The Accidental Tourist (16 page)

“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.