Anne Tyler - Celestial Navigation

“Someone has stolen our suitcases,” I said to Laura.

She was just settling Jeremy into a parlor chair, like an invalid. She looked up at me with her mind on something else and said, “Oh no, Amanda, I’m sure they would never—”

“They’re gone, aren’t they? And no one’s been in that door but us and Mr. Somerset, he says he never saw them.”

“It’s true, it’s true,” said Mr. Somerset, and then beat a retreat up the stairs as if I might accuse him of something. Just before disappearing he leaned over the banister to say, “You might ask Howard when he comes in, though as I say I don’t believe he — and you might talk to him about making noise. I don’t sleep too good as it is. You might mention it to him.”

“We’ve been robbed,” I said to Laura.

“Oh, they’ll show up. I’m sure of it.”

“No, they’re gone,” I told her. “We’ve seen the last of them.”

Isn’t that always the way it is? You would think that in time of tragedy the trivial things would let themselves go smoothly for once, but they never do.

I sat down in an armchair, just crumpled into it. “Imagine!” I said. “Someone who would rob a house in mourning. Oh, I’ve heard of such things. Burglars who check obituaries daily, they know the bereaved are too upset to take good notice. Isn’t it shameful?”

“Oh, I’m sure they didn’t do that.”

“What, then?”

“We could call the police,” Laura said.

“They’d be no help. They’re paid to keep their eyes closed.”

“Well, all that worries me is what will I do for a nightgown,” Laura said. “And a funeral dress. Will this be suitable?” She opened her coat wider to show the maroon knit, all creased across the front. “Lucky you” she told me. “You wore your black on the train.”

People always call it luck when you’ve acted more sensibly than they have.

I said, “This never would have happened in the olden days. There was a time when our neighborhood was so safe you could walk it at night without a thought, but now look! I don’t know how often I told Mother she ought to move.”

“One thing,” Laura said, “it’s not as if we had any valuables in our bags.”

“Speak for yourself,” I told her, “there are valuables and valuables. My suitcase was Mother’s graduation gift. The only useful thing she ever gave me.”

“We should talk about something more cheerful,” Laura said.

“Other times it was sachets and pomander balls and religious bookmarks, but that suitcase was top-quality cowhide.”

“Hush, now,” Laura said. “Shall I make us a little supper? There’s bound to be something in the icebox. Would anyone like an omelet?”

And off she went, still in her galoshes, tugging at her coat. She is the cook in the family — you can tell it by her figure. I myself couldn’t have taken a bite right then. I was too sick at heart. I set my feet upon a needlework footstool and said, “What would help me most now is a good long rest. I’ve walked far more today than I should have.” I was talking to Jeremy, but you would never have known it for all the reaction he gave me. “See my feet?” I asked him. “How puffy?”

He didn’t answer.

“We couldn’t get a taxi from the funeral parlor. It was hard enough to find one at the railroad station, and evidently no one thought to meet us.”

But all Jeremy did was lay his hands very lightly upon his knees, as if they would break.

I sat erect in Mother’s wing chair and looked all around me. Everything imaginable seemed to be crowded into that parlor. Chipped figurines, a barometer, a Baby Ben that worked and a grandmother clock that didn’t, a whole row of Kahlil Gibran, a leaning tower of knitting magazines, peacock feathers stuck behind the mirror. Cloudy tumblers half full of stale water, a Scrabble set, a vaporizer, a hairbrush choked with light brown hair, an embroidery hoop, a paperback book on astrology, an egg-stained shawl, doilies on doilies, Sears Roebuck catalogues, ancient quilted photo albums, a glass swan full of dusty colored marbles, plants escaping their pots and sprawling along the windowsill. On the table beside me, a bottle of Jergens lotion and a magnifying glass and a patented news-item clipper. (How she loved to clip news items! They stuffed all her envelopes, and for years I unfolded them one by one and tried to figure out their relevance to me. I never could. Puppies were rescued from sewer pipes, orphaned rabbits were nursed by cats, toddlers splashed in wading pools on Baltimore’s first summer day. Nothing that meant anything. I learned to throw them away without a glance, as if they had come as so much padding for her wispy little notes.) Beneath the clutter, if you could see that far, was scrolled and splintery furniture so scrawny-legged you wondered how it stood the strain. I felt anxious just looking at it. I placed my fingertips to my forehead, warding off one of my headaches. “Well, Jeremy,” I said. “I suppose I should hear how this business happened.”

Jeremy raised his eyes, not to me but to a point on the wall.

“How Mother went.”

“Oh. It — I was — it happened like this.”

“You don’t have to make a long story of it, just tell,” I said. I know I shouldn’t snap at him that way.

“I had made a new piece,” Jeremy said.

“What?”

“Piece. A new piece in my studio.”

“ Oh yes.”

That’s what he calls them: pieces. He pastes them together and calls them pieces. Well, they’re surely not pictures . Not even regular collages, not that intricate, mosaic-like way he does them. He has had this drive to paste things together ever since he was old enough for scissors and a gluepot. He started off at Mother’s feet, dressing paper dolls, and in grade school he moved up to scrapbooks. Other boys play baseball; he made scrapbooks. One for famous people and another for foreign places and another for postcards. (Photos of hotels, mostly, with X’s on minute little windows twelve stories up—”Here’s where my room is!”—sent to Mother by a cousin.) Then he began his pieces. Mother thought they were wonderful, naturally, but as far as I could see they were just more of the same. More cutting, more pasting. Little people made of triangles of wrapping paper and diamonds of silk. No definite outlines to them. Something like those puzzles they have in children’s magazines — find seven animals in the branches of this bush. I couldn’t see the point of it. “Then what?” I asked.

“I wanted her to see my piece. I went down and brought her up and at the top of the stairs she just fell down, she fell down and I saw she was dead.”

All his eye for detail goes into cutting and pasting. There is none left over for real life. What did Mother say, climbing the stairs? What were her last words? Was she out of breath? Holding her chest? Did she give him any kind of a look when she had fallen? (Maybe she looked at him and thought, Good heavens. Is this what I’m dying for? A little paper quilt put together by a middle-aged man?)

“Go on,” I said.

He looked blank.

“Tell me,” I said (already tired out by the thought of all I would have to ask), “had she been doing any complaining about chest pains?”

“Oh, Mama never complained.”

That was true, but another person could have read the signs anyway. Whenever she had health problems — gas, indigestion, a little trouble with bowels — she did her own doctoring. Took herb tea and patent medicine and refused all meals. Many’s the time I have eaten lunch with her sitting across the table watching, nothing in front of her but a steaming cup and a pint bottle of Pepto-Bismol, eyes following my spoon. “Aren’t you eating, Mother?”