinched back, her hands clasped by her rear, her long gaze past the audience. She didn’t seem to be aware that I was on the stage with her. It was as if she were already the ambassador to Egypt, so that I both wanted to laugh and also was slightly unnerved.

  “Which state,” Mrs. Kraselnik asked Amanda, “has a climate suitable for growing citrus fruits—California or Maine?”

  That was so easy it was not in any way funny. “Cali-FONia,” Amanda snapped.

  “Mary Frances,” my lovely teacher said, “which country has the world’s largest Muslim population—Indonesia or Mexico?”

  Up flipped my mental map of world religions. Symbols across the continents, arrows flashing to show the way. It was additionally helpful to know that Mexico had been settled by the Spanish, who generally are Catholics. I knew that Indonesia was the correct answer, and I knew, also, that I would say so. I noticed Dolly on her side staring at me, her little teeth, her pointy bottom teeth on purpose cutting into her upper lip. My father, about six rows back, on the other aisle, was sitting forward, his head down. My mother was looking at Gloria’s lap, and Gloria herself had turned to face the clock. Only William was watching me, his chin up, a slight sm
ile, no blinking. I remembered the once upon a time when he’d told me the story about how our house would come to find me, it loved me that much. Once there was a girl who lived near the end of the world. A place no contestant in the Geography Bee could ever know or find.

  “Indonesia,” I said.

  “That’s correct,” Mrs. Kraselnik pronounced. The audience clapped, although so long into the contest their tributes seemed halfhearted.

  For Amanda: “To visit the ruins of Persepolis, an ancient ceremonial capital of Persia, you would have to travel to what present-day country? Iran or Syria?”

  Again, a cinch. “Eye-wan,” Amanda said.

  I was asked a question about physical geography with the answer of isthmus, and Amanda had another improbably easy question about what a barometer measures. “You girls are spectacular,” Mrs. Kraselnik said, “aren’t they?” The audience clapped in earnest, a few people cheering. “My goodness, you really are both winners.”

  I noticed Dolly again. She wanted to look like a respectable person with the hairdo, like someone who lived in a subdivision. Like the mother of a winner. How was it that Sherwood had married her, so that forever he had to be in public with the former Miss Muellenbach? Dolly having latched on to him for her single and only dream: Adam and Amanda in cap and gown. Her children were going to go to a great college, she always said to customers at the apple barn, maybe a place hidden with ivy. By hook, she said, or by crook. Her children, she’d explain, scored off the charts. A logical therefore kind of question: Therefore, what did I need with a scholarship since I was going to stay on the farm?

  Maybe Dolly didn’t just want Amanda to win for the sake of it. Maybe she needed her to win. That’s why she was biting hard into her lip, about to draw blood. Because of the impossible sum. Fifty thousand dollars for national champion, far more than my father and Sherwood ever made for themselves in a year. I began to sweat. Was this what my parents, what William and Gloria had been trying to tell me? And maybe, yes, Mrs. Kraselnik had, too, her whole sermon about putting good into the world meant only for me.

  I had to say to Mrs. Kraselnik, “Could you—could you please repeat the question?”

  By allowing Amanda, the girl in the business attire, to win, would I, the cheater, in fact be a force for good?

  There were a few more rounds, both of us answering without much effort within the twenty-second time period, and yet I was dizzy and warm, the sweat running down my back. The thought I’d had about cheating was insane; I was maybe going crazy, a foaming in my mind. But remember, remember, Mrs. Kraselnik had been practically teary in class when she’d been imparting her message about goodness. She’d been suffering because of what she was asking, because of the enormity of my sacrifice. I had a fever. That was it, I was suddenly ill. I was going to burn up and fall over, my vision failing, Mary Frances soon to go blind. Poor good blind girl, blind and then dead. I felt that in a minute I might die.

  Nonetheless, my turn came again when I was still standing. “Which Canadian province produces more than half the country’s manufactured goods?” Mrs. Kraselnik was wearing an orange cashmere dress that came to her knees, made shapely by a giant leather belt with a huge O buckle, clothing to lay your face against even if you yourself were boiling.

  I knew, of course, that Ontario borders all the Great Lakes and also has access to the St. Lawrence Seaway. Ontario, therefore, was the reasonable answer. There was a hitch in my throat and sweat in my eyes, that sting. I turned to look at the orange softness of Mrs. Kraselnik. She nodded at me supportively. Put good into the world, Mary Frances. I looked at William, at his uplifted, bright face. Do it, Imp. Amanda was not going to become the farmer, no, she was going to leave home. She would have to prove herself everywhere she went in her heels and jacket, whereas the farm would be ours, William’s and mine. Was that not winning? Was that not the real prize? Everyone had been trying to tell me the answer and maybe even I myself had known it all along: Amanda should have the Geography Bee. If I lost, and because Mrs. Kraselnik knew about my secret vein of goodness, she would gather me to her. She would thank me, whispering in my ear, her wet cheek to mine. And I’d choke, Oh, Mrs. Kraselnik!

  Thank you, my love. Thank you, Mary Frances.

  Come on, Imp, let her have it, William beamed to me.

  Do I have to, William?

  Yes.

  It was something William would do, kind good William. I felt his eyes not only on me but boring into me so steadily they were nearly my eyes, too, his good deep-brown eyes.

  And so I said it, I said, “British Columbia.”

  The startled hush in the crowd. Is it right, is it wrong? “I’m sorry,” Mrs. Kraselnik said quietly, the audience groaning, the audience sorry for me although glad, too, that the evening was soon going to be over. They could get home for the end of the Packer game.

  But not so fast. The winner had to answer another question correctly, the contest not yet done. Our course could be reversed—there was still hope. Instantly after the corrupted answer I knew that I did not want to be the loser; I didn’t want to put good in the world after all, no interest, none, in that project.

  Mrs. Kraselnik began a narrative question, which by and large she’d avoided. “Hundreds of wooden and stone churches, Amanda,” she said, “containing both Christian and Viking symbols were built during the Middle Ages in what country that borders the Barents Sea?”

  Russia, didn’t Russia border that sea? Amanda didn’t answer immediately. She was breathing heavily, her lips tightly pursed. The harsh gym lights, the sound of her breathing, the trick question, the digital clock in front of us—all compounded my illness and fatigue. Mrs. Kraselnik hadn’t said a Nordic country, which would have been expected if the answer was Norway. Were there Vikings in Russia in the Middle Ages? Maybe I’d missed that unit. I couldn’t think exactly where Norway was, and what of Finland, my mind was suddenly no good, the maps gone dark. It had to be Russia, Russia touched the Barents Sea. With two seconds on the clock Amanda said, “No way.”

  No way? No way was not a country. No way most certainly could not stand as the answer. And yet next I knew Mrs. Kraselnik was hugging Amanda on stage, this before our teacher outlined the future. “Right here, in our presence,” she then said, “a possible county champion, and who knows, a girl who could get to state and maybe beyond.” Never, Mrs. Kraselnik said, had she worked with such dedicated students, but now in our gym she meant that only Amanda was the truly dedicated one.

  As an afterthought Mrs. Kraselnik said, “Let’s give another hand for the excellent Lombards.”

  I had slunk down the steps, even though I was supposed to stay on as the loser, as the runner-up, the alternate, in the event that in the weeks to come Amanda had a change of heart or broke a limb. Or damaged her vocal cords trying to learn Standard English. I ignored my mother’s outstretched hand and went to sit next to William. He may have spoken to me—I don’t know. I wanted to stand up and shout the truth, to explain my reasoning. On the way out many people tried to hug me but Dolly especially made a point to draw me to her ample breasts. She’d never hugged me before but I had to let her. “You girls did so well!” she screamed even though I was pressed into her. “So wonderfully well!”

  Gloria hugged me, too. She murmured one of her incomprehensible Gloria sentences. She said, “You have so many advantages, Mary Frances. I’m very proud of you.”

  When William and I were grown, when Dolly and Gloria were old ladies, maybe we’d put a plate of pie by the door of the manor house. Say the men had gone away, and it was only the history hermit upstairs, the farmer’s wife downstairs with her black bob, and Gloria, the three women stuck with each other. They would all be closed up with May Hill, and like May Hill they wouldn’t even celebrate Christmas or Thanksgiving, never a holiday. Maybe we wouldn’t feed them at all.

  That’s what I was thinking all the way home in the car, while my parents and William kept talking about how much I knew, their praise and jubil
ation no more noise than a door banging in the wind or hail on the roof.

  10.

  How Hard Must the Pumpkin Visitors Work?

  At the County Geography Bee in December, which I was too ill to attend, Amanda stayed in the contest for an admirable length of time. Ultimately the hopefuls were defeated by a seventh-grade whiz kid, a boy predictably from India. It was said that she cried on stage. That was too bad. After the four–five split bee I’d more or less recovered from my loss, our teacher making me the assistant director for the class holiday play, Mary Frances Lombard with clipboard, pen tucked behind her ear, keeper of the details. Even so, I was sick to my stomach for the County Bee in Racine, and stayed home.

  For that competition Stephen did his duty as uncle and went along with Gloria, my mother riding with them, which she afterward said made her want to put a bullet to her brain. Even though my mother’s exaggerations were not funny, we’d understood after Halloween why she made such dire comments about the couple who were something like newlyweds.

  In that fall she was often asking my father accusing questions as if Jim Lombard were responsible for the couple, questions such as, “Why can’t Stephen be good to Gloria, Jim? Why can’t he just once look at her when she says something? Would it kill him to act as if she exists?”

  My father didn’t have an answer, my father unable to choose sides.

  We did wonder if Gloria put her arms around Stephen the way she did to us, kissing his head longingly although he was right there firmly in her clasp. We thought she might do that, and therefore we were squarely in Stephen’s camp. Until, that is, until the night the pumpkin visitors came to the Lombard Orchard for the last time.

  We took it for granted that everyone understood the utmost importance, every Halloween, of the pumpkin visitors coming to Velta. If you’d heard about them, of course you understood. For the special guests to appear, it had to grow dark. We sat at the table eating spaghetti and store bread soaked to sponge in garlic butter, and probably we were describing our classmates’ costumes when suddenly, suddenly, there, out the kitchen window. A pumpkin, was it a pumpkin in the night? Its lopsided toothless grin all joy, glowing at us?