Noah’s Compass: A Novel

by Anne Tyler

  “How long is she staying?” Barbara asked.

  “She’s not staying at all, as far as I know, but why don’t you ask her about that? I’ll have her call when she gets up.”

  “Liam, you are in no condition to take on a teenage girl,” Barbara said.

  “God forbid; I wouldn’t think of taking—Condition?” he said. “What condition do I have?”

  “You’re a man. And also you lack experience, since you have never been very involved in your daughters’ lives.”

  “How can you say that?” Liam asked. “I raised one of my daughters, entirely by myself.”

  “You didn’t even raise her through toddlerhood. And it was nowhere near by yourself.”

  A rush of emotions swept through him—a combination of injured feelings and frustration and defeat all too familiar from their marriage. He said, “I have to get off the line. Goodbye.”

  “Wait! Liam, don’t go. Wait a minute. Did she tell you what we argued about?”

  “No,” he said. “What did you argue about?”

  “I have no idea! That’s the thing of it. The two of us are just flying apart, and I don’t understand why. Oh, we used to get on so well together. Remember what a sweet little girl Kitty was?”

  Liam had barely known Kitty as a little girl, to be honest. She’d been one of those last-ditch efforts—a save-the-marriage baby born late in their lives, only she hadn’t saved the marriage (surprise, surprise), and within the year he’d become a visitor to his own family. And not so frequent a visitor, at that—least frequent of all with Kitty, since she had been so young.

  Well. No point dwelling on the past.

  He told Barbara, “She’s going to be fine; don’t worry. This is only a stage they go through.”

  “Oh, yes, I know,” Barbara said on a long sigh. “I know it is. Thanks, Liam. Do have her call me, please.”

  “I will.”

  He hung up and looked at his watch. It was almost eight o’clock. Why hadn’t he informed Eunice last night that he was an early riser? She could have phoned him an hour ago.

  He cleared away his breakfast things and loaded the dishwasher, taking care to be quiet now because if Kitty wasn’t leaving for work, he would just as soon she went on sleeping. But while he was sponging the counter, the door to the den opened and she came shambling out, yawning and ruffling her hair. She wore striped pajama bottoms and what looked to him like a bra, although he hoped it was one of those jogging tops instead. It was so difficult to tell, these days. “Now what?” she asked him. “I’m wide awake and it’s not but eight in the morning.”

  “Don’t you have any plans?”

  “Nope.”

  “Nothing going on with Damian?”

  “Damian’s in Rhode Island,” she said. “His cousin’s getting married.”

  “Well, your mother would like you to phone her. I hadn’t realized you didn’t tell her where you would be.”

  “Wouldn’t you think she could figure it out?” Kitty asked. She opened the refrigerator and gazed into it for a long moment. Liam hated it when she did that. He could practically feel the dollars whooshing past her and disappearing. He held his tongue, though, because he wanted to fare better with her than Barbara had. Eventually Kitty reached for a carton of milk and then shut the door. “I really think Mom might be cracking up,” she told Liam. “Maybe it’s change of life.”

  “Change of life! Wouldn’t she be done with that?”

  Kitty shrugged and took a box of cereal from the cupboard.

  “I believe menopause hits in the late forties. Or fifties, maybe,” Liam said.

  “Oh, menopause; sure. I’m talking about change of life.”

  “What?”

  An uncertain look crossed Kitty’s face. “Do I mean midlife crisis?” she asked.

  “Only if you’re expecting her to live to a hundred and twenty.”

  “Well, I don’t know; I just feel like she’s acting crazy. Every little thing I do, it’s ‘Kitty, stop that,’ and ‘Kitty, you’re grounded,’ and ‘Kitty, how often must I tell you.’ Senile dementia; maybe that’s what I mean.”

  “Do you suppose it has to do with her boyfriend?” Liam asked. “What’s-his-name?”

  Kitty shrugged again and sat down at the table.

  “How is that going, anyway?” Liam asked.

  There was only the faintest chance that Kitty would answer, but it never hurt to try. Before she could draw in a breath, though, the doorbell rang. Liam said, “Now, who—?”

  He went to the front door and opened it to find Eunice. She stood looking at him with a solemn, oddly dubious expression, holding her purse primly in front of her with both hands. “Why, Eunice!” he said. “Hello!” He was thrown off a bit by her glasses, which he had somehow forgotten—the huge size of them, the smudged lenses.

  “Your phone number’s unlisted,” she said.

  “Yes, it is, actually.”

  “And you didn’t write it down for me.”

  “I didn’t?” he said. “Oh!”

  “I told the operator I knew you but she still wouldn’t give out the number.”

  “Yes, that’s … kind of the idea,” Liam said. “I apologize. I honestly thought I wrote it down. Freudian slip, I guess.”

  “Why?” she asked him.

  “Why?”

  “Why Freudian? You didn’t want me to call?”

  “No, no … It’s just that I hate to talk on the phone.”

  “Oh, I love to talk on the phone!”

  She took several steps inside, as if propelled by a gust of enthusiasm. “It’s one of my favorite occupations,” she said.

  She was wearing pants today, wide gauze pants gathered at the waist and gathered at the ankles but ballooning at the hips. He believed that was called the harem style. She would have been better off in a skirt, he felt. But she did have very creamy skin, and the dimples were showing in both her cheeks.

  “I forgot it was the Fourth of July,” he told her. “I hope you haven’t changed any plans.”

  “I was glad to change my plans,” she said. “My parents always throw this lawn party and I’m supposed to be helping them set up.”

  She gave a little chuckle—a warm, infectious sound—and the dimples deepened. He smiled at her. He said, “Won’t you come in and sit down?”

  On her way to one of the armchairs, she trilled her fingers at Kitty. “Hi, Kitty!” she said.

  “Hi.”

  “I see I’m interrupting your breakfast.”

  “Not really,” Kitty said. Which was true; she remained hunched over her cereal bowl, shoveling in Honey Nut Cheerios.

  Liam said, “Kitty, weren’t you going to call your mother?”

  “I’ll do it in a minute,” she said.

  “Do it now, please. I promised her you’d call as soon as you were up.”

  Kitty gave him a look, but she set down her spoon and pushed her chair back. “It’s not like it’s a national emergency,” she said as she went off to the den.

  “She didn’t leave word where she would be last night,” Liam told Eunice. (It seemed a nice, safe, neutral topic.) He settled across from her, in the rocker. “I hadn’t realized that till her mother phoned this morning.”

  “So the two of you get along?” Eunice asked.

  “Oh, yes, as well as can be expected. Considering she’s an adolescent.”

  “Her mother is adolescent?”

  “What? No, Kitty is. Kitty’s the adolescent. I’m sorry; you were asking about her mother?”

  “I just meant … you know, do you talk with her mother on the phone and all.”

  “We have to talk on the phone; we’ve got three daughters,” Liam said. “But I should be offering you coffee! It’s already made. Would you like a cup?”

  “I’d love some,” Eunice said. She had a way of drawing back slightly when something pleased her. It gave her a bit of a double chin, which was surprisingly becoming.

  She stayed in her chair wh
ile Liam rose and went to the kitchen. “Cream? Sugar?” he called.

  “Just black.”

  He could hear Kitty on her cell phone in the den, even through the closed door—the “Na-na, na-na” of some protest or accusation. To drown her out, he said, “So! Eunice. Tell me about your job.”

  “There’s not a whole lot to tell,” she said.

  “Well, what exactly would you do in the average day, for instance?”

  “Oh, I might go around to different places with Mr. C. Drive him out to check on a project, say. Or we attend a meeting of some sort.”

  Liam brought her coffee in a cup with a real saucer, part of a matched set that he used so seldom, he’d had to wipe the dust off first. He sat back down in the rocker and said, “You stay with him through the whole meeting?”

  “Yes, because I need to take notes. I take separate notes just for him, in a big ring binder that fills up every month or so. And also, well, if he gets a notion to leave, I’m the one who reminds him it’s not time yet.”

  “I see,” Liam said. Then he said, “These notes are like regular minutes?”

  “No, they’ve got, you know, tabs that are color-coded.”

  “Aha!”

  Eunice looked startled.

  “Different colors for different memories,” he suggested.

  “Or for different categories of memories, really. Like, red is for things that he’s already said about certain proposals, so that he won’t repeat himself, and then green is for personal information he might want for his conversations. Say somebody at the meeting turned out to have a son who went to school with Mr. C.’s son. That kind of thing.”

  “Does that actually work?” Liam asked.

  “Well, no,” she said. “Not very well.” She took a gulp of her coffee. “It’s just all I could come up with. I’m trying different approaches.”

  “What else are you thinking of trying?” he asked her.

  “I’m not sure.” She gazed down into her cup and said, “I’m probably going to get fired.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “There are such a lot of categories! Life has so many things in it that people need to remember! And Mr. C. is falling farther and farther behind. I’m working as hard as I can, but even so … I suppose pretty soon he’ll have to retire.” She gave Liam a brief, perky smile and said, “So we’d better get busy, right? I won’t have an inside track with Cope Development for much longer.”

  She placed her cup and saucer on the lamp table and bent to rummage through her purse. “First I’ll just jot down some of your facts,” she said. She brought forth a steno pad and a ballpoint pen.

  “I get a notebook all my own!” Liam said in a jokey voice.

  “What?”

  “A notebook like Mr. Cope’s.”

  She looked at the steno pad and then at Liam. “No, well, Mr. Cope’s is more of a binder,” she said.

  “Yes, I realize that, but … I was thinking how nice it would be if you were to keep my memories.”

  “Oh!” she said. She flushed a deep pink and let her pen fall to the floor. Bending down to retrieve it turned her even pinker.

  It was possible, Liam thought, that Kitty had been right: Eunice harbored some personal feeling for him. On the other hand, maybe she just reacted this way to life in general.

  Kitty chose that moment to emerge from the den. She held her cell phone out at arm’s length. “Mom wants to talk to you,” she told him. She walked over to him and handed him the phone.

  Liam spent a second trying to figure out how such a tiny object could make contact with both his ear and his mouth at the same time. He gave up, finally, and pressed it to his ear. “Hello?” he said.

  Barbara said, “Kitty tells me she wants to stay with you all summer.”

  “She does?”

  “Have the two of you not discussed this?”

  “No.”

  Kitty suddenly fell to the floor, surprising him so that he nearly dropped the phone. Kneeling in front of him, she pressed her hands together like someone praying and mouthed a silent Please please please please.

  “I won’t deny that I could use a little help, here,” Barbara said. “But I still have a lot of reservations. If we do this, I need to be sure you’ll set some limits.”

  Liam said, “Wait, I—”

  “First you’ll have to promise me she’ll be home by ten on weeknights. Twelve on Fridays and Saturdays. And she is absolutely not allowed one moment alone in the apartment with Damian or any other boy. Is that clear? I’ve no desire to end up with a pregnant seventeen-year-old.”

  “Pregnant!” Liam said.

  Kitty lowered her hands and gaped at him. Eunice’s eyes grew very wide behind her glasses.

  “No, of course not,” he said hastily. “I’m sure she wouldn’t want that either. Merciful heavens!”

  “You act as if it’s an impossibility, but believe me, these things happen,” Barbara told him.

  “I’m aware of that,” Liam said.

  “Okay, Liam. I just hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “But—”

  “If she wants to come by for her clothes, I’ll be here till late afternoon. Put her on, will you?”

  Wordlessly, Liam handed the phone to Kitty. She sprang to her feet and walked off with it, saying, “What. Yes, I hear you. I’m not a total dummy.”

  The den door shut behind her. Liam looked at Eunice.

  “Seems all at once I have a long-term visitor,” he said.

  “She’s going to live here?”

  “For the summer.”

  “Well, isn’t it nice that she wants to!” Eunice said.

  “It’s more a case of her not wanting to live with her mother, I believe.”

  “Is her mother a difficult person?” Eunice asked.

  “No, not particularly.”

  “Then why did you two divorce?”

  This was beginning to feel like a date, somehow. It might have had to do with the way Eunice leaned forward to ask her questions—so attentive, so receptive. But Liam wasn’t sure now that he wanted a date. (At the moment, her head of curls reminded him of a Shirley Temple doll.)

  He said, “The divorce was Barbara’s idea, not mine. I don’t even believe in divorce; I’ve always felt marriages are meant to be permanent. If it were up to me, we’d still be together.”

  “What was she unhappy about?” Eunice asked.

  “Oh,” he said, “I guess she felt I wasn’t, um, forthcoming.”

  Eunice went on looking at him expectantly.

  He turned his palms up. What more could he say?

  “But you’re forthcoming with me,” she said.

  “I am?”

  “And you listen so well! You asked all about my job; you want to know every detail of how I spend my days … Men don’t usually do that.”

  “I didn’t do it with Barbara, though,” Liam said. “She was right. I told her that. I said, ‘It’s true, I’m not forthcoming at all.’”

  This made Eunice blush again, for some reason. She said, “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  He was still trying to figure out why it should be a compliment when she said, “Maybe your marriage was troubled because of your loss.”

  “What did I lose?”

  “Didn’t you say your first wife had died?”

  “Oh, yes. But that was a long time before.” He slapped his thighs and stood up. “Let me top off your coffee!” he said.

  “No, thanks, I’m okay.”

  He sat down again. He said, “Should we be getting on with my résumé?”

  “All right,” she said. “Fine.” She clicked her pen point. “First, your places of employment.”

  “Employment. Well. From nineteen seventy-five to nineteen eighty-two, I taught ancient history at the Fremont School.”

  “The Fremont School? Gosh,” Eunice said.

  “That was my first job.”

  “Well, but you’re supposed to start with your las
t job,” she told him, “and work your way back.”

  “You’re right. Okay: eighty-two till this past spring, I taught at St. Dyfrig.”

  She wrote it down without comment.

  “I taught fifth grade from ninety … four? No, three. From ninety-three on, and before that, American history.”

  He liked this business of proceeding in reverse order. It meant he was listing progressively higher positions instead of lower. (In his opinion, history was definitely higher than fifth grade, and ancient history higher than American.) Eunice took notes in silence. When he stopped speaking, she looked up and said, “Any honors or awards?”

  “Miles Elliott Prize in Philosophy, nineteen sixty-nine.”

  “You were employed in sixty-nine?”

  “I was in college.”

  “Oh. College.”

  “Philosophy was my major,” he said. “Pretty silly, right? Who do you know who’s majored in philosophy and actually works as a philosopher?”

  “How about your professional life? Any awards there?”

  “No.”

  “Let’s pass on to your education.” She flipped a page of the steno pad. “I have this software program that produces résumés,” she told him. “All I have to do is plug in the facts and the program does the rest. My parents gave it to me for Christmas one year. Is your computer Windows or Macintosh?”

  “I don’t have a computer,” he said.

  “You don’t have a computer. Okay. I’d better write your letter of inquiry, too,” she said, and she made another note.

  Liam said, “Eunice. Do you really think we should go on with this?”

  “What? Why not?”

  “I don’t have any business experience. I’m a teacher! I don’t even know what they’re looking for.”

  Eunice seemed about to offer an argument, but just then Kitty came out of the den. She was wearing shorts now and a T-shirt that advertised Absolut vodka. “Poppy,” she said, “can I borrow your car?”

  “My car! What for?”

  “I need to get some more of my clothes.”

  Liam wasn’t used to lending out his car. He knew it wasn’t much of a car, but it was sort of attuned to his ways, he felt. Also, he had a suspicion that there was some kind of insurance complication with teenage drivers.