Noah's Compass Page 21

  She was wrong. Every time a floorboard creaked, he just cleared his throat or rattled his newspaper—covered the sound up in some way, as he had always covered suspicious sounds up even before the break-in.

  All along, it seemed, he had experienced only the most glancing relationship with his own life. He had dodged the tough issues, avoided the conflicts, gracefully skirted adventure.

  He let Mrs. Twill leave her telephone number because that was the easiest way to get rid of her, and then he showed her out.

  When he sat back down in his armchair (unpleasantly warm now from Mrs. Twill’s bony rear end), he found he had lost the thread of his thoughts. He felt restless and distracted. He wondered if he should take a walk. Or go grocery shopping, maybe? He was nearly out of orange juice. He rehearsed the preparations in his mind: make a list, collect his recyclable bags …

  He saw Mrs. Twill as she had looked when he’d opened the door—her who-cares posture, her garish lipstick, her unfamiliar, unwelcome, un-Eunice face.

  “Oh, Liam,” he heard Eunice say again. O Liam, he saw in her round schoolgirl script, for she had a habit of spelling oh without the h, which had lent her little smiley-face notes an unexpectedly poetic tone. (O I wish Mr. C. didn’t have that budget meeting tomorrow …)

  Sometimes, without his say-so, the most specific memories of Eunice would suddenly swim up. Her refusal to drive on major highways, for instance, because she feared what she called the “peer pressure” of the drivers behind her on entrance ramps. Her tendency to talk about any subject that was on her mind, regardless of her audience, so that she was perfectly capable of asking the mailman what gift she should bring to a baby shower. And the way she had of biting her lower lip when she was concentrating on something—her two small, pearly front teeth recalling the teeth of an old-fashioned bisque doll that one of his daughters had owned.

  Or the harder memories, from after he’d learned she was married. “But what about our only life?” he heard her say, and it was almost a melody, a plaintive little clear-voiced song hanging in the air of the room.

  Why was it that he had known so many sad women?

  His mother, to begin with—abandoned by her husband, perennially in poor health, no solace remaining to her but her children, as she was forever pointing out to them. “If you two left me, I don’t know how I’d bear it,” she said. And then what did Liam do? He left her. He accepted a partial scholarship to a college in the Midwest, although the University of Maryland had offered a scholarship too, and a full one at that. How could he? all her church friends asked. Thank the good Lord for Julia; daughters were always a comfort; but wouldn’t you think Liam could stay in the same geographical area, at least? When his mother was so alone, so unfortunate, such a victim of circumstance! A saint, in fact. (As she said so often: “I just seem to put myself last, even though everyone tells me I shouldn’t. I know they must be right, but I’m just made that way, I guess.”)

  Liam offered no defense. There really wasn’t any defense. He reminded himself, very sensibly, that somebody would always be saying something disapproving. No point letting it get to him.

  Funny, it used to be so simple to sum his mother up, but now that he looked back he seemed to be ambushed by complexities. He saw again the frightened look in her eyes when she was going through her last illness, and her tiny, curled hands. It struck him that life in general was heartbreaking—a word he didn’t toss off lightly.

  His girlfriends had been sad types as well, not that he had consciously chosen them for their sadness. Sooner or later, it seemed, every girl he dated ended up revealing some secret sorrow—an alcoholic father or a mentally ill mother or, at the very least, an outcast childhood.

  Well, who knows. It could be that the whole world was that way.

  Millie, though: Millie was his golden girl. She was tall and slender, with a veil of straight blond hair and a beautiful pale face. Her eyes were deep-set and startlingly light in color, the lids luminous as eggshells, and she had a floating, sashaying style of walking.

  Millie, he thought now, forgive me. I’d forgotten how much I loved you.

  His first glimpse of her had been at a friend’s apartment. She was playing the cello in an impromptu, very inept and cobbled-together string quartet, which was making her laugh. She laughed with her hair tossed back, her body loose and relaxed, her knees spread open to accommodate her instrument. This was misleading, as it turned out. Millie was not an open-kneed kind of person. She wasn’t even a cellist; she was a harpist. Liam learned later that she’d gone a few months earlier to pick up a skirt from the cleaner’s, but the cleaner had closed for lunch hour and so she’d stepped into the music store next door and bought herself a cello instead. That was Millie for you: whimsical. Fey. A sort of water maiden. Liam had fallen head over heels. He had pursued her single-mindedly until she agreed to marry him, less than six months after they met.

  Had he been too insistent? Had she harbored some misgivings? He hadn’t thought so at the time, but now he was less sure. At the start of their marriage, he had believed she was content. (Though always, now that he looked back, rather muted, a bit remote.) It was true she was not an enjoyer. She seemed to find sex something of a trial, and she deplored the excessive notice that other people—even Liam, back then—paid to food and drink. In fact she soon became a strict vegetarian, which made her even more pallid and translucent-looking.

  But the major change dated from her pregnancy. This was an unplanned pregnancy, admittedly, but not the end of the world. They were both in agreement on that. When she started sleeping too much and grew even more disconnected from everyday life, well, it was only to be expected, wasn’t that so? But then she didn’t change back again after the baby was born.

  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.

  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.