Celestial Navigation (17 page)

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 planning 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.”

It seemed unlikely that she would keep her promise, but I couldn’t think of any decent way to get out of the room. I settled back in my chair. “Now, I’ve been to see the baby,” I told her. “Seems quite healthy, I’d say from the looks of him.”

“Did you see him, Miss Vinton?”

“I told you. I’ve just been by the nursery.”

“I meant Jeremy. Did you see him?”

“Yes, this morning I did.”

“How did he look? Was he all right?”

“He was
fine,”
I told her. “Just fine.”

“They won’t let me use the phone again until I’m up and about,” Mary said, “and that won’t be till tomorrow. It’s out in the hall. All I want to do is ask how the children are, and get this misunderstanding straightened out. I can’t stand just lying here thinking that—”

“The children are managing beautifully,” I said.

“Are they doing what he tells them to?”

“Of course.”

“He doesn’t always know quite how to handle them, you see, and I worry that—”

“They’re
fine,”
I told her.

“He said he wanted to come visit me.”

“Oh, good, good,” I said. I thought that was a wonderful sign; before he had always left the visiting to me.

“I told him not to.”

“Mary Pauling! Why ever not?”

“It’s so hard for him,” Mary said. “I told him not to bother.”

Some people take a terribly long time learning things.

I went home and found everything in chaos—Buddy cooking spaghetti, Jeremy changing Hannah’s diaper, Mr. Somerset stroking the carpet with an old bent broom. There is something so pathetic about men trying to figure out the way a house works. “Here,” I said to Jeremy, “let me do that.” He had laid a clean diaper on the floor but he seemed to be having trouble getting Hannah to set herself down on it. I said, “At eight o’clock it will be visiting hour at the hospital. I’ll stay with the children while you go.”

“She doesn’t want me to,” he said. He looked at me with his eyes very wide and steady. It nearly broke my heart.

“Jeremy,” I said, “are you
sure
she doesn’t?”

“She asked me not to come.”

Then Hannah started wandering off toward a stack of blocks. I grabbed her. “Now listen, young lady,” I said, “this has gone far enough, do you hear?” Only Hannah, of course, was not really who I was mad at.

It is very difficult to live among people you love and hold back from offering them advice.

I have never been married and never planned to be, never had the inclination to be. Yet I don’t believe I am an unhappy
person. I had a normal childhood, good parents, five fine brothers and sisters. I had the usual number of young men to come calling when I was the proper age. Still, I did not once consider the possibility of marrying any of them. If you were to ask my vision of the future back then, my favorite daydream, it was this: I would be reading a book alone in my room, and no one would ever, ever interrupt me. I realize how antisocial that sounds. But it seemed to me that my life was so
crowded
, when I was young. There were always so many people around. Everyone knew everyone’s secrets. And then later, when my father died and my brothers and sisters married and moved away, I was the one who nursed my mother through her final illness. I chose to; it wasn’t a case of the put-upon spinster daughter. And my mother was never one of those querulous old ladies. She was kind and cheerful, right to the end. But the
sharing
we did! The five years of meals shared, house shared, news shared, plans and worries and money problems, even the plots of
books
shared. I knew everything about her, because I had to: the state of her bowels and the foods that disagreed with her and the thoughts that kept her awake nights. And she knew about
me
because there was no escaping me; I was perpetually with her. Toward the end I even slept on a cot in her bedroom. When she died I was awakened merely by the silence—the stopping of a breath that I had lived with continually for five long years.
Solitude
shocked my eyes open. I was alone. I went through her funeral fully composed, and the only thing that disturbed me was the noise of all those brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews that had gathered for the occasion. “Oh, Mildred,” they said, “we know how you feel: you can’t believe it yet.” That was how they explained my not crying. Then Carrie, the sister closest to me, said, “I guess it must be almost a relief to you, her going. None of us would be shocked to hear it.” But it wasn’t the kind of relief she meant. I wasn’t relieved
to be free, or to be rid of the work; I was relieved to have my privacy. If you were to shake me awake in the middle of the night and say, “Quick, without thinking: What is the most important thing in the world?” I would say, “Privacy.” I
know
that’s not right; you don’t have to tell me. I know that the true answer is probably love, or understanding, or feeling needed—even for me. But I am telling you what comes to mind first, and that’s privacy. Sitting alone in a room reading a book, with no one to interrupt me. That is all I ever consciously wanted out of life.

When I first came here, immediately after Mother died, I announced my requirements from the doorstep. “I see you let rooms,” I said. “I’d like one that’s cheap and quiet. No noise, no people in large numbers. Can you provide that?” At the time, I had no way of knowing that everything I said was unnecessary. Jeremy Pauling and his mother were more private than I had ever thought it possible to be. That front door might as well have had a curtain of cobwebs across it, like the Sleeping Beauty’s palace gate, with the two of them inside trying to make as little noise as possible and the rest of the world outside—some large cold frightening force waiting to pounce, something certain to win, superior to them in every way. Mrs. Pauling, going to the grocery store, wore several layers of clothing no matter how hot the weather was, as if she wished for armor. She stopped outside the house and looked all around her with a timid blue startled gaze, checking on what the enemy had in mind for her. She returned pushing a wire tote cart so packed with non-perishables that it seemed she was expecting a siege, and she would scurry inside with them and line them up in rows in her cupboards and then stand back to stare at them a long time, moving her lips as if counting. After one of those trips she might not go to the store again for weeks—or anywhere else, except church occasionally. She and Jeremy stayed inside and drank hot cocoa.
Was there any other door in the world so suitable for me to knock upon? Originally I was going to live here only a few months, until I found a job and had saved the money for an apartment. Then I could be
truly
alone. But the years passed and I just never got around to it, and now I suppose that I never will. I like it here. If you want my opinion, our whole society would be better off living in boarding houses. I mean even families, even married couples. Everyone should have his single room with a door that locks, and then a larger room downstairs where people can mingle or not as they please. For I do like
some
people. I’m no hermit. I like to watch Jeremy’s and Mary’s children growing up, and the medical students turning into doctors, and Mr. Somerset shuffling through his pension. For such a good life, isn’t it fair that I should have to pay some price? The price is silence. Keeping silent when I am moved to speak, staying out of other people’s affairs, holding back my advice, giving them the privacy I have asked for myself. Often I wonder if I am making a mistake. I think: Am I missing something? Have
I
forfeited too much? Is there a time when people I love might not
want
to be left alone? But I resist; I climb the stairs to my room. I turn the key in the lock. One sad thing about this world is that the acts that take the most out of you are usually the ones that other people will never know about.