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
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
