Free Searching for Caleb by Anne Tyler Page B

good hand to be taken home again.
       Now he developed a new obsession: he wanted to leave this combustible city entirely and build further north, way out on Falls Road. He dreamed his room was alight with flames and not a member of his family would come to rescue him. He called in the night for Laura, whose bed he had left some fifteen years ago following her third miscarriage, and he made her sleep by his side with her hand on a brass bell from India. He jarred her awake periodically and sent her out to the hall to sniff for fire. And Caleb, who was working around the clock to rebuild the warehouse, had to come to his father's room every evening and listen to interminable garbled, stammered instructions for the buying of land in Roland Park.
       Nowadays Caleb always smelled of smoke from the city and he moved in a deep, tired daze. He would rest his cheek against the doorframe and slump until his sooty white shirt appeared to have nothing inside it, while his father wove his tangled mat of words: builders, masons, two fire, two fireproof houses.
       Two?
       Well, Justin figured Daniel would be marrying Margaret Rose Bell.
       Now Margaret Rose Bell was a Washington girl who had come to spend the winter with her cousins, the Edmund Bells. And although it was true that she and Daniel were often seen together, the fact was that she was not yet eighteen years old, and Daniel was still working at Norris & Wiggen.
       Customarily a man would wait till he was able to buy and furnish a house by himself before he would take a wife.
       Yes, but Justin planned to have a great many descendants and he was anxious to get them started.
       Land was purchased in Roland Park. Master builders were hired to supervise the construction of two large houses set side by side, with almost no space between them, although great stretches of land lay all about. And meanwhile Margaret Rose was fitted for a complicated ivory satin wedding dress with one hundred and eight pearl buttons running down the back. They were married in the summer. Because the houses were not yet finished Margaret moved into Daniel's boyhood room, where his wooden-wheeled roller skates sat next to his shelf of law-books. She was a small, vivid girl who generally wore dresses of soft material like flower petals, and at any moment of the day she could be seen running up and down the stairs, or flinging open windows to watch some excitement in the streets, or darting into Justin's room to see if he needed anything. At the sight of her Justin would begin blinking and nodding in his doddering old man's way, and he would go on nodding and nodding and nodding long after she had kissed the top of his head and left again. Oh, he hadn't been mistaken, Margaret Rose was what this house had needed. And she would be certain to provide descendants. Why, by the fall of 1905, when Justin Peck's golden oak and wine-colored household set off on a caravan of wagons to Roland Park, Margaret Rose was already holding a baby in her lap and expecting another. Things were working out just fine. Everything was going according to plan.
       By 1908 they had bought a snorting black Model T Ford with a left-hand steering wheel and splashless flower vases. Each morning the two brothers rode off to work in it-handsome young men in hats and high white collars.
       Daniel had his own law office now, a walnut-paneled suite of rooms with an oil portrait of his father over the mantel. He was taking on no partners because, he said, he wanted to have his sons for partners, not just anyone. And Caleb had rebuilt his father's warehouse, bigger and better than before. He had a brand new roll-top desk with twice as many cubbyholes.
       Whenever Caleb chose to marry, another house would be built beside the first two, but meanwhile he lived at home with his parents. He was a quiet man who became quieter every year. It was a known fact that he drank sometimes, but he never troubled anyone