“Max? This is Annie. Can I come there?”

She heard a child’s voice in the background.

“I don’t know what to do…” she muttered to herself. Max heard her.

“Come right away,” he said. “But I can drive and get you.”

“No. I’ll get there.”

Chapter 14

Nothing that Annie had seen secured her attention so much as Max Shore, his wife and child, and the way they lived in their three rooms among their books, their cooking pots, their child’s battered toys. Sometimes Eva was late for work and left before making their bed. From the studio couch in the living room, Annie, drinking a cup of coffee, watched Max at this task through the open door. When the bed was made, the day began even though Thomas had been up for hours by then, building and kicking over towers of blocks, or rolling canned goods across the narrow kitchen floor.

They were kind to her. Eva tended to lower her voice when she spoke to Annie, as though she were convalescent. So she must have seemed to Eva, she knew. Her sense of her own strangeness grew apace with the efforts the Shores made to include her in their life.

She was observing a marriage; in the midst of it, its essential nature eluded her. She waited for a revelation. It never came. Thomas had his routines, as fixed as rituals. His parents went about their tasks without consulting each other. They took turns cooking, but Max was responsible for disposing of the garbage and shopping for groceries, Eva saw to the laundry. On Saturdays, they cleaned the house together. In the evening, Max played chamber music on their record player. Eva called it chamberpot music. She preferred Paul Robeson or folk singers, Benny Goodman or Fats Waller.

Thomas had violent tantrums during which he rolled on the floor like an infant madman, screaming till he choked. At other times, he was a self-absorbed little boy who amused himself by piling objects on other objects. Sometimes he lay in his father’s lap, sucking his thumb, staring dreamily up at the ceiling. Eva fed him his supper, her elbow on the table, a spoon thrust out toward Thomas’s open mouth. She drank a whiskey neat while she was feeding him, talking idly to Max about the day’s events. When Thomas flung a jar of applesauce into the air, he observed his mother implacably as she exhorted him. Mild arguments occurred about domestic matters—a leaking faucet, a chair leg that needed mending. Except for the child’s rages, the climate of life was lenient, forbearing. Yet Annie felt a mystery, some concealed drama of temperaments, an excess of emotion that was not so much dissembled as it was restrained. It was not to be found in the hard-surfaced quality of political talk, and she could only speculate about what went on behind the Shores’ closed bedroom door at night. She struggled against such speculation, but it won out, awaiting her every turn of thought.