She was the only person outside of school who called me Mary Frances, as if she alone had license to call me by my real name.
William and I didn’t say anything. Because: No matter our duty, we were not something to be shared. We didn’t really know what she meant by saying such a thing, and also we were certain that if we conveyed that wrongheaded, awful gratitude to Nellie she would be furious with Gloria. So we didn’t agree outright to say thank you, and we never, not once, told our mother.
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.