Celestial Navigation

by Anne Tyler

  “Also some gifts, I believe,” he said. “Let me see, here.” He hunched his way out of the backpack and set it on the bed. From between his two sandwiches he pulled the surprise balls, and then took forever trying to break into the plastic wrappings. In the end he had to chew through them with his teeth in order to start a rip. He distributed the balls in a great hurry, one to each child, one even to Rachel. “Open them,” he said. “Go on. They’re surprises, no one knows what’s in them.” He was so anxious for the gifts to turn out all right that the children’s fumbling fingers strained his nerves. He reached into the backpack for one of the sandwiches, unwrapped it and took great tearing bites of it, chewing steadily as he watched the long ribbons of white crêpe paper unwinding onto the floor.

  The first to find anything was Pippi. A little ping sounded at her feet. “Oh!” she said, and bent and picked up a flat tin whistle the size of a postage stamp. She turned it over several times. “It’s a whistle,” she said finally. She blew on it, but the sound that came out was whispery and toneless. She turned it over again. “Never mind,” said Jeremy, “go on unwrapping. I’m sure there’s more.” He took another bite of his sandwich. He looked over at Darcy, who had just found her surprise—another whistle. Everyone had whistles. Some had one, some two or three. The only difference between them was the colors. The gifts’ round shape was formed by a cardboard center, something like the core of a ball of string. The centers fell to the floor and rolled around with hollow sounds. Crêpe paper ribbons rose like mounds of spaghetti around everyone’s feet. One by one the children lifted the whistles to their lips, blew them, lowered them, and looked at Jeremy. They seemed not so much disappointed as puzzled. Their faces were courteous and watchful, as if they were waiting for some explanation. When Rachel cried out, holding up her own ball, which was still unopened but damp where she had chewed it, Mary said, “Here, Rachel, I’ll help,” and those faces swung toward Rachel all at the same second, as if they thought she might provide what they were waiting for. While Mary unwound the ball Rachel reached out with both hands, catching tails of crêpe paper. At the very end two whistles fell to the floor—one yellow, one blue. She crowed and stooped to pick them up, but Mary was too quick for her. “No, honey,” she said. “You might swallow them.” Over her shoulder she called, “Darcy, find her something. Hand her my keys, will you?” But the keys were no good. Rachel threw them away and started crying, still straining toward the whistles in her mother’s hand. “Rachel, they’ll hurt you,” Mary told her. Then she said to Jeremy, “I’ll just save them till later, shall I?”

  “Oh. Surely,” he said.

  “As soon as she’s old enough I’ll give them to her. I know she’ll love them.”

  Never mind, the last thing I need is tact, he wanted to tell her. I know they don’t care for whistles. And I know it doesn’t matter all that much anyway; I’m not a child, after all. But there was no way to say it out loud without bringing on more tact—reassurance, protestations. “J think these gifts are lovely,” Mary said. “Aren’t they, children? Wasn’t it nice of Jeremy to bring them?”

  Murmurs rose up too quickly, on cue. “Thank you, Jeremy.” “Golly, these sure are nice, Jeremy.”

  “Oh, well,” he said.

  “You know how fond children are of things that make noise,” Mary told him.

  He looked at her helplessly, at her kind, protecting, understanding eyes, and for lack of words he finished the last of his sandwich with a single chomp and wiped the crumbs off on the front of his shirt. Chewing gave him a good reason not to speak. He gazed straight ahead of him, chewing hard, conscious of seven faces turned in his direction and frozen there.

  “How is your work going?” Mary asked him.

  He chewed on. He couldn’t seem to finish. The bread and cheese seemed to have molded together like soggy newspaper.

  “Jeremy?” she said. “Aren’t you working any more?”

  Her face was so concerned. She was being so careful of him. He swallowed hard and cleared his throat. “Of course I am,” he said.

  “You are?”

  “My work is going very well. Very well. I am very pleased with it.”

  “Oh,” said Mary. “Well, that’s wonderful.”

  “In fact, it’s going better than it ever has before,” he said.

  “That’s nice.”

  She turned and went out of the bedroom. Following her, he had to bat his way between the damp diapers. The children came behind him in a shuffling, whispering line. When he located Mary again—just easing herself onto a dingy mound of a sofa and arranging Rachel upon her lap—Jeremy sat down too, but at some distance from her. The children settled themselves on the floor, all facing their parents, completely silent now. He winced to see them on that cold, blackened linoleum. He noticed how shabby and unattractive they looked—ragged children with reddened noses and chapped hands and lips, their sleeves short enough to expose their wrists and their shoes muddy and curling at the toes. And the house filled him with despair. At each gust of wind outside the cold burst in upon him like little knives from several directions. The furniture seemed untrustworthy—infested or disease-ridden. He sat gingerly on the edge of the couch. He kept his eyes averted from the miserable attempt at a kitchen that he had glimpsed across the room. Why must she choose the very worst house to live in? Why had she gone husbandless to the hospital that time, no doubt calling down all the nurses’ pity and indignation? Was it purposeful? Was it aimed at him? Yet the next thing she said was, “We’re doing very well, too.”

  He stared at her.

  “We’re doing beautifully,” she told him.

  Yes. She would do beautifully anywhere. There was no defeating her. He felt tired at the thought of her.

  “I have a job now, you know,” she said. “I work at a day nursery in one of those cottages up the road. You probably passed it.”

  “Do—but what about the children?” he said.

  “Well, the younger ones I take with me. The others go to school.”

  “School? Is there a school out here?”

  “There are schools everywhere, Jeremy. They can walk out to the highway and catch a bus that takes them right to the door.”

  He imagined them in a huddle at the bus stop, shivering in their thin, patched dresses, their bare legs blotchy with cold. “Mary, I don’t think—it sounds so—”

  “The day nursery lets out the same time school does. I’m home before they are. And I like my work.”

  Yes, but what about me? he asked silently. Are you saying you won’t consider returning? Have I come all this way for nothing?

  “You know, Jeremy,” Mary said, “I’m managing on my own now. I’m not depending on a soul. I’m doing it on my own.”

  Well, of course she was. Mary had always managed on her own. Why did she even bother mentioning it? The answer was simple: she was telling him she had no place for him. He turned to meet her eyes and found her glowing and confident, as beautiful as ever, more beautiful. “I’ve even started paying Brian rent money,” she said. “I don’t want to be beholden to him.”

  “Mary, haven’t you used any of the money in the bank?”

  “That’s your money, Jeremy. I’m trying to manage on my own.”

  “But the children! I mean—”

  “How are things at home? Is Miss Vinton helping you out?”

  “Oh, Miss Vinton, yes.”

  “How’s Olivia?”

  “Why, she left,” he said. “She didn’t even tell us goodbye.”

  “Left? Where’d she go to?”

  “I’m not at all sure. And toward the end she didn’t seem to be herself, I do hope—”

  “Oh dear, I’ve thought of her often,” Mary said. “I should have taken her with me.”

  “Where, here?”

  “Certainly here.”

  “I don’t understand how you have room for the number you do have,” he said, looking around.

  “Really, we’re very comfortable. A
lso I’m planning to buy an oil stove,” she told him. “That will help when it gets colder. And Darcy and I are winterizing the place ourselves, did you notice?”

  “Um—”

  “Sealing off the windows and everything.”

  He thought of the rolled-up newspapers. “Ah, yes,” he said. “No, I know what winterizing is, I just thought—”

  “We’re doing a pretty good job, don’t you think?”

  “Yes.”

  “Most people would have to ask some man to do that.”

  “Oh. Well, I think I had better take care of it now,” he said.

  “You?”

  “I’ll go tend to it right away.”

  “But Jeremy,” she said. “Wouldn’t you like to—”

  “Do you think I don’t know how?”

  “No, of course not. I don’t think that for a minute. I’m sure you know how.”

  “Well, then,” he said. “I expect I’d better get started.”

  “Do you mean right this minute?”

  “Why, yes.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to sit here a while? I could give you a bite to eat.”

  “I’ve already eaten.”

  “You could sit and talk, maybe. Don’t you want to?”

  If they talked, she would say what he dreaded to hear, and once said it could never be taken back. He rose hastily, draping his bald spot with the sudden coolness of a diaper. It was important to take action at once. To surround her with efficiency and authority. “I’ll do it all, you see to the children,” he told her. And he had clapped his cap on and was out the door before she had time to rise to her feet.

  He had to do a better job of it than she and Darcy could. That was essential. Instead of folding tubes one by one as he needed them he did them all at once, and weighted them with a stone. He cut off lengths of masking tape and fastened them by their tip ends to the sills of the various windows. Only then did he climb up on the crate and begin the actual task. It seemed that his fingers could not make a wrong move today. Everything proceeded so smoothly, in such a well-ordered fashion. Why, there was nothing to this sort of work! He could have been taking care of it all these years. The wood was rotten and it crumbled beneath the tape but he managed anyway, locating the most solid places, feeling a sense of patience and tolerance for this pitiful world that Mary thought so much of. He could win her back in no time, it wasn’t impossible. Wasn’t he managing this windowsill well? Wasn’t he finally in control?

  Mary came out of the house carrying a mug of coffee, balancing Rachel on her left hip in a familiar way that hurt him to see. She still had not put on a sweater, and the baby’s feet were bare. “She’ll get sick, Mary,” he told her.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “It’s much too cold out here.”

  “Cold?”

  She looked up at him, at where he stood teetering on the crate. “Jeremy, it’s not cold,” she said. “This is the warmest fall in anyone’s memory. It’s November and people still have their boats out.”

  “But the wind,” he said.

  She turned and looked out toward the water, as if the wind would be visible there. She looked at him again. “But it’s not a cold wind, Jeremy,” she said. “It’s just a cool breeze. Are you cold?”

  “No, no.” He felt beaten. He was sorry he had mentioned it. Mary smiled up at him with her face bright and suntanned and her eyes very certain, her bare arms showing not a single goose bump. When she handed him the mug of coffee she touched his hand with hers, and even her fingertips were warm. She let her hand rest there as if proving the warmth, gloating over it, but Jeremy slipped out of her reach immediately and then she went away.

  As soon as the windows were done he went back in the house. He carried his stack of newspapers and roll of tape. “Oh, good, you’re finished,” Mary said. “Won’t you sit down with me and have some more coffee? Children, will you get out from underfoot, please?” But Jeremy said, “No, no, I want to do this properly. I’ll have to seal the insides, too.”

  “You mean, right now?”

  “I want to get this done the way it ought to be,” Jeremy told her.

  “I see,” said Mary. “Well, goodness. You certainly are fixing it so we could stay all winter here.”

  “I can manage everything. I don’t want you to have to bother yourself at all.”

  “I see,” Mary said again, and then she sat down in a kitchen chair and let him get on with his work.

  • • •

  “What next?” he said when he was done. Mary was in the kitchen, slicing carrots. There were so many children around her that he had to shout to make himself heard, but as soon as he had spoken they fell silent. He had never known such a silence. He couldn’t understand what they were waiting for. Mary turned and looked at him, but her face was blank and he wondered if he should repeat the question. “What next?” he said. “What else needs doing?”

  “Why, nothing I can think of, thank you.”

  “Nothing? There must be something.”

  “No.”

  “You said you were doing things to winterize.”

  She turned very suddenly back to the cutting board. She began slicing the carrots with a clipped, definite motion.

  In the silence one of the children said, “We were going to air the sails, remember?”

  “We can do that later,” Mary said without looking around.

  “Do what?” said Jeremy.

  “Air the sails,” Abbie told him.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We do it for Mr. O’Donnell. After a rainy spell we go out and run up his sails to dry them. Mom hates doing it.”

  He looked at Mary. Still only at her back.

  “Oh,” he said finally. “Well, then. It seems that’s something I’d better take care of.”

  Then she did turn. She said, “Never mind that, Jeremy, I can see to it later.”

  “But I—Abbie says you hate it.”

  “Jeremy, please. Can’t you stop doing things a minute?”

  “I’m not at all overtired,” he said.

  “No, I know you’re not.”

  “Then what are we waiting for?”

  He was out the door and six feet away before he realized that he didn’t know which boat was Brian’s. When he turned, he found a whole cluster of children watching him from the steps. They advanced on him, all talking at once. “It’s the blue one, the ketch.” “There it is.” “You have to row out in a dinghy.”

  “A dinghy. Oh,” he said.

  “There’s the dinghy.”

  He followed Hannah’s pointing finger and found a dinghy nearly hidden in a clump of weeds down by the water. An enormous thing. He cleared his throat. “Ah, yes,” he said.

  “You run the sails up the masts and let them dry a little while.”

  “Yes, I see.”

  “Can we come too?”

  “Come—surely your mother must need you at home,” he said.

  “No, she doesn’t.”

  The thought of the children alongside him, rocking the boat and swarming everywhere, falling overboard and requiring him to jump in after them when he couldn’t swim, was even more terrifying than the thought of rowing alone. “Perhaps another time,” he said.

  “Why can’t we? Mom always lets us.”

  “She does?”

  “She takes the bunch of us and the baby too.”

  “I see. Well, then,” said Jeremy, “I suppose you may come.”

  The children cheered. Jeremy walked toward the water with very small, firm steps, fixing his eyes upon the dinghy and praying for it to turn out to be more manageable than it looked from here. It wasn’t. It seemed gigantic. Its peeling, weathered surface had the same depressing effect on him as gray-painted machinery or factory buildings. There was a pool of scummy water in the bottom. Wasn’t that a danger sign? The oars looked too long to handle. Even the rope that tied it presented a problem; it was fastened to a post with a clever, casual-lookin
g knot. “Here,” said Darcy, when he had taken too long loosening it. “Let me.” She slipped it off easily and handed it to him. While he waited, numbly keeping hold of it, she helped the children pile in. “Not Pippi, Pippi went first last time. It’s Eddie’s turn. Who’s going to sit next to Jeremy?”

  “Wait!” they heard. Jeremy turned and saw Mary flying down the slope toward them with the baby bouncing on her hip and her face pale and her eyes dark and wide, almost without whites to them. He thought something terrible must have happened. He had never seen her look so frightened. When she came up beside him she was breathless. “Mary?” he said. “What is it?”

  “Jeremy, I—please don’t take the children.”

  He felt as if she had hit him in the stomach. While she gasped for breath he did too, clenching his end of the rope. “I’m sorry,” Mary said. “It’s just that I—well, I was just about to feed them. Why don’t you leave them with me? You’ll only be gone a little while.”

  Of course he shouldn’t take them. He knew that too. But to have her stand there telling him that, saying she was willing for him to go himself but not to take the children! She thought his silence meant that he was simply being stubborn. “Or, I know what,” she said, trying a new tone. “I’ll come along. How will that be?” She smiled up at him. The children murmured encouragement. She laid a hand gently on his arm. “Wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t it be better if we all went out together?”

  “Get away from me,” he said.

  Her hand dropped. Her smile vanished so suddenly it seemed to have broken and shattered.

  “Just leave me alone, leave me be,” he said. “And you,” he told the children. “Get out.”

  They came awkwardly, stumbling over each other and keeping their eyes on him instead of the ground. “Jeremy?” said Mary. Her voice was thin and choked, but he didn’t look at her. As soon as the last child was on dry land he bent over the boat, gave it a long shove, and then hopped in, as neatly as if he had done it all his life. The only thing that gave him away was the violent trembling of his knees as he bent to sit down. The whole boat trembled. He pretended not to notice. He reached for the oars, fitted them into the oarlocks, and after a few dry swoops hit water and pulled. The dinghy set off with a start. But was he facing in the right direction? He thought of Winslow Homer’s paintings; he tried to remember which way the men in dinghies had been pulling. It would be just like him to perform this entire task sitting backwards. He splashed himself a few times, then plowed too deep, and took a while to realize which oar to lift when he veered to one side. The dinghy kept jerking ahead and then losing half the gain before he could manage another stroke, but when he looked over his shoulder he saw that he was making progress. He knew he would get there eventually. He turned to look at the shore again and found Mary and the children lined up, watching. Their faces were small and white and featureless. The only sound that came from them was the shrill tweet of Edward’s whistle, which he blew in an absent-minded way as he faced out toward the water. Then Hannah’s whistle, copying Edward’s, but hers was softer and the creaking of the oars nearly drowned it out.