For the first few hours they tried to keep him in a separate part of the house, which of course was hopeless. He had to follow Macon wherever he went, and also he developed an immediate interest in Alexander. Lacking a ball, he kept dropping small objects at Alexander’s feet and then stepping back to look expectantly into his face. “He wants to play fetch,” Macon explained. Alexander picked up a matchbook and tossed it, angling his arm behind him in a prissy way. While Edward went tearing after it, Macon made a mental note to buy a ball first thing in the morning and teach Alexander how to throw.
Alexander watched TV and Edward snoozed on the couch beside him, curled like a little blond cashew nut with a squinty, blissful expression on his face. Alexander hugged him and buried his face in Edward’s ruff. “Watch it,” Macon told him. He had no idea what to do if Alexander started wheezing. But Alexander didn’t wheeze. By bedtime he just had a stuffy nose, and he usually had that anyhow.
Macon liked to believe that Alexander didn’t know he and Muriel slept together. “Well, that’s just plain ridiculous,” Muriel said. “Where does he imagine you spend the night — on the living room couch?”
“Maybe,” he said. “I’m sure he has some explanation. Or maybe he doesn’t. All I’m saying is, we shouldn’t hit him in the face with it. Let him think what he wants to think.”
So every morning, Macon rose and dressed before Alexander woke. He started fixing breakfast and then roused him. “Seven o’clock! Time to get up! Go call your mother, will you?” In the past, he learned, Muriel had often stayed in bed while Alexander woke up on his own and got ready for school. Sometimes he left the house while she was still asleep. Macon thought that was shocking. Now he made a full breakfast, and he insisted that Muriel sit at the table with them. Muriel claimed breakfast made her sick to her stomach. Alexander said it made him sick, too, but Macon said that was just too bad. “Ninety-eight percent of all A students eat eggs in the morning,” he said (making it up as he went along). “Ninety-nine percent drink milk.” He untied his apron and sat down. “Are you listening, Alexander?”
“I’ll throw up if I drink milk.”
“That’s all in your head.”
“Tell him, Mama!”
“He throws up,” Muriel said gloomily. She sat hunched at the table in her long silk robe, resting her chin on one hand. “It’s something to do with enzymes,” she said. She yawned. Her hair, growing out of its permanent at last, hung down her back in even ripples like the crimps on a bobby pin.
Alexander walked to school with Buddy and Sissy Ebbetts, two tough-looking older children from across the street. Muriel either went back to bed or dressed and left for one or another of her jobs, depending on what day it was. Then Macon did the breakfast dishes and took Edward out. They didn’t go far; it was much too cold. The few people they encountered walked rapidly, with jerky steps, like characters in a silent film. They knew Macon by sight now and would allow their eyes to flick over his face as they passed — a gesture like a nod — but they didn’t speak. Edward ignored them. Other dogs could come up and sniff him and he wouldn’t even break stride. Mr. Marcusi, unloading crates outside Marcusi’s Grocery, would pause to say, “Well, hey there, stubby. Hey there, tub of lard.” Edward, smugly oblivious, marched on. “Weirdest animal I ever saw,” Mr. Marcusi called after Macon. “Looks like something that was badly drawn.” Macon always laughed.
He was beginning to feel easier here. Singleton Street still unnerved him with its poverty and its ugliness, but it no longer seemed so dangerous. He saw that the hoodlums in front of the Cheery Moments Carry-Out were pathetically young and shabby — their lips chapped, their sparse whiskers ineptly shaved, an uncertain, unformed look around their eyes. He saw that once the men had gone off to work, the women emerged full of good intentions and swept their front walks, picked up the beer cans and potato chip bags, even rolled back their coat sleeves and scrubbed their stoops on the coldest days of the year. Children raced past like so many scraps of paper blowing in the wind — mittens mismatched, noses running — and some woman would brace herself on her broom to call, “You there! I see you! Don’t think I don’t know you’re skipping school!” For this street was always backsliding, Macon saw, always falling behind, but was caught just in time by these women with their carrying voices and their pushy jaws.
Returning to Muriel’s house, he would warm himself with a cup of coffee. He would set his typewriter on the kitchen table and sit down with his notes and brochures. The window next to the table had large, cloudy panes that rattled whenever the wind blew. Something about the rattling sound reminded him of train travel.
He would telephone hotels, motels, Departments of Commerce, and his travel agent, arranging future trips. He would note these arrangements in the datebook that Julian gave him every Christmas — a Businessman’s Press product, spiral-bound. In the back were various handy reference charts that he liked to thumb through. The birthstone for January was a garnet; for February, an amethyst. One square mile equaled 2.59 square kilometers. The proper gift for a first anniversary was paper. He would ponder these facts dreamily. It seemed to him that the world was full of equations; that there must be an answer for everything, if only you knew how to set forth the questions.
Then it was lunchtime, and he would put away his work and make himself a sandwich or heat a can of soup, let Edward have a quick run in the tiny backyard. After that he liked to putter around the house a bit. There was so much that needed fixing! And all of it somebody else’s, not his concern, so he could approach it lightheartedly. He whistled while he probed the depth of a crack. He hummed as he toured the basement, shaking his head at the disarray. Upstairs he found a three-legged bureau leaning on a can of tomatoes, and he told Edward, “Scandalous!” in a tone of satisfaction.
It occurred to him — as he oiled a hinge, as he tightened a doorknob — that the house reflected amazingly little of Muriel. She must have lived here six or seven years by now, but still the place had an air of transience. Her belongings seemed hastily placed, superimposed, not really much to do with her. This was a disappointment, for Macon was conscious while he worked of his intense curiosity about her inner workings. Sanding a drawer, he cast a guilty eye upon its contents but found only fringed shawls and yellowed net gloves from the forties — clues to other people’s lives, not hers.
But what was it he wanted to know? She was an open book, would tell him anything — more than he felt comfortable with. Nor did she attempt to hide her true nature, which was certainly far from perfect. It emerged that she had a nasty temper, a shrewish tongue, and a tendency to fall into spells of self-disgust from which no one could rouse her for hours. She was inconsistent with Alexander to the point of pure craziness — one minute overprotective, the next minute callous and offhand. She was obviously intelligent, but she counteracted that with the most global case of superstition Macon had ever witnessed. Hardly a day passed when she didn’t tell him some dream in exhaustive detail and then sift through it for omens. (A dream of white ships on a purple sea came true the very next morning, she claimed, when a door-to-door salesman showed up in a purple sweater patterned with little white boats. “The very same purple! Same shape of ship!” Macon only wondered what kind of salesman would wear such clothing.) She believed in horoscopes and tarot cards and Ouija boards. Her magic number was seventeen. In a previous incarnation she’d been a fashion designer, and she swore she could recall at least one of her deaths. (“We think she’s passed on,” they told the doctor as he entered, and the doctor unwound his muffler.) She was religious in a blurry, nondenominational way and had no doubt whatsoever that God was looking after her personally — ironic, it seemed to Macon, in view of how she’d had to fight for every little thing she wanted.
He knew all this and yet, finding a folded sheet of paper on the counter, he opened it and devoured her lurching scrawl as if she were a stranger.
No, not that. Not that.
Then it was three o’clock and Alexander was home from school, letting himself in with a key that he wore on a shoelace around his neck. “Macon?” he’d call tentatively. “Is that you out there?” He was scared of burglars. Macon said, “It’s me.” Edward leapt up and went running for his ball. “How was your day?” Macon always asked.
“Oh, okay.”
But Macon had the feeling that school never went very well for Alexander. He came out of it with his face more pinched than ever, his glasses thick with fingerprints. He reminded Macon of a home-work paper that had been erased and rewritten too many times. His clothes, on the other hand, were as neat as when he’d left in the morning. Oh, those clothes! Spotless polo shirts with a restrained brown pinstripe, matching brown trousers
