The Accidental Tourist

five

“Oh, I’ve erred and I have stumbled,” Macon’s sister sang in the kitchen, “I’ve been sinful and unwise…”

She had a tremulous soprano that sounded like an old lady’s, although she was younger than Macon. You could imagine such a voice in church, some country kind of church where the women still wore flat straw hats.

Macon was lying on the daybed in his grandparents’ sun porch. His left leg, encased in plaster from mid-thigh to instep, was not painful so much as absent. There was a constant dull, cottony numbness that made him want to pinch his own shin. Not that he could, of course. He was sealed away from himself. The hardest blow felt like a knock on the wall from a neighboring room.

Still, he felt a kind of contentment. He lay listening to his sister fix breakfast, idly scratching the cat who had made herself a nest in the blankets. “I’ve had trials, I’ve had sorrows,” Rose trilled merrily, “I’ve had grief and sacrifice…” Once she got the coffee started, she would come help him across the living room to the downstairs bathroom. He still found it difficult to navigate, especially on polished floors. Nowadays he marveled at all those people on crutches whom he used to take for granted. He saw them as a flock of stalky wading birds, dazzlingly competent with their sprightly hops and debonair pivots. How did they do it?

His own crutches, so new their rubber tips were not yet scuffed, leaned against the wall. His bathrobe hung over a chair. Beneath the window was a folding card table with a wood-grained cardboard top and rickety legs. His grandparents had been dead for years, but the table remained set up as if for one of their eternal bridge games. Macon knew that on its underside was a yellowed label reading ATLAS MFG. CO. with a steel engraving of six plump, humorless men in high-collared suits standing upon a board laid across the very same table. FURNISHINGS OF DECEPTIVE DELICACY, the caption said. Macon associated the phrase with his grandmother: deceptive delicacy. Lying on the sun porch floor as a boy, he had studied her fragile legs, from which her anklebones jutted out like doorknobs. Her solid, black, chunky-heeled shoes were planted squarely a foot apart, never tapping or fidgeting.

He heard his brother Porter upstairs, whistling along with Rose’s song. He knew it was Porter because Charles never whistled. There was the sound of a shower running. His sister looked through the sun porch door, with Edward peering around her and panting at Macon as if he were laughing.

“Macon? Are you awake?” Rose asked.

“I’ve been awake for hours,” he told her, for there was something vague about her that caused her brothers to act put-upon and needy whenever she chanced to focus on them. She was pretty in a sober, prim way, with beige hair folded unobtrusively at the back of her neck where it wouldn’t be a bother. Her figure was a very young girl’s, but her clothes were spinsterly and concealing.

She wrapped him in his bathrobe and helped him stand up. Now his leg actively hurt. It seemed the pain was a matter of gravity. A throbbing ache sank slowly down the length of the bone. With Rose supporting him on one side and a crutch on the other, he hobbled out of the sun porch, through the living room with its shabby, curlicued furniture. The dog kept getting underfoot. “Maybe I could stop and rest a moment,” Macon said when they passed the couch.

“It’s only a little farther.”

They entered the pantry. Rose opened the bathroom door and helped him inside. “Call me when you’re ready,” she said, closing the door after him. Macon sagged against the sink.

At breakfast, Porter was cheerily talkative while the others ate in silence. Porter was the best-looking of all the Learys — more tightly knit than Macon, his hair a brighter shade of blond. He gave an impression of vitality and direction that his brothers lacked. “Got a lot to do today,” he said between mouthfuls. “That meeting with Herrin, interviews for Dave’s old job, Cates flying in from Atlanta…”

Charles just sipped his coffee. While Porter was already dressed, Charles still wore his pajamas. He was a soft, sweet-faced man who never seemed to move; any time you looked at him he’d be watching you with his sorrowful eyes that slanted downward at the outer corners.

Rose brought the coffeepot from the stove. “Last night, Edward woke me twice asking to go out,” she said. “Do you think he has some sort of kidney problem?”

“It’s the adjustment,” Macon said. “Adjustment to change. I wonder how he knows not to wake me.”

Porter said, “Maybe we could rig up some sort of system. One of those little round pet doors or something.”

“Edward’s kind of portly for a pet door,” Macon said.

“Besides,” Rose said, “the yard’s not fenced. We can’t let him out on his own if he’s not fenced in.”

“A litterbox, then,” Porter suggested.

“Litterbox! For a dog?”

“Why not? If it were big enough.”

Macon said, “Use a bathtub. The one in the basement. No one goes there anymore.”

“But who would clean it?”

“Ah.”

They all looked down at Edward, who was lying at Rose’s feet. He rolled his eyes at them.

“How come you have him, anyway?” Porter asked Macon.

“He was Ethan’s.”

“Oh. I see,” Porter said. He gave a little cough. “Animals!” he said brightly. “Ever considered what they must think of us? I mean, here we come back from the grocery store with the most amazing haul — chicken, pork, half a cow. We leave at nine and we’re back at ten, evidently having caught an entire herd of beasts. They must think we’re the greatest hunters on earth!”

Macon leaned back in his chair with his coffee mug cupped in both hands. The sun was warming the breakfast table, and the kitchen smelled of toast. He almost wondered whether, by some devious, subconscious means, he had engineered this injury — every elaborate step leading up to it — just so he could settle down safe among the people he’d started out with.

Charles and Porter left for the factory, and Rose went upstairs and ran the vacuum cleaner. Macon, who was supposed to be typing his guidebook, struggled back to the sun porch and collapsed. Since he’d come home he’d been sleeping too much. The urge to sleep was like a great black cannonball rolling around inside his skull, making his head heavy and droopy.

On the wall at the end of the room hung a portrait of the four Leary children: Charles, Porter, Macon, and Rose, clustered in an armchair. Their grandfather had commissioned that portrait several years before they came to live with him. They were still in California with their mother — a giddy young war widow. From time to time she sent snapshots, but Grandfather Leary found those inadequate. By their very nature, he told her in his letters, photos lied. They showed what a person looked like over a fraction of a second — not over long, slow minutes, which was what you’d take to study someone in real life. In that case, said Alicia, didn’t paintings lie also? They showed hours instead of minutes. It wasn’t Grandfather Leary she said this to, but the artist, an elderly Californian whose name Grandfather Leary had somehow got hold of. If the artist had had a reply, Macon couldn’t remember what it was.

He could remember sitting for the portrait, though, and now when he looked at it he had a very clear picture of his mother standing just outside the gilded frame in a pink kimono, watching the painting take shape while she toweled her hair dry. She had fluffy, short, brittle hair whose color she “helped along,” as she put it. Her face was a type no longer seen — it wasn’t just unfashionable, it had vanished altogether. How did women mold their basic forms to suit the times? Were there no more of those round chins, round foreheads, and bruised, baroque little mouths so popular in the forties?

The artist, it was obvious, found her very attractive. He kept pausing in his work to say he wished she were the subject. Alicia gave a breathless laugh and shooed away his words with one hand. Probably later she had gone out with him a few times. She was always taking up with new men, and they were always the most exciting men in the world, to hear her tell it. If they were artists, why, she had to give a party and get all her friends to buy their paintings. If they flew small planes on weekends, she had to start pilot’s lessons. If they were political, there she was on street corners thrusting petitions on passersby. Her children were too young to worry about the men themselves, if there was any reason to worry. No, it was her enthusiasm that disturbed them. Her enthusiasm came in spurts, a violent zigzag of hobbies, friends, boyfriends, causes. She always seemed about to fall over the brink of something. She was always going too far. Her voice had an edge to it, as if at any moment it might break. The faster she talked and the brighter her eyes grew, the more fixedly her children stared at her, as if willing her to follow their example of steadiness and dependability. “Oh, what is it with you?” she would ask them. “Why are you such sticks?” And she would give up on them and flounce off to meet her crowd. Rose, the baby, used to wait for her return in the hall, sucking her thumb and stroking an old fur stole that Alicia never wore anymore.

Sometimes Alicia’s enthusiasm turned to her children — an unsettling experience. She took them all to the circus and bought them cotton candy that none of them enjoyed. (They liked to keep themselves tidy.) She yanked them out of school and enrolled them briefly in an experimental learning community where no one wore clothes. The four of them, chilled and miserable, sat hunched in a row in the common room with their hands pressed flat between their bare knees. She dressed as a witch and went trick-or-treating with them, the most mortifying Halloween of their lives, for she got carried away as usual and cackled, croaked, scuttled up to strangers and shook her ragged broom in their faces. She started making mother-daughter outfits for herself and Rose, in strawberry pink with puffed sleeves, but stopped when the sewing machine pierced her finger and made her cry. (She was always getting hurt. It may have been because she rushed so.) Then she turned to something else, and something else, and something else. She believed in change as if it were a religion. Feeling sad? Find a new man! Creditors after you, rent due, children running fevers? Move to a new apartment! During one year, they moved so often that every day after school, Macon had to stand deliberating a while before setting out for home.

In 1950, she decided to marry an engineer who traveled around the world building bridges. “Portugal. Panama. Brazil,” she told the children. “We’ll finally get to see our planet.” They gazed at her stonily. If they had met this man before, they had no recollection of it. Alicia said, “Aren’t you excited?” Later — it may have been after he took them all out to dinner — she said she was sending them to live with their grandparents instead. “Baltimore’s more suitable for children, really,” she said. Did they protest? Macon couldn’t remember. He recalled his childhood as a glassed-in place with grown-ups rushing past, talking at him, making changes, while he himself stayed mute. At any rate, one hot night in June Alicia put them on a plane to Baltimore. They were met by their grandparents, two thin, severe, distinguished people in dark clothes. The children approved of them at once.

After that, they saw Alicia only rarely. She would come breezing into town with an armload of flimsy gifts from tropical countries. Her print dresses struck the children as flashy; her makeup was too vivid, like a foreigner’s. She seemed to find her children comical — their navy-and-white school uniforms, their perfect posture. “My God! How stodgy you’ve grown!” she would cry, evidently forgetting she’d thought them stodgy all along. She said they took after their father. They sensed this wasn’t meant as a compliment. (When they asked what their father had been like, she looked down at her own chin and said, “Oh, Alicia, grow up.”) Later, when her sons married, she seemed to see even more resemblance, for at one time or another she’d apologized to all three daughters-in-law for what they must have to put up with. Like some naughty, gleeful fairy, Macon imagined, she darted in and out of their lives leaving a trail of irresponsible remarks, apparently never considering they might be passed on. “I don’t see how you stay married to the man,” she’d said to Sarah. She herself was now on her fourth husband, a rock-garden architect with a white goatee.

It was true the children in the portrait seemed unrelated to her. They lacked her blue-and-gold coloring; their hair had an ashy cast and their eyes were a steely gray. They all had that distinct center groove from nose to upper lip. And never in a million years would Alicia have worn an expression so guarded and suspicious.

Uncomfortably arranged-looking, they gazed out at the viewer. The two older boys, plump Charles and trim Porter, perched on either arm of the chair in white shirts with wide, flat, open collars. Rose and Macon sat on the seat in matching playsuits. Rose appeared to be in Macon’s lap, although actually she’d been settled between his knees, and Macon had the indrawn tenseness of someone placed in a physically close situation he wasn’t accustomed to. His hair, like the others’, slanted silkily across his forehead. His mouth was thin, almost colorless, and firmed a bit, as if he’d decided to take a stand on something. The set of that mouth echoed now in Macon’s mind. He glanced at it, glanced away, glanced back. It was Ethan’s mouth. Macon had spent twelve years imagining Ethan as a sort of exchange student, a visitor from the outside world, and here it turned out he’d been a Leary all along. What a peculiar thing to recognize at this late date.

He sat up sharply and reached for his trousers, which Rose had cut short across the left thigh and hemmed with tiny, even stitches.

No one else in the world had the slightest idea where he was. Not Julian, not Sarah, not anyone. Macon liked knowing that. He said as much to Rose. “It’s nice to be so unconnected,” he told her. “I wish things could stay that way a while.”

“Why can’t they?”

“Oh, well, you know, someone will call here, Sarah or someone—”

“Maybe we could just not answer the phone.”

“What, let it go on ringing?”

“Why not?”

“Not answer it any time?”

“Most who call me are neighbors,” Rose said. “They’ll pop over in person if they don’t get an answer. And you know the boys: Neither one of them likes dealing with telephones.”

“That’s true,” Macon said.

Julian would come knocking on his door, planning to harangue him for letting his deadline slip past. He’d have to give up. Then Sarah would come for a soup ladle or something, and when he didn’t answer she would ask the neighbors and they’d say he hadn’t shown his face in some time. She would try to get in touch with his family and the telephone would ring and ring, and then she would start to worry. What’s happened? she would wonder. How could I have left him on his own?

Lately, Macon had noticed he’d begun to view Sarah as a form of enemy. He’d stopped missing her and started plotting her remorsefulness. It surprised him to see how quickly he’d made the transition. Was this what two decades of marriage amounted to? He liked to imagine her self-reproaches. He composed and recomposed her apologies. He hadn’t had such thoughts since he was a child, dreaming of how his mother would weep at his funeral.

In the daytime, working at the dining room table, he would hear the telephone and he’d pause, fingers at rest on the typewriter keys. One ring, two rings. Three rings. Rose would walk in with a jar of silver polish. She didn’t even seem to hear. “What if that’s some kind of emergency?” he would ask. Rose would say, “Hmm? Who would call us for an emergency?” and then she would take the silver from the buffet and spread it at the other end of the table.

There had always been some family member requiring Rose’s care. Their grandmother had been bedridden for years before she died, and then their grandfather got so senile, and first Charles and later Porter had failed in their marriages and come back home. So she had enough right here to fill her time. Or she made it enough; for surely it couldn’t be necessary to polish every piece of silver every week. Shut in the house with her all day, Macon noticed how painstakingly she planned the menus; how often she reorganized the utensil drawer; how she ironed even her brothers’ socks, first separating them from the clever plastic grips she used to keep them mated in the washing machine. For Macon’s lunch, she cooked a real meal and served it on regular place mats. She set out cut-glass dishes of pickles and olives that had to be returned to their bottles later on. She dolloped homemade mayonnaise into a tiny bowl.

Macon wondered if it ever occurred to her that she lived an odd sort of life — unemployed, unmarried, supported by her brothers. But what job would she be suited for? he asked himself. Although he could picture her, come to think of it, as the mainstay of some musty, antique law firm or accounting firm. Nominally a secretary, she would actually run the whole business, arranging everything just so on her employer’s desk every morning and allowing no one below her or above her to overlook a single detail. Macon could use a secretary like that. Recalling the gum-chewing redhead in Julian’s disastrous office, he sighed and wished the world had more Roses.

He zipped a page from his typewriter and set it face down on a stack of others. He had finished with his introduction — general instructions like A subway is not an underground train and Don’t say restroom, say toilet—and he’d finished the chapter called “Trying to Eat in England.” Rose had mailed those off for him yesterday. That was his new stratagem: sending his book piece by piece from this undisclosed location. “There’s no return address on this,” Rose told him. “There’s not meant to be,” Macon said. Rose had nodded solemnly. She was the only one in the family who viewed his guidebooks as real writing. She kept a row of them in her bedroom bookcase, alphabetized by country.

In midafternoon, Rose stopped work to watch her favorite soap opera. This was something Macon didn’t understand. How could she waste her time on such trash? She said it was because there was a wonderfully evil woman in it. “There are enough evil people in real life,” Macon told her.

“Yes, but not wonderfully evil.”

“Well, that’s for sure.”

“This one, you see, is so obvious. You know exactly whom to mistrust.”

While she watched, she talked aloud to the characters. Macon could hear her in the dining room. “It isn’t you he’s after, sweetie,” she said, and “Just you wait. Ha!”—not at all her usual style of speech. A commercial broke in, but Rose stayed transfixed where she was. Macon, meanwhile, worked on “Trying to Sleep in England,” typing away in a dogged, uninspired rhythm.

When the doorbell rang, Rose didn’t respond. Edward went mad, barking and scratching at the door and running back to Macon and racing again to the door. “Rose?” Macon called. She said nothing. Finally he stood up, assembled himself on his crutches, and went as quietly as possible to the hall.

Well, it wasn’t Sarah. A glance through the lace curtain told him that much. He opened the door and peered out. “Yes?” he said.

It was Garner Bolt, a neighbor from home — a scrawny little gray man who had made his fortune in cleaning supplies. When he saw Macon, every line in his pert, pointed face turned upward. “There you are!” he said. It was hard to hear him over Edward, who went on barking frantically.

“Why, Garner,” Macon said.

“We worried you had died.”

“You did?”

Macon grabbed at Edward’s collar, but missed.

“Saw the papers piling up on your lawn, mail inside your screen door, didn’t know what to think.”

“Well, I meant to send my sister for those,” Macon said. “I broke my leg, you see.”

“Now, how did you do that?”

“It’s a long story.”

He gave up blocking the door. “Come on in,” he told Garner.

Garner took off his cap, which had a Sherwin-Williams Paint sign across the front. His jacket was part of some long-ago suit, a worn shiny brown, and his overalls were faded to white at the knees. He stepped inside, skirting the dog, and shut the door behind him. Edward’s barks turned to whimpers. “My car is full of your mail,” Garner said. “Brenda said I ought to bring it to your sister and ask if she knew of your whereabouts. Also I promised your friend.”

“What friend?”

“Lady in pedal pushers.”

“I don’t know any lady in pedal pushers,” Macon said. He hadn’t realized pedal pushers still existed, even.

“Saw her standing on your porch, rattling your doorknob. Calling out, ‘Macon? You in there?’ Skinny little lady with hair. Looked to be in her twenties or so.”

“Well, I can’t imagine who it was.”

“Squinching in and shading her eyes.”

“Who could it be?”

“Tripping down the porch steps in her great tall pointy high heels.”

“The dog lady,” Macon said. “Jesus.”

“Kind of young, ain’t she?”

“I don’t even know her!”

“Going round the back of the house to call out, ‘Macon? Macon?’ ”

“I barely met her!”

“It was her that told me about the windle.”

“Windle?”

“Windle to the basement, all broke out. Fall sets in and it’ll turn your furnace on. Waste all kinds of energy.”

“Oh. Well. Yes, I suppose it would,” Macon said.

“We thought you might’ve been burglarized or something.”

Macon led the way to the dining room. “See, what happened,” he said, “I broke my leg and I came to live at my family’s till I could manage for myself again.”

“We didn’t see no ambulance though or nothing.”

“Well, I called my sister.”

“Sister’s a doctor?”

“Just to come and take me to the emergency room.”

“When Brenda broke her hip on the missing step,” Garner said, “she called the ambulance.”

“Well, I called my sister.”

“Brenda called the ambulance.”

They seemed to be stuck.

“I guess I ought to notify the post office about my mail,” Macon said finally. He lowered himself into his chair.

Garner pulled out another chair and sat down with his cap in his hands. He said, “I could just keep on bringing it.”

“No, I’ll have Rose notify them. Lord, all these bills must be coming due and so forth—”

“I could bring it just as easy.”

“Thanks anyway.”

“Why don’t I bring it.”

“To tell the truth,” Macon said, “I’m not so sure I’ll be going back there.”

This hadn’t occurred to him before. He placed his crutches together delicately, like a pair of chopsticks, and laid them on the floor beside his chair. “I might stay on here with my family,” he said.

“And give up that fine little house?”

“It’s kind of big for just one person.”

Garner frowned down at his cap. He put it on his head, changed his mind, and took it off again. “Look,” he said. “Back when me and Brenda were newlyweds we were awful together. Just awful. Couldn’t neither one of us stand the other, I’ll never know how we lasted.”

“We aren’t newlyweds, though,” Macon said. “We’ve been married twenty years.”

“Brenda and me did not speak to each other for very nearly every bit of nineteen and thirty-five,” Garner said. “January to August, nineteen and thirty-five. New Year’s Day till my summer vacation. Not a single blessed word.”

Macon’s attention was caught. “What,” he said, “not even ‘Pass the salt’? ‘Open the window’?”

“Not even that.”

“Well, how did you manage your daily life?”

“Mostly, she stayed over to her sister’s.”

“Oh, then.”

“The morning my vacation began, I felt so miserable I like to died. Thought to myself, ‘What am I doing, anyhow?’ Called long distance to Ocean City and booked a room for two. In those days long distance was some big deal, let me tell you. Took all these operators and so forth and it cost a mint. Then I packed some clothes for me and some clothes for Brenda and went on over to her sister’s house. Her sister says, ‘What do you want?’ She was the type that likes to see dissension. I walk right past her. Find Brenda in the living room, mending hose. Open my suitcase: ‘Look at here. Your sundress for dining in a seafood restaurant,’ I tell her. ‘Two pairs of shorts. Two blouses. Your swimsuit.’ She don’t even look at me. ‘Your bathrobe,’ I say. ‘Your nightgown you wore on our honeymoon.’ Acts like I’m not even there. ‘Brenda,’ I tell her. I say, ‘Brenda, I am nineteen years old and I’ll never be nineteen again. I’ll never be alive again. I mean this is the only life I get to go through, Brenda, so far as I know, and I’ve spent this great large chunk of it sitting alone in an empty apartment too proud to make up, too scared you’d say no, but even if you did say no it can’t be worse than what I got now. I’m the loneliest man in the world, Brenda, so please come to Ocean City with me.’ And Brenda, she lays down her mending and says, ‘Well, since you ask, but it looks to me like you forgot my bathing cap.’ And off we went.”

He sat back triumphantly in his chair. “So,” he said.

“So,” Macon said.

“So you get my point.”

“What point?”

“You have to let her know you need her.”

“See, Garner, I think we’ve gone beyond little things like letting her know I—”

“Don’t take this personally, Macon, but I got to level with you: There’s times when you’ve been sort of frustrating. I’m not talking about myself, mind; I understand. It’s just some of the others in the neighborhood, they’ve been put off a little. Take during your tragedy. I mean people like to offer help at occasions like that — send flowers and visit at the viewing hour and bring casseroles for after the service. Only you didn’t even have a service. Held a cremation, Lord God, somewheres off in Virginia without a word to anyone and come home directly. Peg Everett tells you she’s put you in her prayers and Sarah says, ‘Oh, bless you, Peg,’ but what do you say? You ask Peg if her son might care to take Ethan’s bike off your hands.”

Macon groaned. “Yes,” he said, “I never know how to behave at these times.”

“Then you mow your lawn like nothing has happened.”

“The grass did keep on growing, Garner.”

“We was all dying to do it for you.”

“Well, thanks,” Macon said, “but I enjoyed the work.”

“See what I mean?”

Macon said, “Now, wait. Just to insert some logic into this discussion—”

“That’s exactly what I mean!”

“You started out talking about Sarah. You’ve switched to how I disappoint the neighbors.”

“What’s the difference? You might not know this, Macon, but you come across as a person that charges ahead on your own somewhat. Just look at the way you walk! The way you, like, lunge, lope on down the street with your head running clear in front of your body. If a fellow wants to stop you and, I don’t know, offer his condolences, he’d be liable to get plowed down. Now, I know you care, and you know you care, but how does it look to the others? I ask you! No wonder she up and left.”

“Garner, I appreciate your thoughts on this,” Macon said, “but Sarah’s fully aware that I care. I’m not as tongue-tied as you like to make out. And this isn’t one of those open-shut, can-this-marriage-be-saved deals, either. I mean, you’re just plain goddamned wrong, Garner.”

“Well,” Garner said. He looked down at his cap, and after a moment he jammed it abruptly on his head. “I guess I’ll fetch your mail in, then,” he said.

“Right. Thanks.”

Garner rose to his feet and shuffled out. His leaving alerted Edward, who started barking all over again. There was an empty spell during which Macon looked down at his cast and listened to the soap opera from the living room. Meanwhile Edward whined at the door and paced back and forth, clicking his toenails. Then Garner returned. “Mostly catalogs,” he said, flinging his load on the table. He brought with him the smell of fresh air and dry leaves. “Brenda said we might as well not bother with the newspapers; just throw them out.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” Macon said.

He stood up and they shook hands. Garner’s fingers were crisp and intricately shaped, like crumpled paper. “Thanks for stopping by,” Macon told him.

“Any time,” Garner said, looking elsewhere.

Macon said, “I didn’t mean, you know — I hope I didn’t sound short-tempered.”

“Naw,” Garner said. He lifted an arm and let it drop. “Shoot. Don’t think a thing about it.” Then he turned to leave.

As soon as he did, Macon thought of a flood of other things he should have mentioned. It wasn’t all his fault, he wanted to say. Sarah had a little to do with it too. What Sarah needed was a rock, he wanted to say; someone who wouldn’t crumble. Otherwise, why had she picked him to marry? But he held his peace and watched Garner walk out. There was something pitiable about the two sharp cords that ran down the back of Garner’s neck, cupping a little ditch of mapped brown skin between them.

When his brothers came home from work, the house took on a relaxed, relieved atmosphere. Rose drew the living room curtains and lit a few soft lamps. Charles and Porter changed into sweaters. Macon started mixing his special salad dressing. He believed that if you pulverized the spices first with a marble mortar and pestle, it made all the difference. The others agreed that no one else’s dressing tasted as good as Macon’s. “Since you’ve been gone,” Charles told him, “we’ve had to buy that bottled stuff from the grocery store.” He made it sound as if Macon had been gone a few weeks or so — as if his entire marriage had been just a brief trip elsewhere.

For supper they had Rose’s pot roast, a salad with Macon’s dressing, and baked potatoes. Baked potatoes had always been their favorite food. They had learned to fix them as children, and even after they were big enough to cook a balanced meal they used to exist solely on baked potatoes whenever Alicia left them to their own devices. There was something about the smell of a roasting Idaho that was so cozy, and also, well, conservative, was the way Macon put it to himself. He thought back on years and years of winter evenings: the kitchen windows black outside, the corners furry with gathering darkness, the four of them seated at the chipped enamel table meticulously filling scooped-out potato skins with butter. You let the butter melt in the skins while you mashed and seasoned the floury insides; the skins were saved till last. It was almost a ritual. He recalled that once, during one of their mother’s longer absences, her friend Eliza had served them what she called potato boats — restuffed, not a bit like the genuine article. The children, with pinched, fastidious expressions, had emptied the stuffing and proceeded as usual with the skins, pretending to overlook her mistake. The skins should be crisp. They should not be salted. The pepper should be freshly ground. Paprika was acceptable, but only if it was American. Hungarian paprika had too distinctive a taste. Personally, Macon could do without paprika altogether.

While they ate, Porter discussed what to do with his children. Tomorrow was his weekly visitation night, when he would drive over to Washington, where his children lived with their mother. “The thing of it is,” he said, “eating out in restaurants is so artificial. It doesn’t seem like real food. And anyway, they all three have different tastes. They always argue over where to go. Someone’s on a diet, someone’s turned vegetarian, someone can’t stand food that crunches. And I end up shouting, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, we’re going to Such-and-Such and that’s that!’ So we go and everybody sulks throughout the meal.”

“Maybe you should just not visit,” Charles said reasonably. (He had never had children of his own.)

“Well, of course I want to visit, Charles. I just wish we had some different program. You know what would be ideal? If we could all do something with tools together. I mean like the old days before the divorce, when Danny helped me drain the hot water heater or Susan sat on a board I was sawing. If I could just drop by their house, say, and June and her husband could go to a movie or something, then the kids and I would clean the gutters, weather-strip the windows, wrap the hot water pipes… Well, that husband of hers is no use at all, you can bet he lets his hot water pipes sit around naked. I’d bring my own tools, even. We’d have a fine time! Susan could fix us cocoa. Then at the end of the evening I’d pack up my tools and off I’d go, leaving the house in perfect repair. Why, June ought to jump at the chance.”

“Then why not suggest it,” Macon said.

“Nah. She’d never go for it. She’s so impractical. I said to her last week, I said, ‘You know that front porch step is loose? Springing up from its nails every time you walk on it wrong.’ She said, ‘Oh, Lord, yes, it’s been that way,’ as if Providence had decreed it. As if nothing could be done about it. They’ve got leaves in the gutter from way last winter but leaves are natural, after all; why go against nature. She’s so impractical.”

Porter himself was the most practical man Macon had ever known. He was the only Leary who understood money. His talent with money was what kept the family firm solvent — if just barely. It wasn’t a very wealthy business. Grandfather Leary had founded it in the early part of the century as a tinware factory, and turned to bottle caps in 1915. The Bottle Cap King, he called himself, and was called in his obituary, but in fact most bottle caps were manufactured by Crown Cork and always had been; Grandfather Leary ran a distant second or third. His only son, the Bottle Cap Prince, had barely assumed his place in the firm before quitting to volunteer for World War II — a far more damaging enthusiasm, it turned out, than any of Alicia’s. After he was killed the business limped along, never quite succeeding and never quite failing, till Porter bounced in straight from college and took over the money end. Money to Porter was something almost chemical — a volatile substance that reacted in various interesting ways when combined with other substances. He wasn’t what you’d call mercenary; he didn’t want the money for its own sake but for its intriguing possibilities, and in fact when his wife divorced him he handed over most of his property without a word of complaint.

It was Porter who ran the company, pumping in money and ideas. Charles, more mechanical, dealt with the production end. Macon had done a little of everything when he worked there, and had wasted away with boredom doing it, for there wasn’t really enough to keep a third man busy. It was only for symmetry’s sake that Porter kept urging him to return. “Tell you what, Macon,” he said now, “why not hitch a ride down with us tomorrow and look over your old stomping ground?”

“No, thanks,” Macon told him.

“Plenty of room for your crutches in back.”

“Maybe some other time.”

They followed Rose around while she washed the dishes. She didn’t like them to help because she had her own method, she said. She moved soundlessly through the old-fashioned kitchen, replacing dishes in the high wooden cabinets. Charles took the dog out; Macon couldn’t manage his crutches in the spongy backyard. And Porter pulled the kitchen shades, meanwhile lecturing Rose on how the white surfaces reflected the warmth back into the room now that the nights were cooler. Rose said, “Yes, Porter, I know all that,” and lifted the salad bowl to the light and examined it a moment before she put it away.

They watched the news, dutifully, and then they went out to the sun porch and sat at their grandparents’ card table. They played something called Vaccination — a card game they’d invented as children, which had grown so convoluted over the years that no one else had the patience to learn it. In fact, more than one outsider had accused them of altering the rules to suit the circumstances. “Now, just a minute,” Sarah had said, back when she’d still had hopes of figuring it out. “I thought you said aces were high.”

“They are.”

“So that means—”

“But not when they’re drawn from the deck.”

“Aha! Then why was the one that Rose drew counted high?”

“Well, she did draw it after a deuce, Sarah.”

“Aces drawn after a deuce are high?”

“No, aces drawn after a number that’s been drawn two times in a row just before that.”

Sarah had folded her fan of cards and laid them face down — the last of the wives to give up.

Macon was in quarantine and had to donate all his cards to Rose. Rose moved her chair over next to his and played off his points while he sat back, scratching the cat behind her ears. Opposite him, in the tiny dark windowpanes, he saw their reflections — hollow-eyed and severely cheekboned, more interesting versions of themselves.

The telephone in the living room gave a nipped squeak and then a full ring. Nobody seemed to notice. Rose laid a king on Porter’s queen and Porter said, “Stinker.” The telephone rang again and then again. In the middle of the fourth ring, it fell silent. “Hypodermic,” Rose told Porter, and she topped the king with an ace.

“You’re a real stinker, Rose.”

In the portrait on the end wall, the Leary children gazed out with their veiled eyes. It occurred to Macon that they were sitting in much the same positions here this evening: Charles and Porter on either side of him, Rose perched in the foreground. Was there any real change? He felt a jolt of something very close to panic. Here he still was! The same as ever! What have I gone and done? he wondered, and he swallowed thickly and looked at his own empty hands.