Celestial Navigation (19 page)

For there I was, against a background of crepe-paper turkeys and pilgrim-shaped candles and sheaves of plastic Indian corn: my bony face all lit up and feverish and my pupils enormous and my fingers a little shaky, clutching those earrings. Like some tacky trite cartoon: old maid preparing for the arrival of the troops, or waiting for the meter man. Only it wasn’t any soldier or meter man that had lit my eyes so; it was the prospect of what I was going to do today. Choose the children’s surprises on my own, check Mary out of the hospital, carry that new baby home the way Jeremy used to do. Why, I could
see
myself carrying him! It was as if, without realizing it, I had spent all of the night before imagining every detail! I saw myself climbing the front steps holding the baby exactly right
(much better than Jeremy would have, much more securely). I saw the children crowding around me, all anxious to share my treasure. I saw myself dispensing gifts. “Open that bag, will you, Darcy? See what you find. There are surprises there for all of you, I chose them myself.” They would scatter brown paper bags and cash register slips, all excited over gifts I had selected that Mary would never have thought of. Mary faded. Jeremy faded. I was left alone with that baby wrapped in powder blue and that circle of little faces.

I picked three toys in haste and went directly home. In the front hall I found Pippi, wearing frayed underpants and nothing else. She was shivering. Tears had made little gray streamers down her cheeks. “Miss Vinton, Abbie
hit me”
she said. I gave her a pat on the head and walked on by. I went straight to the kitchen, where I found Jeremy trying to get Hannah to eat her egg. That was what he had been doing when I left, an hour ago. Hannah was in her high chair with her lips clamped together, and Jeremy was saying, “Please, Hannah. Won’t you consider taking another bite?”

“Jeremy, here are some things I’d like you to give Mary,” I told him. I set my shopping bag on a chair. Jeremy looked up quickly. “Me?” he said.

“I won’t be going to the hospital, but I’ll be happy to stay with the children.”

Jeremy set the spoonful of egg down and opened the bag, as if he expected to find some answer inside it. “E-Z-Do Embroidery Set,” he said.

“Hush, it’s supposed to be a surprise.”

“I don’t quite see,” he told me. “Have I—is there something the matter, Miss Vinton?”

“Nothing’s the matter.”

“I had thought perhaps Mary wanted
you
to bring her home.”

“No, I think she would prefer you to do it.”

He started smiling. He nodded several times and his face grew pink. “Oh, well, then, certainly,” he said. “Thank you, Miss Vinton! I certainly do—”

“Any time,” I said. “Here, give me that,” and I reached for Hannah’s bowl of egg. “Now you’d better hurry. She was due to be released at ten and it’s already five of.”

“Oh yes,” Jeremy said. He rose and held out his hand. For a moment I couldn’t think why, but then I saw that he was beaming at me and I set the bowl on the table and shook his hand. “It’s certainly—it’s just wonderful of you to watch the children this way,” he said. “I really don’t know how to—”

“Oh shoot. Run along, now.”

He picked up the bag of gifts, which I had forgotten all about, and left the kitchen. I heard him in the hallway, scattering hangers and stumbling over rubber boots in the coat closet. A minute later I heard the front door slam. “Where’s he going?” Darcy said, coming into the kitchen. “I thought you were off getting Mom.”

“Jeremy’s doing that,” I told her.

“He is? Then can’t we all go too?”

“Not this time.”

“But Miss Vinton! We always
used
to!”

“That’s no reason to keep on doing a thing, is it?” I said.

I lifted Hannah out of her high chair and then I went into the parlor, to the front bay window. The lace curtains hid me. I watched Jeremy for as long as he stood waiting there—a radiant, dumpy man holding a paper bag. He leaned forward from time to time and looked for a taxi, first in one direction and then the other (although we live on a one-way street). He kept shifting the bag higher on his stomach. He wore no coat or jacket, nothing but his gray tweed golf cap and that sleazy sweater he had been in all week, but I held back from rushing out to him with an armload of wraps.

Then a taxi stopped for him, but instead of getting in
immediately, Jeremy turned and looked back at the house. His face was so open, so happy and hopeful. I saw him take in a breath, maybe planning to call out something. Yet I know that he couldn’t see me. I stayed far back in the room. Finally he climbed into the taxi, and I sat down on the windowseat and reached for Pippi.
“You
think she hit just a little,” Pippi said. “But she hit me hard, smack in the stomach. She really hurt.” “I know, I know,” I said, barely listening. I put her on my lap and set my face against her head. Her hair had a clean sharp smell. I took a breath of it and felt it fill me like an ache, and I closed my eyes and held on to her for as long as she would allow.

Darcy made a poster: WELCOME EDWARD. We Scotch-taped it to the window. The four girls sat beneath it, freshly dressed and combed, making four steamy o’s on the glass. Then Abbie said, “Here they are! Here they come!” The taxi pulled up, the door opened, out stepped Mary. After her came Jeremy, with the baby in his arms. “See, how little?” I said, but I was talking to an empty room. The children were already fighting their way to the door. “I open it, because I’m the oldest,” Darcy said, but Abbie said, “You
always
get to do things!” “Hush!” I called. They paid me no attention. I stood alone at the window and smiled down at Jeremy and Mary, who came up the walk side by side, laughing, surrounded by a sea of bobbing heads and small hands waving in celebration.

“I have something to tell you,” Mary said. “Jeremy? Are you listening?”

He wasn’t. He was making a statue. He stood before a circle of tin children, waist-high; he wrung his hands. Like a man in a well, he heard Mary’s voice only dimly. It was necessary to find red. Where was the right red? But then he detected some urgency in what she said, something different from the Muzak of her discussions of washing machines, report cards, DPT shots. “What?” he said. He struggled up from under layers and layers of thought. There was a dry feeling at the back of his throat, as if he had been buried in cotton. He fixed his eyes on Mary but saw, instead, the exact shade of red he needed—very bright, a little fuzzy. It seemed familiar. He turned away from her and dumped out a carton of scraps. Nothing there. He went across the room nearly at a run, bent-kneed. He flung open shelves and pulled out drawers and turned over a wastebasket There was a red lace heart and a
red geometric design from a magazine and a piece of red construction paper that smelled like the inside of his grammar school forty years ago. He held the paper to his nose and closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Now children’s voices came singing through his head, over all those decades:

Red flannel. He saw it clearly now. He even saw the microscopic dots of lint left from laundering. He plowed through the wastepaper and out of the door, across the hall to the girls’ room. “Jeremy?” said Mary. “What are you doing? You said you wouldn’t use their things any more, you promised!”

“I’ll get them new ones,” Jeremy said.

“New what? What are you looking for? You
always
say that, Jeremy.”

He paused in the middle of a drawer, up to his elbows in pink and white. “Where are their red pajamas?” he asked.

“What red pajamas?”

“Don’t children wear red pajamas any more?”

“They
never had any red pajamas.”

He straightened up from the drawer and went over to the closet. Scattered across the floor were dirty socks, blouses, stuffed animals—you would think that somewhere in here would be a tiny piece of red flannel. He opened the closet door and scanned a rack of dresses, all different sizes and colors. “I have something I want to tell you,” Mary said.

Like a string pulling him, some strong piece of twine pulling him away from the picture in his head. Even before he turned to her the red flannel had dissolved and the circle of children had stopped spinning, dropped their hands, and crumbled away. He opened his mouth to protest but saw, suddenly,
how the curve of her cheek fitted so exactly to the curve of Rachel’s head—the latest baby, nestled into her mother’s neck like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. Mary’s hair had come undone and was tumbling down her back, lit by the sun in the window. The three faint lines beginning at the corner of each eye were lit as well, radiating as precisely as a cat’s whiskers, giving her a look of constant, gentle puzzlement. “What is it, Mary?” he asked.

“Are you really listening to me?”

“Yes, yes.”

But up came the sound of feet, pounding on the stairs. An interruption to the interruption. Was this how life progressed? If he traced his way back through the chain of interruptions, looking for the first act someone had tugged him from, wouldn’t he find himself ten years in the past? In came Pippi, out of breath. “Mom? Where’s Mom?”

“Why, here she is,” said Jeremy.

“Guess what, Mom?”

Mary’s face took on that change that always happened when her children spoke. She bent her head, her eyes grew instantly opaque with concentration and every muscle seemed tensed to listen. “Some men are bringing in a refrigerator,” Pippi told her.

“A refrigerator?”

“They say Jeremy won it in a contest.”

Mary raised her head and looked at him. “You should have let me know,” she said.

“But I—how could I? This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

“They say he got a letter,” said Pippi.

“Oh, Jeremy. Are you not opening letters again?”

“Why, I
thought
I was. I can’t imagine what—”

“They say you have to come down, Mom,” Pippi said.

“All right, I’m coming.”

She descended the steps without hurry, unruffled as ever,
behind Pippi’s clattering shoes. Rachel’s face bobbed over her shoulder. Jeremy followed, wiping his hands on his trousers. He felt pulled in too many directions. Pieces of the statue still crowded his mind along with Mary’s listening face, the thunder of furniture moving downstairs, the news she had never managed to tell him. “Um, Mary,” he said, “can’t they take it back again? This house is getting so full. We surely don’t
need
another refrigerator.”

“Oh, that’s all right, Jeremy, we’ll put it in the basement.”

“We put the last one in the basement.”

“Well? There’s still room. You know how much food this family eats.”

“But it feels so cluttered,” Jeremy said. “Mary, there are so many
things
in this house. I just feel so—”

They arrived in the downstairs hallway. Two men in leather jackets were rolling an enormous pink refrigerator along a path they had cleared through the parlor, steering their way between rocking chairs and tricycles and hordes of children. “Look!” said Mary. “It’s a side-by-side refrigerator-freezer, the kind I’ve always wanted.”

“Kitchen?” said one of the men.

“No—well, yes, why not. Then we’ll send the old one down to the basement. Could you move the old one first?”

“Look, we ain’t
moving
men.”

“I’ll pay you,” Mary said.

“Five dollars is what we would ask for it.”

Jeremy?

Everyone looked at him. He felt embarrassed, as if he were there under false pretences. He wasn’t the one who handled the money. “Well, actually,” he said, “I don’t believe we want this item.”

“Jeremy!”

“You should’ve told the contest people that,” one man said. “All we do is deliver them, like they ask us to.”

“It appears I must have mislaid the letter. Actually I—we
have
two refrigerators.”

“What you go and enter the contest for, then?”

“I thought I might win money,” Jeremy said.

“Jeremy, you know we can use another refrigerator,” Mary told him. “Especially for this summer, when watermelons come in. Leave the gentlemen alone, Hannah. And you know the boarders need shelves of their own, they don’t want to get—”

“Do we move it or don’t we, lady?”

“Yes!” said the children, and jumped up and down, and clapped, and made Jeremy’s head ache. Mary said, “Of course you do. Empty the old one, will you, children? Everybody help; just put the food on the counter.” She herded them into the kitchen and Jeremy followed. He would feel awkward left alone with the delivery men. He watched from the doorway while children stacked endless cartons of milk on the drain-board, relayed heads of lettuce to the table, tossed an arc of oranges across the room. “Quite a family you got there,” a delivery man said behind him. Jeremy smiled too widely and ducked his head.

Did anyone guess how his children baffled him? He didn’t understand them. He had trouble talking to them. All he could do was watch: drink them in with such speechless, open-mouthed amazement that he was accused of being off in a daze. Mary watched too, but for different reasons. She was checking for danger and germs and mischief; she was their armed guard. What Jeremy was doing was committing them to memory, preparing for some moment far in the future when he could sit down alone and finally figure them out. He knew the exact curl of Abbie’s eyes when she laughed, the way Hannah rubbed the down on her upper lip when she sucked her thumb, the dimples like parentheses in Rachel’s cheeks. It seemed to him that all of his children were miniature Marys.
He could find no physical resemblance to himself. He thought that was natural, for Mary’s pregnancies appeared to be entirely her own undertakings. It was she who discovered and announced them, took her calcium tablets, disappeared behind those closed swinging doors at the hospital to give birth. But then he looked at Darcy—still blond and blue-eyed, nearly as tall as her mother now but with someone else’s frail bones.
Her
father had not been eclipsed. Her father’s genes must have been as recessive as Jeremy’s, all pale and slight; yet they had won out. How come? He turned a puzzled stare on his own children, brown-headed and dark-eyed. He watched his son Edward, who at two and a half wore faded Levis dangling below the pot of his stomach and little cowboy boots. He had not known they made boots as small as that. He had never had boots when
he
was a boy; and if he had he would not have known how to walk in them with that jaunty swagger or how to hook his thumbs through the belt loops of his Levi’s. Where had Edward learned? Where had
all
of them learned to march so fearlessly across the teeming streets, to brave their way through the city schools, and shout and cheer and throw oranges without a trace of self-consciousness?