Anne Tyler - Celestial Navigation

Please take care of him .

Please see to it that he doesn’t just go to pieces .

I have thought a long time about what he should do, and I wondered if he would go to you girls but I don’t suppose he will. He still won’t leave this block, you know. Last July I did get him to come with me to Mrs. Pruitt’s, which is two streets away, but that’s the first time since art school that he has done such a thing and it didn’t work out. So maybe he will just want to stay on in this house .

Please don’t let anything happen to him .

Love ,

Mother

I took the letter and marched straight out of the bedroom, past Jeremy, who was slumped in a parlor chair staring at nothing, and into the kitchen, where Laura was doing the dishes. She had one of Mother’s old-fashioned flowered aprons pinned to her front, and who she was talking to was Howard. He was drying plates, if you please. He was saying, “Next year, when I have more freedom—”

“Take a look at this,” I told Laura, and I handed her the letter.

She wiped her hands and started reading, and right away her eyes filled. I knew that would happen. “Oh, look,” she said, “she’s thought of everyone. Even Miss Vinton. Even poor old Mrs. Pruitt at the church.”

“Not that part.”

She read on.

“What, the house and furniture?” she said. “Well, that seems fair to me, Amanda. After all, we have always—”

“No, no. Jeremy.”

She looked up.

“See what she says about Jeremy? Where she says he never leaves this block?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know that?”

“Well, of course,” Laura said.

“But not since art school, she says. Art school! Years and years ago!”

But Laura was rereading the beginning of the letter now. She didn’t seem concerned at all. I turned to Howard, who hadn’t had the tact to leave the room. “Did you know?” I asked him.

“Oh, why sure.”

Even strangers knew. How could I have let such a thing slip past me? Because Jeremy never stated it outright as a principle, that’s why. He gave individual excuses, never the same one twice, whenever we invited him to come someplace. To the park, to take the fresh air: “Thank you, but I’m working on a piece right now.” Out shopping at a department store: “Oh, I believe I have a cold coming on.” They never visited us in Richmond because Mother was prey to motion sickness. Or so she said. Protecting him again. Is it possible to live out your life within one block? I thought of what this block contained — a café, a corner grocery, and a shoe repair. Church was off-limits. Also moviehouses, pharmacies, barbershops, clothing stores. Funeral parlors. “How does he get what he needs?” I asked.

Laura looked up from the letter with her eyes all glassy.

“Well, there is the mail order,” Howard said. “Also, your mother went a few blocks farther afield now and then.”

“Has he ever been out of Baltimore? I mean, ever in his life?”

“Not since I’ve been here,” Howard said.

And certainly not while I was there. Our father took the car with him when he left.

I snatched back Mother’s letter, which Laura had started to read for the fourth time running. “Listen to me,” I said. “That is just not normal , Laura.”

“Oh, Amanda! He’ll hear you.”

“I don’t care if he hears me or not,” I said, although as a matter of fact I was speaking barely above a whisper. Laura always thinks I’m shouting when she doesn’t like what I’m saying. “You’re taking this so calmly,” I said. “You let things ride because it’s easier, but meanwhile, he’s our brother! Sitting in one spot like a beanbag. Howard, you’re a medical student. Wouldn’t it be to his own good to make him stop this before it gets worse?”

“Oh, well, I don’t—”

“You can’t just let it go on indefinitely.”

“Oh, well, it’s not as if he’s hurting anyone.”

“I will never understand this world,” I said. “More is tolerated every day. Nobody bats an eye.”

I left. I went out through the parlor, passing Jeremy, who continued staring into space. Listen here! I wanted to say. Just come out of this, jerk yourself up by your own bootstraps, it’s all a matter of will. Do you think nobody else has days when he wants to give up?

I went back into Mother’s room, squashed the letter inside the jewelry box and slammed the lid. Keep your English china. I yanked the rug straight and folded an afghan, I shook out Mother’s shapeless gray gabardine coat and took it to hang in the coat closet. And then, as I was just closing the closet door, I chanced to look again at Jeremy. He sat with his hands pressed flat between his knees as if he were cold. His eyes had an empty look. A man without landmarks, except for the unavoidable ones of getting born and dying. You could imagine that dying was what he was waiting for while sitting in that parlor chair, since there didn’t seem to be anything else ahead of him.

I took my own coat from the closet and put it on. I went over to Jeremy and tapped him on the shoulder. “Come,” I said.

He raised his head. “Hmm?” Then he saw me buttoning my coat and he drew back and looked alarmed.

“All I want is for you to come outdoors a minute,” I said.

“Um, perhaps I—”

“Surely you’re not afraid to do that much.”

He rose and stood beside the chair, with his knees bent a little like Mr. Somerset. I took his hand to lead him toward the door. As we passed the closet I thought of getting his coat, but that would have made him suspicious. We went out on the stoop. “My,” I said, “I believe it’s finally going to clear. Don’t you? Smell that air. We may have nice weather for Mother’s funeral after all.” In actuality it was still a bit damp — spray in our faces, the streetlights misty — but I was hardly thinking of what I was saying. And certainly Jeremy was not listening. “Has it been a particularly rainy fall?” I asked him, and he said, “Hmm? No, um — no,” meanwhile looking around him nervously, first at the house and then the street and then me.

“We’ve had very nice weather in Richmond,” I said.

I heard the front door fall shut behind us. Shut and lock, automatically. Jeremy heard it too and said, “Amanda—”

“Come and look at Mother’s poor rosebush,” I said. I led him down our walk and onto the main sidewalk. “Do you think there’s any life left in it? If it were pruned, perhaps—”

“Yes, maybe pruned,” he said. He was so eager to agree, so glad we were only going to look at Mother’s rosebush. But I led him on, with my arm hooked through his. I could feel the lumpy weight of his body resisting me, hanging back, although both of us pretended it wasn’t happening. We reached the yard next door. “Who does this belong to?” I asked him.

“What?”

“Who lives here now?”

“It’s been partitioned up, I believe,” he said. He raised his other hand to free his arm from me. I let myself be pried loose, but as he turned back toward the house I took hold of him again. “It’s a shame to see these old houses go,” I told him. “Why, I remember when those two up ahead were owned by a single family. The Edwardses, remember them? They had so many children they needed two houses to hold them all. Catholic. And now look. They’ve been turned into apartments too, I’ll bet you anything. Haven’t they?”

“What? Oh, yes.”

We had reached the end of the block, where we stopped to wait for a traffic light. Jeremy’s teeth were chattering and I wished now that I had brought his coat. Yet it wasn’t that cold. And he did have his sweater, his limp gray sweater with that single button fastened. I reached over and buttoned the others. Jeremy backed away from me and said, “I really think I should be going home about now.”