Anne Tyler - Celestial Navigation

Brian appeared beside him and set a hand on Jeremy’s shoulder. “Hi,” he said. He wore a double-breasted suit that made him appear untrustworthy. Jeremy was used to seeing him in sweaters and corduroy trousers. His beard was trimmed too neatly. “Well, Jeremy,” he said. “What do you think of your show?”

All the visitors looked up, their faces startled and avid. Brian’s voice had carried everywhere. “We’ve got them set up well, wouldn’t you say?” he asked. He smelled of some bitter spicy aftershave. He smiled not at Jeremy but at one of the statues, ignoring the visitors as if it were accidental that they had overheard.

Jeremy freed himself from Brian’s arm. “You said, but you said — you told me there wouldn’t be people here.”

“Well, Jeremy, it is relatively—”

“You broke your word.”

“Oh, now—”

“I want to go home, Mary,” Jeremy said. He turned to find her and saw, behind her worried face, all the spectators looking pleased. Of course, they seemed to be saying, this is what we expected all along. Brian told us. Had he, in fact, told them something? Did Jeremy have some kind of reputation? He pulled his golf cap on with shaky fingers; he turned on his heel, making Mary run to catch up with him. Yet immediately he sensed that he had done something else they expected. There was nothing he could do they would not expect. He stumbled across miles of deep treacherous carpet, trapped still in their image of him. His breath came rustily. He flailed one hand behind him and encountered Mary’s strong fingers. Then she had caught up with him and was hugging his arm close to her side and helping him through the glass door. “Never you mind,” she whispered. “It’s all right, Jeremy.” Out on the sidewalk she raised her other hand to cup his face and she kissed him on the cheek. “There now,” she said. But she only troubled him more. Was it expected of him also that he would stand here being kissed like a child? He wiped away the damp equal-sign left by her lips, and he pulled his coat more tightly around him and trudged off toward the car.

They had no medical student now. Buddy had married and moved to an apartment, and before a successor could be found Mary came home one day with a girl hitch-hiker she had picked up while driving Miss Vinton’s car. A hippie named Olivia. Her hair was like spun glass, colorless and straight, long enough to sit on. She was so thin she seemed translucent and she wore jeans studded with silvery stars and a shimmering white trenchcoat. When she held out a hand to Jeremy, her fingers felt like ice. “I found this child thumbing rides,” Mary told him. “Can you imagine? Why, you must be no older than Darcy!”

“I’m eighteen,” said Olivia.

Mary said, “I don’t care, any age is too young,” and she went off to find the girl some food. Olivia trailed her, the way one of Mary’s children might. She had a watery, boneless way of walking. From the dining room, where Jeremy sat with a cup of tea, he could hear her questions: “What is this for? What are you doing now? Is it all right if I have one of these crackers?” Later Mary told him that she had persuaded Olivia to stay in the south front bedroom. “What?” said Jeremy. He mentally placed the house on a map, set down a star for the compass points, found south. “But that’s the students’ room! We have always had students there!”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know it mattered,” Mary said.

“Well, no, of course it doesn’t matter. It’s just that—”

“I worry so, seeing a child out in the streets that way,” Mary said.

It seemed to him that every year she was becoming more motherly. She had six children now and she was six times more motherly than when she had had only one. Was it a quality that grew by such mathematical progressions?

Last month, going to Dowd’s grocery store for milk, they had been approached by a teenaged boy asking for money for a meal. “Why, you poor soul!” said Mary. “Haven’t you eaten?” It was six in the evening; all her own children had been fed an hour ago. “Wait here,” she said. “They sell sandwiches at Dowd’s.” “Well, money is what I rather —” the boy said. “Don’t go away,” said Mary. “Stay with him, Jeremy.” She went alone into the store. The point of her kerchief fluttered behind her, her family-sized handbag swung at her side, her unstockinged legs flashed white in the twilight and her scuffed oxfords beat out a businesslike rhythm. The eternal mother, scandalized, indignant, interfering, setting everyone straight. “Money is what I rather have,” the boy told Jeremy. Jeremy only nodded and swallowed. He couldn’t think of anything to say. Then Mary returned with a sandwich in waxed paper and a cellophane tray of oranges and a carton of milk. “You eat every bit of this, you hear?” she said. “Look,” the boy told her, “you didn’t have to go to all this trouble. Look, what I could really use is—”

But she had pressed the food into his hands and turned to go into the store again. “Don’t gulp it, now,” she said. “Not on an empty stomach.”

“Well. Thank you, ma’am.”

Then he and Jeremy had stood looking at each other, bemused, unsmiling, across the knobs and angles of Mary’s gifts.

At night, colors and shapes crowded his mind, elbowed each other aside, quarreled the way his children did: “Let me speak! No, let me speak!” He traced outlines in the dark with his index finger. He pressed his thumbs against his lids to erase images that disturbed him — cones rising in a tower, the base of one resting on the point of another in a particularly jarring way; yellow and blue appearing together, a combination he could not tolerate. Meanwhile Mary slept soundly beside him, and her breaths were so soft and even that they might have been no more than the sound of his own blood in his ears.

Were women always stronger than men? Mary was stronger, even when she slept. Her sleeping was proof that she was stronger. In Jeremy’s insomnia there was something fretful and nervous; he felt the presence of thoughts he would rather not look at, nameless fears and dreads. Yet Mary, who could name exactly what she feared and whose worries came complete to the last detail — Was Abbie’s tonsillectomy really necessary, when anesthesia could backfire and kill you? Should Edward have had a tetanus shot for that cat bite? — lay peacefully on her back with her palms up, her fingers only loosely curled, open to everything. She didn’t even believe in God. (Jeremy said he didn’t either — how could he, knowing how carelessly objects are tossed off and forgotten by their creators? — but he was haunted by a fear of hell and Mary was not.) Mary was more vulnerable than any man, the deepest pieces of herself were in those children and every day they scattered in sixty different directions and faced a thousand untold perils; yet she sailed through the night without so much as a prayer. There was no way he could ever hope to match her.

He sank back through time until he encountered the faded, powdery face of his mother — a woman who had prayed all day every day, every breath a prayer. (“I don’t have to say my prayers at bedtime, Jeremy, I’ve been saying them since I got up this morning. I said them all last night in my sleep. It’s you I pray for.”) He saw her pouring tea at his tenth birthday party, which he and she had celebrated all alone in the parlor. “Just us would be more fun,” she said, and of course she was right, because his classmates disliked him and if they spoke to him at all they called him Germy. “We don’t need those other children,” she said. She smiled at him over the teapot, with the corners of her mouth trembling slightly the way they always did, making her look uncertain of the smile, uncertain of what she said, uncertain that there was anything less than God Himself that she might have confidence in. The smile grew pale and then transparent. The teapot vanished. He saw her from even longer ago than the birthday party, some distant point in time when hats were covered with starched cloth roses and her limp, watery dress was the height of elegance — the dress that looked exactly like her, its tracery of flowers so faint you could almost wonder if she had put it on inside out. She was taking him to the dentist. She stood in front of a receptionist whose hair seemed to be coated with black shoe polish. “I don’t care what you thought,” the receptionist said, “the appointment was for an hour ago and you’ve missed it. You kept the doctor waiting. He had to go on to another patient.”