“She hid it. Hey, I saw a rat on my way over here,” he said. “Crossing the road in broad daylight. That’s what’s new. Homeless, on account of they filled in the dump. It was looking sickly. You ever see a rat dancing in broad daylight?”
No, she never had. They sat out on the lawn for another five minutes, saying nothing, Gordy pulling up little bits of grass, the two of them making small adjustments on the lawn so that they would stay in the shade, until Saul and Harold returned, both of them soaked in sweat and smelling like dogs, and Saul loaded Gordy and his bicycle back into the car and drove him home again, this time without incident. By that time, it was twelve minutes after two.
Seven
During the fall and winter, Mary Esther, whom they often called Emmy now, grew so rapidly and easily that her parents could not always believe their good fortune in having such a child. She was a mild, sweet-tempered baby, given to smiles and careful listening with her eyes wide open and her head slightly tilted in concentration. She only seemed to cry when there was something specific she wanted — food, or a diaper change, or sleep. Her screaming always appeared to have a rational purpose. She did not cry — as Delia informed Saul that he had done — for no particular reason, or for the pleasure of sheer temperamental discharge. When Emmy was eight months old, in November, her verbal sounds already seemed to be on the verge of becoming words, and she looked at her parents with such intelligence and full comprehension that at certain times Saul felt his privacy violated. Through some means that he could not imagine, his daughter had already acquired — he was certain of this — an ability to read his mind.
The house with loose brown aluminum siding was now too small for the three of them. Saul and Patsy were getting in one another’s way. That physical congestion had been a pleasure when they were first married, but now it was not. And the problem with mice in the basement was no longer a pretext for comedy. Besides, they did not want to be renters anymore to a landlord like Mr. Munger, the unsuccessful Pentecostal evangelist whose raptures, it was said, were unconvincing. To make ends meet, he worked as an electrician. He had come to fix the ungrounded humidifier and talked without conviction about Jesus.
During the time that they had been in Five Oaks, the farm fields near their house had been purchased by a developer from Ann Arbor, and on all sides of their rental property, apartments and condos and housing projects were springing up in fields where cows had once grazed and soybeans had been planted. Mr. Munger had not yet sold his property to the developers, but it was just a matter of time before he did. After a week of indecision, Saul and Patsy finally purchased a house on Whitefeather Road two miles closer to downtown than their rental house had been. A two-story economy-sized colonial on a good-sized lot in a development called The Uplands, the house had large front and back yards and a shady tree in front, and with some contributions from Patsy’s parents for the down payment, they had calculated that they could afford it, though just barely. Patsy found it curious, or mortifying, that she, a loan officer at the bank, had had to apply for a loan in exactly the way everyone else did.
They moved in in October. Saul took two personal days off from teaching American history to help Patsy unpack their earthly possessions — the furniture, the kitchen utensils, the posters, the board games, including the Scrabble set — and arrange the house. Patsy herself had taken two days’ leave from the bank branch where she now worked. Emmy’s room on the second floor looked north, where, in the distance, the Wolverine Outlet Mall was still visible, as was the Bruckner Buick plasticene polar bear, which their daughter also loved to see from the car. In the mornings, she would stand up in her crib and gaze out the window at the Bruckner Buick blimp balloon, which was usually observable on clear days to the east of the outlet mall.
After her first word, “Wzzat,” and her second word, “Mama,” her next word was “Dadda.” Her seventh or eighth word was “Gordy.”
Gordy had continued to show up intermittently on Saul and Patsy’s front lawn when they still lived in the rented house with loose brown aluminum siding. At first they were alarmed at his arrivals and would try to get him to go home. After four or five visits, however, they began to get used to him. Sometimes they gave him odd jobs to do, which he would either try to perform or not, depending on his mood and skills. A few times they paid him, and he looked at the money they handed to him with disbelief and incomprehension. He never thanked them or expressed any gratitude.
They had both given up trying to discover the purpose of his visits. After asking him what he wanted or what they could do for him and receiving no comprehensible answer, they didn’t persist. Saul called Brenda Bagley, and if she happened to be at home, she would tell him to send Gordy back if he was being a pest. He wasn’t a pest, exactly, but you couldn’t ask him anymore why he was there, because the question had become metaphysical. It was like trying to ask a dog why it followed you around.
Once they moved to their new house in The Uplands, however, they thought they were finally rid of him. It wasn’t as if they had moved in order to ditch him, but they were sure that the new location would put an end to his visits.
Yet somehow Gordy, who had dropped out of high school by this time, found out where they had moved to, and one Saturday morning in November, there he was again, standing under the large tree, the linden, that the developers had spared in their yard. In his characteristic way, Gordy was staring at the house, then at the sky, then at the ground, then at the house again. Their local acned Bartleby. He hadn’t come on his bicycle; The Uplands happened to be on the Five Oaks city busline route. Saul thought of calling the police to complain of Gordy as a trespasser, and then he imagined being laughed at for his complaint. He would have to take action himself.
He strolled out to the front yard. “You found us,” he said.
Gordy nodded.
“How did you manage to do that?” Saul inquired.
“I seen your car in the driveway,” Gordy informed him. “That white Chevy. That I rode in.” Saul went back into the house and left Gordy outside. He was not about to invite him in, what with the new floors, and the carpeting, and the carefully placed furniture. He wasn’t about to ask him to do anything.
At times Patsy would rise in the morning and walk into the nursery, only to find Mary Esther standing in her crib and, with a rapt expression, gazing through the window at the young man on the autumn lawn. Was he shivering? Patsy thought that they should call the police and have Gordy arrested for trespassing and stalking and harassment and just for making a general nuisance of himself — Gordy’s visits bothered and upset her — but Saul disagreed, saying that if they ignored him, he would gradually go away, and besides, if they had him arrested, he would still eventually find his way back. What were they going to do, get a court injunction, or call Gordy’s aunt again? No, Saul claimed, despite what he had once thought about Gordy — his mindlessness, his blank stares, the episode with the gun — he would cause them no trouble. Gordy meant them no harm, it seemed. He was just loitering without intent. It was an emotional thing with him. Sooner or later he would give it up.
Gradually they forgot about him even when he was there, the way you forget about your shadow. When they did remember to take notice of him, they would give him cookies, which he would sometimes eat.
As fall turned into winter, and Emmy gained weight and began to make herself crawl and achieved her first moves to an upright position, time seemed to pass more rapidly than Saul and Patsy had thought it would. Their jobs and their new house and their daughter took all their attention, and the presence of Gordy now and then on their front lawn gradually became an accepted part of their lives, a feature they recognized, anomalous though it was, as a given. Gordy Himmelman stood blankly on Saul and Patsy’s lawn, wearing his raffish visored cap. When they were working in front, raking leaves, he would shadow them and sometimes, if he could, help them out. “Every couple has something freakish in their lives that they have to accept,” Patsy said one evening at dinner, looking out at Gordy, standing there in the driveway as night fell and snow drifted slowly down. “He’s ours.”