The Accidental Tourist

Sir?”

He came to a stop.

“I suspect they may have given you my crutches,” she said.

He looked down at the crutches. They were, of course, not his. They were diminutive — hardly more than child-sized. Any other time he would have grasped the situation right off, but today it had somehow escaped him. Any other time he would have swung into action — called for the manager, pointed out the restaurant’s lack of concern for the handicapped. Today he only stood hanging his head, waiting for someone to help him.

nine

Back when Grandfather Leary’s mind first began to wander, no one had guessed what was happening. He was such an upright, firm old man. He was all sharp edges. Definite. “Listen,” he told Macon, “by June the twelfth I’ll need my passport from the safe deposit box. I’m setting sail for Lassaque.”

“Lassaque, Grandfather?”

“If I like it I may just stay there.”

“But where is Lassaque?”

“It’s an island off the coast of Bolivia.”

“Ah,” Macon said. And then, “Well, wait a minute…”

“It interests me because the Lassaquans have no written language. In fact if you bring any reading matter they confiscate it. They say it’s black magic.”

“But I don’t think Bolivia has a coast,” Macon said.

“They don’t even allow, say, a checkbook with your name on it. Before you go ashore you have to soak the label off your deodorant. You have to get your money changed into little colored wafers.”

“Grandfather, is this a joke?”

“A joke! Look it up if you don’t believe me.” Grandfather Leary checked his steel pocket watch, then wound it with an assured, back-and-forth motion. “An intriguing effect of their illiteracy,” he said, “is their reverence for the elderly. This is because the Lassaquans’ knowledge doesn’t come from books but from living; so they hang on every word from those who have lived the longest.”

“I see,” Macon said, for now he thought he did see. “ We hang on your words, too,” he said.

“That may be so,” his grandfather told him, “but I still intend to see Lassaque before it’s corrupted.”

Macon was silent a moment. Then he went over to the bookcase and selected a volume from his grandfather’s set of faded brown encyclopedias. “Give it here,” his grandfather said, holding out both hands. He took the book greedily and started riffling through the pages. A smell of mold floated up. “Laski,” he muttered, “Lassalle, Lassaw…” He lowered the book and frowned. “I don’t…” he said. He returned to the book. “Lassalle, Lassaw…”

He looked confused, almost frightened. His face all at once collapsed — a phenomenon that had startled Macon on several occasions lately. “I don’t understand,” he whispered to Macon. “I don’t understand.”

“Well,” Macon said, “maybe it was a dream. Maybe it was one of those dreams that seem real.”

“Macon, this was no dream. I know the place. I’ve bought my ticket. I’m sailing June the twelfth.”

Macon felt a strange coldness creeping down his back.

Then his grandfather became an inventor — spoke of various projects he was tinkering with, he said, in his basement. He would sit in his red leather armchair, his suit and white shirt immaculate, his black dress shoes polished to a glare, his carefully kept hands folded in his lap, and he would announce that he’d just finished welding together a motorcycle that would pull a plow. He would earnestly discuss crankshafts and cotter pins, while Macon — though terribly distressed — had to fight down a bubble of laughter at the thought of some leather-booted Hell’s Angel grinding away at a wheatfield. “If I could just get the kinks ironed out,” his grandfather said, “I’d have my fortune made. We’ll all be rich.” For he seemed to believe he was poor again, struggling to earn his way in the world. His motorized radio that followed you from room to room, his floating telephone, his car that came when you called it — wouldn’t there be some application for those? Wouldn’t the right person pay an arm and a leg?

Having sat out on the porch for one entire June morning, studiously pinching the creases of his trousers, he announced that he had perfected a new type of hybrid: flowers that closed in the presence of tears. “Florists will be mobbing me,” he said. “Think of the dramatic effect at funerals!” He was working next on a cross between basil and tomatoes. He said the spaghetti-sauce companies would make him a wealthy man.

By then, all three of his grandsons had left home and his wife had died; so Rose alone took care of him. Her brothers began to worry about her. They took to dropping by more and more often. Then Rose said, “You don’t have to do this, you know.”

They said, “What? Do what? What are you talking about?” And other such things.

“If you’re coming so often on account of Grandfather, it’s not necessary. I’m managing fine, and so is he. He’s very happy.”

“Happy!”

“I honestly believe,” Rose said, “that he’s having the richest and most… colorful, really, time of his life. I’ll bet even when he was young, he never enjoyed himself this much.”

They saw what she meant. Macon felt almost envious, once he thought about it. And later, when that period was over, he was sorry it had been so short. For their grandfather soon passed to pointless, disconnected mumbles, and then to a staring silence, and at last he died.

Early Wednesday morning, Macon dreamed Grandfather Leary woke him and asked where the center punch was. “What are you talking about?” Macon said. “I never had your center punch.”

“Oh, Macon,” his grandfather said sadly, “can’t you tell that I’m not saying what I mean?”

“What do you mean, then?”

“You’ve lost the center of your life, Macon.”

“Yes, I know that,” Macon said, and it seemed that Ethan stood just slightly to the left, his bright head nearly level with the old man’s.

But his grandfather said, “No, no,” and made an impatient, shaking-off gesture and went over to the bureau. (In this dream, Macon was not in the sun porch but upstairs in his boyhood bedroom, with the bureau whose cut- glass knobs Rose had stolen long ago to use as dishes for her dolls.) “It’s Sarah I mean,” his grandfather said, picking up a hairbrush. “Where is Sarah?”

“She’s left me, Grandfather.”

“Why, Sarah’s the best of all of us!” his grandfather said. “You want to sit in this old house and rot, boy? It’s time we started digging out! How long are we going to stay fixed here?”

Macon opened his eyes. It wasn’t morning yet. The sun porch was fuzzy as blotting paper.

There was still a sense of his grandfather in the air. His little shaking-off gesture was one that Macon had forgotten entirely; it had reappeared on its own. But Grandfather Leary would never have said in real life what he’d said in the dream. He had liked Sarah well enough, but he seemed to view wives as extraneous, and he’d attended each of his grandsons’ weddings with a resigned and tolerant expression. He wouldn’t have thought of any woman as a “center.” Except, perhaps Macon thought suddenly, his own wife, Grandmother Leary. After whose death — why, yes, immediately after — his mind had first begun to wander.

Macon lay awake till dawn. It was a relief to hear the first stirrings overhead. Then he got up and shaved and dressed and sent Edward out for the paper. By the time Rose came downstairs, he had started the coffee perking. This seemed to make her anxious. “Did you use the morning beans or the evening beans?” she asked.

“The morning beans,” he assured her. “Everything’s under control.”

She moved around the kitchen raising shades, setting the table, opening a carton of eggs. “So today’s the day you get your cast off,” she said.

“Looks that way.”

“And this afternoon’s your New York trip.”

“Oh, well…” he said vaguely, and then he asked if she wanted a bacon coupon he’d spotted in the