The Excellent Lombards (5 page)

It was late summer when Stephen Lombard appeared in the orchard. That was his habit, showing up with no warning. We were nine and ten. He was Sherwood’s youngest brother, another of my father’s cousins, and here was a curious and unsettling fact: He had been my mother’s boyfriend in college. After their graduation she came to visit Stephen on the orchard but somehow or other instead of going off into the world with her classmate she married my father. The natural, right choice but ticklish. Jim Lombard had been living for many years with his aged aunt Florence, so my mother had to barge in on that situation. She said that’s what you had to do to catch a farmer. Jim was a far older person than my mother, a previously uncaught man who worked such long hours and so hard any future wife had to run alongside him on the orchard path, grab his collar, and say, “We are getting married right now, hold still.” It mostly seemed to us a funny idea, that Stephen could have been our father.

After my parents fell in love, after my mother wed the Lombard family, Stephen went away. He eventually found a job with a nameless American contractor instructing secret agents. That’s the story he told, anyway. He wrote manuals for the CIA, he said, educating operatives about the country they’d be living in, about the culture and religion, and also he figured out guidelines in the event of emergency, if the airport blew up, say, if the embassy was attacked, if you were held hostage by so-and-so or such-and-such. He had to go to the region in question, do the research in person to best preach safety to the recruits. We’d watch
Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?
, and my mother, passing through the room, might mutter, “Where in the hell is Stephen Lombard?” Sudan, for instance, was where, and Iran and maybe Egypt. Suspicious, unnerving places, no place that could ever be your home. This was what we all very much wanted to know for certain: Was he himself a spy?

Every few years he came back in the late summer to revisit his childhood by picking apples and to purchase his big shoes and the fleecy warm clothes he couldn’t get in the desert. At least that’s what he said he wanted to do at home, shop and help out on the farm. Maybe, though, he was in hiding. Maybe in his line of work it was important to disappear periodically. He didn’t have an office in the United States, one of the clues he was a rootless agent, and also he wouldn’t talk directly about his projects, and furthermore, he insisted that his job was really just entry-level grunt work. While he was in the trees, perilously reaching with his tremendously long arms for the highest apple, he’d gossip about foreigners as if they were people we knew. For instance, after the first World Trade Center bombing he was making idle conversation, saying, “Ramzi Yousef ordered the chemicals for the bomb from his hospital room. He’d been in a car accident, he lands in the hospital in New Jersey, he orders urea nitrate over the phone while a nurse’s aide is in the bathroom, emptying the bedpan.” The aluminum ladder made a warping sound as he reached for another apple. “The deal with these characters? They believe only jihad can bring peace to the world.” No one in our neighborhood in 1993 was using the word
jihad
then, and we thought he was maybe talking about a beautiful, princely person named Jihad. Stephen Lombard absolutely was a spy, my mother always said.

“If he was truly a spy he’d have some completely unrelated job as his cover,” was my father’s position. “He’d lead safaris or be a mapmaker or a computer technician. A plumber.”

“Not necessarily, Jim. Maybe the thinking is, he’s doing something so obviously related to the CIA, it’s staring you in the face so you don’t suspect it.”

“I think,” William said. We all waited, wanting to know. “I think he is a…”

A what?

“A genie of the Orient.”

My parents laughed.

I said, “He is! He is!” He was tall enough and he had a full lower lip and could cross his muscly arms over his chest in an imposing way. When he frowned, as genies must, his brows would surely make two slanting lines toward the bridge of his nose, a telltale sign.

The probable spy/genie stayed in our guest room even though Sherwood was his brother, even though the manor house had eleven bedrooms. Even though he was uncle to Adam and Amanda. He wouldn’t stay in the upstairs with May Hill—no one did that—and he couldn’t be in the downstairs house because there the Lombard hoarding trait was on full display, no place in Sherwood and Dolly’s quarters for a person to fully stretch out. So Stephen stayed on our side of the road, in Velta; Stephen was ours, like it or not.

With or without his glasses the genie of the Orient was handsome, the planes of his large face broad and smooth, his lashy brown eyes tapering delicately, his supple mouth often nicely moistened with ChapStick. One of the things I liked about him was his dark-brown hair that curled prettily at the neck. I liked also how he dipped his head in a shy way when he came into a room, not letting anyone see his beauty, and when he spoke he held his hand to his chin and cheek, as if he were in hiding, as his true job must have demanded. He was a genius, my mother said, and complicated, which William told me a spy/genie had to be, pretending to be one thing when you were another.

Back to Stephen’s appearing in the orchard in that summer of Gloria. She had just broken it off with the North Dakotan. Even though she’d spent a lot of effort on the boyfriend she hadn’t been able to get him to do what she wanted. Why she hadn’t fallen in love with Stephen in previous years we didn’t know, or maybe she’d been pledged to the old man in their long-distance fashion.

A week or two after Stephen arrived we saw her walking out of the orchard with him at day’s end, both of them with their picking bags slung carelessly over their shoulders. But wait, was it Gloria? Her head was tipped back, her face shining and open in a way that was not usual. He was different, too, his hand wasn’t covering his cheek, Stephen unguarded, gazing down at her. Both of them heedless of any stone or stick that might be on the path. And one standard feature of Stephen, usually, when he got himself talking? He couldn’t stop the story, the story driving hard and sure until the end, and beyond, the very end. Even so, you had to wait for a good while to be sure it was truly over before you tried to make a comment or ask a question or change the subject, no point in two people trying to squeeze through the needle’s eye at once.

And yet, with Gloria on their walk that day, he was waiting, waiting for her to say her part. He was listening. He said a sentence or two, and then she spoke. Neither one was confused or struggling. Along they came, in and out of the lavish long rays of the late afternoon, the two of them sometimes bumping a little against each other and also, most alarming, looking at one another for an impolite length of time. We were on the roof of the old chicken coop and we felt funny watching them, somewhat dizzy even, as if we were the pair in the staring contest.

They came in for dinner and as usual Gloria and my father discussed who had picked what, how many bushels, how the trade was at the apple barn, what was tasting good and should be picked next, and what they should include in the market load. What was strange, bizarre, even, was Gloria’s being almost bubbly. “Thirty-one customers,” she sang out, as if there had never been such a number on a sunny afternoon. William gave me a
Huh?
sort of look. My mother moved around the table and finally she sat, pouring herself another glass of wine, Nellie Lombard on her own path to happiness. Gloria, who was usually hungry at dinner and eager, pushed her plate up to her glass of milk. She stared at the lamb chop, the ear of corn, the pink applesauce, the mashed potatoes fluffed with butter, everything we ourselves had grown, as if she had no idea what food was for. That’s when Stephen started his story, when with good reason she could turn her full attention to the storyteller. We all knew his tales were always funny in parts, but also they were sad. They almost always involved him as the hero who does exactly the wrong or clumsy thing, so that even if we didn’t want to we found ourselves listening.

He told the one where he was little, when he and his father were picking in the Cortland line. His father, straining for a huge, deep-red apple growing from a leader that was impossibly high, fell eighteen feet to the ground. Thwump. There he lay in a heap. Five-year-old Stephen froze to the rungs of his own ladder.

“Oh, Stephen!” Gloria cried.

“One of my first existential crises,” Stephen said modestly. “Where was God? Was there a God? What was God going to do for me?”

Everyone except Gloria laughed.

“Couldn’t find God, but probably more important, couldn’t locate my feet. Or my vocal cords. Not only my first existential crisis but my first stunning public display of ineptitude. If only I’d known how many more were to come.”

Gloria smacked her hand to her mouth. It seemed as if she might cry. We all knew how the story came out, how eventually the father was loaded onto an old door for a stretcher and put in the apple truck and taken to the emergency room, that he’d miraculously sustained only a few broken ribs. There was no reason to cry.

William and I also knew we were supposed to love the fumbling, sweet boy, young Stephen, just as everyone else did. But how could we? When Stephen talked about his childhood we got the feeling he didn’t actually believe that any child had come after him on the farm. For that reason we couldn’t laugh or feel very sorry for him. He hardly seemed to notice that we were at the table, that we, Mary Frances and William, were the actual, real true children.

When he’d finished the story, the father alive and hardly wounded, Stephen abruptly pushed back in his chair and stood up. “Thanks,” he said to my mother. “You cook lamb better than the Saudis.”

My mother, so pleased by the compliment, tittered girlishly. Gloria watched him hastily tie his shoes and land a short pat pat on Butterhead, the old yellow cat. She stared at the aged tom, both of them glazy-eyed, while Stephen crossed the yard and started out to the hay field. After a minute Gloria blinked away her dream, she looked at her full plate, and then—what did she do but go to the sink and scrape all of that bounty into the bucket for the chickens.

“Gloria?” my mother said. “You all right?”

“Fine!” Gloria said so brightly we knew she had to be ill. Nonetheless she was putting on the smock she wore at our house so she could wash the dishes.

What’s going on?
It was my mother who first asked the question of my father with the look, eyebrows raised, the wide glare of alarm.

Next we knew Gloria was ripping off the smock, throwing it on the counter, and she was gone, out the door.

“Oooooh…sweeeet…” My mother’s oath was coming from her mouth, a slow leak. “…Geeeesus.”

“What’s the matter?” William said.

“Do not, Gloria, go after Stephen.” My mother spoke as if Gloria were still in the room.

“Is that what’s happening?” my father wondered.

She shook her head mournfully, which seemed to mean yes.

“Why are you doing that, Mrs. Lombard?” William had started using her formal title when strictness was required.

“It’s just that—it’s just that if, if Gloria likes Stephen—if she likes him very much—he just won’t—he just can’t attend to—”

“Is that what’s going on?” My father’s same basic question.

“Yes, Jim, yes it is.”

“Gloria likes Stephen?” I said.

“All the signs indicate yes,” my mother explained. Not only was she the person in the family who knew about the world in general, but she had also once followed Stephen all the way from her college in Ohio to the orchard. So she should know.

William looked at me, I looked at him. We were thinking about how Gloria had recently scooped up a batch of late-summer kittens from our barn, the mother, Piggy, having eaten the first two, the glutton Piggy feasting on her own young. In rushed Gloria to rescue the remaining babies from both Piggy and my murderous father, who, if given a chance, would slit their throats, a quicker, kinder death, he always said, than drowning them in a bucket. What remained were three blind little mewlers who required feeding with a syringe. So, right away, if Stephen and Gloria got married, they’d have something like an instant family.

“It’s not going to work out,” my mother pronounced, pushing back to clear the plates.

My father, always hopeful where love was concerned, said, “Maybe it will, Nellie. Maybe he’s ready.”

“Oh God, Jim.”

“He’s got this sabbatical situation. Maybe he’s ready for a new life.”

“You know Stephen is not domesticatable,” my mother said, going to her husband’s chair, standing behind him, draping her arms down his front. “You know you are utterly out of your mind.”

He smiled as if she’d given him a compliment, as if she’d said something factual.

“You’re not crazy, Papa!” I cried.

My parents laughed, the way they did when, without warning, they were in their own realm where everything was funny. If anyone was crazy it was Gloria. She had flung down her smock. She’d torn away. So that’s how it happened, not eating any of your dinner, abandoning the dishes, having to run to try to catch, maybe not even the man, but the love itself? None of it seemed like a good idea, but we weren’t going to worry about Gloria’s disappointment in the event it didn’t work out. We wandered off upstairs to our room. We got to wondering whether, if it did work out, if she and Stephen would then have real children instead of cats. If they did, those children would be our cousins. Because Gloria was a knowledgeable gardener, unlike my mother, whose plot was a tangle, and because Gloria was interested in farming, those children might want to live on the orchard. They might want to take it over. Those future relatives would be our rivals, our enemies, and furthermore they would have extensive knowledge, something we had neglected to get. We would then be sorry we hadn’t loved Gloria more, so that she would have been satisfied with just us.