Searching for Caleb

At the Blue Bottle, when he went, he played on a scarred wooden desk behind the counter. He swept away stacks of bills, circulars, and correspondence, clearing the large space that spider required. When the bell tinkled over the door he didn't hear. If he had to answer a question or ring up a purchase he was annoyed, and showed it. Couldn't they see he was busy? By now he despised antiques. He despised the people who collected them-artificial-looking ladies who had, no doubt, thirty years ago thrown away the identical beechwood rolling pins that they were now rebuying at such exorbitant prices. And to make it worse, Silas Amsel had become a nuisance. Once the shop had proved a success, he expected things of Duncan. He was always waiting to hear good news. Duncan couldn't stand to have things expected of him. Gradually he sold less and less, bought fewer tools, behaved more rudely toward the customers. Silas began to complain. He mentioned trivial lapses: the few times Duncan had forgotten to lock up, and the mornings he was slightly late. There was a misplaced bronze he claimed had been stolen. (As if anyone would bother stealing an object so ugly, or so heavy.) There were little spats and insults every time Silas came to the shop. And he came more and more often, and stayed longer, and meddled more. He would start grumbling even before he was fully inside. He would stand in the doorway, shaking his head. Duncan pretended not to see him. (Sometimes he really didn't see him.) He remained seated, pondering over a vast network of playing cards, one finger hooked in a bottle of Old Crow. He felt the air turning gluey with the weight of other people's disapproval, suspicions, hopes, preconceived notions. Only Justine allowed him to go unclassified.

Justine trailed through the shop and out again with the crumpled streamers of her hat fluttering indecisively.

"I'll be finished in a minute," he called, and she said, "Hmm?" and returned, vaguely. She did not shut doors behind her; so for her the antique sleighbell was forever still, a fact he appreciated. She lacked finality. She was the other shoe which never dropped. He looked up from his cards and sent her a smile so deep and sudden that it would surely have wiped all the forlornness off her face if she had seen it, but she didn't. She was studying a chipped paperweight. She looked lost. Nowadays all she would talk about was her grandfather, his wishes she had not granted and gifts she had not thanked him for. She did not mention Caleb.

Duncan waited for her to, but she didn't. Now it was October and if she were disappointed, leafing through the mail every morning with her listless, uncertain fingers, she didn't show it. She merely returned to the same old subject: she unwrapped the past endlessly, untying the ribbons, removing the tissue, untying more ribbons. "Do you remember when he took us on the train? I don't know where to. He took all us children, it was some kind of outing. Some patriotic occasion of some sort. I believe he was sorry before we'd even left the depot but it was too late to back out and he didn't want-"

Duncan couldn't remember. He suspected that he had been left at home. But he didn't say so to Justine. He watched her turning the crystal paperweight, and peering into it, and then raising her eyes to examine without interest her own reflection in an ormolu mirror. "Look at me," she said, "I'm one of those eccentric old ladies you see on the street, with a beat-up hat and a shopping bag."

But to him she was an awkward girl-cousin wearing very long shoes, and the comical up-dip at the ends of her hair was enough to make him leave his cards and come set a kiss on her cool cheek.

"You might find me going through a trash basket," she said, still to the mirror. She ignored his kiss.

"Maybe we should take a trip," Duncan told her. "Somewhere we've never been."

"Children would make bets on what I carry in my string bag."