Anne Tyler

by Noah's Compass

  Nothing about any memory problems.

  The next entry dealt with a question of sewage disposal for a golf community that Mr. Cope was proposing near the Pennsylvania border. In the next, he was merely a name on a list of donors to Gilman School. Liam signed off and closed the computer. He might have known he would come up empty. The whole point of hiring a rememberer, after all, was to conceal the fact that one was needed.

  And anyhow, what had he hoped to accomplish even if he had found what he was looking for?

  On Thursday morning he had another visit from the police. There were two of them, this time—a man and a woman. The woman did all of the questioning. She wanted to know if Liam recalled any recent conversations in which he had publicly mentioned some valuable possession. Liam said, “Absolutely not, since I have no valuable possessions.”

  She said, “Well, maybe not by your standards, but … a high-definition TV, say? For lots of folks, that’s a hot property.”

  “I don’t even have a low-definition TV,” Liam told her.

  She looked annoyed. She was an attractive young woman, petite and towheaded, but a little W of wrinkles between her eyebrows marred the overall impression. She said, “We’re just trying to figure out why your place would have been targeted, and on the very first night you lived here.”

  “Well, it wasn’t Damian, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “Damian?”

  He regretted bringing the name to her attention. He said, “It wasn’t the guys who moved me in.”

  “No. Those were friends, as I understand.”

  “Right.”

  “How about the man’s voice? Did you hear him speak?”

  He felt a sudden sense of despair. He said, “Didn’t they tell you I don’t remember? I don’t remember a thing!”

  “Just checking.”

  “What: do you imagine you’ll trip me up?”

  “No need to get excited, sir.”

  He forced himself to take a deep breath. No need at all; she was right, but somehow he felt accused. To this woman he looked inattentive, sloppy, lax. He decided to go on the offensive. “So what will you do next?” he asked her.

  “Well, we have the case in our records now.”

  “Is that it?”

  She stared him down.

  “How about fingerprints? Did they find any fingerprints?” he asked.

  “Oh, well, fingerprints. Fingerprints are overrated,” she said.

  Then she told him to take care (an expression he hated; take care of what?), and she and her partner walked out.

  Back during Liam’s first marriage, when all their friends were having babies, he and Millie knew a woman who experienced some terrible complication during labor and lay in a coma for several weeks afterward. Gradually she returned to consciousness, but for a long time she had no recollection of the whole preceding year. She didn’t even remember being pregnant. Here was this infant boy, very sweet and all that but what did he have to do with her? Then one day, a neighbor climbed her porch steps and trilled out, “Yoo-hoo!” Evidently that was the neighbor’s trademark greeting, uttered in a high fluty voice with a Southern roundness to the vowels. The woman rose slowly from her chair. Her eyes widened; her lips parted. As she described it later, it was as if the neighbor’s “Yoo-hoo” had provided a string for her to grab hold of, and when she tugged it, other memories came trailing in besides—not just the previous “Yoo-hoos,” but how this neighbor brought homemade pies to people at the drop of a hat, and how she always labeled her pie tins with her name on a strip of masking tape, and how in fact she’d contributed a pie to the final, celebratory meeting of the childbirth class that they had both attended. Childbirth! And bit by bit, over the course of the next few days, more and more came back, until the woman remembered everything.

  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Liam could find such a string?

  “Good afternoon, Dr. Morrow’s office,” the voice on the telephone said.

  Liam said, “Ah, hello. Verity? I’m calling on behalf of Ishmael Cope. Mr. Cope has mislaid his appointment card, and he asked me to find out when he’s due in next.”

  “Cope,” the receptionist said. There was a series of clicking sounds. “Cope. Cope. Ishmael Cope. He’s not due in.”

  “He’s not?”

  “Did he say he was?”

  “Well, ah … yes, he seemed to believe so.”

  “But he was just here,” the receptionist said.

  “Was he? Oh, his mistake, then. Never mind.”

  “Ordinarily he waits till closer to the actual time to make the next appointment, since we see him just every three months is all, but if you’d prefer to set something up for him—”

  “I’ll find out and call you back. Thanks.”

  Liam replaced the receiver.

  That evening his sister arrived bearing a cast-iron pot. “Stew,” she announced, and she swept past him into the apartment and stopped short and looked around. “Goodness,” she said. Liam didn’t know why. All his boxes were unpacked now and he thought the place was looking fairly decent. But: “You know,” she said, “just because you live alone doesn’t mean you have to live miserably.”

  “I’m not living miserably!”

  She turned and skinned him with a glance. “And don’t think I can’t see what you’re up to,” she said. “You’re trying to come out even with your clothes.”

  “Come out …?”

  “You suppose if you play your cards right, you won’t have to buy more clothes before you die.”

  “I don’t suppose any such thing,” Liam said. Although it was true that the idea had crossed his mind once or twice, just as a theoretical possibility. “What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?” he asked her.

  “Your pants are losing a belt loop and that shirt is so old it’s transparent.”

  He had hoped nobody would notice.

  Julia herself was, as always, impeccably put together. She wore what she must have worn to work that day: a tailored navy suit and matching pumps. It was obvious she and Liam were related—she had Liam’s stick-straight gray hair and brown eyes, and she was short like him although, of course, smaller boned—but she’d never allowed herself to put on so much as an extra ounce, and her face was still crisply defined while Liam’s had grown a bit pudgy. Also, she had a much more definite way of speaking. (This may have been due to her profession. She was a lawyer.) She said, for instance, “I’m going to stay and eat with you. I trust you have no plans,” and something in her tone suggested that if he did have plans, he would naturally be canceling them.

  She marched on into the kitchen, where she set the pot on the stove and slid a canvas grocery bag from her shoulder. “Where do you keep your silverware?” she asked.

  “Oh, um …”

  Just then Kitty sauntered down the hallway from the bedroom, clearly summoned by the sound of their voices. “Aunt Julia!” she said.

  “Hello, there, Kitty. I’ve brought your dad some beef stew.”

  “But he doesn’t eat red meat.”

  “He can just pluck the meat out, then,” Julia said briskly. She was pulling drawers open; in the third, she found the silverware. “Will you be joining us?”

  “Well, sure, I guess so,” Kitty said, although earlier she’d told Liam not to count on her for supper. (All three of his daughters seemed drawn to Julia’s company, perhaps because she made herself so scarce.)

  Kitty was wearing one of those outfits that showed her abdomen, and in her navel she had somehow affixed a little round mirror the size of a dime. From where Liam stood, it looked as if she had a hole in her stomach. It was the oddest effect. He kept glancing at it and blinking, but Julia seemed impervious. “Here,” she said, handing Kitty a fistful of silver. “Set the table, will you.” No doubt she saw all sorts of get-ups in family court. She slapped a baguette on a cutting board and went back to searching through drawers, presumably hunting a bread knife, although Liam could have told her she wouldn’t
find one. She settled on a serrated fruit knife. “Now, I trust you’re researching burglar alarms,” she told Liam.

  “No, not really,” he said.

  “This is important, Liam. If you insist on living in unsafe surroundings, you should at least take steps to protect yourself.”

  “The thing of it is, I don’t think this place is unsafe,” Liam told her. “I think what happened was just a fluke. If I hadn’t left the patio door unlocked, and if some drugged-up guy hadn’t come fumbling around on the off chance he could get in somewhere … But at least I seem to have neighbors who will call the police, you notice.”

  He had met the neighbors that morning—a portly, middle-aged couple heading out to their car just as he was dropping a bag of garbage into the bin. “How’s your head?” the husband had asked him. “We’re the Hunstlers. The folks who phoned 911.”

  Liam said, “Oh. Glad to meet you.” He had to force himself to proceed through the proper steps—thank them for their help, give a report on his injuries—before he could ask, “Why did you phone, exactly? I mean, what was it that you heard? Did you hear me say any words?”

  “Words, well, no,” the husband said. “Just, like, more of a shout. Just a shout like ‘Aah!’ or ‘Wha?’ and Deb says, ‘What was that?’ and I look out our bedroom window and see this guy running away. Kind of a darker shape in the dark, was all I could make out. Afraid I wouldn’t be much of a witness if it ever came to trial.”

  “I see,” Liam said.

  “It was a medium-sized guy, though; I will say that. Medium-sized individual.”

  Liam said, “Hmm,” barely listening, because why would he care what size the man was? It was his own words he’d hoped to hear about. That was it? “Aah!” and “Wha?” Surely he had said more. He felt a flash of exasperation with the Hunstlers.

  As Julia said, setting the bread plate on the table, “You’d be a fool to rely on neighbors.”

  “Well, maybe you’re right,” Liam said. “I’ll give some thought to an alarm.”

  But he knew he wouldn’t.

  “And have any arrests been made?” she asked once they’d taken their seats.

  “Not that I’ve heard of.”

  “Any leads, at least?”

  “Nobody’s told me of any.”

  “Here’s what I think,” she said. “I think it was somebody in this complex.”

  “A neighbor?”

  “You can see this is a down-and-outers’ kind of place. Flimsily built rental units, opposite a shopping mall—imagine the sort of people who live here.”

  “I live here, for one,” Liam said. He started buttering a slice of bread. “And so do the Hunstlers.”

  “Who are the Hunstlers?”

  “Julia, you’re missing the point,” Liam said.

  “What is the point, then? Surely you want to see justice done.”

  “This is more about me,” he said. “Why can’t I remember what happened?”

  “Why would you want to?”

  “Everybody asks me that! You don’t understand.”

  “No, evidently not,” Julia said, and then she turned to Kitty and, in an obvious changing-the-subject tone of voice, started quizzing her about her college plans.

  Which wasn’t much more successful, really. Kitty said, “I don’t have any plans. I’ve just finished my junior year.”

  “I thought you were a senior.”

  “Nope.”

  “Shouldn’t she be a senior?” Julia asked Liam.

  “Nope.”

  Julia turned back to Kitty. “But still you must have visited some campuses,” she said.

  “Not yet. I might not even be going to college. I might decide to travel a while.”

  “Oh? Where would you travel to?”

  “Buenos Aires is supposed to be fun.”

  Julia looked at her blankly for a moment. Then she shook her head and told Liam, “I thought she was a senior.”

  “Just goes to show,” Liam said cheerfully. “This is the kind of thing that happens when you don’t keep in touch with your family.”

  “I keep in touch!”

  Liam raised his eyebrows.

  “I phoned you just this past Saturday, when you were moving in!”

  “So you did,” Liam said.

  “And I’ve brought you this nice beef stew, which you haven’t even tasted!”

  “Sorry,” Liam said.

  It was true; all he had on his plate was the one slice of bread. He helped himself to some stew. There were carrots, potatoes, and celery chunks along with the meat—enough to make a meal of, if he just scraped off the gravy.

  “Your father’s been a picky eater all his life,” Julia told Kitty.

  “It’s not so much that I’m picky as that I’m out of the habit,” Liam said. “If I went back to eating meat now, I doubt I’d have the enzymes anymore to digest it.”

  “See what I mean?” Julia asked Kitty. “There was a period in his childhood when he would eat nothing but white things. Noodles and mashed potatoes and rice. Our mother had to fix him an entire separate meal.”

  Liam said, “I don’t remember that.”

  “Well, you were little. And another period, you would eat only with chopsticks. For one solid year, you insisted on eating everything including soup with these pointy ivory chopsticks they shipped back with Uncle Leonard’s belongings after he died in the War.”

  “Chopsticks?” Liam said.

  “And you had to have this old record played every night before you went to bed: ‘It’s Been a Long, Long Time,’ with Kitty Kallen. Whatever happened to Kitty Kallen? Kiss me once, and kiss me twice,” Julia sang, in an unexpectedly pretty soprano. “It was how Mother taught you to kiss us good night. You would blow kisses in tempo. Kiss to the right, kiss to the left … big smacking sounds, huge grin on your face. Wearing those pajamas with the feet and the trap-door bottom.”

  “How come you always remember so much more than me?” Liam asked.

  “You were only two, is why.”

  “Yes, but you come up with so many details. And some are from when I was ten or twelve, when supposedly I was a fully conscious being; but still they’re all news to me.”

  Although total recall was not an unmixed blessing, he had noticed. His sister could hold a grudge forever. She collected and polished resentments as if it were some sort of hobby. For over half a century now, she hadn’t spoken to their father. (He’d left them to marry a younger woman back when they were children.) Even when he suffered a heart attack, a few years ago, Julia had refused to visit him. Let him go ahead and kick the bucket, she’d said; good riddance if he did. And she insisted on using their mother’s maiden name, although their mother herself had stayed a Pennywell till she died. It may have been this bitter streak that kept Julia single. She had never even seriously dated, as far as Liam knew.

  “I can see you plain as day,” she said now. “Your little red cheeks, your sparkly eyes. Your fat little fingers flinging kisses. Don’t tell me you didn’t know exactly how cute you were being.”

  There was an acid edge to her voice, but even so, Liam envied how she envisioned this picture so clearly, hovering in the air above the table.

  Cope Development’s offices were on Bunker Street, near the train station, according to the telephone book. You would think Ishmael Cope could have sprung for a better address—something around Harborplace, say. But that was how the rich were, sometimes. It might be why they were rich.

  Shortly before noon on Friday, defying medical orders, Liam drove down to Bunker Street. When he reached Cope Development he pulled over to the curb and shut off the ignition. He had hoped for a little park of some sort, or at least a strip of grass with a bench where he could sit, but clearly this was not that kind of neighborhood. All the buildings were scrunched together, and their wooden doors were chewed-looking, the paint on their trim dulled and scaling, their bricks crumbling like biscuits. The place to the right of Cope Development sold plumbing suppli
es; the place to the left was a mission for indigent men. (That was how the sign in the window phrased it. Would indigent men know the word “indigent”?) Apart from a hunched old woman dragging a wheeled shopping tote behind her, there wasn’t a pedestrian in sight. Liam’s original plan—to blend in with the crowd on the sidewalk, trailing Ishmael Cope and his assistant unobserved as they strolled to some nearby café—seemed silly now.

  He sat low behind the steering wheel, arms folded across his chest, eyes on the Cope building. It looked as dismal as the others, but the plaque beside the door was brass and freshly polished. Twice the door opened and people emerged—a boy with a messenger bag, two men in business suits. Once a woman approached the building from the direction of St. Paul Street and paused, but she moved on after consulting a slip of paper she took from her purse. It was a warm, muggy, overcast day, and Liam had rolled his window down, but even so, the car began to grow uncomfortable.

  He hadn’t planned what he would do after he’d followed them to lunch. He had imagined finagling a table next to them and then, oh, just worming his way in, so to speak. Joining them. Becoming a member.

  It was just as well that they weren’t showing up, because this would never have worked.

  Still, he went on waiting. He noticed that although he was watching for the two of them, it was the assistant he wanted to talk to. Mr. Cope himself had nothing to teach him; Liam knew all there was to know about forgetting. The assistant, on the other hand … Unconsciously, he seemed to be crediting the assistant with specialized professional skills, as if she were a psychologist or a neurologist. Or something more mysterious, even: a kind of reverse fortune teller. A predictor of the past.