She went.
Saturday evening Caleb met the train but Margaret was not on it. When Daniel found out he merely pressed his lips together and walked away. Later he was heard telling his mother’s servant Sulie to put the children to bed. Apparently no inquiries were going to be made.
On Wednesday Daniel received a letter from Margaret’s father. He wrote in brown ink. Everyone knew that ink, because when Margaret’s father wrote she would race through the house reading passages to different people and laughing at the funny parts. But Daniel read this letter in silence, and then went up to his room. When he came down again nothing at all was said about it.
In a month the children stopped asking for their mother. The baby stopped crying and the older ones went back to their games and nursery rhymes. Only Caleb seemed to remember Margaret Rose. He went up to Daniel one day and asked him point blank why he didn’t go after her. Or Caleb himself would, though Daniel would be better. Daniel looked straight through him. Then Caleb went to Justin, who certainly loved Margaret Rose too and used to wait every day for the fluttering of her petal skirts against the banister. Now Justin merely closed his eyes and pretended not to hear. “But why?” Caleb asked him. “Don’t you care? Life is not the same here when Maggie Rose is gone.”
In all the accounts of the family history, told by all the aunts and uncles and upstairs maids, that was the only direct quotation of Caleb’s that was ever handed down. Two generations later it was to ring in Justine’s ears like poetry, taking on more depth and meaning than Caleb had probably intended. But Justin was not moved at all, and he kept his eyes shut very tightly and waited for his son to leave.
Now Laura ran both households, upright and energetic as ever in her ugly brown dresses with her hair screwed back so tightly it stretched her eyes. To the Peck children she was the center of the universe, sometimes the only family member they saw for days. Justin was too old and sick to be bothered, and Daniel hardly ever came home before their bedtime. As for Caleb, he kept to himself. They might catch sight of him striking out across the field toward the Samson stable, the sunlight pale on his Panama hat; or leaving for work in the morning, already tired and beaten-looking; or returning late in the evening with his manner of walking curiously careful. He never played with them. Sometimes on those extra-careful evenings he even got their names confused. He did nothing to earn their attention. So they failed to notice how he appeared to be dimming and wearing through, almost transparent; and how his only friends now were the questionable types in taverns, and how the music from the stable had thinned and shredded until you almost couldn’t hear it. Laura noticed. But what could it mean? She pondered over his long, unbreakable silences, the likes of which she had not seen before and would not again until the days of Caleb’s great-nephew Duncan, as yet unborn and unthought of. She tried to shame him into more normal behavior. “Where is your common courtesy? At least think of the family.” But he would only wander off, not hearing, and sometimes he would not reappear for days.
On a Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1912, Daniel was standing at the bay window watching Justin Two ride his bicycle. It was a heavy black iron one, hard for Two to manage, but he had just got the hang of it and he teetered proudly down the driveway. From out of nowhere, Daniel saw a small, clear picture of Caleb on his velocipede merrily pedaling after a flutist on a sidewalk in old Baltimore. The memory was so distinct that he left his house and crossed the yard to his mother’s and climbed the stairway to Caleb’s room. But Caleb was not there. Nor was he in the kitchen, where he most often ate his meals; nor anywhere else in the house, nor outdoors nor in the stable. And the Ford was parked in the side yard; he wouldn’t be downtown. Daniel felt uneasy. He asked the others — the children and Laura. They didn’t know. In fact, the last time anyone could remember for sure he had been walking off down the driveway three days earlier, carrying his fiddle. The children saw him go. “Goodbye now,” he called to them.
“Goodbye, Uncle Caleb.”
But of course that didn’t mean a thing, he would surely have . . . Daniel went to Justin’s room. “I can’t find Caleb,” he said. Justin turned his face away. “Father? I can’t—”
A long, glittering tear slid down Justin’s stony cheek.
Really, the old man was beginning to let his mind go.
Years later, whenever he was fixing some family event in its proper time slot, Daniel Peck would pause and consider the importance of 1912. Could there be such a thing as an unlucky number? (Justine would look up briefly, but say nothing.) For in 1912 it seemed that the Peck family suddenly cracked and flew apart like an old china teacup. First there was Caleb’s disappearance, without a trace except for a bedroom full of hollow, ringing musical instruments and a roll-top desk with an empty whisky bottle in the bottom drawer. So then they had to sell the business, Justin’s last link with the outside world. And after that Justin started dying, leaving his family in the same gradual, fading way that Caleb had until it was almost no shock at all to find him lifeless in his bed one morning with his bluish nose pointing heavenward.
In the winter of 1912 there was another envelope from Washington addressed in brown ink. After Daniel read it, he told his children that Margaret Rose had been killed in a fire. They were to pray for her to be forgiven. Now her children wore brown to school and could properly be called poor motherless orphans, although they continued to look surprised whenever some well-meaning lady told them so. They were calm, docile children, a little lacking in imagination but they did well in their lessons. They did not seem to have suffered from all that had happened. Nor did Laura, who continued as spry and capable as ever. Nor Daniel, of course — a man of even temper. Although sometimes, late at night, he would take the Ford and drive aimlessly over the moonlit roads, often ending up in the old section of the city where he had no business any more, and knew no one, and heard nothing but the faint, musical whistling of the streetcar wires in the dark sky overhead.
5
Justine’s childhood was dark and velvety and it smelled of dust. There were bearded men under all the furniture, particularly her bed. When her door was shut at night blue worms squiggled through the blackness, but when it was open the knob stuck out exactly like a shotgun barrel sidling through to aim at her head, and she would have to lie motionless for hours pretending to be a wrinkle in the blankets.
In the mornings her father was away, either at the office or out of town, and her mother was in bed with a sick headache, and Justine sat in the living room with the curtains shut so that even to herself she was only a pale glimmer. She was waiting for the maid. First there was the scrabbling of the key in the apartment door and then light, air, motion, the rustle of Claudia’s shopping bag and her thin cross mosquito voice. “Now what you doing sitting there? What you up to? What you doing sitting in that chair?” She would yank the curtains open and there was the city of Philadelphia, a wide expanse of blackened brick apartment houses and dying trees in cages and distant factory smokestacks. Then she would dress Justine in a little smocked dress and braid the two skinny braids that she called plaits. “Don’t you go getting that dress dirty. Don’t you go messing yourself up, I’ll tell Miss Caroline on you.” By that time maybe her mother’s headache would be lifting, at least enough so that her parched voice could trail out from the bedroom. “Justine? Aren’t you even going to say good morning?” Although not an hour ago she had buried her face in the pillow and waved Justine away with one shaky, pearl-studded hand.