Anne Tyler - Celestial Navigation

Then to top it off, Mother’s place still seemed deserted. The only lit window was on the second floor. There was the same echo when we rang the doorbell. Laura said, “Oh, what if we’re locked out? Where will we stay?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I told her. “This house is teeming with boarders, if nothing else, and you can see that someone’s been and taken our suitcases in.” For the vestibule was bare again. Nothing remained but the flowerpot.

I put my finger on the doorbell and held it there. Eventually a light came on in the hallway, and then we saw a shadow behind the lace curtain. Mr. Somerset, hitching up his suspenders as he shuffled toward us. I knew him by his bent-kneed walk and his rounded shoulders. He was as familiar to me as some elderly uncle, though no uncle I ever asked for. “Now this,” I told Mother once, “is what I mean about your boarders, Mother: Mr. Somerset is a depressing old man and I don’t know why you’ve put up with him so long.” “Yes, but all he has is his pension, poor man,” she said. She didn’t mean that. She meant, How will I tell him to go? How will I get used to someone new? Can’t we just let things stay as they are?

“Miss Pauling,” Mr. Somerset said. “And Mrs. Bates. You’ve come about your mother, I reckon.”

“Why, yes, we have,” I said, “and we’ve been all afternoon at the funeral parlor without seeing a sign of Jeremy. Now, where might he be, Mr. Somerset?”

“He’s setting on the stairs,” he said.

“On the stairs?”

“On the stairs where your mother passed. He’s been there all day.”

“We came before now, Mr. Somerset. At noon. We rang the doorbell.”

“I must’ve been out.”

“My brother was here, you say.”

“He don’t answer doorbells,” said Mr. Somerset, “and he don’t move from where he’s at. Sets in the dark.”

“For mercy’s sake,” I said. “Jeremy?”

But it was Laura who went to find him, running up the stairs with her galoshes still on. I heard her flick a light switch, start on up toward the third floor calling, “Jeremy, honey!”

“He’s not himself at all today,” Mr. Somerset told me.

People say that about Jeremy quite often, but what they mean is that he is not like other people. He is always himself. That’s what’s wrong with him. I called, “Jeremy, come down here please. Laura and I have been looking for you.”

“He won’t,” said Mr. Somerset. “He’s setting on the step where—”

“She passed on the stairs?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, of all places!”

“Way I heard it, he sat by her side till Mrs. Jarrett come home. Hours maybe. Nobody knows. It was Mrs. Jarrett dialed your number on the telephone. Otherwise he might never have done so. And then she sent him to bed, for after the fuss with the funeral parlor and the doctor and so on he just come right back to that step up yonder, planning on passing the night there, I believe. Mrs. Jarrett said, ‘Mr. Pauling, I think you should lie down on a regular bed now,’ and he did. But I noticed this morning he was setting on the stairs again, sat there all day. I told Miss Vinton that. She said let him be. I said how long were we supposed to let him be? ‘This is not natural , Miss Vinton,’ I told her, but she wouldn’t—”

“Well, he’s come to the end of that,” I said, and I took off my Rain Dears and hung my coat and hat in the closet and went upstairs. I crossed the second floor hallway, which smelled of damp towels. I climbed on to the third floor, where Jeremy works and sleeps all alone, seldom letting other people in. There he was, hunched over on the uppermost step, with Laura crouching beside him. She was out of breath; she never takes exercise. “Jeremy, honey, you don’t know how worried I was,” she was telling him. “Why, we rang and rang! I thought for certain you would be here.”

“I was sitting on the stairs,” Jeremy said.

“So I hear,” I said, climbing till my face was even with his. “The least I expected was to see you at the funeral parlor.”

“Oh, no.”

“Well, you’ll have to come downstairs now,” I told him.

“I don’t believe I feel like it just now, Amanda.”

“Did I ask if you felt like it?”

He spread his fingers and looked at the bitten nails, not answering. Speak sharply to Jeremy and you will bowl him over; he can’t stand up to things. You’ll get further being gentle with him, but I always remember that too late. He puts me in a fury. I don’t see how he could let himself go the way he has. No, letting yourself go means you had to be something to start with, and Jeremy never was anything. He was born like this. He is, and always has been, pale and doughy and overweight, pear-shaped, wide-hipped. He toes out when he walks. His hair is curly and silvery-gold, thin on top. His eyes are nearly colorless. (People have asked me if he is an albino.) There is no telling where he manages to find his clothes: baggy slacks that start just below his armpits; mole-colored cardigan strained across his stomach and buttoning only in the middle, exposing a yellowed fishnet undershirt top and bottom, and tiny round-toed saddle oxfords. Saddle oxfords? For a man? “Pull yourself together, Jeremy,” I said, and he blinked up at me with his lashless, puffy eyes.

“She’s only concerned for you,” Laura told him.

“I’m concerned for all of us,” I said. “How would it be if everyone just sat in one place when they didn’t feel like moving?”

“In a while I will move,” Jeremy said.

“At the funeral parlor they said they hadn’t seen a sign of you.”

“No.”

“Said you hadn’t even stopped in to check on how they laid her out.”

“I couldn’t manage it,” Jeremy said.

“We managed, didn’t we?”

“She looked very peaceful,” Laura said. She had leaned forward to grasp both his shoulders. He gave the impression that if she let go he would crumple very slowly to one side with his eyes still wide and staring. “You might think she was just asleep,” she told him.

“She fell asleep over solitaire a lot,” Jeremy said.

“She looks as pretty as her wedding picture.”

Now, where did she get that? Mother looked nothing like her wedding picture. It would have been mighty strange if she had. But all Jeremy said was, “The one in the album?”

“That’s the one.”

“Her face was kind of full in that picture,” Jeremy said.

“Her face is full now.”

“I suppose they have some way of doing that.”

“Her color is good, too.”

“Does she have a bit of color?”

“They’ve put on rouge, I imagine. Nothing garish , though. Just enough to — and they’ve waved her hair.”

“Mama never waved it.”

“Yes, but it looks just lovely, Jeremy. And that dress, it sets off her complexion. Did you choose the dress? You did just fine. I think I might have picked the flowered beige, the one she always wore at Easter, but this is nice too, and the color sets off her—”

“The funeral man suggested that,” Jeremy said.

“I suppose he knows about these things.”

“I had to go looking for clothes in her closet.”

“Really. And then the way they’ve done her—”

‘ “Had to push down all the rack of things in her closet.”

“Yes, I know.”

“They told me I had to,” Jeremy said. “I said, couldn’t they do it? They said no. They were scared they would get into trouble somehow, be accused of choosing wrong or maybe even stealing, I guess, if anything turned up missing. But I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t accuse them.”