The Excellent Lombards

by Jane Hamilton

  “Papa! Papa! The pumpkin visitors have come!”

  “What?” He’d hurry into the kitchen from somewhere or other. “Where?”

  “Look!”

  “They came,” my mother would say in a hush.

  We ran to the front door to see if the sidewalk visitor had made the trip, and yes, there he was, crooked teeth as usual. Up the stairs we chased to find the two roof visitors outside our window, the ones with question marks for ears and eyebrows thin and curved like seagulls in flight.

  “They came!” I had to needlessly point out.

  Gloria, wearing her gypsy costume, having followed us, put her arms around me, singing out her hello, hello, as if through the double-paned glass they could hear her. The visitors sometimes left us notes, not of course inside their shells with the burning candle but on our pillows, formal, short messages wishing us good cheer and fortune. Once, when William started to wonder how they occupied themselves during the rest of the year, he started to cry. He had made the mistake of thinking outside the bounds of their magic, glimpsing their loneliness, such sad creatures who could only be useful one night of the year. The Easter Rabbit, too, doomed to 364 days of leisure. My father soothed William by involving the pumpkin visitors in Kind Old Badger’s life and times, the visitors’ rotund fleetness an asset for any number of adventures. But even so it wasn’t long after William’s upset that my father decided to bring him into his dark enterprise.

  When I was seven we were at dinner as usual, the spaghetti, the garlic bread, the discussion of the costumes at school. I happened to look up from my plate just as a tower of flame shot into the sky out in the hay field. “William!” I screamed. “A rocket!”

  He ran to the window. “It’s—it’s…the brush pile? The brush pile, ohmygosh! It’s on fire!”

  “How in the world—?” My mother was too surprised to finish the sentence.

  “Could it be—?” I tried. “Do you think—?”

  “What could it be?” Gloria sang out, the bells on her gypsy costume tinkling.

  “The pumpkin visitors?” I said it, what no one else had yet understood.

  “The pumpkin visitors! The pumpkin visitors!”

  All of my family was with me, no possible way anyone at the table had made it happen. I was not so stupid as to at least wonder. “A whole bonfire this time,” I shouted. As always we flew to the front door. The proper visitor was on the walkway, and we tore upstairs, our old friends there on the roof.

  The following year I had to learn—it was necessary to be told—that William had climbed out of my father’s office window and lit the perfectly appointed woodpile. He’d lit the pumpkins, too, before he’d slipped back into the house. The fire hadn’t roared up until he’d been peaceably eating his dinner. I would have been glad to pretend not to know, everyone forever doing the trick to amuse Mary Frances, but that year I was called into service.

  My grandmother was dying up in St. Paul. She had been in a locked ward for a few years, a little lady in her own room with a swivel table over the bed for mealtimes. For the most part we didn’t listen to the bulletins of her suffering. Finally, my father got the call and he had to break away from the harvest to drive to Minnesota. Only a catastrophe could get him out of an apple tree. He arrived and an hour later Athena Hubert Lombard died. “Very peacefully,” he told my mother on the phone, so that she said, “Oh, Jim, I’m glad.” We had seen the ram on its back kicking and kicking right before he died, when the shearer had nicked his artery, so we knew what she meant.

  When he returned it was Halloween night. He was almost too tired to eat, my mother sitting close by, pointing out what was most delicious.

  She had instructed us to do the work of the evening. The pumpkin visitors, she claimed, would cheer him up. Even though it was Grandmother’s time, even though she’d died in her sleep, he still would need the comfort of tradition. We understood the importance of doing it perfectly. While my mother went on speaking quietly to my father William and I stole outside. The barn cats were like minnows in the shallows, moving around our legs as we carried the visitors from the bushes and went pumpkin to pumpkin, lighting the candles. Once the faces were illuminated even the big-headed torn-up toms crouched low, frightened and full of respect.

  When my father at last turned to see the toothless beauty in the kitchen window he did something that surprised us. All of him right there at the table seemed to dissolve. My mother didn’t shush him or say that soon he’d feel better. Together they huddled in his wide old chair, both of them weeping. There was no comfort—we could see this, none to be had—and so we crept away to our room and into our bunks. We cried not for our grandmother, a woman so ancient she didn’t know us. We were crying because the visitors, for the first time in their long history, had failed to bring happiness. We had done the work wrong, or it wasn’t for us to do, or their powers were over and done? Somehow, we had made a mistake.

  Later, my father came upstairs to tell us how much he loved the magic. He said he couldn’t have imagined a better homecoming, and if Grandma were still with us—plus, he meant, still had her mind—she would have enjoyed the story. It was a nice try. We appreciated his effort but we knew that the pumpkin visitors would never come again.

  It must have been the next Halloween when Stephen was more or less living with Gloria. Again my mother was the one who made the suggestion about the visitors. Why didn’t William and I make them appear at the cottage? We promptly forgot about the disaster of the previous year, all of a sudden excited and serious. With utmost care we picked out several pumpkins from our private patch. There was the carving to do, the four of us working together at the table, the great emptying to make the creatures live, the wet pulp in mounds on the newspaper.

  When all was ready we set out. My father had the brute in his arms, my mother with the moderate girlish one, William and I each carrying two small howling faces. In a line we crossed the road and went through the old orchard, the long knobby branches laid out in shadows on the moonlit ground. We trooped past the potato garden and the marsh, considering the muskrats deep inside their thatchy houses. At the cottage we went to our stations, working in complete silence, as a spy must, setting the visitors on the porch and the walkway and in the back window. My father had hidden a ladder near the barn early in the day for the purpose of placing one pumpkin on the roof, outside the bedroom.

  We were hiding in the bushes, admiring the display, when the door opened. Gloria came sweeping out in a long, floaty gown, her hair wrapped in a leaning and towering scarf. She wasn’t wearing her glasses, but on that night perhaps full vision was hers. Gloria, who never wore jewelry of any kind, was covered in beads and bangles and she had long glittery earrings, each a set of chimes, a percussion section unto herself. In her hand she held a taper, her face ghoulishly lit. We laid ourselves flat, trembling with glee as she drifted among the pumpkins, singing in her high thin voice, greeting them one by one, a shivery vibrato in her thank yous. We remembered what was easy to forget, that Gloria every year often became nearly as magical as the visitors. On that night, there the peculiar and graceful spirit was, dancing in the yard. A spirit who had somehow intuited that she should be ready for the spectacular.

  The door opened once more. Stephen, in ordinary clothes, stepped out. “Where’d these come from?” he called. He apparently, somehow, was not familiar with our customs.

  “The pump-kin visitors,” Gloria sang in her fairy voice, the coins around her waist jangling. “The pumpkin vis-it-ors, oh, the pump…kin visitors, have come”—up went the note in a wild leap—“have come to us.”

  Without saying a word Stephen leaned over the big fellow on the porch and blew out the candle.

  “What’s he doing?” William whispered.

  On the walk Stephen pinched the light inside my little screamer. “Make him stop,” I said.

  “Time’s up,” my father pronounced, moving low on monkey hands, he and my mother going in their knuckled run. We start
ed to scoot after our parents but in the same instant we turned back. Gloria had stopped singing. She was standing at the bottom of the slope facing her dark cottage. There was only the single pumpkin on the roof still shining into her bedroom, the one visitor who must do all the work, trying to bring generosity and merriment to that place and to that couple.

  “Come on, Frankie,” William said, but I wanted to look a little longer at the last pumpkin visitor. There would never be another. And so together we stood saying our own private farewells.

  11.

  My Mother Is Right

  As my mother had predicted, there came an end to the Stephen Lombard era. In that next spring his so-called sabbatical was over, Langley no doubt offering him a plum position. I alone knew that he had somehow proved to the CIA that he could successfully insert a battery into his alarm clock. Even if Stephen was merely the writer of spy manuals his work would be plentiful. The first World Trade Center bombing had already occurred, those years a time when agents were brushing up on their Arabic and being redirected. We later considered that maybe he had gone to try to prevent everything that was going to happen, listening in on phone conversations, attempting to avert the tide of history.

  It was my mother who announced his departure, coming to the table with the pot filled with butternut squash risotto, cookbooks by a tyrannical Italian woman her new enthusiasm. In our neighborhood noodles had not yet transitioned to pasta, all of us resisting the change, lobbying for regular old macaroni and cheese rather than bucatini with tomato and pancetta. She had stood obediently stirring the mail-order arborio rice for twenty-three minutes without saying a word. It was when she set the pot in front of us that she said, “Stephen is leaving.”

  “He’s what?” my father said.

  “He’s leaving Gloria, I guess is more to the point. He already returned his library books. Thirty dollars of overdues.”

  “You waived his fee,” William said, as if it were an order.

  “Sadly, yes.”

  Her nonchalance about the departure, her dwelling on the details was her way of saying, Told you so.

  “Why would he go now?” My father asked the basic question. “His sabbatical isn’t over yet. He was going to be here through June.”

  “I didn’t interrogate him,” my mother said.

  “What about Gloria?” William asked the other fundamental question.

  “He can’t go,” I said.

  “Why, really, would he stay.” My mother’s remark did not seem to be an actual question. William and I would have liked to know how he could leave the kittens, and anyway hadn’t he been wanting to quit his CIA job, get out of that racket? Why wouldn’t he stay for another harvest when he knew we needed him? He’d been devoting himself to reading and therefore weren’t there still books he wanted to check out?

  My father shook his head slowly. “Gloria,” he murmured. “Oh, Gloria.”

  “Yes,” my mother said, as if that was an answer.

  We thought of Stephen bundling everything he owned into his duffel bag, all of his life in that lump, and going to a city like Cairo, a city so thick with people and cars you had to bribe a policeman to get yourself across the street. Or he’d be locked away in a compound in Saudi Arabia, or stuck in a hovel in Africa. He obviously should not go anywhere. He was a gifted and dedicated apple picker, probably as capable as my father and maybe faster than Sherwood. With his tremendous wingspan and grace he could lean and twist to get into a jungly place where the largest, most perfectly ripe apple hung on its thin stem. While everyone else was knocking apples down accidentally you never heard the th-whump th-whump from his tree. And he was swift, running up and down the ladder, a picker who always kept in mind that time was marching on, the cold winds were on the way, the winter snows upon us.

  My father, his thick hair in its messy weave, that high hat above his wonderfully lean face, the delicate knobs of his cheekbones, his short dignified nose, and his eyes that were sometimes green and sometimes, no, we thought blue—he finally made the pronouncement: “Stephen should stay. There is no reason for him to leave.”

  My mother froze in her pop-eyed amazement. “You do understand, Jim,” she was able to say, “you do understand he cannot do that.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Because.”

  “Because why?” William asked.

  “Because,” she said evenly, “it would be difficult for him to work alongside the present management. How exactly would he fit in?”

  “There’s a place for him,” my father insisted. “He knows that.”

  “I’m sorry.” My mother shook her head as if she truly wanted to apologize. “I just don’t see Stephen leaping into the operation, taking any kind of charge. For one, this isn’t something that Sherwood wants. At least that’s my guess. Anointing the little brother who, in his mind, in his exceptional mind, is the goof-off. Which is terribly funny, when you think about it. If he stayed on as a picker—well, being part of the crew is not exactly a career move.”

  “He could stay,” William said meekly, doing what he could for our father.

  “He’s Adam and Amanda’s uncle,” I reminded the table, the trump card, Stephen’s title surely winning the day.

  William said, “He should not go.”

  Stephen hadn’t been a child, not really, not in a way we could believe in despite all his stories. But what if—what if, beyond our poor powers to imagine, he actually had been young? For the discussion’s sake, let’s just say he had once been four or five or six. How, then, could he leave? We were at once certain that Stephen was the sorriest person in the world. Through dinner and even into dessert we could almost—I say almost—understand why he’d blown out the pumpkin visitors. They had come to the cottage but he couldn’t have them. They weren’t his anymore. He had gone away and lost the ability to recognize them, all of his life now and forever a poverty. We wanted to call him or maybe even run to the cottage to say, Don’t go, Stephen! You don’t have to leave us! We forgive you about the pumpkin visitors, we do. This sudden generosity ran thickly in us.

  The night before his departure for Washington, DC, my mother had a long-planned party for her librarian friends from Chicago. We did not like her parties with book lovers because for a few days beforehand she banished us from the kitchen. It was as if her favorite authors were coming, or real celebrities. Then, once the librarians sat down to dinner, they’d go into their ridiculous swoons over the novels they adored, and they’d end up arguing about who was great and who wasn’t, the professionals growing increasingly noisy and high-spirited while the spouses glumly ate their food. That night, my mother was just about to recite for the assembly what, in her opinion, was a perfect description of a human being, her performance piece for special occasions. In college she had committed an entire page of Edith Wharton to memory, a paragraph devoted to the physical description of a single character. She was about to begin with, “Mr. Raycie was a monumental man.”

  Right before she opened her mouth my father made a face that was a problem for both of them. He didn’t just close his eyes. He shut them hard, he shut them tight, not, however, as if he were going to have a restful little pause. No, in order, it seemed, to blot her out. It was hard for him when she was that animated, when she was that monstrously joyful. Maybe there was a Lombard gene that made it difficult for the men in the family to endure too much enthusiasm or energy, so that even someone as quiet as Gloria was excessive for Stephen. My mother happened to notice her husband as he was bracing himself, right before he shut his eyes, just before the wince sealed his face. That wall against her seemed to have a specific temperature; for her, it, his very head, that wall, was hot. So hot it scalded her eyeballs, so hot she had to scrabble for her empty plate, blindly grabbing at it to save it from the heat. Instead of rescue, though, she raised it, she turned her whole body from the table, from him, the plate in the air, for a moment still whole. And then with all her strength she brought the china down, the blu
e-and-white pagoda scene smashing into slivers at her feet.

  The librarians looked at my mother. They looked at my father, and next not at anyone. “Whoops,” Mrs. Lombard cried.

  “Whoooa, Nellie!” one of the women brayed, the oldest joke in my mother’s book.

  Even before one of the husbands said, “Time to go!” my father was leaping up to fetch the coats.

  William and I had already gone through the D.A.R.E. program at school and we knew our mother was a real true Alcoholic, and that the glass or two of wine she had at dinner on many evenings, and the three she had at her parties, were going to ruin her life and eventually kill her. My father occasionally joined her but usually he drank cider so he was safe. When there was half a bottle corked on the counter we sometimes poured the rest of it down the drain, to save her from herself. She made the excuses that Alcoholics make, the kind of thing Officer Radewan at school had warned us about. My mother insisted that red wine was good for the heart, that it reduced low-density lipoproteins and was also instrumental in reducing breast cancer—at least some doctors thought so. “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” she’d say, “wine is food. It’s part of a meal. William, do not look so sad. I’m not in danger. Get this out of your heads, you two, that wine is evil, will you please? If you don’t, I’ll really have to become a drunk.”

  She said that if we wanted to see what an Alcoholic looked like we should inspect the postmaster more carefully, or her patron, Mrs. Prinks. But we were not fooled. We usually forgot during the day that she had an addiction, a disease, but at dinner we again remembered, her affliction on full display. Officer Radewan had shown the class a photograph of an Alcoholic’s liver, the crusty, shriveled black slab, our mother probably already secretly on the list for an organ transplant. When we recalled that she was an Alcoholic we knew that her occasional violence was first and primarily the result of the wine. But even if she was merely drinking water the closing of my father’s eyes, the blotting-out, always made her temporarily lose her mind. Sometimes we did think he could have closed his eyes a little less firmly, that he didn’t have to look as if he were about to have a knife plunged into his chest just because she was going to recite Edith Wharton. We didn’t know that our parents were objecting to the other’s self, that enormous hulking thing each possessed, that a self of course is not inconsequential.