Celestial Navigation (3 page)

“How long are you planning to sit here, Jeremy?” I asked him.

He straightened up then, but he didn’t answer.

“We do have things to get done, you know,” I said. “First you’ll have to change and go over to the funeral parlor.”

Laura said, “Amanda—”

“Then we have to make some plans for your future. I don’t know whether you’ve thought yet about what you’re going to do.”

“Do?” Jeremy asked.

“Oh, why don’t we talk about this after supper?” Laura said. “For now we’ll just get you off these stairs, Jeremy. I know you must be ready to come down. Aren’t you?”

It was plain he hadn’t thought of it, but he let her knead
and pull him like so much modeling clay until he was finally in a standing position, and then she guided him down the stairs. I came behind. I arrived on the bottom step to find Mr. Somerset still at the front door, gaping at Jeremy. (In this house, I believe everyone
does
stay just where he wants. As if Mother’s inertia were contagious.) I said, “Mr. Somerset, did you put the suitcases in my mother’s room?”

“What’s that you say?”

“Our suitcases. Did you put them somewhere?”

“I never saw no suitcases.”

“Well,
someone
did,” I said. I bypassed Jeremy and Laura and went to Mother’s bedroom, off the dining room. There were no suitcases there. Only her unmade bed, stopping me in my tracks for a moment. I slammed the door shut again and said, “Jeremy? I want to know where our suitcases are.”

“Um, what suitcases are those, Amanda?”

I went through the entire first floor, flicking on lights in the kitchen, the bathroom, the dining room, the parlor. No suitcases. And they wouldn’t be upstairs; all the second floor belonged to boarders. “Mr. Somerset,” I said, “think, now. Who else has come in while we were out?”

“Why, nobody,” said Mr. Somerset. “The two ladies have been gone all day, and Howard left at seven this morning and never come back. I heard him go. I heard him whistling at seven
A.M
. outside my bedroom door, not a particle of consideration, and nights he comes in from a date eleven, eleven-thirty, twelve o’clock sometimes still whistling, never thinks to—”

“Someone has stolen our suitcases,” I said to Laura.

She was just settling Jeremy into a parlor chair, like an invalid. She looked up at me with her mind on something else and said, “Oh no, Amanda, I’m sure they would never—”

“They’re gone, aren’t they? And no one’s been in that door but us and Mr. Somerset, he says he never saw them.”

“It’s true, it’s true,” said Mr. Somerset, and then beat a retreat up the stairs as if I might accuse him of something. Just before disappearing he leaned over the banister to say, “You might ask Howard when he comes in, though as I say I don’t believe he—and you might talk to him about making noise. I don’t sleep too good as it is. You might mention it to him.”

“We’ve been robbed,” I said to Laura.

“Oh, they’ll show up. I’m sure of it.”

“No, they’re gone,” I told her. “We’ve seen the last of them.”

Isn’t that always the way it is? You would think that in time of tragedy the trivial things would let themselves go smoothly for once, but they never do.

I sat down in an armchair, just crumpled into it. “Imagine!” I said. “Someone who would rob a house in mourning. Oh, I’ve heard of such things. Burglars who check obituaries daily, they know the bereaved are too upset to take good notice. Isn’t it shameful?”

“Oh, I’m sure they didn’t do
that.”

“What, then?”

“We could call the police,” Laura said.

“They’d be no help. They’re paid to keep their eyes closed.”

“Well, all that worries me is what will I do for a nightgown,” Laura said. “And a funeral dress. Will this be suitable?” She opened her coat wider to show the maroon knit, all creased across the front. “Lucky
you”
she told me. “You wore your black on the train.”

People always call it luck when you’ve acted more sensibly than they have.

I said, “This never would have happened in the olden days. There was a time when our neighborhood was so safe you could walk it at night without a thought, but now look! I don’t know how often I told Mother she ought to move.”

“One thing,” Laura said, “it’s not as if we had any valuables in our bags.”

“Speak for yourself,” I told her, “there are valuables and valuables.
My
suitcase was Mother’s graduation gift. The only useful thing she ever gave me.”

“We should talk about something more cheerful,” Laura said.

“Other times it was sachets and pomander balls and religious bookmarks, but that suitcase was top-quality cowhide.”

“Hush, now,” Laura said. “Shall I make us a little supper? There’s bound to be something in the icebox. Would anyone like an omelet?”

And off she went, still in her galoshes, tugging at her coat. She is the cook in the family—you can tell it by her figure. I myself couldn’t have taken a bite right then. I was too sick at heart. I set my feet upon a needlework footstool and said, “What would help me most now is a good long rest. I’ve walked far more today than I should have.” I was talking to Jeremy, but you would never have known it for all the reaction he gave me. “See my feet?” I asked him. “How puffy?”

He didn’t answer.

“We couldn’t get a taxi from the funeral parlor. It was hard enough to find one at the railroad station, and evidently no one thought to meet us.”

But all Jeremy did was lay his hands very lightly upon his knees, as if they would break.

I sat erect in Mother’s wing chair and looked all around me. Everything imaginable seemed to be crowded into that parlor. Chipped figurines, a barometer, a Baby Ben that worked and a grandmother clock that didn’t, a whole row of Kahlil Gibran, a leaning tower of knitting magazines, peacock feathers stuck behind the mirror. Cloudy tumblers half full of stale water, a Scrabble set, a vaporizer, a hairbrush choked with light brown hair, an embroidery hoop, a paperback book
on astrology, an egg-stained shawl, doilies on doilies, Sears Roebuck catalogues, ancient quilted photo albums, a glass swan full of dusty colored marbles, plants escaping their pots and sprawling along the windowsill. On the table beside me, a bottle of Jergens lotion and a magnifying glass and a patented news-item clipper. (How she loved to clip news items! They stuffed all her envelopes, and for years I unfolded them one by one and tried to figure out their relevance to me. I never could. Puppies were rescued from sewer pipes, orphaned rabbits were nursed by cats, toddlers splashed in wading pools on Baltimore’s first summer day. Nothing that meant anything. I learned to throw them away without a glance, as if they had come as so much padding for her wispy little notes.) Beneath the clutter, if you could see that far, was scrolled and splintery furniture so scrawny-legged you wondered how it stood the strain. I felt anxious just looking at it. I placed my fingertips to my forehead, warding off one of my headaches. “Well, Jeremy,” I said. “I suppose I should hear how this business happened.”

Jeremy raised his eyes, not to me but to a point on the wall.

“How Mother went.”

“Oh. It—I was—it happened like this.”

“You don’t have to make a long story of it, just
tell,”
I said. I know I shouldn’t snap at him that way.

“I had made a new piece,” Jeremy said.

“What?”

“Piece. A new piece in my studio.”

“
Oh
yes.”

That’s what he calls them: pieces. He pastes them together and calls them pieces. Well, they’re surely not
pictures
. Not even regular collages, not that intricate, mosaic-like way he does them. He has had this drive to paste things together ever since he was old enough for scissors and a gluepot. He started off at Mother’s feet, dressing paper dolls, and in grade
school he moved up to scrapbooks. Other boys play baseball; he made scrapbooks. One for famous people and another for foreign places and another for postcards. (Photos of hotels, mostly, with X’s on minute little windows twelve stories up—”Here’s where
my
room is!”—sent to Mother by a cousin.) Then he began his pieces. Mother thought they were wonderful, naturally, but as far as I could see they were just more of the same. More cutting, more pasting. Little people made of triangles of wrapping paper and diamonds of silk. No definite outlines to them. Something like those puzzles they have in children’s magazines—find seven animals in the branches of this bush. I couldn’t see the point of it. “Then what?” I asked.

“I wanted her to see my piece. I went down and brought her up and at the top of the stairs she just fell down, she fell down and I saw she was dead.”

All his eye for detail goes into cutting and pasting. There is none left over for real life. What did Mother say, climbing the stairs? What were her last words? Was she out of breath? Holding her chest? Did she give him any kind of a look when she had fallen? (Maybe she looked at him and thought, Good heavens. Is
this
what I’m dying for? A little paper quilt put together by a middle-aged man?)

“Go on,” I said.

He looked blank.

“Tell me,” I said (already tired out by the thought of all I would have to ask), “had she been doing any complaining about chest pains?”

“Oh,
Mama
never complained.”

That was true, but another person could have read the signs anyway. Whenever she had health problems—gas, indigestion, a little trouble with bowels—she did her own doctoring. Took herb tea and patent medicine and refused all meals. Many’s the time I have eaten lunch with her sitting
across the table watching, nothing in front of her but a steaming cup and a pint bottle of Pepto-Bismol, eyes following my spoon. “Aren’t you eating, Mother?”

“No, darling, but pay it no mind. I’m sure I’ll be all right.” Another sip of herb tea, a tablespoon of Pepto-Bismol. But Jeremy (if he was even at the table, and not off pasting things together and having lunch sent up on a tray) only ate on with his eyes lowered and never appeared to notice. He was so used to being the sickly one himself. I am sure he never changed. Mother could have trailed a line of digitalis tablets clear across to his place mat and he would only have asked for more custard.

Laura came to the dining room doorway and said, “I’ve laid a little supper on. Will you have some?”

“I’m sorry, I just don’t believe I can,” I said.

“Oh, Amanda. Try, dear. We have to keep our strength up.”

So I came, but while Laura and Jeremy were settling themselves I went out and made myself a cup of hot milk. It was all I felt up to. I stood at the stove, surrounded by dirty dishes and objects out of their proper places, while in the dining room I heard the steady clinking of china.
They
could eat through anything. When I came out I saw their plates just heaped with food, omelets and rolls and several kinds of cake. I said, “Well, don’t come to me with your indigestion, that’s all I have to say.” Which stopped them for a moment; they wiped their mouths and looked up at me with identical foolish expressions. But then they returned to their plates and paid me no more mind. Spreading butter on one roll after another, spinning the lazy Susan to find some new kind of jelly. “Try the gooseberry, Jeremy. I know you’ve no appetite, but—” Jeremy, who has a sweet tooth, ate half a pineapple upside-down cake. I saw him. And just the bought, gluey kind; Mother never bestirred herself to bake. Laura served it to him sliver by sliver, the politest little portions you
ever saw, and he watched each piece arrive as if it had nothing to do with him but when he was finished half the cake was gone. Laura ate most of the other half. Yet she was so dainty about it! She took such tiny bites and set her fork down on her plate betweentimes. Jeremy chewed in a halfhearted way, the same as he does everything. Rolling the food around in his mouth. And then to top it off Laura said, “When this is over I’m going to have to go back on my diet.” As if Mother’s passing were a picnic! A vacation! Some kind of eating spree! But before I could point it out to her in walked Howard, who has the south front bedroom. “Oh, excuse me,” he said, and stood teetering over us. He is a beakish young man with glasses, a medical student. For as long as I can remember his room has been inhabited by medical students. They pass it down from one to another along with a shelf of fifth-hand textbooks and the number of the nurses’ dorm scrawled on the wallpaper beside the hall telephone. It is convenient, of course, to know that that particular room will always have an occupant, but the students are generally noisy and untidy and their hours are not at all regular. I would have dispensed with them long ago. And their manners! This Howard, for example, never even troubled himself to offer his condolences. All he said was, “I see you people got here okay.”

“Howard,” I said, “I wonder if you might have any idea where our suitcases are.”

“Me? No, ma’am.”

“Well, there went our one last hope,” I told the others.

Laura said, “Won’t you join us for supper, Howard?”

“Oh, I have a little something in the kitchen,” he said. He scratched his head a moment and then left, and I could hear him out clattering around in the silverware drawer. No wonder the kitchen was in such a state. What do you expect,
letting people wander in and out like that? I have been trying for years to make Mother lay down a few ground rules. “This is not a genuine
boarding
house,” I told her. “You never contracted for them to eat here, they’re supposed to take their meals in restaurants.”

“Oh, well,” she said, “I know you’re right, Amanda.” Yet she never did a thing more about it, and as a result look what has happened: ants in the upstairs rooms where people have carried their sandwiches, roaches in the kitchen, strangers dirtying pans and littering counters and stuffing the cupboards with their various foods. The student before Howard, what was his name? He kept a cake tin in the icebox with a label Scotch-taped to it:
CAUTION BACTERIOLOGICAL SPECIMEN DO NOT DISTURB
. All a deception, of course; there was only cake inside. But nevertheless it was a disturbing thing to come across as I was searching for an egg or a bit of lettuce, and more than once it’s put me off my feed.