Anne Tyler - Celestial Navigation

But it was mid-November, about four o’clock one morning, when the knock came on my door. I had been expecting it for so long that it hardly seemed real. I ran downstairs still fastening buttons and carrying my belt looped over my wrist, and there was Mary as calm as always, smiling up at me. She had on the blue maternity dress that she’d worn day in and day out for the majority of her married life, and over that the old black coat that didn’t meet across her stomach. “Are you all right?” I asked her.

“I’m fine.”

“How close are the pains?”

“Every four minutes.”

“Jeremy had better hurry,” I said.

“Oh, he’s not coming.”

“Not coming?”

“I didn’t wake him.”

I stared at her.

“Well, I do have you to help,” Mary said. “It’s not as if I have to manage the taxi any more.”

“Mary, he wouldn’t want to miss being with you now for all the world,” I told her. If there was one thing I was sure of, that was it. Why, that man would move heaven and earth for her! You have only to look at him to see how much he loves her. But there stood Mary shaking her head, planted squarely in front of me like little Abbie when she has made up her mind about something. “You don’t know how hard it is for him,” she said.

I did know. I probably knew better than she did, but I also believe that everyone has a right to take his own leaps. Of course, I didn’t tell Mary that. She has her rights too. And there might be other reasons I had no inkling of, so all I did was nod and bend to pick up her overnight case. “Suit yourself,” I said. “You got everything?”

“I think so.”

“Let’s go, then,” I said. It wasn’t even necessary to call Mr. Somerset — not with Jeremy at home.

But I felt that we were making a mistake, all the way to the hospital. Mary didn’t, apparently. She just looked out the window and talked about ordinary things — the house, the children. I have to admit I was relieved about that . I don’t like hearing too much of people’s personal lives. Sometimes she stopped speaking and her face would flatten and her eyes would get fixed on a point far away. That was the only sign she gave of being in labor. It wasn’t at all like in the movies, thank God. Then after a minute she would relax and go on with what she was saying before. “I wanted to get Pippi’s snowsuit out. That nylon jacket she has is not—”

“I’ll see to it.”

“I believe it’s in the trunk. It’s that old one of Abbie’s, you remember.”

“Yes, yes.”

I had never realized how long some traffic lights can take.

“And Darcy needs a note of permission, she’s going on a field trip.”

“I’ll write her one in the waiting room.”

“But how will you sign it? How will they know who Miss Vinton is?”

I had assumed I would simply forge Mary’s name, but since that didn’t seem to have occurred to her I came up with another answer. “I’ll give it to Jeremy to sign,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” Mary said. She turned and looked at me. Why did she suddenly become so beautiful? The corners of her mouth lifted, and she brushed her hair up off her neck and tipped her head back until it rested on the back of the seat. “Jeremy can do it,” she said. Then she closed her eyes, and the light changed to green. I nearly stripped all the gears, I was so anxious to get us moving again.

At the hospital they whisked Mary away in a wheelchair, and I went into a waiting room I found at the end of the hall. It was huge and barren-looking, with linoleum floors and vinyl furniture and a stiff bouquet of hothouse flowers on a coffee table. On one couch a bald man was stretched out asleep. I took a chair at the other end of the room from him, turned on a lamp, and wrote a note on the back of a shopping list: “To whom it may concern, Darcy Tell has my permission to go on a field trip today. Signed,” and I left a blank space for Jeremy’s signature. Then I sat back and stared at the blank space. I kept wondering if I should just go and phone him. Wouldn’t Mary be glad, after all, once he had come? I know that Jeremy is supposed to be the weak one in that couple but he might surprise some people: if you are so scared of so many things, sometimes you turn out even stronger than ordinary men. I took a dime from my purse, but then I reconsidered. I haven’t lived fourteen years on the edges of other people’s lives for nothing . I could never interfere like that. So I stayed in my seat. I spent the next hour chain-smoking and reading torn Life magazines whose photos seemed very dim and long ago, the way they always do in waiting rooms. Then someone said, “Miss Vinton?” and I looked up to find a doctor dressed in green standing in the doorway. “Are you Miss Vinton? Mrs. Pauling sent me to tell you,” he said. “She has a boy.”

I said, “A boy? Are you sure?”

Which made him smile, but you can’t really blame me. The first three babies were girls: Abigail, Philippa, and Hannah. They’d been planning for an Edward so long that the name was getting stale. I think all of us had given up hope. I said, “My, won’t Jeremy be surprised? I can’t wait to tell him!” but the doctor held up his hand and said, “That was the rest of her message. She’ll call her husband herself, she says. She wants to.”

“Oh, of course,” I said. “I didn’t think.”

I watched him walk off again. Then I looked down at the warm dime in the palm of my hand. Other people save dimes for weeks. They spend hours in the phone booth as soon as the baby is born, telling grandparents and aunts and uncles and friends. Who could I tell? As far as I knew Jeremy had one solitary sister left from all his family — Amanda, who kept her distance. (She never did get on with Mary.) I couldn’t see waking her at five-thirty in the morning. The only friends were the women Mary sat in the park with, behind a row of strollers. I didn’t even know their last names and possibly Mary didn’t either. So in the end I put the dime away again, and got up to leave. The bald man was still asleep on the couch. I hadn’t seen a single husband pacing the floor in his shirtsleeves. Things rarely work out the way the magazines would lead you to expect.

By the time I got home it was almost light, and the children were up. They keep the most amazing hours. Darcy was in the kitchen fixing cereal for the little ones, Abbie and Pippi were quarreling in the parlor, and Hannah was sitting in her high chair sucking her thumb. “Heavens,” I said to Darcy. “Who’s watching over you? Where’s everyone else?”

“In bed, I guess,” Darcy said.

“Didn’t Jeremy tell you you have a baby brother?”

“No.”

She was eleven at the time — a silent age.

“Well, you do,” I said.

“Well, nobody told us.”

“I believe they’re naming him Edward.”

“I knew that,” she said. “I’m the one that chose it.”

I’d forgotten. They let her choose all the names, to make her feel a part of things. It’s lucky they didn’t end up with a pack of Hepzibahs and Lancelots. I said, “Well, I think that’s a very fine choice, Darcy.”

“When do we get to see him?”

“In a few days.”

She poured milk into the cereal bowls and I went out to the parlor to separate the two who were quarreling. “All right, what’s going on here?” I said. It was something to do with a pack of bath salts. I put the pack on the mantel, wiped Pippi’s tears, and buttoned Abbie’s pajamas. Meanwhile, I was wondering who was in charge. I seemed to be the only grownup around. I still had my mackintosh on. I was stained with tears and pink bath salts, and in two hours I was due at the bookstore. Not that I would have minded staying with the children. I have offered to, for every birth. “Let Jeremy go on with his work,” I always tell Mary. “I’ll take some of my vacation time.” She says, “No, goodness, he can manage.” Now I couldn’t see a sign of him. I got the two girls seated with their cereal and then I went into the dining room and tapped on Jeremy’s door. He and Mary share his mother’s old room. But there was no answer, and finally I looked inside. All I found was an empty bed, unmade. Bedclothes trailing across the floor. I shut the door and went back to the kitchen. “All right, children,” I said. “It looks like we’re the ones holding the fort.” I passed out paper napkins, and fixed them hot cocoa while they sat eating around the kitchen table. They made quite a picture — Darcy so blond, the others brown-headed and round-faced and solemn. The younger ones were fairly close together in age — six, four, and two — and that morning it seemed to me that the littlest was much too little to have a new baby coming in. She was drinking from one of those training cups with a spout. Every time she took the cup out of her mouth she replaced it instantly with her thumb. Abbie and Pippi continued to fight. Darcy started bossing them around — a bad habit she has. Meanwhile Buddy came through, our current medical student, and grabbed an apple on his way out, and Mr. Somerset appeared but left when he saw the crowd. “Mr. Somerset! Wait,” I said. “Have you seen Jeremy?”