Noah’s Compass: A Novel Read online

  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.

  All this dwelling on the past was Eunice’s fault. If not for her—or the loss of her—he wouldn’t be thinking about such things.

  In the most unforeseen way, Eunice really had turned out to be his rememberer.

  Kitty came back from Ocean City with skin the color of caramel, except for the bridge of her nose, which was pink and peeling. She walked in with her bag slung over her shoulder, leaving the door wide open behind her. “Poppy!” she said. “Hi there!”

  It was Sunday morning, and Liam was fixing scrambled eggs for breakfast. It took him a moment to register her presence.

  “Can you give Damian a ride?” she asked him.

  “Where to?”

  “His mom’s, in a while. Otherwise he’d have to go right now with his aunt and uncle.”

  “I guess so.”

  She threw her bag on a chair and spun around to return to the door. “It’s okay!” she called in a piercing voice. So much noise, all of a sudden! Liam felt a bit dazed.

  When she came back, she had Damian with her. He was carrying a knapsack and he was as white-skinned as when he’d left. “At least someone heeds the warnings,” Liam told him.

  Damian said, “Huh?”

  “The dermatologists’ warnings.”

  Damian looked blank.

  “He lay out as much as I did,” Kitty said, “but the sun doesn’t affect him.”

  Liam said, “Really.” This seemed a bit creepy, as if Damian were some sort of vampire, but he put the thought out of his mind. “Anybody want breakfast?” he asked.

  “Breakfast!” Kitty said. “It’s almost eleven.”

  “I got a late start.”

  “I’ll say you did.”

  “It is the weekend, after all.”


  “And you look like a homeless person. Are you growing a beard or something?”

  “It’s the weekend!” he said again. He rubbed his chin.

  Damian said, “I could go for some breakfast.”

  “You ate breakfast hours ago,” Kitty told him.

  “That’s why I could eat again.”

  “Not now, Damian; we’ve got to talk.”

  Liam was puzzled (hadn’t they had the whole beach trip to talk?), but then he realized he was the one she planned to talk to. She stepped up to face him and said, “Poppy, I’ve been thinking.”

  He braced himself.

  “I’m thinking I should stay here for the school year,” she said.

  “What! Stay with me?”

  “Right.”

  He felt a confusing mixture of reactions to this proposal. How about his privacy, how about his nice solitary life? But also, he was conscious of an odd sense of relief. He set down his spatula. “There’s not enough room, though,” he said. “There’s only my study.”

  “You’re not using your study!”

  “I haven’t been able to, might I point out.”

  “What would you be doing there?”

  He couldn’t come up with an answer. He said, “Oh, well, let’s talk about this later. We’ve got plenty of time to discuss it.”

  “No, we don’t. Summer’s almost over.”

  “It is?”

  “School begins in two weeks.”

  “It does?”

  Last Thursday, a woman had phoned from a place called Bet Ha-Midrash and told him she had heard he might be interested in a job there. “A job,” he’d said, caught off guard.

  “A job as zayda in our three-year-olds’ class.”

  “Oh,” he’d said. “Okay …”

  “Would you like to send us your application?”

  “Okay …”

  But somehow he’d been assuming he had weeks and weeks yet to do that, and in fact he hadn’t given it any further thought. “It’s August,” he said now, disbelievingly.

  “It’s late August,” Kitty told him.

  “Isn’t that always the way?” Liam asked Damian. “Summer just flies right by.”

  And Eunice had been merely a summer romance, if you didn’t know the whole story.

  Damian had seated himself at the table, and he was biting into a piece of toast—Liam’s toast, as it happened. He might not have realized Liam was addressing him. Kitty said, “Summer didn’t fly by for me. I was buried alive in a dentist’s office.”

  “Well, I’ll have to think this over,” Liam said, stalling for time. He dished his eggs onto a plate. “Of course it will depend on what your mother says.”

  “She’s going to say no,” Kitty told him.

  “So in that case you can’t do it, can you.”

  “But if you talked to her—”

  “I told you I would.”

  “When?”

  “Oh … I’ll call her this afternoon.”

  “No, not on the phone! It’s too easy for her to say no, on the phone. We should go visit her in person.”

  Liam studied her suspiciously.

  “I want her to realize we’re serious,” Kitty said. “You and me should drive over there right this very minute and lay out all our reasons.”

  “What are our reasons?”

  “We don’t get in each other’s hair, for one thing.”

  Liam said, “If by that you mean that I’m more lax, then your mother is going to say that you should be with her. And she would be right.”

  Oops, he had sent Kitty into her prayerful-maiden pose. Plop onto the floor, hands clasped to her breast. Damian stopped chewing and stared at her. “Please, please, please,” she said. “Have I given you any trouble this summer? Have I violated my curfew by one single eentsy minute? I’m begging you, Poppy. Have mercy. All I could think of at the beach was, School’s about to start and I’m going to have to go back home and deal with Mom again. It’s not fair! I should get to live with you a while. I’ve never lived with you, not when I was old enough to know it. In my whole entire life all I’ve had is this little bit of summer—July and part of August. Xanthe and Louise had lots more time than that. And it’s only for a year, you know. After this I’ll be in college. You’ll never have another chance at me!”

  Liam laughed.

  It seemed ages since he had laughed.

  “Well,” he said, “let’s see what your mother says.”

  Kitty clambered to her feet and smoothed her clothes down.

  Damian asked, “Have we got any marmalade?”

  It was proof of how serious Kitty was about all this that she wouldn’t let Damian come with them to Barbara’s. “You would just complicate things,” she told him. “We’ll drop you off at your mom’s house on the way.”

  Damian said, “Thanks a lot!” but Kitty paid no attention; she’d already moved on to Liam.

  “I hope you’re planning to shave,” she told him.

  “Well, I could do that, I guess. Once I’ve had my breakfast.”

  “And how about what you’re wearing?”

  “How about it?”

  “You’re not planning to go out in those clothes, are you?”

  He glanced down at them—a perfectly respectable T-shirt and a pair of pants that he always referred to as his gardening pants, although he didn’t garden. “What’s wrong with them?” he asked. “It’s not as if I’m appearing in public.”

  “Mom will think you look … not reliable.”

  “Fine, I’ll change. Just let me finish my breakfast, will you?”

  Kitty backed off then, but he was conscious of her hovering at the edges of his vision, fidgeting and flouncing about and picking things up and putting them down. Damian, meanwhile, had assumed a horizontal position in an armchair with the sports section from the Sun. Every now and then he read out a baseball score to Kitty, but she didn’t seem to be listening.

  As Liam was shaving, it occurred to him to wonder why he had said yes to her. He didn’t want this child living with him permanently! For one thing, he was tired to death of all these fruity-smelling shampoos and conditioners crowding the rim of his bathtub. And the carpet in the den had not been visible since she’d moved in there.

  But when he emerged, presentably dressed, he found she had washed and dried the breakfast dishes and cleaned up the kitchen. He was touched by the earnestness of the gesture even though he knew it wouldn’t likely be repeated.

  It was an overcast day, but pleasant enough that people were out and about on their Sunday pursuits—tooling down the bike lane along North Charles, jogging, walking, spilling forth from various churches. On the street where Damian’s mother lived, two teenage boys were tossing a football back and forth, and Damian exited the backseat with barely a “Thanks” and went to join them. “I’ll let you know how it goes!” Kitty called after him.

  Damian lifted an arm in acknowledgment, but he didn’t turn around. It was his broken arm—the cast gray with dirt by now and scribbled over with graffiti. Evidently it didn’t hinder him, though, because when one of the boys sent the football his way he caught it easily.

  “On Tuesday they’re cutting his cast down so it’s not covering his elbow anymore,” Kitty told Liam, “and then he can drive again. You won’t have to chauffeur me around after that. See how it’s all working out for me to live with you?”

  “Just don’t get your hopes up,” Liam warned her. “I’m not sure your mother’s going to go for this.”

  “Oh, why are you always so negative? Why do you always expect the worst?”

  He left the question unanswered.

  In Barbara’s neighborhood—his neighborhood, once upon a time, green and manicured and shaded by old trees—the central fishpond was surrounded by children feeding bread crumbs to the ducks. Strollers and tricycles dotted the grass, and blankets were spread here and there for babies to sit on. Liam drove slowly, for safety’s sake. He braked to let a small group cross in
front of him, two couples shepherding a little girl and a taller boy who might have been her brother. “It was the same turtle we saw last time; I know it was,” the little girl was saying, and Liam wondered if it was the same turtle he and his daughters used to see. Louise always tried to pet it; she would lean so far over the edge of the pond, reaching a hand toward the water, that Liam had felt the need to grab hold of her overall straps in case she fell in. And once Xanthe actually had fallen in, when the girls went ice skating on a winter afternoon. The pond wasn’t deep enough to be dangerous, but the water had been cruelly cold. She had arrived home in tears, Liam remembered, and Louise had been crying too, in sympathy.

  He turned onto Barbara’s street and parked in front of their old house, which was a modest white clapboard Colonial, not half as large or imposing as most of the others. When she and Madigan married there had been some talk of their buying a place in Guilford, but she hadn’t wanted to leave her neighbors. Secretly, Liam had been glad of that. He would have felt even more rejected, more ousted, if she had moved somewhere he couldn’t picture in his mind’s eye when he thought about her.

  He was just stepping out from behind the wheel when Kitty said, “Oh, shoot.”

  “What is it?”

  “Xanthe’s here.”

  He looked around him. “She is?” he said. “How do you know?”

  “That’s her car in front of us.”

  “That’s Xanthe’s car?”

  It was one of those new sharp-edged, boxy things, pale blue. The last he’d known, Xanthe drove a red Jetta. But Kitty said, “Yup.”

  “What happened to the Jetta?”

  “She traded it in.”

  “Is that a fact,” Liam said. He tried to remember how long it had been since he and Xanthe had seen each other.

  “This is the last thing we need,” Kitty said as they started up the front walk.

  “Why’s that?”

  “She’s mad at me, I don’t know what for. It would be just like her to take Mom’s side against me out of spite.”

  “She’s mad at me too,” Liam said.

  “Great.”

  If Xanthe was including Kitty in this snit of hers, then it must be true that Damian was the reason. Someone ought to inform her that an entirely different person had been arrested for the break-in. Liam started to say as much to Kitty, but he stopped himself. Kitty probably had no inkling of Xanthe’s suspicions.