Anne Tyler - Noah's Compass

Or maybe she’d been that way all along, and Liam had just lacked the wisdom to perceive it.

Like being dragged down by the ankles into a swamp, that was how his life began to feel. Millie was already submerged and he was struggling to support the weight of her.

Of course the university psychologist was consulted, but Millie said he didn’t know what he was talking about and so that had come to nothing. And then for a brief time, her doctor had conjectured that she might be suffering from a silent form of appendicitis-some chronic, low-grade infection that would explain her constant tiredness and lack of zest. Both of them (Millie too, it saddened Liam now to recall) had been almost giddy with relief. Oh, then! Just something medical! Something curable with surgery!

But that theory had been discounted, by and by, and she had returned to dreary hopelessness, barely slogging through the days. Often Liam would come home in the evening to find her still in her bathrobe, the baby straggly-haired and fretful, the apartment smelling of soiled diapers, the sink piled high with unwashed dishes. Oh, Lord, just go ahead and die! he’d thought more than once. Not meaning it, of course.

Could it be that underneath, he had guessed ahead of time that she might take those pills? And had done nothing to prevent it?

No, he didn’t think so.

But he had to admit he had blamed her for her unhappiness. He had felt a kind of superiority; he had wondered why she didn’t just pull herself together, for God’s sake.

The old woman from the apartment next door stepped out into the hall as he came home one evening. She said, “Mr. Pennywell, that baby has been crying since morning. Every now and then it gets quiet but then it starts crying again. Since eight o’clock in the morning and its voice has gone all croaky. Twice I rang your bell but nobody answered, and your wife has got the door locked.”

“Well, thanks,” he said, not feeling thankful in the least. Interfering old biddy. He couldn’t be expected to do everything! He let himself into the apartment and then he thought, Since eight o’clock in the morning?

He had left for his carrel in the library shortly after seven. Millie had been a humped shape beneath the afghan on the living-room couch. She often got out of bed at night when she couldn’t sleep and watched old movies on TV. He had switched the TV off and left without trying to wake her.

Eight o’clock in the morning, he thought, and he stood frozen, not even breathing, hearing the great, hollow, echoing silence beneath the baby’s hoarse sobs.

People said, trying to be helpful, “It’s only natural to feel angry.” But Liam shrugged them off.

“I’m not in the least angry,” he said. “Why would you think I was angry?”

Instead he was very brisk and efficient. He devoted the first few weeks to finding childcare, juggling work and a baby. He did love his daughter; or he felt attached to her, at least; or at least he felt deeply concerned for her welfare. Still, his favorite daydream from that time was the vision of himself sitting alone in an empty room for hours and hours and hours, uninterrupted, undisturbed, unneeded by a single human being.

But, “I’m doing fine!” he told friends. “Never better!”

He saw the adjustment in their expressions, a sort of clicking over from solicitous to shocked to carefully neutral. “Well, good for you,” they said.

They said, “It’s wonderful you’re able to get on with your life this way. Put it all behind you! Very healthy.”

He and Xanthe moved back to Baltimore in the fall. It was an admission of defeat; he was learning just how much rearing a toddler could take out of you. He rented an apartment not far from where his mother and his sister lived, and he started teaching at the Fremont School-a comedown, no doubt about it. At his university he’d held an instructor’s position and he was starting his dissertation. At the Fremont School he taught history, not even his field, only peripherally related to the philosophers he loved so much. But it was a very prestigious school, and without any education credits he felt lucky to have been hired.

He put Xanthe in a daycare center that seemed to be closed more often than it was open; it observed holidays he didn’t even know existed, which meant he was always scrambling to find sitters. He relied heavily upon his mother, inadequate though she was, and a few older black women provided by an agency. Xanthe endured these patchy arrangements without objecting-in fact, without reacting in any way whatsoever. She was a stolid child, solemn-faced and watchful and very obviously motherless. Somehow she gave off a visible aura of motherlessness. Her lack of a mother was so pathetically apparent that women took one look at her and turned into crazy people. They brought Liam muffins and cookies and giant country hams. They stood at his door smiling dazzlingly, offering to tidy his place a bit and wondering if his daughter had any particular food preferences. Xanthe ate barely any food at all. He didn’t know how she stayed so chubby, as little as she ate.

These women had extra circus tickets and free passes to Disney movies. They knew of a special spray that would ease the tangles out of little girls’ hair. They loved, loved, loved having picnics on Cow Hill.

Liam himself hated picnics. He hated the two spots of dampness that always developed on the seat of his trousers even in the driest weather. He seemed to be a magnet for mosquitoes. And it took so much effort to rise to these women’s high pitch. They were all of them, every last one of them, full of gaiety and enthusiasm. He sat by their checkered tablecloths feeling like a puddle of a man, sunken and speechless, next to his speechless child.

Barbara, on the other hand, had required nothing of him. He got to know her when he started eating lunch in the school library in order to avoid the other teachers, two of whom were Picnic Ladies. Of course eating in the library was not allowed, but his lunch was unobtrusive-a slice of cheese, a piece of fruit-and Barbara pretended not to notice. At the time she was in her early thirties, a friendly, pleasant-faced woman a couple of years older than he, not someone he gave any special thought to. Generally she left him to his own devices, or they would have, at most, a brief conversation about some book he’d slipped at random from a shelf. She wasn’t at all like the others.

Through his first year there and half of his second, he plodded along in his comfortable, undemanding routine. Fall semester, spring semester, fall semester again. Young students who were likable enough, by and large, and who occasionally showed a spark of interest in his lessons. Lunches in the library, with Barbara stopping by his table to exchange a few words or occasionally settling for a moment onto the chair beside his. She knew the bare facts of his life by now, and he knew her facts, such as they were. She lived alone on the third floor of an old house on Roland Avenue. She had a father in a nursing home. She found her job very congenial.

One day, as she was showing him a new book about the city-state of Carthage, he kissed her. She kissed him back. They were level-headed adults; they didn’t make a big to-do about it. He certainly didn’t feel that tremulous elation that he’d felt in the early days with Millie, but neither did he want to. He appreciated Barbara’s cheerfulness. He liked her self-reliance.

Oh, but probably he should have made a to-do. He must have been a terrible husband. (Well, obviously he had been, if you considered how it all ended.) When he thought back to how Barbara used to dance at the students’ proms-throwing her whole heart into “Surf City” and “Dr. Octopus”-he asked himself how he could have been so blind. She must have wanted so much, underneath! And he had given her so little.