What do you want, a medal? And also, what really are you doing here?
My mother at that point would bust in with a smattering of questions about Philip’s experience with high school drama, Mrs. Lombard coming to the rescue. I’d eat and excuse myself because after all I had a lot of lines to learn.
Nonetheless, against my will I was learning a few details about him, facts a person couldn’t help hearing and thinking about. For instance, his mother had been in the grip of breast cancer for years. She’d died when he was sixteen. Which was why he and his father hadn’t visited the farm in all the time he was growing up; because that mother had been sick for nearly Philip’s entire life, the father and son tending to her, and if they traveled it was to exotic places to try out a treatment that was not available in America. But there was something else I learned, something I could hardly stand to consider. When Philip was in fifth grade he’d had to do a family history project. An assignment for a teacher who was perhaps close to his heart, his own Mrs. Kraselnik. And so what did he do? What must all children do who have a resource such as we Lombards had at our disposal? He wrote a letter to May Hill requesting information, May Hill after all his true aunt. He was her only younger kin, the only nephew and there were no nieces. Apparently she’d written him back a very long letter that included a hand-drawn family tree. Also precious photographs. And then what happened? They began to correspond. They had what my mother called an epistolary relationship, a courtship, you might even say. They became pen pals, not just temporarily, not only for the first flush of interesting stamps and news from foreign lands, but for years.
He was a very special, unusual person, my mother often said.
So that of an evening when I sometimes saw the young man and the hermit walking together, or if they were down in front of the manor house, digging around in May Hill’s garden plot, it was clear that they were behaving like old friends. He’d kneel in a mulchy aisle nodding as she talked, as they picked beans, and they’d put their heads together to examine a bug of some kind, and then she might hand him a sweet little tomato, which he’d pop into his mouth. It was a tableau I’d spy on if I happened to be at a distance and yet it was a miserable sight that always made me feel as if somehow all along I had understood nothing.
In our house, when Philip wasn’t around, there were conversations taking place that William and I were not a part of, our parents often talking long after we’d left the table. We’d come upon their discussions and they’d abruptly scoot their chairs back and again make bright little remarks that signified something but gave nothing away. Okay! So, ah, well, that’s that! My father was nearing sixty but everyone said he looked like a hale and hearty forty-nine. Sherwood had broken his arm the year before and it hung in a slightly crooked way from his shoulder, which didn’t mean that he had lost his strength or that he still wasn’t a superb apple picker. They were fine, the men, they were lean and magnificent.
One Saturday morning in the first fall Philip was with us I came late to pick in the Jonathan row, late because I was playing Penelope Sycamore in You Can’t Take It with You. Philip was in charge of the weekend crew, two older women from town and a retired science teacher. I’d slipped on my picking bag and was up a ladder before he saw me. “Mary Frances!” he called out. “Welcome! Glad you’re here.”
I had never flipped anyone the bird but right then I could completely understand the impulse. He then had the gall to say, “Great performance last night.”
Philip had come to my play? As if he was an uncle or teacher or friend? My parents and William had seen it the previous weekend, no one saying the Seattle visitor would be in the audience.
He said, “You played her with just the right edge of daffiness. Not crazy, not over the top, but sweetly daffy.” He apparently was an authority on everything. “Congrats.”
How could I not say Thank you? I had to thank him. He’d forced me to.
Even though I had a natural dislike for him, as I said, it was sometimes, however, hard to maintain an unequivocal feeling about him. It seemed that you could assume one thing about his character but two seconds later consider the exact opposite, and adding to the puzzlement, you might be correct on both counts. One time, for example, my father was trying to corral the lambs in order to castrate them. He went dashing toward a big fellow but missed his mark and was falling, falling, possibly going to smash his head on the shed wall if Philip wasn’t by his side, the annoying presence, who before my father cracked his brow somehow righted him and also at the same time scooped up the lamb.
“Philip!” my father exclaimed. “Whew! Thanks!”