Celestial Navigation

by Anne Tyler

  5

  Fall, 1968: Miss Vinton

  The way it used to be, I stayed home with the children while Jeremy took Mary to the hospital by taxi. This was before I had bought my little car. Mary would wake me in the night just to let me know I was in charge—“Now don’t get up!” she always said, but of course I did get up, I wouldn’t have missed the excitement for anything. I put on a bathrobe and ran downstairs to say goodbye, only then it would turn out that they weren’t quite ready to go yet. Mary was waiting at the front door with her overnight case and Jeremy was off trying to locate the house keys or change for the taxi. I kept Mary company. We just stood there smiling at each other. We beamed. Never mind that I am an old maid; I can still recognize a happy occasion when I see one. When Jeremy arrived, all worried and shaky, I would find his coat for him and help him into it. “Hurry now,” I’d say. “I hear the taxi. Don’t let him leave you.” I slid back bolts and flung open first the inner door and then the outer door, I burst into the frosty night air ahead of them. I wanted to shout out a fanfare: “Make way! Make way! We have a pregnant woman here! A baby is being born!” Instead I opened the door of the taxi, meanwhile holding my bathrobe collar shut with one hand. “You get in first,” I would tell Jeremy. He always had this moment of hesitation just then, but when I gave him a pat he would climb on in. Mary laid her cheek against mine, leaning across a whole table’s width of stomach and overnight case, which made us laugh. We would have laughed at anything, I believe. Mary glowed all over, lighting up the sidewalk. “Take care of Jeremy for me,” she always whispered. And then, aloud: “I’m off!” She climbed into the cab. She rolled down the window and leaned out, waving. “Goodbye, Miss Vinton! And thank you for getting up! I’m off! Goodbye!”

  I bought my little car when my knees grew too rheumatic for bicycling. I chose a ‘51 DeSoto, not much to look at but very steady and reliable. This was when Mary was well into her fourth pregnancy. (Her fifth, counting Darcy.) “One thing,” I told her. “You can go to the hospital in style this time. Well, maybe not style, exactly, but at least you won’t have to depend on the Yellow Cab Company.” Secretly I was a little nervous. I must have checked the route to the hospital a dozen times, although it wasn’t far and I had often been before. I kept reminding Mr. Somerset, “Don’t go anywhere in November. Promise me, please.” He was supposed to watch the children while I was away. Now, Mr. Somerset had not been gone overnight in the fourteen years I’d known him, so you can see how edgy I must have been. I kept wishing that Julia Jarrett were still alive. Or that they had replaced her, at least—found another grandmotherly type for that room instead of turning it into a nursery. What kind of babysitter was an old man with a fondness for bourbon? By October, before Mary had even packed her suitcase, I had laid out a dress on the chair beside my bed and put a pair of shoes beneath it, all ready to hop into. I took to sleeping in tomorrow’s underwear. I kept dreaming that my car ran out of gas halfway to the hospital.

  But it was mid-November, about four o’clock one morning, when the knock came on my door. I had been expecting it for so long that it hardly seemed real. I ran downstairs still fastening buttons and carrying my belt looped over my wrist, and there was Mary as calm as always, smiling up at me. She had on the blue maternity dress that she’d worn day in and day out for the majority of her married life, and over that the old black coat that didn’t meet across her stomach. “Are you all right?” I asked her.

  “I’m fine.”

  “How close are the pains?”

  “Every four minutes.”

  “Jeremy had better hurry,” I said.

  “Oh, he’s not coming.”

  “Not coming?”

  “I didn’t wake him.”

  I stared at her.

  “Well, I do have you to help,” Mary said. “It’s not as if I have to manage the taxi any more.”

  “Mary, he wouldn’t want to miss being with you now for all the world,” I told her. If there was one thing I was sure of, that was it. Why, that man would move heaven and earth for her! You have only to look at him to see how much he loves her. But there stood Mary shaking her head, planted squarely in front of me like little Abbie when she has made up her mind about something. “You don’t know how hard it is for him,” she said.

  I did know. I probably knew better than she did, but I also believe that everyone has a right to take his own leaps. Of course, I didn’t tell Mary that. She has her rights too. And there might be other reasons I had no inkling of, so all I did was nod and bend to pick up her overnight case. “Suit yourself,” I said. “You got everything?”

  “I think so.”

  “Let’s go, then,” I said. It wasn’t even necessary to call Mr. Somerset—not with Jeremy at home.

  But I felt that we were making a mistake, all the way to the hospital. Mary didn’t, apparently. She just looked out the window and talked about ordinary things—the house, the children. I have to admit I was relieved about that. I don’t like hearing too much of people’s personal lives. Sometimes she stopped speaking and her face would flatten and her eyes would get fixed on a point far away. That was the only sign she gave of being in labor. It wasn’t at all like in the movies, thank God. Then after a minute she would relax and go on with what she was saying before. “I wanted to get Pippi’s snowsuit out. That nylon jacket she has is not—”

  “I’ll see to it.”

  “I believe it’s in the trunk. It’s that old one of Abbie’s, you remember.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  I had never realized how long some traffic lights can take.

  “And Darcy needs a note of permission, she’s going on a field trip.”

  “I’ll write her one in the waiting room.”

  “But how will you sign it? How will they know who Miss Vinton is?”

  I had assumed I would simply forge Mary’s name, but since that didn’t seem to have occurred to her I came up with another answer. “I’ll give it to Jeremy to sign,” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” Mary said. She turned and looked at me. Why did she suddenly become so beautiful? The corners of her mouth lifted, and she brushed her hair up off her neck and tipped her head back until it rested on the back of the seat. “Jeremy can do it,” she said. Then she closed her eyes, and the light changed to green. I nearly stripped all the gears, I was so anxious to get us moving again.

  At the hospital they whisked Mary away in a wheelchair, and I went into a waiting room I found at the end of the hall. It was huge and barren-looking, with linoleum floors and vinyl furniture and a stiff bouquet of hothouse flowers on a coffee table. On one couch a bald man was stretched out asleep. I took a chair at the other end of the room from him, turned on a lamp, and wrote a note on the back of a shopping list: “To whom it may concern, Darcy Tell has my permission to go on a field trip today. Signed,” and I left a blank space for Jeremy’s signature. Then I sat back and stared at the blank space. I kept wondering if I should just go and phone him. Wouldn’t Mary be glad, after all, once he had come? I know that Jeremy is supposed to be the weak one in that couple but he might surprise some people: if you are so scared of so many things, sometimes you turn out even stronger than ordinary men. I took a dime from my purse, but then I reconsidered. I haven’t lived fourteen years on the edges of other people’s lives for nothing. I could never interfere like that. So I stayed in my seat. I spent the next hour chain-smoking and reading torn Life magazines whose photos seemed very dim and long ago, the way they always do in waiting rooms. Then someone said, “Miss Vinton?” and I looked up to find a doctor dressed in green standing in the doorway. “Are you Miss Vinton? Mrs. Pauling sent me to tell you,” he said. “She has a boy.”

  I said, “A boy? Are you sure?”

  Which made him smile, but you can’t really blame me. The first three babies were girls: Abigail, Philippa, and Hannah. They’d been planning for an Edward so long that the name was getting stale. I think all of us had given up hope. I said, “My, won’t Jeremy b
e surprised? I can’t wait to tell him!” but the doctor held up his hand and said, “That was the rest of her message. She’ll call her husband herself, she says. She wants to.”

  “Oh, of course,” I said. “I didn’t think.”

  I watched him walk off again. Then I looked down at the warm dime in the palm of my hand. Other people save dimes for weeks. They spend hours in the phone booth as soon as the baby is born, telling grandparents and aunts and uncles and friends. Who could I tell? As far as I knew Jeremy had one solitary sister left from all his family—Amanda, who kept her distance. (She never did get on with Mary.) I couldn’t see waking her at five-thirty in the morning. The only friends were the women Mary sat in the park with, behind a row of strollers. I didn’t even know their last names and possibly Mary didn’t either. So in the end I put the dime away again, and got up to leave. The bald man was still asleep on the couch. I hadn’t seen a single husband pacing the floor in his shirtsleeves. Things rarely work out the way the magazines would lead you to expect.

  By the time I got home it was almost light, and the children were up. They keep the most amazing hours. Darcy was in the kitchen fixing cereal for the little ones, Abbie and Pippi were quarreling in the parlor, and Hannah was sitting in her high chair sucking her thumb. “Heavens,” I said to Darcy. “Who’s watching over you? Where’s everyone else?”

  “In bed, I guess,” Darcy said.

  “Didn’t Jeremy tell you you have a baby brother?”

  “No.”

  She was eleven at the time—a silent age.

  “Well, you do,” I said.

  “Well, nobody told us.”

  “I believe they’re naming him Edward.”

  “I knew that,” she said. “I’m the one that chose it.”

  I’d forgotten. They let her choose all the names, to make her feel a part of things. It’s lucky they didn’t end up with a pack of Hepzibahs and Lancelots. I said, “Well, I think that’s a very fine choice, Darcy.”

  “When do we get to see him?”

  “In a few days.”

  She poured milk into the cereal bowls and I went out to the parlor to separate the two who were quarreling. “All right, what’s going on here?” I said. It was something to do with a pack of bath salts. I put the pack on the mantel, wiped Pippi’s tears, and buttoned Abbie’s pajamas. Meanwhile, I was wondering who was in charge. I seemed to be the only grownup around. I still had my mackintosh on. I was stained with tears and pink bath salts, and in two hours I was due at the bookstore. Not that I would have minded staying with the children. I have offered to, for every birth. “Let Jeremy go on with his work,” I always tell Mary. “I’ll take some of my vacation time.” She says, “No, goodness, he can manage.” Now I couldn’t see a sign of him. I got the two girls seated with their cereal and then I went into the dining room and tapped on Jeremy’s door. He and Mary share his mother’s old room. But there was no answer, and finally I looked inside. All I found was an empty bed, unmade. Bedclothes trailing across the floor. I shut the door and went back to the kitchen. “All right, children,” I said. “It looks like we’re the ones holding the fort.” I passed out paper napkins, and fixed them hot cocoa while they sat eating around the kitchen table. They made quite a picture—Darcy so blond, the others brown-headed and round-faced and solemn. The younger ones were fairly close together in age—six, four, and two—and that morning it seemed to me that the littlest was much too little to have a new baby coming in. She was drinking from one of those training cups with a spout. Every time she took the cup out of her mouth she replaced it instantly with her thumb. Abbie and Pippi continued to fight. Darcy started bossing them around—a bad habit she has. Meanwhile Buddy came through, our current medical student, and grabbed an apple on his way out, and Mr. Somerset appeared but left when he saw the crowd. “Mr. Somerset! Wait,” I said. “Have you seen Jeremy?”

  “Nope.”

  “I bet you he’s in the studio,” Darcy said.

  So while they were busy with breakfast I set off for the third floor. I took Darcy’s teacher’s note with me. I held it in front of me, like a ticket of admission, while I knocked. “Jeremy? It’s Mildred Vinton,” I said. No answer. I knocked again. They put a door on his studio when they moved the first two girls upstairs, to his old bedroom. It used to be that the whole house showed signs of his working, scraps littered everywhere and the smell of glue and construction paper, but the better his pieces get the more he shuts them away from us. Someday, I believe, Jeremy is going to be a very famous man, but it is possible that no one will be allowed to see his work at all by then, not even strangers in museums.

  I said, “Jeremy? Are you in there?” Then I said, “Well, I’m not going to disturb you, but I do have to know if you’d like me to stay with the children today.”

  Footsteps creaked across the floor. The door opened and there stood Jeremy, unshaven, in a round-necked moth-eaten sweater and a pair of baggy trousers. It was years since I had seen him looking so awful. The funny thing about Jeremy is that he never seems to age, he always has the same smooth plump face, but today that made it all the worse. He looked shocking, like a baby with a hangover. However, I pretended not to notice. “Morning, Jeremy,” I said. “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you, Miss Vinton.”

  When we heard they were married (and after we got over the surprise), and the house warmed up and we started using first names more, I asked them to call me Mildred but apparently that proved impossible. I am doomed to be Miss Vinton forever.

  I stuck out my note, along with a ballpoint pen. “Could you sign this, please?”

  He signed, but without even reading it so far as I could see. Then he handed it back. “You didn’t call me,” he said.

  “Well, I—she asked me not to, Jeremy.”

  “She didn’t even want me with her.”

  I couldn’t think what to say. I looked off down the stairs, so as not to embarrass him. Finally I asked, “Would you like me to take care of the children today?”

  “You think that I’m not up to it,” he said.

  He startled me. I said, “Why, no, Jeremy, I know you are.”

  “I can do things like that.”

  “Of course, but—if you’re working on something.”

  “I’m not working on anything at all.”

  He shut the door again. What could I do? It seemed he was too abstracted for me to leave the little girls with him, but in the end that’s what I did—bathed and dressed and went off to the shop. At noon I couldn’t get away, but I called. The phone rang seven times before he answered. “Jeremy?” I said. “Is everything all right?”

  “Why, yes.”

  His voice sounded more like himself, and I could hear Pippi singing in the background. It seemed I had worried for no good reason.

  In the afternoon I took off from work early and went to visit Mary. As you can imagine, I was an old hand at hospital visits by that time. I knew enough not to bring her flowers (extravagance makes her anxious) and to stop off at the nursery first so that I could tell her I’d seen the baby. (She always has me promise that everything is fine, no doctor has drawn me aside to whisper anything dire.) After I had looked at Edward a proper length of time I went down the hall to her ward, where I expected to find her chattering and smiling the way she always was after a baby, but she wasn’t that day. She was lying flat on her back, crying. All up and down the room were women with bows in their hair and lace on their bedjackets, talking softly to their husbands, and there was Mary crying. Well, I nearly left. I would have, if I could. When people cry I back off to give them privacy. But then she saw me and I was trapped. “Oh, Miss Vinton,” she said. She sat up quickly and darted her index fingers underneath her eyes, getting rid of the evidence. I pretended not to notice. “Got quite a son there,” I said. I wished I had brought flowers. Then I would have had something to fuss over, give her time to get her bearings. I said, “Were you asleep? Because I only stopped in for a moment. Wasn’t p
lanning to stay. I’ll be back at the next—”

  “I’ve upset Jeremy,” she said.

  “Oh. Well, I’m sure he—he’ll get over it.”

  “You were right. I should have told him.”

  “I really don’t know much about such things,” I said. “I’m sure it will all get straight in the end.”

  “I thought I was helping. All I did was hurt his feelings so badly I don’t know what he’ll do. I’ve never seen him so hurt. I called him and—”

  Then she started crying again. She couldn’t even talk. I said, “Oh, well. Oh, well.” I spent a long time getting my mackintosh unbuttoned and draping it just so over the back of a chair.

  “I called,” Mary said, getting hold of her voice, “and I told him—and he waited a long time and then he said, ‘I see.’ Then he—then—”

  Her voice gave way. I felt helpless. I just knew she would lie awake hating herself for exposing her secrets this way. Could I make believe I hadn’t heard? That was ridiculous.

  “Then he said, ‘Didn’t you want me with you, Mary?’ ”

  “Well, of course you did,” I said, pulling down my sweater cuffs very carefully.

  “I tried to make him see. ‘I always want you with me, Jeremy,’ I said, ‘but it’s not as if this is my first baby after all and I know how hard it is for you to—’ ”

  Honesty: her one fault. There is such a thing as seeing too deeply, and then telling a man too much of what you see, but I don’t know when she’s going to find that out. “Look,” I wanted to say, “the biggest favor you can do for him is to take him at face value.” But I managed to keep quiet. I just handed her the tissue box and watched her blotting her tears. “This is a postnatal depression, I believe,” I told her finally. Mary laughed and then went on crying. “Shall I come back later?” I said.

  “No, Miss Vinton, don’t go. Please don’t go. I promise I’ll stop this.”