Noah’s Compass: A Novel Read online

  Louise said, “Of course he knows. Don’t you, Jonah.”

  “Huh?”

  “You know about your new baby brother or sister, don’t you?”

  Jonah said, “Mmhmm,” and zipped his knapsack shut. Louise raised her eyebrows meaningfully at Liam.

  “When’s your due date?” Liam asked her.

  “Early February.”

  “February!”

  People announced these things so far ahead nowadays, it made pregnancies seem to last a couple of years or more.

  “If you come up with any good names for girls, let us know,” Louise told him. She rose and helped Jonah slip into his knapsack straps. “We’re having trouble agreeing on one. A boy is no problem; but any girl’s name I like, Dougall thinks it’s too froufrou.”

  “What would it be for a boy?” Liam asked her.

  “Madigan, we’ve decided.”

  “Ah.”

  He heaved himself to his feet and followed her toward the door. It was absurd to feel hurt. Madigan had been a very good stepfather. (A very good father, Barbara would have amended if she’d been there.) He’d spared Liam the burden of child support, for one thing; the man had been loaded. Liam said, “Nothing biblical this time?”

  “We’re thinking Jacob for a middle name.”

  “That’s nice.”

  This reminded him; he said, “Louise, what’s the meaning of the Joseph story?”

  “Which Joseph story?”

  “The coat of many colors, the slavery in Egypt—what are people supposed to learn from it?”

  “They’re not supposed to learn anything,” Louise said. “It’s an event that really happened. It’s not made up; it’s not designed for any calculated purpose.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  Best not to pursue that.

  “Why’d you ask?” she said.

  “Just curious.” He opened the door for her and then followed her and Jonah into the foyer. “I saw it in Jonah’s coloring book and I was wondering.”

  “You know,” Louise said, “you’re always welcome to come to church with us on a Sunday.”

  “Oh, thanks, but—”

  “We could pick you up and take you there. We’d be happy to! I’d really love to share my faith with you.”

  “Thanks anyhow,” Liam said. “I guess religion’s just not in my nature, sorry to say.”

  He refrained from telling her that even talking about religion made him wince with embarrassment. Even hearing about it embarrassed him—hearing those toe-curling terms that believers employed, like share, in fact, and my faith.

  But she said, “Oh, Dad, it’s in every person’s nature! We are every one of us born in sin, and till we let Jesus into our hearts we’re condemned throughout eternity.”

  Well, there was no way he could let that pass. He said, “Are you telling me that some little child in Africa is condemned because he’s never been to Sunday school? Or some perfectly good Moslem herding camels in Tunisia?”

  “You cannot be called good until you accept Christ as your personal savior,” she said, and her voice echoed off the cinderblocks with a bell-like, clanging tone.

  Liam’s jaw dropped. “Well,” he said, “I guess …”

  Words failed him for a moment.

  “I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree,” he said finally.

  Words must have failed Louise too, because she just gazed at him for a moment with an expression he couldn’t read. Then she turned away and opened the outer door.

  Eunice stood on the sidewalk, poised to enter. She took a step backward.

  “Oh. Eunice,” Liam said.

  “Have I come at a bad time?”

  “No, no …”

  Louise gave him a questioning look. Liam said, “Eunice, this is my daughter, Louise, and my grandson, Jonah.” He told Louise, “Eunice is—Why, you’ve seen her before. You saw her in Dr. Morrow’s waiting room.”

  “I did?” Louise said.

  Eunice said, “She did?”

  Oops, a slip. Though not too hard to cover up, as it happened. Liam told Eunice, “I realized that only later. I knew you seemed familiar.”

  Eunice continued to look puzzled, but she held out her hand to Louise and said, “Nice to meet you.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Louise said, shaking her hand. “So, do you two have plans for the day?”

  “Eunice is just helping me with my résumé,” Liam told her.

  “Oh,” Louise said. “Well, good. You’re going to look for a real job! Or at least … I mean, surely the zayda job doesn’t require a résumé, does it?”

  “The …? No, no, no. This would be for something else.”

  “The very last place on earth I can see him is in a preschool,” Louise told Eunice.

  “Preschool?” Eunice asked.

  “That’s what he was talking about the other day.”

  Liam said, “I know you have to be going, Louise. Bye, Jonah! Good luck with the coloring book.”

  Jonah hoisted his knapsack higher on his back and said, “Bye.” Louise said, “Thanks for watching him, Dad.” She seemed to have forgotten their quarrel. She gave him a peck on the cheek, waved to Eunice, and followed Jonah out the door.

  “You saw me at Dr. Morrow’s?” Eunice asked Liam.

  She was still standing on the sidewalk, although he held the door open invitingly. She had her arms folded across her chest and she seemed planted there.

  He said, “Yes, wasn’t that a coincidence?”

  “I don’t recall seeing you,” she told him.

  “You don’t? I guess I’m not very memorable.”

  This made her smile, a little. She unfolded her arms and stepped forward to enter the building.

  She was wearing one of her skirts today, and a blouse that showed her cleavage. Her breasts were two full, soft mounds. When she passed him, she gave off a faint scent of vanilla and he had an urge to step closer in order to get a deeper breath of it. He stood back against the door, however, with his hands pressed behind him. There was something bothering the far corners of his mind, something casting a shadow.

  “I should have accepted her invitation,” he said once they were inside the apartment.

  Eunice said, “What?”

  “Louise invited me to her church just now and I didn’t accept.”

  He dropped into an armchair, feeling disheartened. Too late, he remembered that he was supposed to seat his guest first, and he started to struggle up again but then Eunice sat down in the rocker.

  “I’ve never been a good father,” he said.

  “Oh, I’m sure you’re a wonderful father!”

  “No, a good father would say, ‘So what if I’m not religious? This could be our chance to get on a better footing!’ But I was so intent on my … principles. My standards. I blew it.”

  Eunice said, “Well, anyway. Your grandson is really cute.”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “I didn’t picture you being a grandfather.”

  He wondered what this signified. He said, “I guess it does make me seem awfully old.”

  “No, it doesn’t! You’re not old!”

  “I must seem pretty old to somebody your age,” he said. He waited a beat, and then he said, “How old are you, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I’m thirty-eight.”

  “You are?”

  So she wasn’t younger than Xanthe after all. He would have to tell Kitty.

  When Liam was thirty-eight he already had two children. His first marriage was already behind him, and he had started to worry that his second was behind him. But Eunice still seemed so fresh-faced and so … unwritten on. She sat very straight-backed, with her bulky sandals placed wide apart, her hands clasped in the valley of paisley skirt between her knees. Her glasses reflected the light in a way that turned them white, giving her a blank, open look.

  “You could always change your mind,” she told him.

  “Excuse me?”

 
“You could call your daughter on the phone and say you would come to her church after all.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Would she have reached home by now?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Does she have a cell phone?”

  “Look,” he said. “I’m not going to call.”

  Eunice rocked back in her rocker.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “Okay …”

  “It’s difficult to explain.”

  She went on watching him.

  He said, “Did you print up that résumé?”

  He couldn’t have cared less about the résumé. In fact, the very word was beginning to strike him as annoying. Those pretentious foreign accent marks! For God’s sake, didn’t some term exist in ordinary English? But Eunice immediately brightened and said, “The résumé!” (She even pronounced it foreignly, with a long a in the first syllable.) She bent to dig through her purse, which sat beside her on the floor, and she came up with a crisp sheaf of papers folded in half. “I have to say,” she told him, “I’m not entirely satisfied with it.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I couldn’t seem to give it any focus. If you’re not applying at Cope, I don’t know what particular strengths I should be emphasizing—what areas of interest.”

  He gave a short bark of laughter, and she glanced up from the papers.

  “I wouldn’t know either,” he told her. “Basically, I have no areas of interest.”

  “Oh, that can’t be true,” she said.

  “It is, though,” he said. And then he said, “It really is. Sometimes I think my life is just … drying up and hardening, like one of those mouse carcasses you find beneath a radiator.”

  If Eunice was surprised by this, it was nothing compared to how he himself felt. He seemed to hear his own words as if someone else had spoken them. He cleared his throat and spread his fingers across his knees.

  “Well, only on off days, of course,” he said.

  “I know exactly what you mean,” she told him.

  “You do?”

  “I’m always thinking, Why don’t I have any hobbies? Other people do. Other people develop these passions; they collect things or they research things or they birdwatch or they snorkel. They join book groups or they reenact the Civil War. I’m just trying to make it through to bedtime every night.”

  “Yes,” Liam said.

  “I don’t see myself as a mouse carcass, though, but more like one of those buds that haven’t opened. I’m hanging there on the bush all closed up.”

  “That would make sense,” Liam said. “You’re younger. You have everything ahead of you.”

  “Unless I never open, and fall off the branch still closed,” Eunice said.

  Before Liam could make any comment, she said, “Well, enough of that! I sound like some kind of basket case, don’t I?”

  “No,” Liam said.

  Then he said, “I turned sixty on my last birthday.”

  “I know,” Eunice said.

  “Do you think somebody sixty is too old for somebody thirty-eight?”

  When she looked at him now, the light was hitting her glasses at a different angle and he could see directly into her eyes, which were wide and steady and radiant. Her mouth was very serious, almost trembling with seriousness.

  She said, “No, I don’t think it’s too old.”

  “Me neither,” he said.

  8

  Damian came back from his cousin’s wedding with his arm in a cast. He said there’d been a little “contretemps.” Liam was so surprised by his wording that he gave Damian a second look. Was there more to him, perhaps, than met the eye? But Damian sat slouched in his usual C shape on the daybed in the den, his good arm tossed carelessly across Kitty’s shoulders, long ropes of greasy black hair concealing most of his face. They were listening to a song with very explicit lyrics. All Liam had to hear was a single line and he felt himself growing rigid with embarrassment. In addition, this was, after all, an actual bed they were sitting on, and an unmade bed at that. Liam said, “Wouldn’t you two be more comfortable in the living room?” But they just gaped at him, and rightly so; there was no couch in the living room. He’d been noticing that, of late. People couldn’t sit close together there.

  Liam and Eunice couldn’t sit close together either. They had to occupy separate chairs and smile across at each other like fools.

  Although sometimes, as often as possible, Liam would venture to perch on the arm of whichever chair Eunice was inhabiting. He would bring her, say, a Diet Coke and then as if by accident, while talking about nothing much, he would settle on the chair arm and rest one hand on her shoulder. She had soft plump shoulders that exactly, satisfyingly filled the hollows of his palms. Sometimes he would bend to breathe in the scent of her shampoo; sometimes, even, he would bend lower and they would kiss, although it was an inconvenient angle for kissing. She had to crane upward to meet his lips, and if he wasn’t careful, he could nick a cheekbone on the sharp-edged frame of her glasses.

  He didn’t see her nearly as much as he would have liked. She showed up at his apartment at odd hours during the day, and then she came over most evenings, but in the evenings Kitty was usually around and they had to be more circumspect. (What had Liam been thinking, letting Kitty stay with him? Except, of course, that he’d had no way of predicting the turn that his life would take.)

  They couldn’t go to Eunice’s place, because right now she didn’t have a place. She was living with her parents. Her father had suffered a stroke in March and she had moved in to help out. Reading between the lines, Liam guessed that this was less of a sacrifice than it seemed. She didn’t earn much of a salary at Cope, and she was clearly not the home-making type. Besides which, there was something of the only child in her character—an air of perennial daughterliness, an excessive concern for her parents’ good opinion of her. Liam cataloged this trait as he did her others, with scientific interest, without passing judgment. They were still in that stage where the loved one’s weaknesses, even, seemed endearing.

  Unfortunately, Damian’s broken arm was his right arm, immobilized in a right-angle cast from his wrist to above his elbow. Since his car—really his mother’s car—had a stick shift, this meant that he couldn’t drive. And Kitty couldn’t drive either, because it turned out that the extra insurance was way beyond Liam’s means. He had honestly thought he’d heard wrong when the agent told him what the premium would be.

  This put a real crimp in things. Sometimes, Kitty took the bus to Damian’s house directly after work, requiring Liam to pick her up at the end of the evening. Most times, though, Damian’s mother dropped Damian off at Liam’s, and then it was up to Liam to deliver him back home. (Damian’s mother, a widow who seemed much older than her years, refused to drive after dark.) Either way, it seemed Liam was called upon to chauffeur far more than he liked. There were a few blessed occasions when high school friends pitched in, but many of them were off working in Ocean City for the summer, while others were restricted by complicated new laws about driving with peers in the car. Often what happened was that Eunice would volunteer to return Damian on her way home, which was nice of her but it made her leave earlier than Liam wanted her to. And meanwhile, they would have spent the evening with Kitty and Damian; not one minute on their own.

  It was no picnic, living with teenagers.

  At moments, Liam felt he’d gone back to his teens himself. There was the same lack of privacy, the same guilty secrecy, the same tantalizingly halfway physical relationship. The same lack of confidence, even, for Eunice alternated between shyness and startling boldness, while Liam himself … Well, face it, he was a little out of practice. He had some concerns about looking old, or inadequate, or fat. It had been a long time since anyone had seen him without his clothes on.

  Let things proceed at their own leisurely pace, he decided with some relief.

  They liked to talk about their first meeting. Their two different first
meetings, really. Liam recalled the waiting-room scene; Eunice recalled their coffee at PeeWee’s. Liam said, “You seemed so professional. So expert. So in charge.”

  Eunice said, “You asked me more about myself in one conversation than most men ask in a year.”

  “You told Ishmael Cope, ‘Verity,’ and it sounded like a pronouncement handed down from the heavens.”

  “Even in the midst of a job hunt, you wanted to know about my life.”

  “How could I not?” he asked, and he meant it. He found her fascinating and funny and complex. She was a perpetual astonishment. He studied her like a language.

  For instance: She was chronically late everywhere, but she fantasized that she could outwit herself by keeping her watch set ten minutes ahead.

  She acted completely besotted whenever she met a small dog.

  Direct sunlight made her sneeze.

  Among her most deep-seated fears were spiders, West Nile disease, and choral recitals. (She suffered from the morbid conviction that she might suddenly jump up and start singing along with the soloist.)

  In fact she disliked all formal occasions, not only recitals but plays, lectures, symphony concerts, and dining in upscale restaurants. Given a choice, she preferred to stay in, and if they ate out she opted for the humblest café or hamburger joint.

  She cared little about food in general—made not so much as a gesture toward cooking, and never seemed to notice what he gave her to eat.

  She wasn’t used to alcohol and grew charmingly silly after a single glass of wine.

  She never wore dresses; just those peasant skirts or balloony slacks.

  Nor did she use cosmetics.

  She’d had only three serious boyfriends in her entire life—not a one of them, she claimed, worth discussing in any depth.

  But her girlfriends, as she called them, numbered in the dozens, reaching all the way back to nursery school, and she was forever rushing off to bachelorette parties or girls’ nights out.

  She hated spending money, on principle. She drove illogical distances for the cheapest gasoline and she insisted on taking her leftovers home even from McDonald’s.

  She had a cell-phone plan that gave her one thousand free minutes a month, but the only time she answered it was when it played Mr. Cope’s special ring—the “Hallelujah Chorus.” The rest of the time, she ignored it.