Compass Rose

by John Casey

  The phrase became a family joke. She couldn’t remember how long it took to fade, maybe as long as it took her to outgrow the bicycle. She did remember that being the object of envy was painful. This sensation lingered in a fragment of memory that detached itself from time but drifted back across her clear remembering, the way a floater drifted across her eye.

  She got back on the Exercycle. She gripped the handlebars and began to pedal slowly. “… On your knees praying for the decency to rejoice in your sister’s good fortune.” Elsie lolling on the sofa, her lips a little puffy—not exactly the good fortune the old man had in mind that Christmas morning. But if you gave him enough time he’d get the joke, even if it was on him. At least he’d got that one. But what about this one? What’s my favorite daughter got up to now? (That was an even older joke: “Ah, here she is—my favorite daughter.” “But Dad, you’ve only got one.” “Is that right? Just the one?”) And here she is pedaling a bicycle that’s going nowhere, minding a baby that’s none of her own, wishing away a pang of envy, and hearing his voice, hearing now the shy love in it.

  She began to cry. Just tears and a sniffle at first, then a sob she couldn’t help. Elsie took her arm from over her eyes. “Mary?” Elsie sat up and came over, tried to hug her but bumped into the end of the handlebar, came to the side and had to fend off Mary’s knee with both hands as it cycled up.

  “Jesus,” Mary said, and took a breath. She was still crying as she started to laugh. “This thing is a menace.”

  “Mary,” Elsie said. Mary could see Elsie was also caught in between—wasn’t sure if she should laugh yet.

  “It’s okay,” Mary said. “I was just remembering some stuff. Look out now—I’m getting off this thing before it kills us both.”

  Elsie took a step back, reached forward to take Mary’s hand. Elsie said, “I’m sorry I was late. I’m sorry for … whatever it is.”

  “I’ll tell you in a bit. What with pedaling and crying, I’m ready for a beer. So. You and Johnny hit it off?”

  There. Halfway there.

  Mary went to the fridge and held up two bottles of beer. Elsie nodded. They sat on the sofa. Elsie said, “In my station wagon,” and laughed the way she had when she’d come in.

  Mary heard Elsie laugh, heard herself laugh, felt the beer go down her throat, heard Elsie go on talking, but she herself wasn’t all the way back from where she’d been. She’d always been proud of her memory; she remembered songs, stories, conversations; she was the one her brothers called late at night to remember things for them. When her memory jogged along the regular paths, it was a pleasant little outing. Now she was wary. Time might be less ordering than she’d thought. The tenses—I am, I was, I will be; I love, I loved, I will love—lost their certainty when she was engulfed in memory that pulled her … Where? Why was the North Pole up, the South Pole down? She could get dizzy thinking about the earth in space, and once the earth turned or fell over onto its beam ends, all the other pretty pictures, the solar systems, the—What next? The galaxy?—she got the spins.

  It was only luck, a little puff of memory that brought back the favorite-daughter joke. Brought back from where? There might be no end of moments that weren’t in the calendar of Christmases, birthdays, school years—that hadn’t snagged on another memory but sifted into the time that was beyond the gravity of her memory. Time flowed into everyone and then out again, more of it unremembered than remembered. She thought of time growing fainter and fainter as it lost what gave it life—what people heard or saw or touched or smelled or tasted—and then going back to being nothing.

  Elsie was laughing again. “In the middle of it—not the middle middle but the middle of the beginning—I suddenly got mad. Have you ever …? When you were a little bit angry? It reminds me of how you put lemon juice on figs or that fancy Italian vinegar on strawberries and they taste sweeter. Is that like homeopathy? You put in a little bad thing to make the whole thing better?”

  “No,” Mary said. “Not homeopathy. I don’t know about homeopathy. The acid breaks down the fibers, and the fruit gets juicier.”

  Elsie laughed.

  Mary made an even bigger effort but only got as far as saying again, “So you and Johnny hit it off.”

  Elsie turned so her back was against the arm of the sofa, tucked her knees to her chest, and took a swig of beer. “What was nice in another way, in a completely other way, was that afterward we both burst out laughing. We must have thought the same thing—here we are, like a couple of teenagers. The windows steamed up, clothes all tangled. A couple of teenagers.”

  “Like Sylvia Teixeira …”

  Elsie looked up. “Oh, God, Sylvia. Was she okay about staying late? I told her nine o’clock. Have you been back awhile?”

  Mary pressed her lips together and took a second. Mary said, “She was fine. I got back early. Rose was asleep. Sylvia walked down to Miss Perry’s. Everything’s fine.” Elsie closed her eyes and rested her head on her knees.

  Mary said, “When do babies start remembering? I mean, remember for life. When Rose is four she won’t remember what’s going on now, but she’ll remember from then on, right? I’m picking four because that’s when I remember stuff from, it might have been three, but maybe it could happen even earlier with Rose—she’s smart for a baby.”

  Elsie lifted her head and looked hard at Mary. Mary heard the tone of what she’d just said as if it was on a tape recorder—her voice higher than normal and breathlessly needy. If she was tending bar she wouldn’t give that woman another drink. Mary said, “Never mind all that.” She sounded like her father, though he never used the phrase to cancel anything he himself said, just to get everyone else to pipe down.

  Maybe it was that bit of wry remembering, maybe it was that Elsie finally concentrated on her, or maybe it was that Elsie said, “Oh, Rose knows who we are.” There. Elsie said “we.” Mary resurfaced into the present. Elsie said, “She’s like a baby duck or a goose; we’re imprinted on her. You can read Konrad Lorenz about that. His geese hatched and he was the first thing they saw, so they followed him around as if he were their mother.”

  Trust Elsie to give a nature lecture. But Elsie’s effort met her halfway, as good an effort as Mary herself had made, good enough to call it a night.

  She and Elsie were in orbit around Rose. The two of them might be aligned or opposed, they might spin their days and nights at different intervals, but round and round they’d go … Until when? Until Rose grew up? Never mind time. Time wasn’t the only thing that mattered. Rose would be in their memory, and they would be in Rose’s. Elsie had said “we”; she’d said, “Rose knows who we are.” Never mind the geese. Never mind Elsie’s night out. The three of them would move together, making a force field of shared memory that would catch more of time than if each of them was alone.

  This vision held for a moment, then slid away. Mary felt she’d performed a mental act that obtained grace as surely as she’d once believed in grace through prayer. She felt the ghost of all those novenas and rosaries and composition-of-place meditations (“Feel the crown of thorns on our Savior’s brow; feel the weight of the Cross”). And if it was all that that brought her to the same near swoon she used to feel when she’d been lifted up from her aching knees and clasped hands, and the smell of her wet wool scarf—if that piety came back to her in the here and now of how she loved Rose—what of it?

  It was hers—she remembered what she remembered without worrying about blasphemy or sacrilege. And all the other old tunes of her life, when Rose grew old enough to sing them, would snag the new parts of their life, keep them on earth, keep them from flying unremembered into space.

  Elsie had nodded off. Mary woke her up enough so that she could sleepwalk to bed. Mary reached under the quilt and pulled Elsie’s boots off, left her in her wool dress. It looked comfortable enough. She turned Elsie’s alarm on, checked the woodstove, and went up to her room, looking forward to breakfast, to Rose, to the day when she and Rose would be sitting at
the table by the window having a long breakfast together.

  Part Two

  chapter twenty-seven

  Miss Perry’s recovery from her stroke had been, according to the doctor, remarkable for someone her age. He had given her passing marks in motor and language skills. Elsie thought the recovery was remarkable in a different way. It wasn’t that Miss Perry wasn’t Miss Perry, but that—as Elsie struggled to describe it to the doctor—the colors of her moods were more intense. The doctor nodded and then said, “You’ve been a great comfort to her,” and Elsie understood that they weren’t going to have a discussion, certainly not one that might become metaphysical.

  Sylvia Teixeira, although now a student at the University of Rhode Island, still came in the morning and again at suppertime. It was Mary Scanlon who told Elsie that that’s how Sylvia put off having to go to Portugal for a year. Elsie dropped in on Miss Perry after work before going to pick Rose up at Sawtooth and, later, day care.

  When Rose started going to kindergarten, Elsie said to Miss Perry, “My daughter isn’t a baby anymore.”

  Miss Perry understood at once. She said, “You may bring the child with you, and we shall see. Do you remember what ages Charlie and Tom were when I found them agreeable companions?”

  Elsie said she didn’t.

  “I do remember they knew how to s-swim,” Miss Perry said. She stuttered slightly on some sibilants. “The first time we all went out in Dick Pierce’s skiff, I asked, perhaps overcautiously, if the little boys knew how to swim. Dick no more than nodded, and without a word they took off their shirts, jumped in, and dog-paddled to the far bank and back. Dick held out a length of rope, they both took hold, and Dick swung them up over the gunwales. He held them in the air for a moment, their little brown legs dangling, both of them grinning. Dick smiled one of his shy, proud smiles, and I was quite enchanted. It wasn’t simply the display of s-strength, though the boys together may well have made up a hundredweight, but rather the sensation of being the single audience for their larking about. A fortunate consequence was that the boys were released from feeling that I was an inhibiting presence.” Miss Perry paused. Elsie thought she might have lost her train of thought, but Miss Perry was simply composing her next sentence. “When I fear from time to time that I have not done enough with my years, I find that my consolation is not so much in the active parts of my life—although teaching, particularly teaching you, certainly required a good deal of activity—but rather in moments like that in Dick’s skiff, when affection and pleasure simply rose up around us. You have a more vigorous nature than I ever had, and on the whole I admire it, but I hope that after a few more hectic years, when your daughter is grown and I am dead, you will let yourself become a more reflective tutelary spirit. One of the things that contributed to the flowering of New England was that the powerful families almost all had a poor cousin, either actual or figurative, who acted as their conscience. You have devoted a good deal of your energy to defending the natural world. But there is s-something else for which I can’t find a name. I can say only that Captain Teixeira, Everett Hazard, and Dick Pierce are more essential to South County than Jack Aldrich. I am fond of Jack, but he has skewed ordinary life by isolating his part of the community in private luxury. It is disconcerting that someone I don’t much care for, I mean Phoebe Fitzgerald, has taken a wider interest in everyday life than Jack has. When I am in a disparaging mood, I see her as a schoolgirl trying desperately to be popular. When I am in a more sympathetic mood, I grudgingly admire her darting about as the self-appointed town crier.” Miss Perry opened her eyes wide, as if staring at what she’d said. “Oh, I see I’m lingering in the disparaging mood. Let us pass on. What I am attempting to say to you is that you can be a better form of what I have tried to be. If I had to say in a single phrase what my life has been, it is this—a love affair with this small piece of rock-strewn woods and ponds, and the people who truly live in it. It has been perhaps too passive a love but keenly felt. The general confession in the Book of Common Prayer will have to stand for the rest. ‘We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.’ I have been s-snobbish about Phoebe Fitzgerald, mean-spirited about Eddie Wormsley, too timid and reclusive to accept Captain Teixeira’s invitations to his family parties. And, of course, I have taken your affection for granted.” Miss Perry sat back in her armchair, rested her head on the antimacassar, and closed her eyes. Miss Perry’s rehearsed speeches made Elsie rigid with the effort it cost them both. She hoped Miss Perry hadn’t fallen asleep. She didn’t like waking her up, but she couldn’t leave her asleep in a chair until Sylvia Teixeira came.

  After a few moments Miss Perry opened her eyes. “Rose,” she said. “It is Rose. Does Rose know how to swim?”

  Elsie said, “Yes.”

  Miss Perry said, “I remember Charlie and Tom jumping in. Were you there that day?”

  “No, but you described it very clearly.”

  “Ah,” Miss Perry said. She smiled her lopsided smile. “I had a cousin who in his old age began to repeat himself. He would list all the mountains in New England that he’d climbed. I learned to say, ‘Yes, Chocorua—I remember how vividly you described it. I feel as if I’ve climbed it myself.’ Would you please help me upstairs? Actual conversations are more tiring than the conversations I have in my dreams.”

  chapter twenty-eight

  The parts of Elsie’s life that she saw as her own history and geography seemed to her so much the same for such a long time that she couldn’t tell the years apart. Rose growing. Miss Perry reviving, declining, reviving. Elsie quarreled with Jack about different subjects, but it was the same quarrel. She was still undone when she would unexpectedly run into Dick. One time was so sharp that it kept jumping out of sequence—it came back to her as if it had just happened, leapfrogging what was in fact a longer and longer span of time. She was down by the docks; Spartina was in port. Dick was splicing two cables, weaving two starbursts of metal strands into a slowly lengthening joint, a bit thicker than either cable but neatly uniform and hard. Elsie watched the splice grow, watched Dick’s forearms and hands with the kind of absorption she usually felt only when watching something wild. It was when she turned away that she felt desire—not a sexual desire but a desire to sense again his inmost savor. It was such a sharp desire she felt hollowed out by it, as if by fear.

  Another intensity that had an eccentric orbit in her memory—she couldn’t tell if it happened before or after she saw Dick working on the cable splice—was the red squirrel. She was sitting in the undergrowth on the edge of a clearing. She heard the chiming note of a red squirrel, so different from the chatter of a gray squirrel. She tried to imitate the sound, first by whistling, then by humming very high. She came closest when she half clucked, half whistled inward. The red squirrel appeared halfway down a maple tree. It was small even for a red squirrel, probably young. She called again. It looked around, came down to the ground, apparently didn’t see her. She called again and it hopped twice, two small arcs toward her. It turned its head, twitched its ears, hopped again. It was within six feet of her boots when she felt the air move. There was a blur and then a perfect stillness. A hawk folded its wings. The red squirrel was turned on its side, motionless in the talons. The hawk turned its head and looked into Elsie’s eyes. She was held absolutely still as the hawk’s stare moved through her. Then the hawk was gone.

  By the time she got to her feet what had happened in front of her eyes was in fragments. She tried to reassemble it then, and many times later. She never got it whole. It didn’t matter.

  Sometimes she felt guilt, sometimes not. She could place it in a season only because she’d gone over to the maple tree and seen where the red squirrel had gnawed a bare patch on which some maple sap had crystallized. So probably March. She couldn’t remember if she’d been cold. She figured it was most likely a broad-winged hawk, but that was only a guess—larger hawks would have had trouble stoop
ing into such a small clearing. She was a terrible witness—no details about wingspan or plumage—she couldn’t even say whether the talons had pierced the squirrel or clutched it. What she did have was an instant of intimacy that was both ferocious and serene.

  As she had with Dick.

  A milder exchange with Johnny Bienvenue, not one that plummeted so vividly through her, turned out in retrospect to be the start of a gradual rearrangement of her life. It was one of the rare occasions when they were in her bed. Rose was spending the night at May’s house, and Mary was at Sawtooth. Elsie was completely relaxed, happy to lie there, waiting until Johnny got up to make them tea. He rolled onto his side, kissed her shoulder, and sat up. He said, “Have you ever thought of having another child?”

  She was in the middle of a yawn. On the exhale she said, comfortably, “God, no. It’s taking everything I have to raise this one.”

  Johnny kept moving, stood up, and said, “You want something to eat?”

  “Just tea.”

  It was a few days before she replayed the question and answer in her head. She drew a sharp breath, partly at how obtuse she’d been, partly in sympathy for Johnny. But in the end the only thing she felt bad about was the truth coming out on a languorous postcoital yawn.

  They kept seeing each other, usually every other week. She did two things consciously. She asked him more questions about his work, and she got him to be the one to start their lovemaking. He’d been pleasantly surprised in the beginning and even after several years, that she would be the one. His experience wasn’t nearly as varied as hers, and he’d been surprised to find that a woman could have been thinking about him that way. During what she was pretty sure was the slow uncoupling of their love life, she didn’t want him to think he’d been—she picked a lawyer’s word he’d taught her—fungible. A fungible partner, fungible body, fungible pleasure.