The Excellent Lombards (6 page)

That night, though, we forgot as usual everything that was going on around us, forgot to worry. My father always lay on the floor in our room in order to tell us a continuing story that came out of his own head. He could only do it lying down. The story featured a hero named Kind Old Badger. Kind Old Badger seemed doddery and was sometimes baffled but, surprising to some, he was remarkably strong and wise. Not to mention shrewd. The story highlighted William and Mary Frances, too, we who performed feats of astonishing bravery with the dearest of Badgers. We were always having to run swiftly over hill and also over dale, the two of us
run, run, running like the hobbie-a
, my father said. We knew what that meant and also couldn’t have explained it. Neither Gloria nor my mother ever made an appearance in Kind Old’s kingdom. They never had to
run like the hobbie-a
; they would have been unable to. My father also read us the stories about queens being in prison for years, and wife after wife getting her head chopped off. All King Henry wanted was for the right boy to be born, that child standing at the ready to take over when the time came. If my father temporarily ran out of steam with Kind Old we loved second best hearing about the princes and princesses wearing sables and golden gowns, studying the countries on the globe, realms that would be theirs once they assumed the throne.

5.

The Four–Five Split

I
n addition to the romance situation out in the orchard, Stephen and Gloria almost literally sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g, there was another crisis that summer that, although I didn’t know it right away, also involved true love. At the end of July the thing William and I had feared for at least a year came to fruition. Time, we could see, was beginning to run as if it were leading somewhere, as it had not exactly done when we were very small, time occurring back then only in bursts. At any rate, the dread event took place, a radiologist and his wife moving not only to our town but into a house on our side of the road, next to Velta. Dr. and Mrs. Michael Kraselnik. They had two teenagers, David and Brianna, hard to think how students with
KRASELNIK
on the backs of their gym shorts would manage at high school, although we were hardly concerned with their problems. The prospect of their coming was at first so alarming William and I couldn’t stand to imagine it.

For a full year the building of their sprawling four-story house had been in progress on land that should have been ours. My father and Sherwood had tried to buy the ten acres, as a buffer, they said, between the farm and the village, but they’d waited too long to make the offer and lost the chance. When the hole for the doctor’s foundation was dug we looked on from our fence line. William’s mouth, which under usual circumstances was like a little bunched bud, had the further tightness of a person gathering spit. To have neighbors on our side of the road? Even if we were separated by eight acres of orchard and a row of scrubby pines we would see, in winter, the lights of their château. This outrage could not, must not happen—the river, the river would know to flood, the water climbing the hillside, or a meteor might fall into the hole, a tornado smash the building to pieces. Or a sweep of flame would run through the timbers and the stacks of sod waiting to be laid—the doctor paying for earth as if regular old ground wasn’t good enough for him.

But it wasn’t just that a family was moving in, that we were going to have something like next-door neighbors on good farmland. It was stranger than that. Our town, as it happened, was not famous for its races and creeds or lifestyles. There were no blacks, no Filipinos, no Native Americans, the arrival of the Hispanics and the Hmong migration a few years in the future. We did have the men who operated the bed-and-breakfast, two or three adopted Koreans, an occasional Japanese or Brazilian AFS student, and the gym teacher, Miss Manning, so aptly named. For well over a hundred years, then, the job of drawing the line in the sand had been left to the English and the Germans. However, now into our field of Caucasian Christians and Catholics were going to come Dr. and Mrs. Kraselnik, from Chicago. The husband’s people were originally from Poland, my father thought. “Ashkenazi Jews,” he said to my mother because he knew those kinds of things, the history and dispersal of populations. They were moving because the radiologist had a job in Milwaukee and because his wife wanted to own a horse and raise vegetables. Most of all, for her children’s sake, she needed to escape the tony Illinois North Shore where the high school students were crippled with sports injuries and also were under so much academic pressure they became drug addicts. That’s what my mother said.

I first learned about our new neighbor when I was in Volta, at the manor house kitchen table, doing an art project with Amanda. Sherwood and Dolly’s daughter was a round little ball of a girl with long black hair, a year younger than me, a girl who in a babyish way couldn’t say her
r
’s, saying
vewwy
instead of
very
, which the adults thought adorable especially in a person who was so intelligent. She was obsessed by topics such as the Suez Canal and Pompeii and predictably she went through a big hieroglyphics phase. Because she was my cousin I must automatically love her.

I was taking great care with my glitter art when Amanda told me, with a proprietary air, that the
KWaselniks
were moving in. Sometimes she irritated me more than anyone else I knew even though she was my playmate, and also loving her was mandatory. I didn’t look up. A delicate puff, a little blow to the paper, to scatter the excess glitter, the cat coming into focus. I then pointed out that the information about the foreigners was not news, first, and second the family was going to be living on
our
side of the road. While I didn’t want neighbors anywhere near the Lombard Orchard it seemed necessary in our conversation to make my rightful claim. “And it’s the
KR
aselniks,” I said in not at all a nice tone.

“They came ovuh to talk to Dad,” Amanda bragged, ignoring my correction. “We alweady know them.”

“They’ll be in Velta,” I said, letting loose the secret name, something I’d never done before, Mary Frances full of mystery, full of knowledge. “In Velta,” I repeated, tossing my head.

Adam came through the hall and went to the refrigerator, opening it and removing a package of ham. He was going into seventh grade, possibly smarter than Amanda, preoccupied with NASA, Stephen Hawking, and especially the particle accelerator in Batavia, Illinois.

“What’s Velta?” he said, rolling three thin pieces of ham into a cigar and sticking it between his fingers.

“We’re talking about the Kwaselniks,” Amanda said, as haughty as I’d been.

Dolly came up the back stairs just then carrying a basket of tomatoes. She had to be mindful to not activate a burglar alarm that Sherwood had made, one of my favorite things about the kitchen, the marble-type run that involved an egg beater, a cow bell, a wind chime, and a bicycle horn. It was a golf ball that got the whirring and tinkling and honking going.

“Don’t eat that ham,” she cried, Adam retreating with the booty down the hall.

Amanda’s mother was nothing like a real Lombard, having before her marriage been a Muellenbach, a local girl, Dolly with a puff of black hair, everything about her soft, a little blurry, her round face with what kind of nose, what color eyes, how shapely the mouth? You couldn’t recall the details in someone who was merely Dolly, tall enough, not thin but not fat, the mother who happened to be in the background.

Before she’d set the basket down she was talking to us. “If I was a doctor’s wife I wouldn’t work.” Her slow easy speech filled the kitchen. “What would I do with myself?” She was fetching an enormous tray from the pantry. “What would I do with myself?” she repeated. She started to arrange the tomatoes on the tray. “She’s not Jewish, she’s not the religious one. Nobody would have argued with her if she’d kept her own name. But then she wouldn’t be
Doctor
and Mrs. Kraselnik. You girls will be the doctors, the men lining up to sponge off you. If I didn’t have a job in the apple business I’d ride my horse—me with a horse! Spend a lot of time grooming old Chief. And shopping for supplies, you have a horse you need supplies. Saddle soap, maintain the leather, nothing worse than brittle leather.” Dolly was a champ at merrily keeping herself entertained, the interviewer and the subject in one person. “What else? A curry comb. And oats, got to have oats and a feedbag. And those Klan-type hoods, keep the gnats out of Chief’s eyes. Mrs. Kraselnik is teaching the four–five split so you girls will both have her—that’ll be nice for you. I’ll bet she’ll have pictures of Chief on her desk. I’d do steeplechase, get a black velvet helmet, that’s what I’d do, taking the fences, a little noodge with the boot to the flanks, over you go, a little noodge.”

Wait. Four–five split? What did that mean? I stared at Dolly, hoping for the same loop to repeat, as it often did, before she went on to a different loop. Amanda and I were going to be in the same class? Is that what Dolly had said? I was starting the fifth grade, Amanda in fourth, the two classes joined? My cousin looked up from her paper, she, too, registering the essential sentence. And yet she didn’t seem alarmed. She said, “Mom says Mrs. Kwaselnik is intwested in geogwaphy, that we’uh going to pawticipate in the National Geogwaphy Bee.”

“I know,” I lied.

“Mrs. Kwaselnik will want me to bwing in my Suez Canal memowabilia for Show and Tell.” Amanda really did have a collection, Stephen Lombard having once sent her maps and a key chain from Suez when he’d passed through Egypt. “She’ll teach us to use a dweidel.”

It was a matter of urgency that I leave the manor house immediately, that I get to the library where my mother worked. The Mrs. Kraselnik information could not possibly be true. Amanda and I were nothing to each other in school. In the mornings we waited for the bus together on our driveway but once we climbed the steps, even before we found our own seats, we no longer knew each other. This unknowing was an unspoken and mutually agreed-upon law. We weren’t embarrassed by our connection. It was only that we were entirely different persons outside of the orchard. On the way home we were with our friends and could not say hello. The second our feet touched the gravel drive we were again familiar, restored to our Velta-Volta selves, planning our after-school activities. It could not be explained to my mother why Amanda being in my class was a violation; I knew only that it must not happen.

Because my mother was the director of the library, and because there was no place in town except the tavern to gather, the gossips came to the circulation desk to tell all. In that way Nellie Lombard knew everything, the font of knowledge. I made an excuse to Amanda and left my glitter picture. Always in the Dolly kitchen I hurried past the door that led up the stairs to May Hill’s part of the house. It was a fact that she lived right overhead, but it was a fact I did my best not to consider. Her house, even though it belonged to the same structure as the downstairs, was in a different plane, a different realm. This truth also could not be explained. In any case, I ran down the back stairs of Amanda’s house, only to see Sherwood at the basement sink.

“Hallo, Francie,” he said. “You interested in seeing—” He held up a root of some kind but I didn’t look, didn’t stop, said I had to get home, although Velta was not my precise destination. I ran down the drive, past the barn, down the orchard path, up along the potato garden and the marsh, skirting the near hay field, past Gloria’s cottage, up to the baseball diamond, and ragged with running that quarter mile I burst into the library. My mother was at the circulation desk checking out the Bushberger children, Mrs. Bushberger putting no limit on the number of picture books each of her six children was allowed to take home.

“Francie, my goodness,” Mrs. Lombard called to me. But she wasn’t going to pay real attention until every single Bushberger book had been scanned and neatly stacked in the six baskets, each child talking about the plot of the book she loved best, Mrs. Lombard somehow listening to all of them at the same time.

Here is the reason my mother was a favorite person, children and adults, men and women flocking to speak to her: Mrs. Lombard was on the board of the American Library Association, headquartered in Chicago, the representative of rural libraries, and furthermore she’d won the Outstanding Librarian Award (for Populations Under Five Thousand) in 1991. But even if she hadn’t been a nationally famous librarian you wanted to loll around in her company because of her very form, her skinny legs and broad hips, her nice, midsize plush bosom, the gap between her two long front teeth, comic and also glamorous, and in addition to those pleasant encouragements her brown eyes were soft with what seemed like sincerity. You wanted to be with her in the cozy library that was filled with only the good books. She was no beauty by any standards, she once told us, but she said in her la-di-da voice and trailing a moth-eaten scarf that beauty was unimportant as long as a person was captivating. We knew she had something, whatever you wanted to call it, because our father with his tremendous shock of straw-colored hair was famous among his apple-selling haunts, his smile, his beamy, white straight teeth a radiance. Every woman apple customer surely was in love with him, and in fact there wasn’t one person we knew of, besides Sherwood, who didn’t think the world of him.