The Accidental Tourist

ten

"I’ll be honest,” Muriel said, “My baby was not exactly planned for. I mean we weren’t exactly even married yet, if you want to know the truth. If you want to know the truth the baby was the reason we got married in the first place, but I did tell Norman he didn’t have to go through with it if he didn’t want to. It’s not like I pushed him into it or anything.”

She looked past Macon at Edward, who lay prone on the front hall rug. He’d had to be forced into position, but at least he was staying put.

“Notice I let him move around some, as long as he stays down,” she said. “Now I’m going to turn my back, and you watch how he does.”

She wandered into the living room. She lifted a vase from a table and examined its underside. “So anyhow,” she said, “we went ahead and got married, with everybody acting like it was the world’s biggest tragedy. My folks really never got over it. My mom said, ‘Well, I always knew this was going to happen. Back when you were hanging out with Dana Scully and them, one or another of them no-count boys always honking out front for you, didn’t I tell you this was going to happen?’ We had a little bitty wedding at my folks’ church, and we didn’t take a honeymoon trip but went straight to our apartment and next day Norman started work at his uncle’s. He just settled right into being married — shopping with me for groceries and picking out curtains and such. Oh, you know, sometimes I get to thinking what kids we were. It was almost like playing house! It was pretend! The candles I lit at suppertime, flowers on the table, Norman calling me ‘hon’ and bringing his plate to the sink for me to wash. And then all at once it turned serious. Here I’ve got this little boy now, this great big seven-year-old boy with his clompy leather shoes, and it wasn’t playing house after all. It was for real, all along, and we just didn’t know it.”

She sat on the couch and raised one foot in front of her. She turned it admiringly this way and that. Her stockings bagged at the ankle.

“What is Edward up to?” she asked.

Macon said, “He’s still lying down.”

“Pretty soon he’ll do that for three hours straight.”

“Three hours?”

“Easy.”

“Isn’t that sort of cruel?”

“I thought you promised not to talk like that,” she told him.

“Right. Sorry,” Macon said.

“Maybe tomorrow he’ll lie down on his own.”

“You think so?”

“If you practice. If you don’t give in. If you don’t go all soft-hearted.”

Then she stood up and came over to Macon. She patted his arm. “But never mind,” she told him, “I think soft-hearted men are sweet.”

Macon backed away. He just missed stepping on Edward.

It was getting close to Thanksgiving, and the Learys were debating as usual about Thanksgiving dinner. The fact was, none of them cared for turkey. Still, Rose said, it didn’t seem right to serve anything else. It would just feel wrong. Her brothers pointed out that she’d have to wake up at five a.m. to put a turkey in the oven. But it was she who’d be doing it, Rose said. It wouldn’t be troubling them any.

Then it began to seem she had had an ulterior motive, for as soon as they settled on turkey she announced that she might just invite Julian Edge. Poor Julian, she said, had no close family nearby, and he and his neighbors gathered forlornly at holidays, each bringing his or her specialty. Thanksgiving dinner last year had been a vegetarian pasta casserole and goat cheese on grape leaves and kiwi tarts. The least she could do was offer him a normal family dinner.

“What!” Macon said, acting surprised and disapproving, but unfortunately, it wasn’t that much of a surprise. Oh, Julian was up to something, all right. But what could it be? Whenever Rose came down the stairs in her best dress and two spots of rouge, whenever she asked Macon to shut Edward in the pantry because Julian would be stopping by to take her this place or that — well, Macon had a very strong urge to let Edward accidentally break loose. He made a point of meeting Julian at the door, eyeing him for a long, silent moment before calling Rose. But Julian behaved; no glint of irony betrayed him. He was respectful with Rose, almost shy, and hovered clumsily when he ushered her out the door. Or was that the irony? His Rose Leary act. Macon didn’t like the looks of this.

Then it turned out that Porter’s children would be coming for Thanksgiving too. They usually came at Christmas instead, but wanted to trade off this year due to some complication with their grandparents on their stepfather’s side. So really, Rose said, wasn’t it good they were having turkey? Children were such traditionalists. She set to work baking pumpkin pies. “We gather together,” she sang, “to ask the Lord’s blessing…” Macon looked up from the sheaf of stolen menus he was spreading across the kitchen table. There was a note of gaiety in her voice that made him uneasy. He wondered if she had any mistaken ideas about Julian — if, for instance, she hoped for some kind of romance. But Rose was so plain and sensible in her long white apron. She reminded him of Emily Dickinson; hadn’t Emily Dickinson also baked for her nieces and nephews? Surely there was no need for concern.

“My son’s name is Alexander,” Muriel said. “Did I tell you that? I named him Alexander because I thought it sounded high-class. He was never an easy baby. For starters something went wrong while I was carrying him and they had to do a Caesarean and take him out early and I got all these complications and can’t ever have any more children. And then Alexander was so teeny he didn’t even look like a human, more like a big-headed newborn kitten, and he had to stay in an incubator forever, just about, and nearly died. Norman said, ‘When’s it going to look like other babies?’ He always called Alexander ‘it.’ I adjusted better; I mean pretty soon it seemed to me that that was what a baby ought to look like, and I hung around the hospital nursery but Norman wouldn’t go near him, he said it made him too nervous.”

Edward whimpered. He was just barely lying down — his haunches braced, his claws digging into the carpet. But Muriel gave no sign she had noticed.

“Maybe you and Alexander should get together some time,” she told Macon.

“Oh, I, ah…” Macon said.

“He doesn’t have enough men in his life.”

“Well, but—”

“He’s supposed to see men a lot; it’s supposed to show him how to act. Maybe the three of us could go to a movie. Don’t you ever go to movies?”

“No, I don’t,” Macon said truthfully. “I haven’t been to a movie in months. I really don’t care for movies. They make everything seem so close up.”

“Or just out to a McDonald’s, maybe.”

“I don’t think so,” Macon said.

Porter’s children arrived the evening before Thanksgiving, traveling by car because Danny, the oldest, had just got his driver’s license. That worried Porter considerably. He paced the floor from the first moment they could be expected. “I don’t know where June’s brain is,” he said. “Letting a sixteen-year-old boy drive all the way from Washington the first week he has his license! With his two little sisters in the car! I don’t know how her mind works.”

To make it worse, the children were almost an hour late. When Porter finally saw their headlights, he rushed out the door and down the steps well ahead of the others. “What kept you?” he cried.

Danny unfurled himself from the car with exaggerated nonchalance, yawning and stretching, and shook Porter’s hand as a kind of afterthought while turning to study his tires. He was as tall as Porter now but very thin, with his mother’s dark coloring. Behind him came Susan, fourteen — just a few months older than Ethan would have been. It was lucky she was so different from Ethan, with her cap of black curls and her rosy cheeks. This evening she wore jeans and hiking boots and one of those thick down jackets that made young people look so bulky and graceless. Then last came Liberty. What a name, Macon always thought. It was an invention of her mother’s — a flighty woman who had run away from Porter with a hippie stereo salesman eight and a half years ago and discovered immediately afterward that she was two months pregnant. Ironically, Liberty was the one who looked most like Porter. She had fair, straight hair and a chiseled face and she was dressed in a little tailored coat. “Danny got lost,” she said severely. “What a dummy.” She kissed Porter and her aunt and uncles, but Susan wandered past them in a way that let everyone know she had outgrown all that.

“Oh, isn’t this nice?” Rose said. “Aren’t we going to have a wonderful Thanksgiving?” She stood on the sidewalk wrapping her hand in her apron, perhaps to stop herself from reaching out to Danny as he slouched toward the house. It was dusk, and Macon, happening to glance around, saw the grown-ups as pale gray wraiths — four middle-aged unmarried relatives yearning after the young folks.

For supper they had carry-out pizza, intended to please the children, but Macon kept smelling turkey. He thought at first it was his imagination. Then he noticed Danny sniffing the air. “Turkey? Already?” Danny asked his aunt.

“I’m trying this new method,” she said. “It’s supposed to save energy. You set your oven extremely low and cook your meat all night.”

“Weird.”

After supper they watched TV — the children had never seemed to warm to cards — and then they went to bed. But in the middle of the night, Macon woke with a start and gave serious thought to that turkey. She was cooking it till tomorrow? At an extremely low temperature? What temperature was that, exactly?

He was sleeping in his old room, now that his leg had mended. Eventually he nudged the cat off his chest and got up. He made his way downstairs in the dark, and he crossed the icy kitchen linoleum and turned on the little light above the stove. One hundred and forty degrees, the oven dial read. “Certain death,” he told Edward, who had tagged along behind him. Then Charles walked in, wearing large, floppy pajamas. He peered at the dial and sighed. “Not only that,” he said, “but this is a stuffed turkey.”

“Wonderful.”

“Two quarts of stuffing. I heard her say so.”

“Two quarts of teeming, swarming bacteria.”

“Unless there’s something to this method we don’t understand.”

“We’ll ask her in the morning,” Macon said, and they went back to bed.

In the morning, Macon came down to find Rose serving pancakes to the children. He said, “Rose, what exactly is it you’re doing to this turkey?”

“I told you: slow heat. Jam, Danny, or syrup?”

“Is that it?” Macon asked.

“You’re dripping,” Rose said to Liberty. “What, Macon? See, I read an article about slow-cooked beef and I thought, well, if it works with beef it must work with turkey too so I—”

“It might work with beef but it will murder us with turkey,” Macon told her.

“But at the end I’m going to raise the temperature!”

“You’d have to raise it mighty high. You’d have to autoclave the thing.”

“You’d have to expose it to a nuclear flash,” Danny said cheerfully.

Rose said, “Well, you’re both just plain wrong. Who’s the cook here, anyhow? I say it’s going to be delicious.”

Maybe it was, but it certainly didn’t look it. By dinnertime the breast had caved in and the skin was all dry and dull. Rose entered the dining room holding the turkey high as if in triumph, but the only people who looked impressed were those who didn’t know its history — Julian and Mrs. Barrett, one of Rose’s old people. Julian said, “Ah!” and Mrs. Barrett beamed. “I just wish my neighbors could see this,” Julian said. He wore a brass-buttoned navy blazer, and he seemed to have polished his face.

“Well, there may be a little problem here,” Macon said.

Rose set the turkey down and glared at him.

“Of course, the rest of the meal is excellent,” he said. “Why, we could fill up on the vegetables alone! In fact I think I’ll do that. But the turkey…”

“It’s pure poison,” Danny finished for him.

Julian said, “Come again?” but Mrs. Barrett just smiled harder.

“We think it may have been cooked at a slightly inadequate temperature,” Macon explained.

“It was not!” Rose said. “It’s perfectly good.”

“Maybe you’d rather just stick to the side dishes,” Macon told Mrs. Barrett. He was worried she might be deaf.

But she must have heard, for she said, “Why, perhaps I will,” never losing her smile. “I don’t have much of an appetite anyhow,” she said.

“And I’m a vegetarian,” Susan said.

“So am I,” Danny said suddenly.

“Oh, Macon, how could you do this?” Rose asked. “My lovely turkey! All that work!”

“I think it looks delicious,” Julian said.

“Yes,” Porter told him, “but you don’t know about the other times.”

“Other times?”

“Those were just bad luck,” Rose said.

“Why, of course!” Porter said. “Or economy. You don’t like to throw things away; I can understand that! Pork that’s been sitting too long or chicken salad left out all night…”

Rose sat down. Tears were glazing her eyes. “Oh,” she said, “you’re all so mean! You don’t fool me for an instant; I know why you’re doing this. You want to make me look bad in front of Julian.”

“Julian?”

Julian seemed distressed. He took a handkerchief from his breast pocket but then went on holding it.

“You want to drive him off! You three wasted your chances and now you want me to waste mine, but I won’t do it. I can see what’s what. Just listen to any song on the radio; look at any soap opera. Love is what it’s all about. On soap operas everything revolves around love. A new person comes to town and right away the question is, who’s he going to love? Who’s going to love him back? Who’ll lose her mind with jealousy? Who’s going to ruin her life? And you want to make me miss it!”

“Well, goodness,” Macon said, trying to sort this out.

“You know perfectly well there’s nothing wrong with that turkey. You just don’t want me to stop cooking for you and taking care of this house, you don’t want Julian to fall in love with me.”

“Do what?”

But she scraped her chair back and ran from the room. Julian sat there with his mouth open.

“Don’t you dare laugh,” Macon told him.

Julian just went on gaping.

“Don’t even consider it.”

Julian swallowed. He said, “Do you think I ought to go after her?”

“No,” Macon said.

“But she seems so—”

“She’s fine! She’s perfectly fine.”

“Oh.”

“Now, who wants a baked potato?”

There was a kind of murmur around the table; everyone looked unhappy. “That poor, dear girl,” Mrs. Barrett said. “I feel just awful.”

“Me too,” Susan said.

“Julian?” Macon asked, clanging a spoon. “Potato?”

“I’ll take the turkey,” Julian said firmly.

At that moment, Macon almost liked the man.

“It was having the baby that broke our marriage up,” Muriel said. “When you think about it, that’s funny. First we got married on account of the baby and then we got divorced on account of the baby, and in between, the baby was what we argued about. Norman couldn’t understand why I was all the time at the hospital visiting Alexander. ‘It doesn’t know you’re there, so why go?’ he said. I’d go early in the morning and just hang around, the nurses were as nice as could be about it, and I’d stay till night. Norman said, ‘Muriel, won’t we ever get our ordinary life back?’ Well, you can see his point, I guess. It’s like I only had room in my mind for Alexander. And he was in the hospital for months, for really months; there was everything in this world wrong with him. You should have seen our medical bills. We only had partial insurance and there were these bills running up, thousands and thousands of dollars. Finally I took a job at the hospital. I asked if I could work in the nursery but they said no, so I got a kind of, more like a maid’s job, cleaning patients’ rooms and so forth. Emptying trash cans, wet-mopping floors…”

She and Macon were walking along Dempsey Road with Edward, hoping to run into a biker. Muriel held the leash. If a biker came, she said, and Edward lunged or gave so much as the smallest yip, she was going to yank him so hard he wouldn’t know what hit him. She warned Macon of that before they started out. She said he’d better not object because this was for Edward’s own good. Macon hoped he’d be able to remember that when the time came.

It was the Friday after Thanksgiving and there’d been a light snow earlier, but the air didn’t have a real bite to it yet and the sidewalks were merely damp. The sky seemed to begin about two feet above their heads.

“This one patient, Mrs. Brimm, she took a liking to me,” Muriel said. “She said I was the only person who ever bothered talking to her. I’d come in and tell her about Alexander. I’d tell her what the doctors said, how they didn’t give him much of a chance and some had even wondered if we wanted a chance, what with all that might be wrong with him. I’d tell her about me and Norman and the way he was acting, and she said it sounded exactly like a story in a magazine. When they let her go home she wanted me to come with her, take a job looking out for her, but I couldn’t on account of Alexander.”

A biker appeared at the end of the street, a girl with a Baskin-Robbins uniform bunching below her jacket. Edward perked his ears up. “Now, act like we expect no trouble,” Muriel told Macon. “Just go along, go along, don’t even look in Edward’s direction.”

The girl skimmed toward them — a little slip of a person with a tiny, serious face. When she passed, she gave off a definite smell of chocolate ice cream. Edward sniffed the breeze but marched on.

“Oh, Edward, that was wonderful!” Macon told him.

Muriel just clucked. She seemed to take his good behavior for granted.

“So anyhow,” she said. “They finally did let Alexander come home. But he was still no bigger than a minute. All wrinkles like a little old man. Cried like a kitten would cry. Struggled for every breath. And Norman was no help. I think he was jealous. He got this kind of stubborn look whenever I had to do something, go warm a bottle or something. He’d say, ‘Where you off to? Don’t you want to watch the end of this program?’ I’d be hanging over the crib watching Alexander fight for air, and Norman would call, ‘Muriel? Commercial’s just about over!’ Then next thing I knew, there was his mother standing on my doorstep saying it wasn’t his baby anyhow.”

“What? Well, of all things!” Macon said.

“Can you believe it? Standing on my doorstep looking so pleased with herself. ‘Not his baby!’ I said. ‘Whose then?’ ‘Well, that I couldn’t say,’ she said, ‘and I doubt if you could either. But I can tell you this much: If you don’t give my son a divorce and release all financial claims on him, I will personally produce Dana Scully and his friends in a court of law and they will swear you’re a known tramp and that baby could be any one of theirs. Clearly it’s not Norman’s; Norman was a darling baby.’ Well. I waited till Norman got home from work and I said, ‘Do you know what your mother told me?’ Then I saw by his face that he did. I saw she must have been talking behind my back for who knows how long, putting these suspicions in his head. I said, ‘Norman?’ He just stuttered around. I said ‘Norman, she’s lying, it’s not true, I wasn’t going with those boys when I met you! That’s all in the past!’ He said, ‘I don’t know what to think.’ I said, ‘Please!’ He said, ‘I don’t know.’ He went out to the kitchen and started fixing this screen I’d been nagging him about, window screen halfway out of its frame even though supper was already on the table. I’d made him this special supper. I followed after him. I said, ‘Norman. Dana and them are from way, way back. That baby couldn’t be theirs.’ He pushed up on one side of the screen and it wouldn’t go, and he pushed up on the other side and it cut his hand, and all at once he started crying and wrenched the whole thing out of the window and threw it as far as he could. And next day his mother came to help him pack his clothes and he left me.”

“Good Lord,” Macon said. He felt shocked, as if he’d known Norman personally.

“So I thought about what to do. I knew I couldn’t go back to my folks. Finally I phoned Mrs. Brimm and asked if she still wanted me to come take care of her, and she said yes, she did; the woman she had wasn’t any use at all. So I said I would do it for room and board if I could bring the baby and she said yes, that would be fine. She had this little row house downtown and there was an extra bedroom where me and Alexander could sleep. And that’s how I managed to keep us going.”

They were several blocks from home now, but she didn’t suggest turning back. She held the leash loosely and Edward strutted next to her, matching her pace. “I was lucky, wasn’t I,” she said. “If it wasn’t for Mrs. Brimm I don’t know what I’d have done. And it’s not like it was all that much work. Just keeping the house straight, fixing her a bite to eat, helping her around. She was crippled up with arthritis but just as spunky! It’s not like I really had to nurse her.”

She slowed and then came to a stop. Edward, with a martyred sigh, sat down at her left heel. “When you think about it, it’s funny,” she said. “All that time Alexander was in the hospital seemed so awful, seemed it would go on forever, but now when I look back, I almost miss it. I mean there was something cozy about it, now that I recall. I think about those nurses gossiping at the nurses’ station and those rows of little babies sleeping. It was winter and sometimes I’d stand at a window and look out and I’d feel happy to be warm and safe. I’d look down at the emergency room entrance and watch the ambulances coming in. You ever wonder what a Martian might think if he happened to land near an emergency room? He’d see an ambulance whizzing in and everybody running out to meet it, tearing the doors open, grabbing up the stretcher, scurrying along with it. ‘Why,’ he’d say, ‘what a helpful planet, what kind and helpful creatures.’ He’d never guess we’re not always that way; that we had to, oh, put aside our natural selves to do it. ‘What a helpful race of beings,’ a Martian would say. Don’t you think so?”

She looked up at Macon then. Macon experienced a sudden twist in his chest. He felt there was something he needed to do, some kind of connection he wanted to make, and when she raised her face he bent and kissed her chapped, harsh lips even though that wasn’t the connection he’d intended. Her fist with the leash in it was caught between them like a stone. There was something insistent about her — pressing. Macon drew back. “Well…” he said.

She went on looking up at him.

“Sorry,” he said.

Then they turned around and walked Edward home.

Danny spent the holiday practicing his parallel parking, tirelessly wheeling his mother’s car back and forth in front of the house. And Liberty baked cookies with Rose. But Susan had nothing to do, Rose said, and since Macon was planning a trip to Philadelphia, wouldn’t he consider taking her along? “It’s only hotels and restaurants,” Macon said. “And I’m cramming it into one day, leaving at crack of dawn and coming back late at night—”

“She’ll be company for you,” Rose told him.

However, Susan went to sleep when the train was hardly out of Baltimore, and she stayed asleep for the entire ride, sunk into her jacket like a little puffed-up bird roosting on a branch. Macon sat next to her with a rock magazine he’d found rolled up in one of her pockets. He saw that the Police were experiencing personality conflicts, that David Bowie worried about mental illness, that Billy Idol’s black shirt appeared to have been ripped halfway off his body. Evidently these people led very difficult lives; he had no idea who they were. He rolled the magazine up again and replaced it in Susan’s pocket.

If Ethan were alive, would he be sitting where Susan was? He hadn’t traveled with Macon as a rule. The overseas trips were too expensive, the domestic trips too dull. Once he’d gone with Macon to New York, and he’d developed stomach pains that resembled appendicitis. Macon could still recall his frantic search for a doctor, his own stomach clenching in sympathy, and his relief when they were told it was nothing but too many breakfasts. He hadn’t taken Ethan anywhere else after that. Only to Bethany Beach every summer, and that was not so much a trip as a kind of relocation of home base, with Sarah sunbathing and Ethan joining other Baltimore boys, also relocated, and Macon happily tightening all the doorknobs in their rented cottage or unsticking the windows or — one blissful year — solving a knotty problem he’d discovered in the plumbing.

In Philadelphia, Susan came grumpily awake and staggered off the train ahead of him. She complained about the railroad station. “It’s way too big,” she said. “The loudspeakers echo so you can’t hear what they’re saying. Baltimore’s station is better.”

“Yes, you’re absolutely right,” Macon said.

They went for breakfast to a café he knew well, which unfortunately seemed to have fallen upon hard times. Little chips of ceiling plaster kept dropping into his coffee. He crossed the name out of his guidebook. Next they went to a place that a reader had suggested, and Susan had walnut waffles. She said they were excellent. “Are you going to quote me on this?” she asked. “Will you put my name in your book and say I recommended the waffles?”

“It’s not that kind of a book,” he told her.

“Call me your companion. That’s what restaurant critics do. ‘My companion, Susan Leary, pronounced the waffles remarkable.’ ”

Macon laughed and signaled for their bill.

After their fourth breakfast, they started on hotels. Susan found these less enjoyable, though Macon kept trying to involve her. He told a manager, “My companion here is the expert on bathrooms.” But Susan just opened a medicine cabinet, yawned, and said, “All they have is Camay.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“When Mama came back from her honeymoon she brought us perfumed designer soap from her hotel. One bar for me and one for Danny, in little plastic boxes and drainage racks.”

“I think Camay is fine,” Macon told the manager, who was looking worried.

Late in the afternoon Susan started feeling peckish again; so they had two more breakfasts. Then they went to Independence Hall. (Macon felt they should do something educational.) “You can tell your civics teacher,” he said. She rolled her eyes and said, “Social studies.”

“Whatever.”

The weather was cold, and the interior of the hall was chilly and bleak. Macon noticed Susan gaping vacantly at the guide, who wasn’t making his spiel very exciting; so he leaned over and whispered, “Imagine. George Washington sat in that very chair.”

“I’m not really into George Washington, Uncle Macon.”

“Human beings can only go ‘into’ houses, cars, and coffins, Susan.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.”

They followed the crowd upstairs, through other rooms, but Susan had plainly exhausted her supply of good humor. “If it weren’t for what was decided in this building,” Macon told her, “you and I might very well be living under a dictatorship.”

“We are anyhow,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“You really think that you and me have any power?”

“You and I, honey.”

“It’s just free speech, that’s all we’ve got. We can say whatever we like, then the government goes on and does exactly what it pleases. You call that democracy? It’s like we’re on a ship, headed someplace terrible, and somebody else is steering and the passengers can’t jump off.”

“Why don’t we go get some supper,” Macon said. He was feeling a little depressed.

He took her to an old-fashioned inn a few streets over. It wasn’t even dark yet, and they were the first customers. A woman in a Colonial gown told them they’d have to wait a few minutes. She led them into a small, snug room with a fireplace, and a waitress offered them their choice of buttered rum or hot spiked cider. “I’ll have buttered rum,” Susan said, shucking off her jacket.

Macon said, “Uh, Susan.”

She glared at him.

“Oh, well, make that two,” he told the waitress. He supposed a little toddy couldn’t do much harm.

But it must have been an exceptionally strong toddy — either that, or Susan had an exceptionally weak head for alcohol. At any rate, after two small sips she leaned toward him in an unbalanced way. “This is sort of fun!” she said. “You know, Uncle Macon, I like you much better than I thought I did.”

“Why, thank you.”

“I used to think you were kind of finicky. Ethan used to make us laugh, pointing to your artichoke plate.”

“My artichoke plate.”

She pressed her fingertips to her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“For what?”

“I didn’t mean to talk about him.”

“You can talk about him.”

“I don’t want to,” she said.

She gazed off across the room. Macon, following her eyes, found only a harpsichord. He looked back at her and saw her chin trembling.

It had never occurred to him that Ethan’s cousins missed him too.

After a minute, Susan picked her mug up and took several large swallows. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Hot,” she explained. It was true she seemed to have recovered herself.

Macon said, “What was funny about my artichoke plate?”

“Oh, nothing.”

“I won’t be hurt. Was it funny?”

“Well, it looked like geometry class. Every leaf laid out in such a perfect circle when you’d finished.”

“I see.”

“He was laughing with you, not at you,” Susan said, peering anxiously into his face.

“Well, since I wasn’t laughing myself, that statement seems inaccurate. But if you mean he wasn’t laughing unkindly, I believe you.”

She sighed and drank some more of her rum.

“Nobody talks about him,” Macon said. “None of you mentions his name.”

“We do when you’re not around,” Susan said.

“You do?”

“We talk about what he’d think, you know. Like when Danny got his license, or when I had a date for the Halloween Ball. I mean we used to make so much fun of the grown-ups. And Ethan was the funniest one; he could always get us to laugh. Then here we are, growing up ourselves. We wonder what Ethan would think of us, if he could come back and see us. We wonder if he’d laugh at us. Or if he’d feel… left out. Like we moved on and left him behind.”

The woman in the Colonial gown came to show them to their table. Macon brought his drink; Susan had already finished hers. She was a bit unsteady on her feet. When their waitress asked them if they’d like a wine list, Susan gave Macon a bright-eyed look but Macon said, “No,” very firmly. “I think we ought to start with soup,” he said. He had some idea soup was sobering.

But Susan talked in a reckless, headlong way all through the soup course, and the main course, and the two desserts she hadn’t been able to decide between, and the strong black coffee that he pressed upon her afterward. She talked about a boy she liked who either liked her back or else preferred someone named Sissy Pace. She talked about the Halloween Ball where this really juvenile eighth-grader had thrown up all over the stereo. She said that when Danny was eighteen, the three of them were moving to their own apartment because now that their mother was expecting (which Macon hadn’t known), she wouldn’t even realize they were gone. “That’s not true,” Macon told her. “Your mother would feel terrible if you left.” Susan propped her cheek on her fist in a sort of slipshod manner and said that she wasn’t born yesterday. Her hair had grown wilder through the evening, giving her an electrified appearance. Macon found it difficult to stuff her into her jacket, and he had to hold her up more or less by the back of her collar while they were waiting for a taxi.

In the railroad station she got a confused, squinty look, and once they were on the train she fell asleep with her head against the window. In Baltimore, when he woke her, she said, “You don’t think he’s mad at us, do you, Uncle Macon?”

“Who’s that?”

“You think he’s mad we’re starting to forget him?”

“Oh, no, honey. I’m sure he’s not.”

She slept in the car all the way from the station, and he drove very gently so as not to wake her. When they got home, Rose said it looked as if he’d worn the poor child right down to a frazzle.

“You want your dog to mind you in every situation,” Muriel said. “Even out in public. You want to leave him outside a public place and come back to find him waiting. That’s what we’ll work on this morning. We’ll start with him waiting right on your own front porch. Then next lesson we’ll go on to shops and things.”

She picked up the leash and they stepped out the door. It was raining, but the porch roof kept them dry. Macon said, “Hold on a minute, I want to show you something.”

“What’s that?”

He tapped his foot twice. Edward looked uncomfortable; he gazed off toward the street and gave a sort of cough. Then slowly, slowly, one forepaw crumpled. Then the other. He lowered himself by degrees until he was lying down.

“Well! Good dog!” Muriel said. She clucked her tongue.

Edward flattened his ears back for a pat.

“I worked on him most of yesterday,” Macon said. “It was Sunday and I had nothing to do. And then my brother’s kids were getting ready to leave and Edward was growling the way he usually does; so I tapped my foot and down he went.”

“I’m proud of both of you.”

She told Edward, “Stay,” holding out a hand. She backed into the house again. “Now, Macon, you come in too.”

They closed the front door. Muriel tweaked the lace curtain and peered out. “Well, he’s staying so far,” she announced.

She turned her back to the door. She checked her fingernails and said, “Tsk!” Tiny beads of rain trickled down her raincoat, and her hair — reacting to the damp — stood out in corkscrews. “Someday I’m going to get me a professional manicure,” she said.

Macon tried to see around her; he wasn’t sure that Edward would stay put.

“Have you ever been to a manicurist?” she asked.

“Me? Goodness, no.”

“Well, some men go.”

“Not me.”

“I’d like just once to get everything done professional. Nails, skin… My girlfriend goes to this place where they vacuum your skin. They just vacuum all your pores, she says. I’d like to go there sometime. And I’d like to have my colors done. What colors look good on me? What don’t? What brings out the best in me?”

She looked up at him. All at once, Macon got the feeling she had not been talking about colors at all but something else. It seemed she used words as a sort of background music. He took a step away from her. She said, “You didn’t have to apologize, the other day.”

“Apologize?”

Although he knew exactly what she was referring to.

She seemed to guess that. She didn’t explain herself.

“Um, I don’t remember if I ever made this clear,” Macon said, “but I’m not even legally divorced yet.”

“So?”

“I’m just, what do you call. Separated.”

“Well? So?”

He wanted to say, Muriel, forgive me, but since my son died, sex has… turned. (As milk turns; that was how he thought of it. As milk will alter its basic nature and turn sour.) I really don’t think of it anymore. I honestly don’t. I can’t imagine anymore what all that fuss was about. Now it seems pathetic.

But what he said was, “I’m worried the mailman’s going to come.” She looked at him for a moment longer, and then she opened the door for Edward.

Rose was knitting Julian a pullover sweater for Christmas. “Already?” Macon asked. “We’ve barely got past Thanksgiving.”

“Yes, but this is a really hard pattern and I want to do it right.”

Macon watched her needles flashing. “Actually,” he said, “have you ever noticed that Julian wears cardigans?”

“Yes, I guess he does,” she said.

But she went on knitting her pullover.

It was a heathery gray wool, what he believed they called Ragg wool. Macon and both his brothers had sweaters that color. But Julian wore crayon colors or navy blue. Julian dressed like a golfer. “He tends toward the V-necked look,” Macon said to Rose.

“That doesn’t mean he wouldn’t wear a crew neck if he had one.”

“Look,” Macon said. “I guess what I’m getting at—”

Rose’s needles clicked serenely.

“He’s really kind of a playboy,” he said. “I don’t know if you realize that. And besides, he’s younger.”

“Two years,” she said.

“But he’s got a younger, I don’t know, style of living. Singles and apartments and so on.”

“He says he’s tired of all that.”

“Oh, Lord.”

“He says he likes homeyness. He appreciates my cooking. He can’t believe I’m knitting him a sweater.”

“No, I guess not,” Macon said grimly.

“Don’t try to spoil this, Macon.”

“Sweetheart, I only want to protect you. It’s wrong, you know, what you said at Thanksgiving. Love is not what it’s all about. There are other things to consider besides, all kinds of other issues.”

“He ate my turkey and did not get sick. Two big helpings,” Rose said.

Macon groaned and tore at a handful of his hair.

“First we try him on a real quiet street,” Muriel said. “Someplace public, but not too busy. Some out-of-the-way little store or something.”

She was driving her long gray boat of a car. Macon sat in front beside her, and Edward sat in back, his ears out horizontal with joy. Edward was always happy to be invited for a car ride, though very soon he’d turn cranky. (“How much longer?” you could almost hear him whine.) It was lucky they weren’t going far.

“I got this car on account of its big old trunk,” Muriel said. She slung it dashingly around a corner. “I needed it for my errand business. Guess how much it cost?”

“Um…”

“Only two hundred dollars. That’s because it needed work, but I took it to this boy down the street from where I live. I said, ‘Here’s the deal. You fix my car up, I let you have the use of it three nights a week and all day Sunday.’ Wasn’t that a good idea?”

“Very inventive,” Macon said.

“I’ve had to be inventive. It’s been scrape and scrounge, nail and knuckle, ever since Norman left me,” she said. She had pulled into a space in front of a little shopping center, but she made no move to get out of the car. “I’ve lain awake, oh, many a night, thinking up ways to earn money. It was bad enough when room and board came free, but after Mrs. Brimm died it was worse; her house passed on to her son and I had to pay him rent. Her son’s an old skinflint. Always wanting to jack up the price. I said, ‘How’s about this? You leave the rent where it is and I won’t trouble you with maintenance. I’ll tend to it all myself,’ I said. ‘Think of the headaches you’ll save.’ So he agreed and now you should see what I have to deal with, things go wrong and I can’t fix them and so we just live with them. Leaky roof, stopped-up sink, faucet dripping hot water so my gas bill’s out of this world, but at least I’ve kept the rent down. And I’ve got about fifty jobs, if you count them all up. You could say I’m lucky; I’m good at spotting a chance. Like those lessons at Doggie, Do, or another time a course in massage at the Y. The massage turned out to be a dud, seems you have to have a license and all like that, but I will say Doggie, Do paid off. And also I’m trying to start this research service; that’s on account of all I picked up helping the school librarian. Wrote out these little pink cards I passed around at Towson State: We-Search Research. Xeroxed these flyers and mailed them to every Maryland name in the Writer’s Directory. Men and Women of Letters!I said. Do you want a long slow illness that will effectively kill off a character without unsightly disfigurement? So far no one’s answered but I’m still hoping. Twice now I’ve paid for an entire Ocean City vacation just by going up and down the beach offering folks these box lunches me and Alexander fixed in our motel room every morning. We lug them in Alexander’s red wagon; I call out, ‘Cold drinks! Sandwiches! Step right up!’ And this is not even counting the regular jobs, like the Meow-Bow or before that the Rapid-Eze. Tiresome old Rapid-Eze; they did let me bring Alexander but it was nothing but copying documents and tedious things like that, canceled checks and invoices, little chits of things. I’ve never been so disinterested.”

Macon stirred and said, “Don’t you mean uninterested?”

“Exactly. Wouldn’t you be? Copies of letters, copies of exams, copies of articles on how to shop for a mortgage. Knitting instructions, crochet instructions, all rolling out of the machine real slow and stately like they’re such a big deal. Finally I quit. When I got my training at Doggie, Do I said, ‘I quit. I’ve had it!’ Why don’t we try the grocery.”

Macon felt confused for a second. Then he said, “Oh. All right.”

“You go into the grocery, put Edward on a down-stay outside. I’ll wait here in the car and see if he behaves.”

“All right.”

He climbed from the car and opened the back door for Edward. He led him over to the grocery. He tapped his foot twice. Edward looked distressed, but he lay down. Was this humane, when the sidewalk was still so wet? Reluctantly, Macon stepped into the store. It had the old-fashioned smell of brown paper bags. When he looked back out, Edward’s expression was heartbreaking. He wore a puzzled, anxious smile and he was watching the door intently.

Macon cruised an aisle full of fruits and vegetables. He picked up an apple and considered it and set it down again. Then he went back outside. Edward was still in place. Muriel had emerged from her car and was leaning against the fender, making faces into a brown plastic compact. “Give him lots of praise!” she called, snapping the compact shut. Macon clucked and patted Edward’s head.

They went next door to the drugstore. “This time we’ll both go in,” Muriel said.

“Is that safe?”

“We’ll have to try it sooner or later.”

They strolled the length of the hair care aisle, all the way back to cosmetics, where Muriel stopped to try on a lipstick. Macon imagined Edward yawning and getting up and leaving. Muriel said, “Too pink.” She took a tissue from her purse and rubbed the pink off. Her own lipstick stayed on, as if it were not merely a 1940s color but a 1940s formula — the glossless, cakey substance that used to cling to pillowcases, napkins, and the rims of coffee cups. She said, “What are you doing for dinner tomorrow night?”

“For—?”

“Come and eat at my house.”

He blinked.

“Come on. We’ll have fun.”

“Um…”

“Just for dinner, you and me and Alexander. Say six o’clock. Number Sixteen Singleton Street. Know where that is?”

“Oh, well, I don’t believe I’m free then,” Macon said.

“Think it over a while,” she told him.

They went outside. Edward was still there but he was standing up, bristling in the direction of a Chesapeake Bay retriever almost a full block away. “Shoot,” Muriel said. “Just when I thought we were getting someplace.” She made him lie down again. Then she released him and the three of them walked on. Macon was wondering how soon he could decently say that he had thought it over and now remembered he definitely had an invitation elsewhere. They rounded a corner. “Oh, look, a thrift shop!” Muriel said. “My biggest weakness.” She tapped her foot at Edward. “This time, I’ll go in,” she said. “I want to see what they have. You step back a bit and watch he doesn’t stand up like before.”

She went inside the thrift shop while Macon waited, skulking around the parking meters. Edward knew he was there, though. He kept turning his head and giving Macon beseeching looks.

Macon saw Muriel at the front of the shop, picking up and setting down little gilded cups without saucers, chipped green glass florists’ vases, ugly tin brooches as big as ashtrays. Then he saw her dimly in the back where the clothes were. She drifted into sight and out again like a fish in dark water. She appeared all at once in the doorway, holding up a hat. “Macon? What do you think?” she called. It was a dusty beige turban with a jewel pinned to its center, a great false topaz like an eye.

“Very interesting,” Macon said. He was starting to feel the cold.

Muriel vanished again, and Edward sighed and settled his chin on his paws.

A teenaged girl walked past — a gypsy kind of girl with layers of flouncy skirts and a purple satin knapsack plastered all over with Grateful Dead emblems. Edward tensed. He watched every step she took; he rearranged his position to watch after her as she left. But he said nothing, and Macon — tensed himself — felt relieved but also a little let down. He’d been prepared to leap into action. All at once the silence seemed unusually deep; no other people passed. He experienced one of those hallucinations of sound that he sometimes got on planes or trains. He heard Muriel’s voice, gritty and thin, rattling along. “At the tone the time will be…” she said, and then she sang, “You will find your love in…” and then she shouted, “Cold drinks! Sandwiches! Step right up!” It seemed she had webbed his mind with her stories, wound him in slender steely threads from her life — her Shirley Temple childhood, unsavory girlhood, Norman flinging the screen out the window, Alexander mewing like a newborn kitten, Muriel wheeling on Doberman pinschers and scattering her salmon-pink business cards and galloping down the beach, all spiky limbs and flying hair, hauling a little red wagon full of lunches.

Then she stepped out of the thrift shop. “It was way too expensive,” she told Macon. “Good dog,” she said, and she snapped her fingers to let Edward up. “Now one more test.” She was heading back toward her car. “We want to try both of us going in again. We’ll do it down at the doctor’s.”

“What doctor’s?”

“Dr. Snell’s. I’ve got to pick up Alexander; I want to return him to school after I drop you off.”

“Will that take long?”

“Oh, no.”

They drove south, with the engine knocking in a way that Macon hadn’t noticed the first time. In front of a building on Cold Spring Lane, Muriel parked and got out. Macon and Edward followed her. “Now, I don’t know if he’s ready or not,” she said. “But all the better if he’s not; gives Edward practice.”

“I thought you said this wouldn’t take long.”

She didn’t seem to hear him.

They left Edward on the stoop and went into the waiting room. The receptionist was a gray-haired woman with sequined glasses dangling from a chain of fake scarabs. Muriel asked her, “Is Alexander through yet?”

“Any minute, hon.”

Muriel found a magazine and sat down but Macon remained standing. He raised one of the slats of the venetian blind to check on Edward. A man in a nearby chair glanced over at him suspiciously. Macon felt like someone from a gangster movie — one of those shady characters who twitches back a curtain to make sure the coast is clear. He dropped the blind. Muriel was reading an article called “Put on the New Sultry, Shadowed Eyes!” There were pictures of different models looking malevolent.

“How old did you say Alexander was?” Macon asked.

She glanced up. Her own eyes, untouched by cosmetics, were disquietingly naked compared to those in the magazine.

“He’s seven,” she said.

Seven.

Seven was when Ethan had learned to ride a bicycle.

Macon was visited by one of those memories that dent the skin, that strain the muscles. He felt the seat of Ethan’s bike pressing into his hand — the curled-under edge at the rear that you hold onto when you’re trying to keep a bicycle upright. He felt the sidewalk slapping against his soles as he ran. He felt himself let go, slow to a walk, stop with his hands on his hips to call out, “You’ve got her now! You’ve got her!” And Ethan rode away from him, strong and proud and straight-backed, his hair picking up the light till he passed beneath an oak tree.

Macon sat down next to Muriel. She looked over and said, “Have you thought?”

“Hmm?”

“Have you given any thought to coming to dinner?”

“Oh,” he said. And then he said, “Well, I could come. If it’s only for dinner.”

“What else would it be for?” she asked. She smiled at him and tossed her hair back.

The receptionist said, “Here he is.”

She was talking about a small, white, sickly boy with a shaved-looking skull. He didn’t appear to have quite enough skin for his face; his skin was stretched, his mouth was stretched to an unattractive width, and every bone and blade of cartilage made its presence known. His eyes were light blue and lashless, bulging slightly, rimmed with pink, magnified behind large, watery spectacles whose clear frames had an unfortunate pinkish cast themselves. He wore a carefully coordinated shirt-and-slacks set such as only a mother would choose.

“How’d it go?” Muriel asked him.

“Okay.”

“Sweetie, this is Macon. Can you say hi? I’ve been training his dog.”

Macon stood up and held out his hand. After a moment, Alexander responded. His fingers felt like a collection of wilted stringbeans. He took his hand away again and told his mother, “You have to make another appointment.”

“Sure thing.”

She went over to the receptionist, leaving Macon and Alexander standing there. Macon felt there was nothing on earth he could talk about with this child. He brushed a leaf off his sleeve. He pulled his cuffs down. He said, “You’re pretty young to be at the doctor’s without your mother.”

Alexander didn’t answer, but Muriel — waiting for the receptionist to flip through her calendar — turned and answered for him. “He’s used to it,” she said, “because he’s had to go so often. He’s got these allergies.”

“I see,” Macon said.

Yes, he was just the type for allergies.

“He’s allergic to shellfish, milk, fruits of all kinds, wheat, eggs, and most vegetables,” Muriel said. She accepted a card from the receptionist and dropped it into her purse. She said as they were walking out, “He’s allergic to dust and pollen and paint, and there’s some belief he’s allergic to air. Whenever he’s outside a long time he gets these bumps on any uncovered parts of his body.”

She clucked at Edward and snapped her fingers. Edward jumped up, barking. “Don’t pat him,” she told Alexander. “You don’t know what dog fur will do to you.”

They got into her car. Macon sat in back so Alexander could take the front seat, as far from Edward as possible. They had to drive with all the windows down so Alexander wouldn’t start wheezing. Over the rush of wind, Muriel called, “He’s subject to asthma, eczema, and nosebleeds. He has to get these shots all the time. If a bee ever stings him and he hasn’t had his shots he could be dead in half an hour.”

Alexander turned his head slowly and gazed at Macon. His expression was prim and censorious.

When they drew up in front of the house, Muriel said, “Well, let’s see now. I’m on full time at the Meow-Bow tomorrow…” She ran a hand through her hair, which was scratchy, rough, disorganized. “So I guess I won’t see you till dinner,” she said.

Macon couldn’t think of any way to tell her this, but the fact was he would never be able to make that dinner. He missed his wife. He missed his son. They were the only people who seemed real to him. There was no point looking for substitutes.