When all was ready we set out. My father had the brute in his arms, my mother with the moderate girlish one, William and I each carrying two small howling faces. In a line we crossed the road and went through the old orchard, the long knobby branches laid out in shadows on the moonlit ground. We trooped past the potato garden and the marsh, considering the muskrats deep inside their thatchy houses. At the cottage we went to our stations, working in complete silence, as a spy must, setting the visitors on the porch and the walkway and in the back window. My father had hidden a ladder near the barn early in the day for the purpose of placing one pumpkin on the roof, outside the bedroom.
We were hiding in the bushes, admiring the display, when the door opened. Gloria came sweeping out in a long, floaty gown, her hair wrapped in a leaning and towering scarf. She wasn’t wearing her glasses, but on that night perhaps full vision was hers. Gloria, who never wore jewelry of any kind, was covered in beads and bangles and she had long glittery earrings, each a set of chimes, a percussion section unto herself. In her hand she held a taper, her face ghoulishly lit. We laid ourselves flat, trembling with glee as she drifted among the pumpkins, singing in her high thin voice, greeting them one by one, a shivery vibrato in her thank yous. We remembered what was easy to forget, that Gloria every year often became nearly as magical as the visitors. On that night, there the peculiar and graceful spirit was, dancing in the yard. A spirit who had somehow intuited that she should be ready for the spectacular.
The door opened once more. Stephen, in ordinary clothes, stepped out. “Where’d these come from?” he called. He apparently, somehow, was not familiar with our customs.
“The pumpkin visitors,” Gloria sang in her fairy voice, the coins around her waist jangling. “The pumpkin vis-it-ors, oh, the pump…kin visitors, have come”—up went the note in a wild leap—“have come to us.”
Without saying a word Stephen leaned over the big fellow on the porch and blew out the candle.
“What’s he doing?” William whispered.
On the walk Stephen pinched the light inside my little screamer. “Make him stop,” I said.
“Time’s up,” my father pronounced, moving low on monkey hands, he and my mother going in their knuckled run. We started to scoot after our parents but in the same instant we turned back. Gloria had stopped singing. She was standing at the bottom of the slope facing her dark cottage. There was only the single pumpkin on the roof still shining into her bedroom, the one visitor who must do all the work, trying to bring generosity and merriment to that place and to that couple.
“Come on, Frankie,” William said, but I wanted to look a little longer at the last pumpkin visitor. There would never be another. And so together we stood saying our own private farewells.
11.
My Mother Is Right
As my mother had predicted, there came an end to the Stephen Lombard era. In that next spring his so-called sabbatical was over, Langley no doubt offering him a plum position. I alone knew that he had somehow proved to the CIA that he could successfully insert a battery into his alarm clock. Even if Stephen was merely the writer of spy manuals his work would be plentiful. The first World Trade Center bombing had already occurred, those years a time when agents were brushing up on their Arabic and being redirected. We later considered that maybe he had gone to try to prevent everything that was going to happen, listening in on phone conversations, attempting to avert the tide of history.
It was my mother who announced his departure, coming to the table with the pot filled with butternut squash risotto, cookbooks by a tyrannical Italian woman her new enthusiasm. In our neighborhood noodles had not yet transitioned to pasta, all of us resisting the change, lobbying for regular old macaroni and cheese rather than bucatini with tomato and pancetta. She had stood obediently stirring the mail-order arborio rice for twenty-three minutes without saying a word. It was when she set the pot in front of us that she said, “Stephen is leaving.”
“He’s what?” my father said.
“He’s leaving Gloria, I guess is more to the point. He already returned his library books. Thirty dollars of overdues.”
“You waived his fee,” William said, as if it were an order.
“Sadly, yes.”
Her nonchalance about the departure, her dwelling on the details was her way of saying, Told you so.
“Why would he go now?” My father asked the basic question. “His sabbatical isn’t over yet. He was going to be here through June.”
“I didn’t interrogate him,” my mother said.
“What about Gloria?” William asked the other fundamental question.
“He can’t go,” I said.
“Why, really, would he stay.” My mother’s remark did not seem to be an actual question. William and I would have liked to know how he could leave the kittens, and anyway hadn’t he been wanting to quit his CIA job, get out of that racket? Why wouldn’t he stay for another harvest when he knew we needed him? He’d been devoting himself to reading and therefore weren’t there still books he wanted to check out?
My father shook his head slowly. “Gloria,” he murmured. “Oh, Gloria.”